書寫在地/離地：席爾維亞‧渡邊的夏威夷想像

Abstract

本篇論文旨在分析《與逝者交談》（Talking to the Dead）當中，席爾維亞˙渡邊（Sylvia Watanabe）獨特的夏威夷想像。身為夏威夷本土作家，渡邊的作品中所展露的夏威夷意象與大多數美洲大陸作家作品裡的夏威夷意象迥然不同。渡邊不在作品中散播夏威夷作為太平洋中旅遊天堂的刻板印象，而是呈現了夏威夷的多樣性。此研究將渡邊在文本中所虛構出的地方「陸宜」（Luhi）閱讀成為一個「相遇地」（meeting place）。渡邊筆下的「陸宜」可視為夏威夷的縮影，在亞太交通路徑中擔任樞紐位置。 論文共分四章。第一章由不同層面綜述夏威夷。首先，我簡述夏威夷的歷史與文化。然後，我討論不同文學作品呈現出的多樣夏威夷面貌。再來，我介紹席爾維亞˙渡邊這位夏威夷作家，她的作品散發出夏威夷當地人「愛土地」情懷。第二章將夏威夷閱讀為一個開放空間，並以《與逝者交談》當中的幾篇故事作為例證。此章運用梅西（Doreen Massey）的「地方」（place）理論來探討渡邊如何在作品之中模糊了空間的界線。梅西將地方視為是不斷向外擴展的，內外交融的中間地帶。第三章偏重討論渡邊文本中時間的混雜。依巴巴(Homi Bhabha)的「家非家」概念，夏威夷可被視為一個類後殖民的「家非家」空間，其中公領域與私領域彼此交融，促使鬼魅意象衍生。第四章為結論。將渡邊的作品置於全球化∕在地化的情境中討論。我發現渡邊對「在地」的定義並不是全然隔絕全球文化流動；夏威夷「在地」必須吸收各方影響，在亞太潮流當中不斷地被重塑、改造。

This thesis analyzes Sylvia Watanabe’s Hawaiian imagination in Talking to the Dead (1992). As a Hawaiian local writer, Watanabe displays in her writings a Hawai‘i that is different from the dominant representation of the islands from the U.S. mainland. Watanabe does not propagate the prevailing image of Hawai‘i as a tourist paradise in the Pacific, but write to demonstrate the multiplicitiy of the place. Central to my argument is that Luhi, the fictional construction of Watanabe, serves not only as an epitome Hawai‘i but also as the nexus of Asia-Pacific traveling routes. A “meeting place,” it can be understood as a place of temporal and spatial instability. There are four chapters in this thesis. Chapter One serves as an introduction, in which I offer an overview of Hawaii’s history and local culture, discuss the different representations of Hawai‘i in literature, and bring to the fore the significance of studying the stories written by Watanabe, an author who writes from her aloha ‘aina (love of the land). Chapter two centers on the opening-up of Hawai‘i as a place through a close reading of several stories from Sylvia Watanabe’s Talking to the Dead. I focus on Watanabe’s blurring of spatial boundary by employing Doreen Massey’s theory on an extroverted place. Massey extends the meaning of a place from a self-confined site to a borderland where the barriers between the inside and the outside are dismantled, rendering each place an open and porous “dis-place.” In Chapter Three, I explore Watanabe’s blurring of temporal boundary. In light of Homi Bhabha’s concept of “the unhomely,” Hawai‘i can be conceived as a quasi-postcolonial “unhomely” place where the boundaries between the private and the public, the past and the present are dismantled. I argue that it is in this particular “unhomely” place that spirits and ghosts emerge. In Chapter Four, I situate Watanabe’s writing of Talking to the Dead in the global-local context. I conclude that Watanabe’s definition of local is not immune from various global impacts; the Hawaiian local is always reshaping itself in the Asia-Pacific cultural flows.