In recent years, spectacular images of ruined boats, makeshift border camps, and beaches littered with life vests have done much to consolidate the politics of movement in Europe. Indeed, the mediation of migration as a crisis has worked to shore up various forms of militarized surveillance, humanitarian response, legislative action, and affective investment. Bridging academic inquiry and artistic and activist practice, the essays, documents, and artworks gathered in Moving Images interrogate the mediation of migration and refugeeism in the contemporary European conjuncture, asking how images, discourses, and data are involved in shaping the visions and experience of migration in increasingly global contexts.
This article traces the emergence of wireless telegraphy in the Hawaiian Islands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Centrally, I argue that for an ascendant haole (white settler) planter class, wirelessness proffered potent resources with which to articulate a particular model of scale and connectivity—one in which Hawai‘i’s isolation from the US mainland was recast as the predicate of new, and highly lucrative, forms of intimacy and proximity. These intimacies, I argue, overlapped not just symbolically but materially with the de facto and de jure forms of US colonial governance that took shape in the islands in this period. To make the case, I think through and around one particularly notable wireless transmission complex: the American Marconi Company’s hulking installation at Kahuku, on the North Shore of O‘ahu, and its companion station at Koko Head, some fifty miles south. Recounting the maneuvers by which these sites were drawn into the fold of long-distance wireless signaling, I show that to whatever extent wirelessness animated transcendent visions of scalar extensibility and global connectivity, it did so from within the confines of a colonial economy of land use, elaborated around the enclosure and privatization of Indigenous land and the racially stratified exploitation of migrant labor. By way of conclusion, however, the article also considers how Kānaka Maoli (Indigenous Hawaiians) are today developing new models of wireless connectivity that upend this history of colonial enclosure by articulating wirelessness to projects of Indigenous nation building.
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