Power and Pantaloons: The Case of Lee Boo and the Normalizing of the Student in Micronesia

Abstract

Standing at the entrance to Palau Community College is a statue of Lee Boo, the son of the chief of Koror who was sent to England in 1783 as part of an exchange between Palauans and English sailors who had shipwrecked earlier on a nearby island. Dressed as the ideal Enlightenment scholar, Lee Boo serves as both a figuration of the normalization of Western schooling in Palau and other parts of Micronesia, as well as a productive simulacrum. A “reading” of Lee Boo employing visual and discursive analytics allows us to consider more fundamental issues of how a Foucaultian power/knowledge circuit operates through technologies of school and, in this case, the construction of the subjectivity of the student in Micronesia, as well as the ways in which processes of colonization and contemporary “development” circulate through formal schooling in the region.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Hannah M. Tavares, Rachel Miller, Michael J. Shapiro and the outside reviewer and manuscript editor of this journal for their help in shaping this article. I also thank the Dean’s office at the College of Education at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, for its partial financial support of presenting an earlier version of this essay at the American Educational Research Association conference in Denver, Colorado, in May 2010.

Notes

1. Owing to the lack of agreement on the romanization of various Palauan (or, as we shall see, Yapese) names and the general inconsistencies of historical spellings, ‘Lee Boo’ is alternately spelled LeeBoo, Leeboo, Le Boo, LeBoo, Lee Bu, Leebu, etc. Similarly, the name of Lee Boo’s mother, ‘Ludee’, also provides an array of spellings to choose from. For the purposes of this discussion, I am using the most common spelling of Lee Boo’s name as well as his mother’s, where appropriate.