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

Abstract: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.