Description of lecture
This talk takes its title from a headline published in Kauaʻi’s The Garden Island in the late 1960s, which reported regularly on the arrival of a new type of visitor to the sleepy, rural Hawaiian Island. In 1969, Howard Taylor, the brother of actress Elizabeth Taylor, invited a small group of hippies to camp on his land in Hāʻena, the sleepy town at the “end of the road” on Kauaʻi’s North Shore. Their temporary campsite soon transformed into Taylor Camp, one of the Islands’ most iconic communes of the countercultural era. Dismantled in 1977 and later absorbed into Hāʻena State Park, visitors continue to seek the site out despite efforts of Kanaka Maoli-led organizations to refocus visitor attention towards Indigenous conservation projects within the park. For them, Taylor Camp is celebrated as a brief, innocent, anti-materialist “paradise” on Kauaʻi. Yet, this nostalgia depends on the very settler-colonial conditions it appears to reject.
Rather than treating the commune as an anomaly of post-statehood tourism or a prelude to present-day mass tourism, this talk suggests that Taylor Camp illuminates the ways in which Edenic fantasies about Hawaiʻi are produced, circulated, and converted into racialized expectations of access to land, leisure, and belonging. Drawing on visual and textual archives of vernacular architectures, racial and sexual representation, and Indigenous environmental narratives, I trace the settler-colonial production of the tourist gaze beyond formal commercial tourism, ultimately arguing that current efforts to recover Hāʻena as a place of Kanaka Maoli history and cultural practice require not only policy change but also an aesthetic reorientation that transforms what outsiders are trained to see, understand, and desire from Hawaiʻi.
Suggested Readings
- June Jordan, “Report from the Bahamas, 1982,” Meridians 3, no. 2 (2003): 6–16.
- Rob Nixon, “Stranger in the Eco-Village: Race, Tourism, and Environmental Time,” in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 175–198.
- Teresia Teaiwa, “Reading Gauguin’s Noa Noa with Hauʻofa’s Kisses in the Nederends: Militourism, Feminism, and the ‘Polyneisan’ Body,” in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, eds. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 254–255.