IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB819756898

Bone and Coral: Ossuopower and the Control of (Future) Remains in Occupied Okinawa (2022)

Saito, Nozomi (Nakaganeku) (Author)

American Quarterly
Volume: 74
Issue: 3
Pages: 567-589
Publication date: 2022
Language: English

URI: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/865413

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Globalization; internationalization Settler colonialism Bone and bones Corals Indigenous peoples; indigeneity Biopolitics Human remains 21st century 20th century, late Okinawa

Biopolitical and necropolitical frameworks posit death as sovereignty's limit. However, colonial abuses of indigenous remains suggest otherwise. Taking Achille Mbembe's necropolitics as a point of departure, I draw attention to the extraction of soil containing human remains in the US military base construction of occupied Okinawa. I argue that ossuopower—the right to control remains, both human and nonhuman—is fundamental to colonial territorial expansion. Tracing the stories of bones, I first contextualize the exercise of ossuopower in the history of US settler colonialism and garrison militarism in the Pacific, where bones symbolize sovereign power and claims to land. I then offer a case study of the exercise of the right over remains in Okinawa, from the post–World War II era of US occupation through Reversion-era mainland Japanese development to the current Futenma Airbase relocation. Bones bear the material traces of the changing forces of US militarization and Japanese maldevelopment. In closing, I analyze Tsuyoshi Shima's short story "Bones" to illumine an indigenous Okinawan relation to land and suggest the need for epistemes of care for remains and land. In theorizing ossuopower, I offer a lens to analyze the entanglement of militarization, globalization, and securitization in the Pacific Century.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB819756898

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Travis Hay; Teri Redsky Fiddler; (2021)
Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism (/p/isis/citation/CBB792171410/)

Article Aja M. Lans; (2023)
Bioarchaeology of the Self (/p/isis/citation/CBB992160005/)

Article Ashanti Shih; (2023)
Talking Story with the Archives (/p/isis/citation/CBB323217003/)

Article Kristin Burnett; Travis Hay; Lori Chambers; (2016)
Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Peoples and Food: Federal Indian policies and nutrition programs in the Canadian North since 1945 (/p/isis/citation/CBB797467353/)

Book Paul Turnbull; (2019)
Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia (/p/isis/citation/CBB646252193/)

Article Laura Stark; (2022)
Reservations (/p/isis/citation/CBB560352909/)

Book Lianne C. Leddy; (2022)
Serpent River Resurgence: Confronting Uranium Mining at Elliot Lake (/p/isis/citation/CBB377861662/)

Thesis Tess Lanzarotta; (2018)
Unsettling Biomedicine: Research, Care, and Indigenous Rights in Cold War Alaska (/p/isis/citation/CBB670049791/)

Article Alberto Zanatta; Giuliano Scattolin; Gaetano Thiene; Fabio Zampieri; (2016)
Phrenology between anthropology and neurology in a nineteenth-century collection of skulls (/p/isis/citation/CBB513838346/)

Article Barbian, Lenore; Sledzik, Paul; Reznick, Jeffrey; (2012)
Remains of War (/p/isis/citation/CBB001421579/)

Book Stoecker, Holger; (2013)
Sammeln, Erforschen, Zurückgeben?: Menschliche Gebeine aus der Kolonialzeit in akademischen und musealen Sammlungen (/p/isis/citation/CBB001214373/)

Book Dewar, Elaine; (2002)
Bones: Discovering the First Americans (/p/isis/citation/CBB000201815/)

Book Quigley, Christine; (2001)
Skulls and Skeletons: Human Bone Collections and Accumulations (/p/isis/citation/CBB000102055/)

Book Antoine Traisnel; (2020)
Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition (/p/isis/citation/CBB660480379/)

Article Emily Holloway; (2023)
Bodies in Transit: Speculation and the Biopolitical Imaginary (/p/isis/citation/CBB701540645/)

Chapter Jørgensen, Dolly; (2013)
Environmentalists on Both Sides: Enactments in the California Rigs-to-Reefs Debate (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420340/)

Book Heaton, Matthew M.; (2013)
Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry (/p/isis/citation/CBB001202372/)

Article Olson, Philip R.; (2014)
Flush and Bone: Funeralizing Alkaline Hydrolysis in the United States (/p/isis/citation/CBB001421210/)

Article Santora, Lidia; Skolbekken, John-Arne; (2011)
From Brittle Bones to Standard Deviations: The Historical Development of Osteoporosis in the Late-Twentieth-Century (/p/isis/citation/CBB001250223/)

Article Kakaliouras, Ann M.; (2013)
An Anthropology of Repatriation: Contemporary Physical Anthropological and Native American Ontologies of Practice (/p/isis/citation/CBB001212638/)