Pedagogical sights/sites: producing colonialism and practicing art in the Pacific

Producing "Blank/Whiteness"

Students in art are routinely educated to associate the beginning of their creative efforts with blankness - the white sheet of drawing paper, the gessoed canvas, the blue screen of the video monitor. But what if this surface and space, identified as empty, were already filled with something that our artistic sensibilities and aesthetic schema are unable to detect? According to Henri Lefebvre, the primary misconception about space in Western society is that it is empty. For Lefebvre, space is always filled with the unseen social relations of people; it is produced by social relations and embodies them.' We fail to see the historical and contemporary relations of people because we are taught to use particular conceptual strategies and categories in Western culture that ignore these interactions and therefore allow space to appear empty to us. The social, political, economic, and historical relations that actively produce the world and shape the way we live in it are not immediately visible. Ideology and power thus remain largely unseen in daily life.

The term blank/whiteness may be used to name the space(s) of colonialism in Hawai'i for those of us who are nonindigenous and involved in the visual arts. Depending on the cultural context or historical circumstances, a blank two-dimensional surface or an empty three-dimensional space may not really be blank or empty. Lefebvre's insights on social space suggest that those of us engaged in the visual arts in Hawai'i need to begin reading sights/sites of blankness and emptiness in Hawai'i, representational and actual/physical, against and within a history of settler colonialism.

While blankness may refer to the invisibility of settler colonialism and whiteness to the dominant presence of white, Western culture in the islands, blank/whiteness is not the exclusive production of people of European ancestry. It is in part produced by nonindigenous people of color through their everyday support of U.S. culture in Hawai'i and the historical amnesia about colonialism that accompanies it.(2) A great many people of color ironically embrace the ideologies that support it as empowering and consider the social relations that constitute it as democratic.(3) For various reasons, many nonindigenous residents fail to recognize the contemporary existence of colonialism in the islands.(4)

Alarmingly hegemonic in the Gramscian sense, the spaces of blank/whiteness are racialized arenas in which some groups of people wield considerable political, economic, and institutional power over others. Art students are educated to misrecognize these very spaces and their visual representations as democratic terrains and to associate them with freedom of speech, equality of opportunity, and the sites of almost unlimited artistic creativity. It is not so much through the specific content of courses that this takes place, but through the general production of visual imagery, the rhetoric on individualism and creativity that accompanies it, and the near absence of curricular information about colonialism in Hawai'i.

This article is part of a larger study on art pedagogy in Hawai'i that is by no means a disinterested project. For eight years I taught studio art at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, where I eventually began to realize that I was unwittingly reinforcing values of and beliefs in the colonial culture through an uncritical teaching of a Western-oriented curriculum. The fact that I was of Japanese ancestry, born and raised in Honolulu among its multiracial communities, did not guarantee my sensitivity to cultural differences. In 1991 I entered a doctoral program in visual culture to rethink my practice as an artist and educator. During the 1995-96 academic year I conducted a project at the University of Hawai'i at Minoa in which I sat in on selected studio art classes as a participant-observer and conducted formal interviews with teachers and students.

Although I focus on a specific geographic location and educational institution in Hawai'i, what I present has broad implications for the teaching of multicultural concerns in the arts and for the reevaluation of art curricula. In numerous discussions with art educators from the continental United States, Canada, Great Britain, and New Zealand, I have found that we share similar concerns and comparable problems. In their introduction to Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education, Susan Cahan and Zoya Kocur explain that the literature on multicultural education in the United States has been extremely narrow-: "While many promote the study of art from diverse cultures, they overlook the historical and political dimensions of cultural democracy."(5) Their book offers an alternative to this problem by presenting a "critically-based approach to multicultural education" sensitive to social issues.

I also hope to contribute to a critically-based approach by examining how the teaching of art engages in the production and support of the cultural knowledge and social values of a particular place. Toward this end I take up the increasingly important distinction in Hawai'i between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples and use it to scrutinize art pedagogy.(6) Many of the problems I raise about the invisibility of settler colonialism in Hawai'i exist in other geographic locations. Following the work of Edward Said, I believe it necessary to trace the links between the seemingly innocent cultural works of a society (e.g., our visual images and pedagogical practices) and the more objectionable acts of oppression they sanction (e.g., imperial conquest).(7)