The Seduction of Sovereignty and the Birth of Biopolitics: Miscegenation along the U.S. Military Base Fenceline in Okinawa

Annmaria Shimbaku
Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages
UC Riverside

This book theorizes a collaborative U.S.-Japanese colonialism in Okinawa through the prism of U.S.-Okinawan miscegenation along the U.S. military base fenceline from 1945 to 2000. Against geopolitical analyses based on the Westphalian system of territorial sovereignty, this study pursues a biopolitical analysis of miscegenation in Okinawa. Its achievements are twofold: It first provides a global theorization of sovereignty under U.S. military occupation through original readings of Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault with the aim of showing how the transnational management of the population overshadows ambitions for territorial aggrandizement in the constitution of postwar sovereignty. This secondly drives a local analysis of archival documents, literature, and non-fiction essays on miscegenation. In the end, this book positions miscegenation as a site of productive contention that can and should bear meaning on the wider transpacific politics of U.S. military bases in Okinawa.