Incarcerating Travels: Travel Stories,Tourist Orders,and the Politics of the 'Hawai'ian Paradise'

This article explores how travel practices are structured and harnessed to politics. While travel practices operate through claims of innocence, curiosity and adventure, they are deeply political practices that participate in projects and programmes ranging from statecraft to appropriation of peoples and places in the service of global finanscapes. In Michel de Certeau's words, travelling in economies of desire, travel practices partake in the 'production of specific politico-cultural orders' in travel spaces that often articulate narrow horizons in identity, ethnicity, nation, participation and governmentality. In worst cases, travel practices are instrumental in the production of orders that create and simultaneously hide the alterity of peoples and their places. This article reflects on the politics of travel that escapes notice or is concealed in travel discourses and representations in Hawai'i. More specifically, it examines how travel acts participate in the production of (1) a politico-cultural order in Hawai'i that creates and hides the alterity of Hawai'i's indigenous peoples, (2) a plural nation-story of the United States that operates through the interstices of the tourist orders and (3) a capital story that enlists both indigenous resources and predominant political powers to excavate profits.