Alegal : biopolitics and the unintelligibility of Okinawan life
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Alegal : biopolitics and the unintelligibility of Okinawan life
Fordham University Press, 2019
- : pbk
Available at 10 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
-
206.6||SH0020180073768,0020180073772,
: pbk206||SH0020180086650,0020180090814,0020180098549,0020200045476
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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 Japan's 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 razor's edge between insurgency and collaboration. At stake in sovereign power's attempt to secure Okinawa as a military fortress was the need to contain alegality itself-that is, a life force irreducible to the legal order. If biopolitics is the state's 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.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
Note on Translations and Romanizations xvii
List of Commonly Used Acronyms and Abbreviations xix
Introduction 1
1. Japan in the 1950s: Symbolic Victims 15
2. Okinawa, 1945-1952: Allegories of Becoming 38
3. Okinawa, 1952-1958: Solidarity under the Cover of Darkness 65
4. Okinawa, 1958-1972: The Subaltern Speaks 88
5. Okinawa, 1972-1995: Life That Matters 124
Conclusion 143
Acknowledgments 147
Notes 149
Selected Bibliography 195
Index 211
by "Nielsen BookData"