Luhi in Talking to the Dead as a “meeting place.” Serving as the nexus of

Chapter Four

Conclusion: Reconsidering the Local and the Global

In this thesis I have tried to look at Sylvia Watanabe’s fictional construction of

Luhi in Talking to the Dead as a “meeting place.” Serving as the nexus of

Asia-Pacific traveling routes, Hawai‘i, here embodies by Luhi, can be understood as a

meeting place of flows and textures in the Asia-Pacific. To analyze Watanabe’s

blurring of temporal and spatial boundaries, firstly I have employed Doreen Massey’s

theory of place. Secondly, I have focused on reading Watanabe’s construction of

Luhi as an open place where image of ghosts could emerge in light of Bhabha’s

concept of “the unhomely.”

On the basis of Massey’s theory of place, I have argued that Watanabe’s

fictional Luhi can be read as less a self-confined place than a porous place, a meeting

place that includes the departures, arrivals, and transits of people. Instead of

perceiving places as stable entities with fixed boundaries, Massey proffers an

alternative idea insisting that places are not geographically determined, but can be

conceived as intersections, made up of networks of social relations, movements, and

communications. Here, Massey demonstrates the importance to relate a single place

to the realm that is “beyond.” To her, a place should be understood in a broader

context of forces and relations which lay not only within but also beyond the

geographical boundary of the place. Overthrowing the traditional understanding of

place as a fixed geographical location constructed out of introverted, inward-looking

history, she defines place as extroverted rather than introverted, incorporating into

itself its interactions with broader spatial and temporal contexts.

In a way illustrating Massey’s theory, Watanabe’s representation of Hawai‘i in

Talking to the Dead is complicated in terms of both temporality and spatiality.

Spatially, Watanabe blurs the inside and the outside of Luhi. We can perceive from

the stories that the spatial boundary has been dismantled by the movement of her

characters. In addition, temporally, Watanabe merges the past with the present.

She points out that what counts is not just the present, but also what is beyond the

present, be it the personal or historical pasts. Watanabe’s fictional Luhi thus

manifests a mobile and mutable place with both temporal and spatial liminality.

To further elaborate on Luhi’s liminal position, I also employed Bhabha’s

rendition of “the third space” and the “unhomely.” While Massey proposes the

significance of thinking beyond one single restricted geographical locale, Bhabha’s

idea of the “third space” introduces a way to think about the “beyond.” Bhabha

describes that the conventional idea of a unitary culture should be interrogated

because today’s culture is inevitably made up of complicated intersections of different

places. He asserts that when various cultures encounter, they generate the

ambivalence, the “in-between space” wherein cultural hybridity develops. In “The

World and the Home,” Bhabha further refers to the invasion of the domestic sphere by

the public world as the “unhomely” moment, which blurs the boundaries between the

home and the world, and those between the private and the public. The “unhomely”

can be understood as a “meeting place” straddling between the domestic and the

public, a mediating sphere which inscribes the liminal or interstitial condition. It

helps us understand Hawaii’s in-between position from which spirits and ghosts

emerge.

Briefly, my discussion in this thesis has shown that as a local writer, Watanabe

has represented in Talking to the Dead a Hawai‘i that is far more complicated than the

dominant representation of the islands from the U.S. mainland. Instead of

propagating the prevailing image of Hawai‘i as a tourist paradise or a remote Eden in

the Pacific, she writes to reveal the multiplicity of the place out of her devotion to the

memory of the land and its people.

Moreover, Watanabe’s writings enact a very interesting encounter of the global

of the local. Though writing from the perspective of the local, apparently Watanabe

does not define local as the backward, the traditional, or the unchangeable. Despite

the fact that many may ascribe to the local a derogatory image “as enclaves of

backwardness left out of progress, as the realm of rural stagnation against the

dynamism of the urban, industrial civilization of capitalism, as the realm of

particularistic culture against universal scientific rationality,” and, most of all, “as the

obstacle to full realization of that political form of modernity, the nation-state” (Dirlik

23), Watanabe gives the local a sense of liminality. Indeed, Watanabe does not

define the local as in complete opposition or resistance to the global. Like Arif

Dirlik, Watanabe does not set up the global and the local as binary opposites. Dirlik

prefers to stress the interplays rather than the polarization of the local and the global

because “every local story is part of a global ‘big picture’” (37). Although the local

has been frequently represented as the cultural space of collective resistance to the

processes of globalization, it seems impossible to preserve a place that is immune to

global flows. Similarly, Watanabe conceives a local that is shaped and reshaped

through inter-spatial and inter-temporal people and cultural flows. Though claiming

to write her stories in order to record a way of life belonging to her parents and

grandparents, her rendition of Luhi enables us to see a Hawai‘i that is more a mutable

open “dis-place” than a self-restricted place.

Indeed, by characterizing Hawai‘i as a meeting place located at the nexus of the

Asia-Pacific cultural flows, Watanabe’s Talking to the Dead also contributes by

bringing our attention to the central position of Hawai‘i in our contemporary

imagination of the Asia-Pacific. Developing in the second half of the twentieth

century, Asia-Pacific discourse has been laying emphasis on the increasing

importance of the economic and political position of countries on the Pacific Rim.

Focusing their attentions on places including “the United States, Canada, Mexico

(tenuously though...), Japan, China, the Four Tigers [. . .] Malaysia, Thailand,

Indonesia, and the Philippines” that constitute the Pacific Rim (Connery 32), the

discourse of the Asia-Pacific actually leaves out the significance of Hawai‘i as a place

the was and remains integral to the constitution of the Pacific. Indeed, in

Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production (1995), Rob Wilson, along with Dirlik,

attempt to rectify the absence of Pacific Basin cultures (of which the Hawaiian culture

is one of the representatives) in the dominant Asia-Pacific discourse. Pointing out

that an Asia-Pacific discourse would not be complete without including into it the

study of Hawai‘i and other islands in the Pacific Basin, they call for critical attentions

to Hawai‘i and other Pacific islands. Here, I think my study of Watanabe and her

fictional representation of Luhi serves well to bring Hawai‘i to the fore in our

re-imagination of the Asia-Pacific. To conclude, Watanabe has conceived a

Hawaiian local that reconnects our imagination of Hawai‘i to the study of the

Asia-Pacific cultural traffic. Watanabe’s way to preserve the local is not to isolate it

from the outside, but to open it up to diverse cultural flows. In Talking to the Dead,

Watanabe depicts Luhi not as a self-confined locale but as a mobile and mutable,

porous and plural place. It is a meeting place marked by various encounters between

the outside and the inside, the past and the present. In short, Watanabe constructs a

local that is not in stark contrast to the global. Her literary rendition restores Hawai‘i

to the complicated socio-historcial contexts of the Asia-Pacific.