From HI-SEAS to Outer Space: Discourses of Water and Territory in U.S. Pacific Imperialism and Representations of U.S. Mars Colonization

Abstract

This chapter analyzes how imperial discourses of water and territory serve to claim such seemingly disparate spaces as the Hawaiian Islands and the planet Mars for U.S. empire. Through a comparative analysis of the so-called HI-SEAS Mars simulation project located on the slopes of Mauna Loa mountain (Hawai‘i) as well as of recent representations of Mars habitation and colonization, such as Andy Weir’s The Martian, it argues that current conceptualizations of Mars in the U.S. context tend to rely on discourses of territorial management groomed in nineteenth-century U.S. Pacific imperialism.