Tom Smith's "Word across the Water"

Tom Smith is the Keasbey Research Fellow in American Studies at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. His work has been published in Diplomatic History, Historical Journal, and American Nineteenth Century History.

Smith applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Word across the Water: American Protestant Missionaries, Pacific Worlds, and the Making of Imperial Histories, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Word across the Water finds us at the opening of the book’s third chapter – the last of the book’s three chapters on Hawai‘i before the second half discusses the Philippines. The page describes how Native Hawaiians writing to newspapers in 1911 criticized descendants of Protestant missionaries in the islands who had denigrated the performance of hula dances as obscene and immoral. These Native Hawaiians instead defended the hula as a dignified tradition of historical narration. They argued that any perceptions that the hula was a corrupted or indecent activity resulted not from the hula itself, but from outsiders’ failure to truly understand it. At the same time, the page introduces the fact that some descendants of missionaries around this time were in fact breaking away from negative representations of the hula, coming to appreciate it as an aesthetic form.

The page illuminates many of the book’s key themes. The work as a whole explores how historical narration became an important mode through which US Protestant missionaries and their descendants working in Hawai‘i and the Philippines came to understand their relationship both to US empire and to the places in which they worked, around the time at which the United States colonised both island groups in 1898. It argues that, as we see on page 99, historical narration was contested terrain at these sites of empire as missionaries sought to establish the authority of the written word and of religiously inflected narratives over Indigenous forms of engagement with the past, represented on page 99 by the Hawaiian hula. The book also argues, however, that the distinction between missionary and Indigenous forms of historical narration was not as clear-cut as missionaries would have liked their audiences to believe. As they sought to style themselves as experts and authorities, missionaries and their descendants engaged with local traditions in ways that drew them away from an overarching sense of US imperial or historic purpose. The end of page 99 suggests how we see this in Chapter 3 – some descendants of missionaries who had grown up in the islands began to celebrate the hula and to style themselves as experts on it. They missed, or indeed deliberately obfuscated, the dance’s profound political and historical meanings for Native Hawaiians, but through supposedly objective study of it navigated their own anxieties about existing between the imperial and the local.

Learn more about Word across the Water at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue