Moana, Race, and Polynesian Exceptionalism: A Polemical Response

The discourse of cultural protectionism surrounding the movie Moana (Walt Disney Pictures, 2016) has reached bizarre proportions. There is a version of what I cannot describe as anything other than ‘Polynesian exceptionalism’ circulating as the pillar upon which this discourse is based. What I mean by this is the incipient notion that Moana was telling the stories of ‘Polynesians’ broadly construed (I assume this given the number of times I have seen the collective pronoun ‘our’ used) and so the messages of the film must be completely owned by Polynesians. Because the Disney corporation does not have the best history of representing peoples around the world, these culturalists say, they cannot be trusted. Corporate activity, capitalism, and ‘whiteness’ are locked in a signifying chain that links them all together in a magical idealist force that has the power to disperse and manipulate ‘narratives’ that threaten the non-existent cohesiveness of ‘our stories’. Such is the postcolonial paradigm the critics have used to scrutinise the movie: the West, which Disney is figured as a part of, are capitalist colonisers and the Polynesians are helpless victims of its effect. There have been some seriously questionable takes as a result of this already suspicious narrative of domination. Moana is understood as not just a film, but a vicious instance of cultural theft undertaken by Disney. This is despite the film or elements of it being translated into several languages (including Tahitian, Tokelauan, and even Hindi), the original screenplay being worked on by Taika Waititi, Opetaia Foa’i worked on music, the cast being predominantly New Zealand Māori and Polynesian actors (of the lead cast, only Nicole Scherzinger and Alan Tudyk were not), and, furthermore, many more of the main production team being not ‘white’ (including Lin-Manuel Miranda and Osnat Shurer). Tina Ngata, however, has apparently chastised Taika Waititi for working on the movie.

And despite these realities, the dissenting narratives have not changed; Morgan Godfery says Moana is emblematic of “white projections” of Polynesian peoples and places. Vicente M. Diaz argues that Moana “originates not from Pacific Islander efforts to tell their own stories, but in white male writers actively seeking out raw cultural resources for the Disney machine… Underpinning and continuing to inform this entire project is an enduring modern and colonial desire for romanticized primitivism and a colonial nostalgia for lost innocence.” This is, frankly, meaningless speculation on the motives of people who work for Disney in a dislocated and rhetorical fashion. It is also contradictory in its assertions. Disney is apparently trying to secure the Pacific native in the marginal identity constructed by imperialism of innocence, primordial wholeness and naturism by not letting Māori and Pacific Islanders tell their own stories. Yet this is the only consequence of a politics with such fiercely policed cultural boundaries, and in fact that marginal identity is exactly what the prominent advocates of “indigenous perspectives” have narrated about themselves. In an analysis of Māori stereotypes in the media from 1997, geographer Melanie Wall (of Māori and Pākehā ancestry) identifies one particular example of a ‘self-made’ stereotype, that of the “quintessential Māori” identity. It is the production and advocacy of an idea of Māori as a marginal and subordinate rural people who are deeply spiritual and organise themselves around a pre-modern tribal form of kinship bonds.

Academic writers such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Hirini Matunga, Mason Durie, and even sometimes Albert Wendt (among many others) have contributed to the building of these stereotypes to challenge “colonial discourses,” which ironically only ends up mimicking them. The sophistry of Hawaiian scholar Maile Arvin demonstrates the operation of this discourse. Indigeneity is, in her essay “Analytics of Indigeneity,” an analytic that is said to go beyond personal identity but actually does not extend beyond it. One scholar is cited to make a claim about ‘deconstruction’ of one’s identity and another in the next paragraph will insist on the fixed nature of tribes and their national consciousness. A friend of mine aptly described this kind of academic work to me as “attempting, and ultimately failing, to go beyond the level of the subjectivist fetish.” This new academic discourse signified by these scholars cleanses and freezes the past, merges it into and thus decontextualizes the present, understanding it in a crude revisionist form, and politicises Māori and Pacific Islanders on the basis of racial, often tribal identity, excluding the increasingly apparent class differences. Class is not relevant to this discourse as that is implied to be a specific problem facing the arbiters of capitalist economics, understood as ‘Westerners’. Now, the oppressive features of modernity have been rightly challenged in both progressive (e.g. the radical Enlightenment) and reactionary (e.g. neotraditionalist, nationalist) ways. But new mechanisms of oppression have surfaced that incorporate and nullify the effects of oppositional identity politics. These mechanisms extend from both a deregulated financialised capitalism and an ideologically mandated consumerist identity that propels across the globe. Economic globalisation and the neoliberal proliferation of new elites who come from historically marginalised backgrounds has been commonplace in what is optimistically called ‘late capitalism’. Indigenous members of these new elites have begun to cover over their class position by either asserting their marginalised identity as indigenous, an identity which is understood to be non-capitalist despite being increasingly implicated in new emergent modes of accumulation, or justifying it on the basis of neotraditionalist ideology.    

Although the main characters of Moana, the titular heroine and the demigod Maui, broadly reflect the size and stature of their respective actors (Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson and Auli’i Cravalho respectively), they are seen to reflect colonial gender stereotypes of exoticised women and hypermasculine men, as blogger IronLion56 understands it. These are also staple features of ‘oriental discourse,’ the definition of which is commonly attributed to the early anti-humanist work of literary critic Edward Said. Said would later renounce this discourse theory in one of his last books, Culture and Imperialism. And Jenny Salesa, a Member of Parliament for the Labour Party, opened the floodgates when she criticised Maui’s look as glorifying obesity. This sentiment was backed by rugby player Eliota Fuimaono Sapolu and Will Illolohia, who said it was “typical American stereotyping,” among others. Leah Damm, in an excellent post for New Zealand online magazine The Spinoff, rightly criticised Salesa for herself reinforcing negative stereotypes about Pacific Islanders (she posted a meme on her Facebook that described Maui’s depiction as “half pig, half hippo”), which was obviously not Salesa’s intention. Damm links these stereotypes portrayed by the Maui-is-obese group of critics to actual instances of the bullying of Polynesian children. Even positive views of the movie, such as that of Richard Wolfgramm’s, also located the strength of Auli’i Cravalho’s acting in a racial identity. Wolfgramm writes, “It’s apparent in [Cravalho’s] media appearances that she is deeply rooted in Hawaiian culture and identity, which is why she can articulate about (sic) cultural things in a manner that is beyond her age, and be able to translate a white man’s script into something that is tangible, real and recognizable on the screen and not a simplistic, reductive caricature.” To top it off, Wolfgramm argues that Cravalho should be paid more than her co-workers – which for me invalidates the lip service paid to the analysis of capitalism, described as inescapable and ‘inevitable’. I find this conclusion completely unsurprising. A politics that melts a longing for a past that never existed into an endless, futureless present is always going to end up being fatalist and self-defeating.

This repetitive and unchanging discourse about ‘culture,’ which as I (thanks in large part to Kenan Malik) have pointed out numerous times, has become a new byword for ‘race’ deployed by the left wing of neoliberalism. I hold that as a film, Moana is certainly not racist or nostalgic of colonialism or representative of the power of whiteness or whatever else. This idealist patter, I suspect, would have been hauled out no matter what the movie looked like in the end. Instead, I actually saw Moana itself as a deeply layered story with which I found personal resonance: Moana’s longing to know the world outside the boundaries of her tribe against the wishes of the voices of authority and destiny, her dealing with the pain of loss of her grandmother who supported her endeavours (the loss of my own is still somewhat raw), a harsh portrayal of the dangers the Pacific Islands face if human-made ecological decay is not quickly and astutely responded to, the mixture of child-accessible versions of the mythology and the well-honed science of navigation Polynesians developed. My criticism of this discourse, and the fact I liked Moana, does not bring about some happy ending where I reveal all worries about the movie to be fabricated, and this is because of Disney’s status as a capitalist corporation. I understand Disney not as a malevolent, dream-producing entity indictable of cultural manipulation (read Jean Baudrillard’s America if you wish for such a critique) but structurally as generative of the features characterising ‘creative capitalism.’ Disney’s existence as a mass-audience studio of mechanised cultural production is merely a symptom of the capitalist economy’s drive for profit, which is returned in the ever-expanding economies of scale and means of production businesses and elites control as well as the development of new creative technologies and the increasing regulation of the productive forces. Marxist criticism of the totality of capitalism is the hidden third option sitting behind the false opposition the prevailing anti-Moana discourse sets up. This opposition is: either criticise Moana as some kind of masterful cultural theft, or, as Anne Keala Kelly says, you “don’t recognise an insult or culture theft when [you] see it”, in which case she will consider you as a traitor or a happy-go-lucky consumerist.

As Jonathan Friedman says in Cultural Identity and Global Process, the ‘identity spaces’ of traditionalism and primitivism converge on a weakened modernity and attempt to proliferate local understandings of culture, which are, as it happens, the very understandings that emerged as a product of Western colonialism and race science. Kenan Malik aptly puts it in this way: “Ironically, the greatest Western cultural export is not Disney or Starbucks or Tom Cruise. It is the very idea of local culture.” The abandonment of class politics for the politics of identity has enabled this melancholic discourse that capitalism is an inevitable Western imposition to emerge, which has only contributed to further entrenching an ascendant Polynesian elite (having accepted and brokered opportunities for new business interests to emerge or new regimes of accumulation) and diminishing much of the chance for the groups it affects the most (which includes, by the way, working-class whites) to be able to transcend its violence. This is because in the decolonial conception of it advanced by the Moana critics and their respective academic influences, there is no conception of how capitalism actually works in a structural sense and how some among the groups they intend to speak for actually represent its interests as members of newly created elites. The best answer to this problem, Marxism, was abandoned some time ago by this group as a ‘white’ theory. Others do not even realise it exists for their benefit. Structural analyses have been replaced by recourses to magical entities of power, called on when convenient, personified or signified by meaningless go-to phrases such as ‘the white men’ or ‘cultural appropriation’.

Kenan Malik, in his book Strange Fruit, says that “although the right has adopted the language of diversity, [the left has] adopted the idiom of racial identity”. This idiom is the centre of the contradictory nature of much postcolonial theory and indeed the very thing that has caused it to stagnate. Race, now elided into ‘culture,’ is seen as the thing that will emancipate those who were racialised as opposed to what it was actually used for – stereotypes, catalogued and imposed as ‘scientific,’ for the purposes of marginalising and trapping them. ‘Culture,’ no matter what form it takes, is marketable. The drama about Moana has perhaps taught us this if nothing else. The sociological subculture theorists of the 1960s in Britain, led by Stuart Hall, have appeared to learn that the hard way. Cultural studies will realise soon enough that its ascendant idealism is unsustainable. No one has taken heed of my call, which echoes that of Marxist writer Harry Chang, to forgo the category of race (as well as the new obsession with ‘culture’) and replace it with a structural analysis of capitalism and a political programme of recognising the situation capitalism leaves us in, invigorating class consciousness and promoting an international movement of solidarity against elite tyranny and for the dissolution of class altogether. It is about time we left the race discourses behind and worked towards dismantling the last of those institutions that continue to produce the international class differences inside the homogeneous “Polynesian” bloc we have become so accustomed to hearing about, and work towards, to appropriately paraphrase the lyrics of Bob Marley, “emancipation from material slavery.”