Abstract:
Presentation will focus on the transborder memories of military violence in Okinawa and the idea of justice shaped by the region’s specific geo-history. I regard Okinawa under the Cold War U.S. military occupation (1945-72) as a liminal space -- liminal, epistemically within academic discourse, legally with regards to its sovereignty and territorial belonging, and materially as a space of violence in a “post-violence” world. As I hope to show through a close reading of Ōshiro Tatsuhiro’s The Cocktail Party (1967), Okinawa’s liminality is characterized by its ambiguous post-WWII, Cold War condition of being a ‘liberated yet occupied’. I hope to present The Cocktail Party as an indigenous critique of what I have been calling the ‘Cold War formations’ in order to elucidate a critical analytics with which we might grasp the complex and entangled histories of violence that have sustained the militarized condition of Okinawa. Importantly, Ōshiro’s story exposes the limits of the modern categories according to which we habitually understand and present history and memory of violence. I will conclude by arguing that the critical perspective Okinawa’s Cold War liminality of being ‘liberated yet occupied’ renders will bring on an alternative ex pression of historical justice that may well help us move beyond the Cold War formations and their debilitating legacy.