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

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.