Making Micronesia: A Political Biography of Tosiwo Nakayama by David Hanlon (review)

"Making Micronesia: A Political Biography of Tosiwo Nakayama by David Hanlon (review)". The Contemporary Pacific. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii. 28 (1): 248–251. 2016. doi:10.1353/cp.2016.0014. ISSN 1527-9464.

Abstract: Reviewed by: Making Micronesia: A Political Biography of Tosiwo Nakayama by David Hanlon Greg Dvorak Making Micronesia: A Political Biography of Tosiwo Nakayama, by David Hanlon. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2014. isbn 978-0-8248-3846-1; 328 pages, illustrations. Cloth, us $55.00. Biography, in a conventional Western sense, tends to follow the trajectory of an individual from birth to postmortem legacy, focusing on the individual's linear path through the world. In Making Micronesia, historian David Hanlon reconstructs the life of Tosiwo Nakayama, the pioneering first president of the Federated States of Micronesia, yet he does so in terms of a grand oceanic voyage that is anything but linear or individualistic. Hanlon shows how, like all Pacific wayfaring, Nakayama's career involved immense wisdom and navigational skill that triangulated between social and intellectual genealogies, multiple sites, sometimes-conflicting trans-Oceanic affiliations, and major superpowers. This is thus not only a biography but also a Pacific Islands studies–informed history of the cultural contexts and eras linked by Nakayama's life and by the literal and metaphoric ocean worlds he inhabited. It encompasses the lives of whole communities and a worldview that visualizes myriad islands and atolls as part of a larger global neighborhood. Hanlon, who knew Tosiwo Nakayama personally and had the opportunity to interview him in the years before his death in 2007, describes his surprise in learning that Nakayama had discarded all of his presidential papers. Their absence compelled Hanlon to embark on a journey far beyond the archives, resulting in a meticulous and insightful study of a true Oceanian leader and the perspectives that influenced him. As in his other books, Upon a Stone Altar (1988) and Remaking Micronesia (1998), Hanlon here is passionate in his critique of the European, Japanese, and US regimes that gave birth to the colonialist construct of "Micronesia" in the…

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