Critical Responses | Informative Summaries | Works Cited

"Complicating the Tourist Gaze: Literacy and the Internet as Catalysts for Articulating a Postcolonial Palauan Identity"
  by Karla Saari Kitalong and Tino Kitalong

As with many of the chapters in this text, Kitalong and Kitalong directly state their structure and topic:

In this chapter, we discuss a number of Internet sites created by and for Palauans to illustrate some mostly modest and tentative – but occasionally aggressive – ways that Palauans have been using the Internet to begin to articulate a postcolonial identity and to reshape the literacies they have acquired through a century or more of colonial rule. [. . .] In the remainder of this chapter, we illustrate three of the strategies employed by Palauan Web developers to create culturally coherent self-representations that contribute to the construction of a postcolonial Palauan identity and help to moderate the aggressive yet insufficient tourist gaze that dominates the Web. The strategies include community building, cultural pedagogy, and social action. (97, 101)
Kitalong and Kitalong’s argument begins with an analysis of two Palauan Web sites, both of which “provide a significant Palauan-created and -sustained counterforce to the ‘tourist gaze’ that prevails on the Web;” these and other Web sites also “enable Palauans – whether or not they live in Palau – to build community, teach and learn about their cultural heritage, and engage in important social action” (96).  These four features of Palauan Web sites – deflecting the tourist gaze, building community, teaching and learning about their culture, and engaging in social action – are also exhibited through the Web literacy practices of Palauan's email exchanges. Particularly salient are the online literacy practices used to build community:
by slyly inserting cultural commentary meant only to be noticed or understood by insiders, by signaling their affinity with other islanders, and by including electronic mechanisms designed to bring wired Palauans together. In so doing, these early Palauan Web developers forge, for the first time in a century, important new alliances that don’t require the blessing of a colonial power.  In the process of community building, they simultaneously educate themselves and others about Palau and its neighboring islands. (104)
These Palauan Web pages also mitigate the tourist gaze because, by
taking charge of their own Internet representations, some of the newly independent Palauans have begun actively to rearticulate individual and national identities; renew key cultural values; and clarify and strengthen Palau’s global position as an independent entity decoupled from the US. (109)
As such, the community building online has enabled Palauan's to refashion their identity.  Yet these benefits on online literacy for Palauan's are offset by the “less self-evident” yet “potential dangers” posed by the Internet to “Palauans’ salient cultural values,” particularly the prevalence of pornography on the Internet (109). Nevertheless, Kitalong and Kitalong’s article effectively demonstrates “how some Palauans have begun to use literacy practices gained through a century of colonial rule to begin to articulate a postcolonial Palauan cultural identity” (110).