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English in the linguistic transformation of Hawaii: literacy, languages and discourse

1986; Wiley; Volume: 5; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-971x.1986.tb00721.x

1467-971X

Elizabeth B. Buck,

Linguistic Education and Pedagogy

Abstract: The event of contact with the West has always been for the Other a moment of violence, rupture and discontinuity. As a colonized Other, Hawaii was not just modernized and modified, but transformed and reformed. The interactive forces that had constituted the dynamic of Hawaiian history before Cook were suddenly and radically skewed, eliminated and replaced by Western forces of power—not the least of these being language. What had been the totality of the world for the Hawaiians was suddenly only a part, a small part, of a global system containing other cultures, other languages, and other epistemes of knowledge and discourse. In this paper I will focus on language and the linguistic transformation of Hawaii, viewing language as socially constitutive, as creative and recreative, as consciousness that is saturated by and that saturates all social activity. Working within this constitutive view of language, the linguistic intrusion of the West takes on a significance, as significance, that is integral to every aspect of the Western penetration of Hawaii. Three fundamental changes in language were initiated with Western contact: (1) the radical shift from orality to literacy, (2) the displacement of Hawaiian by English as the dominant language of discourse, and (3) the repositioning and redefinition of Hawaii, the Hawaiians and their material and symbolizing practices by discourses informed by English, particularly ideologies embedded in American English. The first two involved fundamental changes in cognitive processes and social consciousness; all three reconstituted social relationships. Forms and practices of symbolic representation, including the most basic one of language itself, are never exterior to material forces. They are part of ideological social practices that are inscribed by history and embedded in social praxis. The English language and practices of that language, were integral to the social restructuring of the Hawaiian islands by Western capitalism, the dispossession and alienation of the Hawaiians, and the ultimate redistribution of power. What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins (Nietzsche, 1968: 46–47).