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Annmaria M. Shimabuku - Alegal: Biopolitics and the Unintelligibility of Okinawan Life

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Alegal: Biopolitics and the Unintelligibility of Okinawan Life: summary, description and annotation

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Okinawan life, at the crossroads of American militarism and Japanese capitalism, embodies a fundamental contradiction to the myth of the monoethnic state. Suspended in a state of exception, Okinawans have never been officially classified as colonial subjects of the Japanese empire or the United States, nor have they ever been treated as equal citizens of Japan. As a result, they live amid one of the densest concentrations of U.S. military bases in the world. By bringing Foucauldian biopolitics into conversation with Japanese Marxian theorizations of capitalism, Alegal uncovers Japans determination to protect its middle class from the racialized sexual contact around its mainland bases by displacing them onto Okinawa, while simultaneously upholding Okinawa as a symbol of the infringement of Japanese sovereignty figured in terms of a patriarchal monoethnic state.
This symbolism, however, has provoked ambivalence within Okinawa. In base towns that facilitated encounters between G.I.s and Okinawan women, the racial politics of the United States collided with the postcolonial politics of the Asia Pacific. Through close readings of poetry, reportage, film, and memoir on base-town life since 1945, Shimabuku traces a continuing failure to become Japanese. What she discerns instead is a complex politics surrounding sex work, tipping with volatility along the razors edge between insurgency and collaboration. At stake in sovereign powers attempt to secure Okinawa as a military fortress was the need to contain alegality itselfthat is, a life force irreducible to the legal order. If biopolitics is the states attempt to monopolize life, then Alegal is a story about how borderland actors reclaimed the power of life for themselves.
In addition to scholars of Japan and Okinawa, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonialism, militarism, mixed-race studies, gender and sexuality, or the production of sovereignty in the modern world.
Alegal is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

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A LEGAL
Through the generous funding of New York University this publication is - photo 1
Through the generous funding of New York University, this publication is available on an open access basis from the publishers website.
Fordham University Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance and support provided for the publication of this book by the New York University Center for the Humanities.
Copyright 2019 Fordham University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.
Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Shimabuku, Annmaria M., editor.
Title: Alegal : biopolitics and the unintelligibility of Okinawan life / Annmaria M. Shimabuku.
Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018024874| ISBN 9780823282661 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9780823282654 (pbk. ; alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: MiscegenationJapanOkinawa-shiHistory20th century. | Military bases, AmericanSocial aspectsJapanOkinawa-ken. | SoldiersSexual behaviorUnited StatesHistory20th century. | BiopoliticsJapanOkinawa-shi. | Okinawa-shi (Japan)History20th century.
Classification: LCC DS894.99.O3785 S527 2019 | DDC 952/.29404dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024874
Printed in the United States of America
21 20 195 4 3 2 1
First edition
To the Okinawan women in my life: Mitsuko, Lucina, and Luella
CONTENTS
In 2000, around the time of the G8 summit in Okinawa, another important event was unfolding. Higa Malia,
Keenly aware of these dynamics, Higa focused on disassociating mixed-race identity from base politics and empowering individuals by helping them locate their long-lost fathers. However, a day before the G8 summit convened, she was taken aback by her young daughters wish to join in peaceful protest by forming a human chain around Kadena Air Base. In response, she wrote:
Personally, I wanted to oppose the bases and join hands with others, but I simply couldnt. By participating, many h fu
Higa identified an incommensurable gulf between public anti-base protest and the private lives of those who intimately embody the reality of U.S. military bases in Okinawa. Concerned with alienating the very individuals she was interested in starting a collective conversation with, she held back from her own daughters invitation to join the protest.
Shortly after the G8 summit, the network ceased to exist, and Higa moved to mainland Japan. She contributed a fourteen-segment series of short articles to the Okinawa Times newspaper over a decade later from July to December 2012 It was this poem, uninhibited by newspaper form, that hit a deeply entrenched cultural nerve. In it, she returned to the disconnect between mixed-race identity and the politics of U.S. military base protest. Only this time, she was not speaking as the representative of a social movement, but as an individual.
The question that drives this poem is, what happens when the insertion of the cold machinery of institutional violence (i.e., U.S. military bases) into the fecund soil of Okinawa produces a new life force that threatens to grow wildly into its cogs? Or, how will Higa, who was born precisely because of [the existence of] the base on Okinawan soil, whose life painfully trellised alongside its barbed wire fence, come to terms with this thing that names her poem, the U.S. Military Base?
The first part of the poem operates through a dialectic of mutual exclusion where she is either a product of institutional violence or a private individual completely separate from it. Each sidethe Okinawan and the U.S. militaryassumes one at the expense of negating the other, leaving Higa bankrupt of a way of articulating her own existence as simultaneously both.
From the Okinawan side, she problematizes the objectifying language she associates with anti-base sentiment.
A child sent from the base, a child who got dumped by the base
Those words that describe me
Could be heard even if I covered my ears
Those words that look down on my mother or other mothers like her as an Amejo
Flowed everywhere
Saying that my mother and I were a shameless and humiliating nuisance
Here, she and her mother are made to stand in for the U.S. military. She is either a child sent from the base, suggesting that is her original point of creation, or her mother is an Amejo , a woman of the Americans, suggesting that is where she belongs. With both being treated in this way as objects of substitution, Higa responds by speaking of a life of unintelligibility. Born and raised in Okinawa, as products of Okinawas historical condition, by what sleight of hand do they suddenly become a stand-in for an institution from which they are both alienated? Is there any room in their existences to not be completely determined by the U.S. military? Could they be both victims of U.S. military violence and also women who had loved a G.I. at the same time? The sovereign power that is suggested here is not the cold machinery of the U.S. military base, i.e., its weapons of death and destruction, but the violence of substitution that works performatively through language to erase the irreducibility of her life force as she shudders in response to Those words that describe me. In other words, sovereign power here functions through the censorship, exclusion, and exception of the possibility of a life irreducible to institutional violence, which ironically operates through the very claim of its total victimization to sovereign power.
This drives Higa to the other extreme of a hyperidentification with her father as a stand-in for the U.S. military base to which she feels compelled to return. But when her father never comes for her as a young child, she pursues him during the summer of her final year of school and writes of her visit with her American family.
I couldnt get through to them well with my shy English
I was made to realize that I was not one of the people from over there
The family with whom I was connected by blood was nice to me on the surface
But I could not sense in them even a modicum of remorse toward me
My father, of course, was not a U.S. military base
He was nothing more than a completely ordinary man
Here, her American family cannot see how her life was impacted by the public institutional violence that her father partook in and reduces the business of her birth to a private family affair. She recognizes this as a privilege that neither she nor other Okinawans have. Hence, she is not one of the people from over there because they can monopolize a clean-cut distinction between the public and the private. The ability to carry on with the messiness of private life in America is a stark contrast to the unchanging reality of the U.S. military that awaits her when she lands back in Okinawa.
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