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.

Introduction: Hawai‘i as “sMars”

In October 2015, an international crew of six women and men donning space suits vital to endure thin atmospheres and to withstand the effects of increased exposure to space radiation arrived at the shiny white, dome-like NASA habitat nested into the reddish, sandy slope of a nearby mountainside (Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1

The HI-SEAS (Hawai‘i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) habitat on Mauna Loa on the island of Hawai‘i. Photograph by University of Hawai‘i News. Available at https://flic.kr/p/QpWyq1. Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

In the habitat, which became the crew’s home and workplace for the coming twelve-month mission, the twelve women and men were virtually on their own. Cut off from the rest of human civilization and with communication between the habitat and mission control delayed by about twenty minutes, the success of the so-called HI-SEAS mission rested solely on the crew’s ability to endure the psychological and emotional stress of the long isolation of NASA’s mission to Mars (see Kizzia 2015, 3, 11, 13; Stuster 1996, xii–xiv). Twelve eventful months later, the mission came to a successful end: the twelve Martian colonists proved that human beings were capable of enduring long periods of isolation on the red planet.

What sounds like the vision of humankind’s first steps into permanent extra-terrestrial settlement is actually a simulation of such an endeavor on U.S. soil—on Mauna Loa mountain on the island of Hawai‘i. Such simulations—and NASA’s HI-SEAS (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) mission series is no exception—are designed to be social experiments, primarily focusing on the interactions between the crew members in conditions of isolation, and thus provide crucial data for the long durations of NASA’s Mars missions. While the mission’s primary objective is to project the behavior and actions of an isolated crew on Earth onto future NASA missions on planet Mars, the representation of the HI-SEAS mission, I want to argue, is founded on a discourse that casually emphasizes the virtual interchangeability of the two spaces of Hawai‘i and Mars. Moving beyond the similarities in the reddish palette of both the soil on Mars and Mauna Loa, these representations emphasize Hawai‘i’s ostensibly remote and isolated location in the Pacific Ocean—in relation to U.S. continental mainland—which makes it a perfect simulation of Mars on Earth; so perfect, in fact, that the crewmembers tended to refer to their Hawaiian habitat as “sMars,” or “simulation Mars” (see Kizzia 2015, 13).

In the discourse that the article frames, the notion of Hawai‘i as an isolated space locates the islands in a list of other terrestrial spaces that allegedly provide a proving ground or blueprint for Mars colonization. Hawai‘i, the argument goes, perfectly re-creates the environment of isolation found both in Arctic/Antarctic exploration, and long-distance maritime travel in the nineteenth century, and thus allows for projecting Mars on Earth (see Kizzia 2015, 1–3; Stuster 1996; Markley 2005, 8). As Tom Kizzia states in his 2015 article “Moving to Mars” for the New Yorker: “The volunteers perched in the lava fields of Mauna Loa are as close as earthlings will get to Mars in the foreseeable future” (5).

This contribution explores how the discourses of isolation and mobility of sea and space travel are all conflated in the space of Hawai‘i in order to turn the islands into a stepping stone to Mars colonization. To be able to disentangle and analyze this conflation, my article discusses discourses of ambiguous territories and the imperial strategies to manage them. I argue that the ways in which Hawai‘i’s territorial configuration is framed to accommodate the characteristics of maritime travel, polar exploration, as well as future Mars colonization, is based on an underlying U.S. imperial discourse of territoriality, which perceives polar and island spaces as existing in a liminal position between water and land, and attempts to manage water and territory alike (see van der Marel 2014; Shell 2014). In other words, since the oceans, the Arctic and Antarctic, and Mars are spaces that escape traditional discourses of territorial colonization—due to what is perceived to be their territorial ambiguity in western colonial thought—the past imperial incorporation and continuously flexible management of the Hawaiian Islands’ territory by the United States provides a blueprint for the negotiation of this extra-terrestrial territorial ambiguity (see van der Marel 2014).

The discussion of the territorial ambiguity of islands and their liminality clearly builds on what scholars like Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Stephens, and Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen have respectively described as an imperial privileging of continentality and continental nations over islands and by extension also island nations (see Roberts and Stephens 2017; Lewis and Wigen 1997). This hierarchy, Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues, has been an integral device in literary representations of islands, which justify imperial campaigns on island spaces like Hawai‘i by imaging the islands and the oceans surrounding them as isolated and passive spaces and their indigenous populations as flotsam at best (see DeLoughrey 2007, 2, 8, 12, 15). Imagining Hawai‘i as an isolated island in the Pacific in relation to the continental USA, and therefore as a perfect stepping stone between terrestrial Mars simulation and actual Mars colonization, the representations of the HI-SEAS project clearly taps into the very same imperial discourse, connecting U.S. imperialisms in island and maritime spaces to that in outer space.

To resist these territorial hierarchies and to (re)claim indigenous claims to sovereignty in the region, Pacific Islanders have put particular emphasis on traditional means of wayfinding navigation, called etak, that counter western models of “passive and empty space such as terra and aqua nullius, which were used to justify territorial expansion” (DeLoughrey 2007, 3; see also 98, 104). Instead, DeLoughrey argues, this form of navigation emphasizes the simultaneous rootedness and mobility of the traveling subject, who is not “physically or culturally circumscribed by the terrestrial boundaries of island space” (3). Alternate conceptions of the territorialities of water and land are essential for this understanding of navigation: etak, which DeLoughrey translates as “moving island,” perceives the ship to be stable in its journey, while the islands and the whole cosmos travel closer to the ship (see Shell 2014; DeLoughrey 2007, 99). I want to argue that Pacific Islander navigation does not only transcend the boundaries of mobility and rootedness, but also connects sovereignty and mobility to a fluidity of conceptions of territory, and a muddied distinction between (is)land and water.

Imperial mappings of the Pacific responding to this notion of navigation and sovereignty are therefore oftentimes based on nullifying and erasing Pacific Islander navigational traditions (see DeLoughrey 2007, 99–100). Lyons and Tengan identify this strategy as a “radical new territorialism of the seas,” embodied by an increase of policing of maritime borders, the militarization of the world’s oceans, and the cutting-up of the sea by contesting areas of jurisdiction (Lyons and Tengan 2015, 562; DeLoughrey 2007, 26). The 2017 conflict between the United States and North Korea exemplifies, however, that beyond merely inhibiting Pacific Islander navigational traditions, U.S. militarism straightforwardly replaces and replicates a fluid understanding of territoriality to the end of strengthening its own grip on the Pacific: observing how the geographies of Pacific islands like Guam and the Hawaiian Islands are dominated by U.S. military installations as a means of allowing the U.S. military to strike from there against about one-fourth of the globe has led scholars and activists from the Pacific to compare the islands to airplane carriers and military vessels (see Perez 2015; and “Rather than keep us safe”). One could argue then that the way that this situation has put Hawai‘i and Guam into the crosshairs of imperial global conflicts is an example of how the notion of the “moving island” can be forcefully beaten into an imperial shape. In my article I argue that this fluidity of territoriality, and the conceptions of mobility that accompany it, travels to Mars in order to make sense of a planet that is legally ambiguous and thus escapes nation-state logic of territoriality.

With this, my article ties in with a wider field of research concerned with discourses of territoriality in U.S. imperialism as well as anti-, post-, and decolonial projects. The article draws attention to the ways in which recent representations of U.S.-led Mars colonization negotiate the tension between an allegedly transnationalized outer space, the legal and geographic ambiguity of Mars, and the discourses of imperialism and colonization traditionally employed in projects of territorial acquisition and control. My article explores these representations of Mars exploration and their entanglements with discourses of imperialism, colonization, territoriality, militourism, transnationalism, and nationalism. The line of connection that this article draws between contemporary imperial discourses of territoriality, and their uses in envisioning a future of outer space colonization, contributes to an understanding of the connections and differences between the various phases of U.S. imperialism. As Craig Santos Perez, John Carlos Rowe, and Camille van der Marel have all pointed out, such a project has to necessarily pay close attention to the ways in which discourses of territoriality in U.S. imperialism flexibly adapt to the context of their application to also include spaces apparently at odds with imperial notions of territorial control, such as ice floes and bodies of water, and, I would add, the reddish waste of Mars (see Rowe 2000; Perez 2015; van der Marel 2014).

With this in mind and using the HI-SEAS project as a point of departure, I critically relate literary texts and state documents, as well as visual representations of both Hawai‘i and Mars, to one another. This comparative analysis of texts like Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawai‘i and Andy Weir’s The Martian, of visualizations such as the “Visions of the Future” poster series, and of documents like the “Outer Space Treaty” explores the ways in which all of these genres and formats contribute to an imperial mapping and incorporation of both terrestrial and extra-terrestrial territorialities. More specifically, it analyzes the relationship between the Hawaiian Islands and U.S. national territory, and how this negotiation provides a discursive blueprint for extra-terrestrial colonization in general and Mars colonization in particular—thus highlighting a continuity of imperial management of water-as-territory in U.S. imperialisms. In other words, my article argues that if stepping on the shores of Hawai‘i means simulating the first tentative steps toward Mars colonization, it also means treading in the well-beaten track of U.S. imperial discourse in the Pacific.

Water as Territory in U.S. Imperialisms

In his 2010 speech at the John F. Kennedy Space Center in front of NASA personnel, then-President Barack Obama framed U.S. space exploration as the epitome of western modernity. Describing NASA’s work as “reaching for new heights, stretching beyond what previously did not seem possible [and thus an] essential part of what it means to be American,” Obama’s speech claims the progressiveness and innovation embodied by space travel for U.S. national identity (Obama 2010). Evoking John F. Kennedy’s famous moon declaration and linking it to his own administration’s plans to send Americans to Mars by 2030, Obama’s speech has revitalized space exploration as a project of national identity and serves as a point of departure for a number of cultural and literary imaginings of the future of U.S.-led space exploration in general and Mars exploration and colonization in particular.¹

In the wake of the speech and as part of this revitalization, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory published the “Visions of the Future” poster series, which imagines the future of a colonized solar system as well as commercial travel to other planets, such as Venus, Titan, Kepler 186f, and Mars. In spite of its agenda to promote the future of interstellar colonization and tourism, the posters are clearly indebted to the aesthetics of the Work Projects Administration (WPA) travel poster ads of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the U.S. travel agency and airline ads of the 1950s to the 1970s. Both the WPA posters and the travel ads carry the weight of an intimate discursive relationship between U.S. imperial expansion, U.S. national identity, and neo-imperial tourism (see Dux 1939). The WPA posters, particularly those which were designed to promote national parks and national historic sites as tourist destinations, load particular spaces with imagined national characteristics and in the process capture and map them as milestones toward U.S. national identity and national space. In a similar sense, the travel agency ads of these decades and their depiction of exotic destinations awaiting U.S.-American visitors, both projected U.S. imperial imaginaries onto locations such as Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hawai‘i, and simultaneously claimed and incorporated these spaces into a U.S. national imaginary (see Fojas 2014, 6). Camilla Fojas argues in Islands of Empire (99–101) that, in the particular context of Hawai‘i, this entanglement of tourism and imperialism became tangible in the Hawaiian statehood campaign of the 1950s, which tried to change the perception of the islands “from a foreign and distant land to a ‘domestic paradise’” so as to attract tourists and spur Hawaiian statehood (102).

The NASA posters pick up on both of these related discourses of neo-colonial tourism by representing Mars as a future national historic site, which is exoticized yet within easy reach, and thus at the heart of a U.S. imperial imaginary. This seemingly paradoxical move of reaching back in time aesthetically to represent the future of Mars colonization is thus not accidental, but instead gestures toward a continuity of imperial discourses of territorial incorporation. In this sense, U.S. conceptions of territoriality in Pacific imperialism offer a blueprint for extra-terrestrial colonization. I want to argue that the negotiation of Hawai‘i in a U.S. imperial imaginary is particularly crucial for the coming to terms with Martian territory—which in turn escapes traditional terrestrial conceptions of territory (Fig. 7.2).

Fig. 7.2

The Visions of the Future Poster Series. According to the website, the poster “imagines a future where tourists on Mars will visit the historic landing sites of the today’s space missions.” Design by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Caltech. Available at https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/resources/927/explore-mars-visions-of-the-future-poster/. Courtesy NASA/JPLCaltech

Consequently, this article is indebted to current discussions in the study of U.S. imperialism that strive to highlight the complex and problematic continuities between U.S. continental imperialism, nineteenth-century Pacific imperialism, and twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. economic and political neo-imperialism all over the globe and even in outer space, while still acknowledging historical and discursive specificities of each of these phases (Rowe 2000, 11; Kaplan 2005; Fojas 2014). The stakes in approaching U.S. imperial discourses in this manner are high: an emphasis on the continuities of U.S. imperialism in all its historical formations runs the danger of glossing over and effectively erasing the specific strategies of managing both territory and peoples, as well as the specific responses and resistance to these strategies articulated by groups, communities, and nations impacted by U.S. imperialism. Approaching U.S. imperialism as a series of unrelated and distinct phases, in turn, could be considered a perpetuation of a narrative of exceptional U.S. imperialism, which in turn legitimizes both continental colonization in the nineteenth century and Pacific and global expansion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (see Rowe 2000). In Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, John Carlos Rowe suggests that looking at the ways that strategies of imperial dominion were adapted according to the context of application might offer a way to map and track U.S.-imperial continuities and specificities:

Even as it pursued traditional imperial ends of territorial acquisition, however, the United States developed non-territorial forms of colonial domination, ultimately systematized in an “imperial” system that in the nineteenth century complemented American nationalism and in the twentieth century grew to encompass “spheres of influence” ranging from the Western Hemisphere to the farthest corners of the earth and by the last three decades of this century to include outer-space travel routes, especially those traversed by satellites for communications and military defense, and scientific research with technological applications. (11)

According to Rowe then, changing conceptions of territory as well as changing strategies of their management are key in understanding the connections between nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. expansion on the North American continent and into the Pacific, and twenty-first-century U.S. neo-imperialism around the globe and into outer space:

There is, then, an imperial heritage—a repertoire of methods for domination—on which the United States drew in the nineteenth century as it expanded westward; considered publicly and secretly specific extraterritorial ventures in the Caribbean, Central America, the South Pacific, and Asia; and formulated influential foreign policies, such as the Monroe Doctrine and Open Door Policy, that are still invoked today. Yet the United States added new means of displacing people, defining “territory,” and pursuing its “national interests” that anticipate the more commercial, technological, and cultural systems of control characteristic of twentieth-century imperialisms, especially those that emerged in the course of overt decolonization following World War II. (11)

Rowe’s focus on changing conceptions of territory is particularly compelling considering that U.S. imperial expansion into the Pacific at the end of the nineteenth century—including the annexation of Hawai‘i—struggled with the discursive leap necessary to negotiate the shift from a United States that was self-contained and continental to one that could incorporate the Pacific’s islands, oceans, and archipelagic spaces—which escape traditional western conceptions of territory—into its imaginary of a U.S. national territory (Rowe 2000; Kaplan 2005; Roberts and Stephens 2017, 1).

In the introduction to their anthology Archipelagic American Studies, Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Stephens suggest that this negotiation is marked by a privileging of continentality as central to U.S. historiography and self-perception, which “eclipsed islands and island-continent relations”(1).² With this, Roberts and Stephens stand on the shoulders of scholars like Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen who argue in The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography that continental structures have been a basic unit for understanding world geography and a guide in our assumptions about the natural world (1997, 2). This line of thinking often translated into what Lewis and Wigen have called the “nation state myth,” which “replicates at a smaller scale many of the errors found in continental thinking,” such as the notion that “cultural identities (nations) coincide with politically sovereign entities (states) to create a series of internally unified and essentially equal units” (9). Elizabeth DeLoughrey reminds us that continental thinking is not only based on foregrounding and privileging the continent as a geographic unit and nation-state structures as cultural-political entities, but that it is also predicated on offering a hierarchy of spatial configurations, which contrast the continent with island spaces, and privilege the former (see DeLoughrey 2007, 2).

This hierarchy, DeLoughrey argues, is particularly relevant in imperial campaigns, which stereotypically render islands as exotic, outlying outposts of civilization, as isolated from imperial centers and thus legitimate prey for colonial expansion (2, 8). The alleged island isolation became an almost iconic mode of representation in Euro-American literature. Terming this system of representation “islandism”—a nod to Orientalism—DeLoughrey highlights how Euro-American literary representations of islands were an integral part of a system of legitimization that normalized Euro-American colonial campaigns on island nations and in oceanic regions (12, 15). Historical representations of Hawai‘i as an isolated island in the Pacific when viewed from the perspective of the continental USA are clearly indebted to this trope (see Osborne 1981). By rendering Hawai‘i as a perfect stepping stone between terrestrial Mars simulation and actual Mars colonization, the representations of the HI-SEAS project clearly tap into the very same imperial discourse, connecting U.S. imperialisms in the Pacific and in outer space. In terms of Rowe’s argument to pay attention to changing conceptions of territory in U.S. imperialism, however, reading the relationship between Hawai‘i and the United States as merely that of isolated island and overpowering continent, for all its currency, does not do justice to the complexity of the relationship between island and ocean in this case. Neither does it reflect the intricate strategies U.S. imperialism employs in managing and incorporating these islands as part of their national territory. As Marc Shell points out in Islandology, “islandness … resides in a shifting tension between the definition of island as ‘land as opposed to water’ and the countervailing definition as ‘land as identical with water,’” and thus prompts a closer scrutiny of the ways in which the sea surrounding those islands figures in imperial conceptions of territory (2014, 1).

While the notion of continent vs. island runs the danger of privileging land, and thus rendering the oceans connecting/dividing the two as absent, a number of scholars have pointed out that the past and present policing of maritime borders, the militarization of the world’s oceans, and the cutting-up of the sea by contesting areas of jurisdiction, hints at an increasingly imperial and nationalistic “maritime territorialism” (see DeLoughrey 2007, 30, 26; Lyons and Tengan, “Introduction: Pacific Currents,” 562; Dudziak and Volpp 2005, 1). In “Transterritorial Currents and the Imperial Terripelago,” Craig Santos Perez translates this notion to a U.S.-American context. Describing how, from a Pacific islander’s perspective, the United States maintains its continental identity precisely because of its overseas island possessions and military bases, Perez proposes the notion of America as an “imperial archipelago” (2015, 619). At the heart of this redefinition of the American empire lies a renegotiation of territoriality: Perez underscores that although the notion of exclusive territory remains an organizing principle of modern sovereign nation-state structures, the concept of territory itself has been in constant flux (see Raustiala qtd. in Perez 2015, 620). Coining the terminology of “American terripelago” (combining of territory and pélago, signifying sea), Perez argues that in the context of Pacific imperialism, territory as a concept includes a conjoining of land and sea, island and continents (Perez 2015, 619–620). Likening the fluidity of territoriality to the structure of marine currents, Perez draws attention to how the multitude of territorial regimes within the U.S. empire—among them maritime borders and the management of the sea—are a strategic pattern within the logic of U.S. imperialism:

The structure of marine currents (surface currents, crosscurrents, undercurrents, rip currents, ebb currents, flood currents) has the power to move the ocean and transform global and local climate patterns. Similarly, the currents of territoriality (or transterritorial currents) possess the power to move (and remove) populations and resources, thus transforming global and local political patterns. (620)

In the specific case of Hawai‘i, the mobility and fluidity that Perez identifies in the fluctuation of territorial concepts translate into a flexible imperial mapping and remapping of islands and the Pacific that surrounds them. In “The Trans-Americanization of Hawai‘i,” Rob Wilson elaborates how Hawai‘i was reimagined flexibly to provide a backdrop for the dominant currents within U.S. imperial discourse: in the logic of U.S. capitalist imperialism, Hawai‘i was framed as a U.S. outpost and bulwark against imperial incursions to and from “the East,” an Edenic appendage of the United States, a “mediating space” for the transmission of cheap labor and goods between Asia and the U.S., and particularly as a strategic military outpost in the Spanish-American War of 1898. According to Wilson, this framework stresses Hawai‘i’s key role in the formation of a “peripheralized ‘American Pacific’ linked to a Euro-American core” (Wilson 2000a, 521–523; cf. Wilson 2000b). Wilson’s discussion of Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawai‘i is an example of this discourse: not only does it reveal that Hawai‘i itself was reimagined with each imperial projection, but it also demonstrates that the Hawai‘ian Islands were flexibly moved around on the imperial map to reflect the relationship between the islands, the United States, and the rest of the Pacific world according to what the currently dominant imperial discourse advocated (526).

This remapping was built on a reimagining of the islands themselves as well as on a manipulation of the Pacific Ocean between the islands and the U.S. mainland (Twain 1975, 12, 31). In what Yunte Huang calls “compressing of Pacific time-space,” Twain advocates the colonization of Hawai‘i by way of reducing the time of travel from California to the islands with the help of faster steam ships (2008, 19). Twain reasons that this will bring the islands closer to the United States, loosen the mounting grip of other colonial powers, and will allow the United States to gain a foothold for future imperial campaigns in the Pacific region (Twain 1975, 12). His tongue-in-cheek description of Hawai‘i as “the loveliest fleet of islands that lie anchored in any ocean” clearly presents us with an imperial appropriation of the concept of the “moving island”—it is after all, the Hawaiian Islands that travel closer to the United States. In using a combination of terms signifying rootedness (anchored, islands) and mobility (fleet, any ocean) to describe the Hawaiian Islands, Twain’s mapping of Hawai‘i is thus linked to what Marc Shell described as the island’s curious position in between water and territory: for Twain’s imperial agenda in the Pacific and Asia, the Hawaiian islands offer both the stable foothold of territory and the flexible mobility of the oceans (2014, 31). In line with Rowe’s proposition, Wilson’s and my reading of Twain’s text offers a point of departure for tracing an imperial history of the strategic management of water and territory in the Pacific, and particularly Hawai‘i. A detailed overview of this history would of course be beyond the scope of this contribution. It is, however, important to note that the strategy resurfaces in twentieth-century U.S. neo-imperial tourism discourse(s), impacting the tourist industry’s representation of Hawai‘i, which, in turn, clearly inspired NASA’s “Vision of the Future” poster series.

As touched upon above, Fojas argues in Islands of Empire that the U.S. tourism industry in the 1950s relied heavily on a representation of Hawai‘i as a “domestic paradise” rather than a “foreign and distant land,” to bolster the Hawaiian statehood campaign, which would, if realized, by extension make the islands more readily accessible for U.S.-American tourists (2014, 99–101, 102). Actual Hawaiian statehood was thus preceded by a projection of Hawai‘i as part of a U.S. national imaginary and as part of the continental nation—even if a peripheral part. The notion of imagining the Hawaiian islands to be closer to the United States and therefore bringing them into the fold of the nation, I would argue, repeats the strategy—first apparent in Twain’s text—of moving the islands around flexibly on the U.S. imperial map. A brochure cited by Fojas, which advocates Hawaiian statehood, perfectly visualizes how this strategy involves the management of both water and territory. In the brochure, Hawai‘i and the North American continent are rescaled to make Hawai‘i appear larger and also much closer to the United States. At the same time, the ships and planes and their travel routes appear like a thread linking the continent and the islands, with the Pacific Ocean disappearing completely as the seam is sewn together.

Nevertheless, a more recent event exemplifies a reversal of this proximity between the United States and Hawai‘i. Voicing his discontent with the decision of a federal judge in Hawai‘i to block the travel ban signed by President Donald Trump, General Attorney Jeff Sessions issued the following statement on 18 April 2017, on the radio show “The Mark Levin Show”: “I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power” (Shalby 2017). Achieving notoriety as the “Island in the Pacific” statement, Sessions’s interview primarily attempts to undermine the legal authority of a federal judge in Hawai‘i with regard to federal law through what could be described as an exact reversal of the discourse found in the aforementioned brochure: it discursively creates distance between Hawai‘i and the U.S. mainland—by positioning Hawai‘i as an insignificant and isolated space somewhere in the vast Pacific Ocean—and severing the ties of jurisdiction that hold the islands and the U.S. mainland together. Simultaneously, Hawai‘i retains its position of exoticism and isolation that justified U.S. imperial intervention in Hawai‘i in the first place.³

By rendering Hawai‘i as a perfect stepping stone between terrestrial Mars simulation and actual Mars colonization, the representations of the HI-SEAS project clearly taps into the very same imperial discourse exemplified above. Hawai‘i is moved around the U.S. imperial map to connect U.S. continental territory with the imaginary future Martian territory. As such, Hawai‘i’s position in this mapping is reminiscent of its role in the imaginary of U.S. imperialism in the Pacific and Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the islands are exotic, uncivilized, and isolated enough to simulate Mars, yet close enough to the nation to safely perform a simulation of colonizing and incorporating “exotic” Martian territory (see Kizzia 2015, 3, 11, 13; Stuster 1996, xii–xiv). Unlike in earlier cases, Hawai‘i as a simulation of Mars is also aligned with and connected to other terrestrial spaces that allegedly present a proving ground—albeit less perfect than Hawai‘i—for Mars colonization. In his article on the HI-SEAS project for the New Yorker, Tom Kizzia opens with a rendition of the 1898 Antarctic mission of the ship Belgica, which nearly failed due to the crew’s unfamiliarity with the Arctic terrain, and their lack of training for enduring long periods of isolation (see 2015, 1–2). Citing Jack Stuster’s Bold Endeavors (1996)—the go-to textbook on modern space travel—Kizzia connects Antarctic and Arctic exploration in the nineteenth century with oceanic journeys of discovery starting with Columbus and describes them as blueprints for modern space travel (2–3). Hawai‘i, the article argues, is the next logical step from these terrestrial spaces on our way to Mars colonization. The series Mars, directed by Ron Howard (2016), seems to make a similar point. By placing an imagined future Mars mission side by side with documentary material on contemporary efforts toward such a mission, Howard’s Mars repeats the projection of Mars on Earth and vice-versa exemplified by the HI-SEAS project. In the episode “Power,” the dangers of creating a colony on Mars are represented in the science-fiction portion of the episode by a storm threatening to destroy the habitat of the colony. This imaginary is placed next to documentary material of a contemporary Mars colony simulation in Antarctica, suggesting that the simulation in the ice and cold of Antarctica specifically prepares a crew for the environmental dangers that a potential Mars colony would face (see Mars, Season 1, Episode 4).

While the comparability of these spaces—Arctic, Antarctic, the open sea, and Hawai‘i—is rather limited or even illogical at first glance, they do fall into a pattern if considered through the lens of U.S. imperial discourses of territory. From this perspective, both the Arctic and Antarctic—like the space of the island—exist in a liminal position between water and land, and in their territorial ambiguity, resist regular regimes of territoriality and discourses of settler colonial territorial colonization, which favor land over water (see Shell 2014).

Discussing Canada’s attempt to strengthen its sovereignty over its Arctic territories, van der Marel describes what she calls the “agricultural-cum-epistemological limits of settler practices for colonial (dis)possession” (2014, 15). These epistemological limits place certain spaces—like deserts, shorelines, and polar “wastes”—outside colonial discourses of territorial incorporation and as a challenge to colonial systems of possession based on agricultural productivity and improvement (16, 10–21). I argue that the way in which the Arctic/Antarctica and Mars are represented as equally threatening to the success of a project of colonization is based on an allegedly comparable territorial ambiguity. The inclusion of oceanic spaces in this list of comparable territorial configurations follows the same logic. As a space of transit and fluidity, in which both “hegemonic and anti-hegemonic mobilities take effect,” the sea has been read as a productive point of departure for criticizing imperial configurations of territory and sovereignty, imperial projects in general, and the nation-state as the allegedly ultimate cultural-political entity, while simultaneously being the subject of imperial regimes and policing (Ganser 2012, 34). In their multidirectionality and layeredness, oceans seem to escape the exclusive logic of territorial control (see DeLoughrey 2007, 20, 21, 96). As scholars from oceanic and polar contexts have demonstrated, then, both Arctic/Antarctic and oceanic spaces are indeed useful in articulating a critique of imperial discourses of territorial incorporation and control.

It is important to underline again, however, that polar spaces as well as oceans do not escape imperial mappings completely, but that they rather challenge imperial strategies of territorial control—which are traditionally fixated onto notions of land, agricultural cultivation, and permanent settlement. Van der Marel writes accordingly that, in the case of Canada’s Arctic North, literary expedition narratives “asserted ownership over contested territories that could not be possessed through agricultural means” (2014, 22). This “literary harvest” of lands deemed barren forces the Arctic North into Canada’s settler-colonial narrative (22). In the introduction to their seminal anthology Legal Borderlands, Mary Dudziak and Leti Volpp similarly point out that oceanic spaces have equally been the subject of imperial border regimes and discourses of possession (see 2005, 1–3; Ganser 2012, 37–38). Here the text of the law replaces plow and spear as tools to mark territorial control: “The boundaries around U.S. territorial waters are not outlined by physical structures; they exist on the shelves of law libraries, their dimensions defined in treaties. Instead of a metal edge, there are words on a page” (Dudziak and Volpp 2005, 1).

The work of van der Marel, as well as Dudziak and Volpp, underlines the flexibility of imperial discourses in adapting their strategies to exact control over spaces deemed territorially ambiguous. My contention is that the flexible mapping of Hawaiian territory in U.S. imperial discourse is a template case for dealing with such territorially ambiguous spaces—like the island, located somewhere between water and territory—and incorporating them into the U.S. national territory and (the U.S. national) imaginary. Presenting Hawai‘i as a perfect stepping stone to the colonization of Mars reveals the territorial ambiguity of Mars itself and also underlines the usefulness of Hawai‘i as a blueprint for coming to terms with the territory of the red planet.

Surf or Turf? Negotiating the Territory of Mars in Andy Weir’s The Martian

During the continuously accelerating space race between the Western and Eastern Blocs during the Cold War in the 1960s, locating celestial bodies like Mars within the territorial regime of nation-states became increasingly relevant. Like much of the international law-making of the time, the United Nations’ “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies” or “Outer Space Treaty” in 1967 was designed to delineate and somehow direct the Cold War conflict to a number of controllable sites of proxy war, and, in this case, keep the conflict from spreading into outer space. In that sense, the treaty’s original clarification of the status of other planets as governed by international law, but outside the limits of terrestrial conflict, should always be understood as originating in context of the Cold War. Its negotiation of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and territory, however, clearly impacts the representations of outer space colonization and discourses of territoriality in the context of this contribution beyond the treaty’s historical context. In spite of several amendments to the original treaty, and an effort to revise some of the original provisions through the “Moon Treaty” of 1979 (which was never ratified by any of the major spacefaring nations), the status of outer space territories is still governed by the original 1967 treaty (see “Agreement” 1979).

In its main provisions, the “Outer Space Treaty” nullifies the sovereignty of any one nation over any extra-terrestrial territory, and instead allows all nations an equally sovereign use of all celestial bodies (see “Treaty” 1967). Thanks to these provisions, Mars and other planets are clearly outside of and at odds with regular regimes of nation-state sovereignty and its core notion of “exclusive jurisdiction within a territorially delimited space” (Griffiths qtd. in Loukacheva 2009, 84). In this, the treaty is comparable to two other UN agreements: the United Nations’ “Convention on the Law of the Sea” (UNCLOS, 1982) and the “The Antarctic Treaty” (1959). Both of these treaties, like the Outer Space Treaty, create a framework of clear rules and regulations that delineate a space outside of the regular regime of nation-state territoriality: international waters and the Antarctic. The form which was chosen in all three cases—a United Nations treaty, embedded in international law—highlights the liminality of all three spaces negotiated in the treaties: international waters, Antarctica, and other planets are all governed by international law, but not subject to its regular regime and, thus, pose a challenge to the traditional narrative of imperial territorial control. Reading these treaties through the lens of territoriality and comparing them to similar treaties governing the status of polar spaces and international waters on Earth shed light on the notion of “territorial ambiguity” at work in the classification of these spaces through traditional imperial discourses of territoriality. In the particular case of Mars colonization, this ambiguity is taken up and negotiated by contemporary representations of future U.S. missions to Mars. These cultural products (films, novels, legal texts, scientific publications) attempt to borrow the term from van der Marel, to literarily harvest a Martian territory that cannot be incorporated through traditional means. The yield, to stay with the metaphor, is a vision of a colonized Mars as part of a narrative of U.S. national expansion and identity.

In my reading of Andy Weir’s popular novel The Martian, this conundrum of coming to terms with the liminal territoriality of Mars in relation to the United States (specifically), is a prevalent trope driving much of the plot. Weir’s fictional account tells the story of the U.S. astronaut Mark Watney, who was exiled on Mars after an accident that left him stranded and pronounced dead by the rest of his crew. Much of the story revolves around Watney’s strategies of survival and his attempts to get back in touch with NASA. Praised for its scientific accuracy and its enticing writing style, Weir’s novel has been read as re-invigorating the interest of the wider public in space travel in general and NASA’s missions to Mars in particular. In spite of promoting the future of Mars colonization as an internationalized effort—the book specifically underlines the collaborative efforts of the United States and China in saving Watney—The Martian clearly attempts to locate Mars colonization within the narrative of U.S. national identity. At the core of this trope lies the text’s and the protagonist’s engagement with Martian territory with the help of traditional U.S. imperial discourses of territoriality.

As mentioned above, much of the plot is driven by Watney’s attempts to engage with and survive in the hostile environment of Mars. Through Watney’s constant pondering of the amount of resources ferried along with astronauts on the mission and how long they will sustain him, the novel clarifies that Watney—a botanist by training—needs to harvest food from barren and hostile Mars itself in order to survive until a rescue mission finds him. Watney’s breakthrough in planting and growing potatoes in Mars’s soil, and thus of introducing agriculture to a territory resisting cultivation, does not only have implications for his survival on the red planet, but also carries with it a traditional U.S. discourse of colonization. As Watney reports his success back to NASA on Earth, he is informed that “once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially colonized it.” He concludes that “technically, I colonized Mars. In your face, Neil Armstrong!” (Weir 2015, 172). By translating Watney’s success of cultivating Mars into the logic of a colonial discourse of territorial incorporation that privileges the agricultural improvement of land—particularly prevalent during U.S. westward expansion in the nineteenth century—the quote underlines that Watney’s ability to harvest food from Mars is intimately connected with locating Mars within a traditional U.S. imperial discourse of territoriality. In other words, the success of Watney’s mission is measured by his own survival and a simultaneous inclusion of Mars within the regime of U.S. imperial territoriality. In spite of initial success, Watney’s attempt at cultivating-cum-colonizing Mars fails utterly as his habitat blows up and his harvest is destroyed (182). Read through the lens of territoriality, this event plays up the red planet’s resistance to colonization by traditional means: Mars continues to be a territorially liminal space. As a result, Watney finds himself in a Robinson Crusoe-like position: he struggles at the brink of starvation and remains confined to the space of his damaged habitat, which is under constant threat of being torn apart by Mars’s hostile environment (184–186). With the loss of the safety of the NASA habitat and the potato harvest, Watney is unable to come to terms with, let alone safely travel in, the landscape he encounters on Mars. His mission is turned into an instance of mock-colonization. This only changes as Watney begins to conceptualize Mars as a maritime territory:

LOG ENTRY: SOL 381 I’ve been thinking about laws on Mars. … There’s an international treaty saying no country can lay claim to anything that’s not on Earth. And by another treaty, if you’re not in any country’s territory, maritime law applies. So Mars is “international waters.” NASA is an American nonmilitary organization, and it owns the Hab. So while I’m in the Hab, American law applies. As soon as I step outside, I’m in international waters. Then when I get in the rover, I’m back to American law. Here’s the cool part: I will eventually go to Schiaparelli and commandeer the Ares 4 lander. Nobody explicitly gave me permission to do this, and they can’t until I’m aboard Ares 4 and operating the comm system. After I board Ares 4, before talking to NASA, I will take control of a craft in international waters without permission. That makes me a pirate! A space pirate! Mark Watney: Space Pirate. (2015, 304–305)

Watney’s conceptualization of Mars as international waters is clearly based on the aforementioned “Outer Space Treaty,” which, I argue, illustrates the territorial ambiguity of Mars. The conceptual leap of therefore interpreting Mars as international waters changes Watney’s position on the planet entirely, and allows for an inclusion of the planet into an imperial territorial regime. In contrast to the barren and hostile environment that threatened Watney’s life and the success of his mission, Mars becomes a maritime territory, sprinkled with islands of U.S. jurisdiction. The notion of Mars as international waters also comes across as an ironic pun on contemporary scientists’ feverish search for water on the red planet. Considering that this search tries to establish the possibility of life on Mars in the past, and to explore the possibility of a future of human colonization on Mars, the book’s invention of a maritime red planet again deliberately connects Watney’s survival and a successful colonization with a negotiation of Martian territory. Watney’s reading of Mars as an oceanic space is contrasted here to his unsuccessful agricultural experiment: initially, Watney’s mobility was arrested by him being limited to his habitat and occasional aimless wanderings in its vicinity. After reading Mars as an oceanic space, Watney turns into a highly mobile subject, who purposefully transgresses spaces, configurations of territory, and jurisdictions—a notion embodied in his celebratory identification as a space pirate (see Ganser 2012, 39). In its rendition of Mars, Weir’s novel echoes the discourses of territoriality embodied by the telling acronym of the HI-SEAS mission on Hawai‘i: by conceptualizing Mars as a liminal space between the maritime and land—an ocean peppered with islands—the red planet becomes controllable and incorporable into U.S. territorial discourses. In this sense then, Hawai‘i serves both as a stepping stone and a blueprint for this incorporation.

Coming to terms with Martian territoriality as existing between water and land clearly has its limitations and loopholes—starting with Watney’s core assumption that the status of Mars in international law is exactly that of international waters on Earth. The point is not that narratives like The Martian imply that the negotiation of Martian territoriality is key to any attempt to envision a future in which Mars is part of a U.S. national narrative. Instead, an analysis of the ways in which discourses of water-as-territory developed in U.S. imperialism campaigns in the Pacific are interrelated with such a negotiation deepens an understanding of all variations of U.S. imperialisms. In this sense, my contribution argues, Hawaiian territorial incorporation is a crucial precedent for conceptualizing a discourse of Mars colonization and an incorporation of Martian territory into U.S. national territory and identity. The “Visions of the Future” Mars poster, discussed above, makes this connection in visual form.

Conclusions: Mars in the U.S. National Imaginary

While novels like The Martian or Ron Howard’s mini-series Mars present us with a vision of the first steps of Martian colonization, the “Visions of the Future” poster series instead imagines Mars in hindsight as already successfully colonized. The caption of the poster accordingly reads:

NASA’s Mars Exploration Program seeks to understand whether Mars was, is, or can be a habitable world. Missions like Mars Pathfinder, Mars Exploration Rovers, Mars Science Laboratory and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, among many others, have provided important information in understanding of [sic] the habitability of Mars. This poster imagines a future day when we have achieved our vision of human exploration of Mars and takes a nostalgic look back at the great imagined milestones of Mars exploration that will someday be celebrated as “historic sites.”

While the poster revisits the question of Martian territoriality, it skips the complicated moment of colonization entirely by imagining Mars as a habitable planet, rich in both land and water, and as such also cultivatable and exploitable for tourism. The terminology of “historic sites,” which mark the road to Martian colonization, is clearly reminiscent of “national historic sites,” which in a United States context mark important spaces and sites that map the path toward the fulfillment of U.S. national identity. Having thus claimed Martian colonization as a uniquely U.S.-American project, the poster presents us with a number of those key sites. One of them, on the right hand side of the poster, is a small observatory. Although not further identified, it could be read as a representation of the Keck Observatory, which was central to estimating the size of Mars’s past oceans and the amount of water that may have existed on the red planet, and for creating a visual projection of a Mars of oceans and continents (see Jefferson 2017). Considering that the Keck Observatory’s location is on Mauna Kea, Hawai‘i, and is included in the list of “historic sites,” it seems that in NASA’s visualization, the Hawaiian Islands have already fulfilled their role as stepping stones toward a future of U.S. Mars colonization.