Militarized Currents
Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific
Publication Year: 2010
Published by: University of Minnesota Press

Foreword
Readers will be reading this collection of insightful articles when Iraq has slipped off the front pages of the world’s daily papers and faded from television news screens. Fewer people will be paying attention to Afghanistan’s ethnic and provincial groups as they continue to cope with the myriad effects of the multinational invasion. ...

Acknowledgments
Our anthology began with a conversation at the Association for Asian American Studies conference in Los Angeles in April 2005. At that time, Setsu was soliciting papers for an anthology conceived under the rubric of feminism and militarism, which she began in January 2005. ...

Introduction: Militarized Currents, Decolonizing Futures
Militarized Currents forges a collaboration that examines how militarization has constituted a structuring force that connects the histories of the Japanese and U.S. empires across the regions of Asia and the Pacific Islands. Foregrounding indigenous and feminist perspectives and the scholarship of people of color, ...
I. Militarized Bodies of Memory

1. Memorializing Pu'uloa and Remembering Pearl Harbor
Third-year Hawaiian-language students spend a good deal of both semesters reading and translating—or I should say, puzzling over—the stories, or mo‘olelo, from Lei Momi o Ewa, written by Sarah Keli‘ilolena Nākoa.2 Of all the texts that confront and confound the Hawaiian-language student, this one indeed is the most difficult. ...

2. Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans
What does the word “bikini” evoke for you? A woman in a two-piece bathing suit, or a site for nuclear-weapons testing? A bikini-clad woman invigorated by solar radiation, or Bikini Islanders cancer ridden from nuclear radiation? The sensational bathing suit was named for Bikini Atoll. ...

3. The Exceptional Life and Death of a Chamorro Soldier: Tracing the Militarization of Desire in Guam, USA
The banal ambiguity of Guam’s political existence, along with other sites such as Guantánamo Bay, either signals the coming of empire or already marks quietly its passage.1 But, as opposed to Guantánamo Bay where the de- and reterritorialization of empire can be seen in much clearer and camera-ready terms, ...

4. Touring Military Masculinities: U.S.–Philippines Circuits of Sacrifice and Gratitude in Corregidor and Bataan
Corregidor Island and Bataan are the hallowed grounds of American World War II valor in the Philippines. Located in the northern region of the Philippines, these two sites, evocative of American World War II martial heroics, function to capture the tourist imagination and conceal histories of imperialism, military violence, and long-standing occupation. ...
II. Militarized Movements

5. Rising Up from a Sea of Discontent: The 1970 Koza Uprising in U.S.-Occupied Okinawa
I came across an account of a riot that occurred in Okinawa on December 20, 1970, that made its way to the front page of many major American newspapers but then suddenly disappeared from news coverage the next day. In the aftermath of the “Koza Riot,” or what I choose to call the “Koza Uprising” ...

6. South Korean Movements against Militarized Sexual Labor
As the twentieth century draws to a close, South Korean survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery (the Japanese “comfort system,” or chŏngsindae) and activists on their behalf have been noted as some of the most persuasive and omnipresent advocates of women’s human rights at international meetings and conferences. ...

7. Uncomfortable Fatigues: Chamorro Soldiers, Gendered Identities, and the Question of Decolonization in Guam
First Sergeant Olympio I. Magofña, a Chamorro recruiter in the U.S. Army, extols in the opening epigraph the virtues of Chamorros in U.S. military uniform—that is, male Chamorro soldierhood. As with every military around the globe, soldiering in colonial Guam is predominantly a male and an overtly masculine occupation. ...

8. Militarized Filipino Masculinity and the Language of Citizenship in San Diego
This chapter focuses on the co-construction of masculinity and manhood among Filipino navy men and their families in San Diego, California, since the mid-1940s.1 This multigenerational study is primarily based on original recorded interview data of approximately twenty Filipino navy families residing in San Diego, ...
III. Hetero/Homo-sexualized Militaries

9. On Romantic Love and Military Violence: Transpacific Imperialism and U.S.–Japan Complicity
From the perspective of colonialism, the international encounter between individuals is first brought about by the presence of the colonizing military. It is normally expected that the relationship between the dominating and the dominated ought to be governed by military administration and technology. ...

10. Masculinity and Male-on-Male Sexual Violence in the Military: Focusing on the Absence of the Issue
According to the 2004 National Human Rights Commission of Korea (NHRCK) investigative report on male-on-male sexual violence in the military, 15.4 percent of those surveyed responded affirmatively to having suffered from sexual violence, while 7.2 percent admitted to having inflicted sexual harm on someone else.1 ...

11. Why Have the Japanese Self-Defense Forces Included Women? The State's "Nonfeminist Reasons"
This chapter analyzes why and how the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (SDF) have included women over the past five decades. Although a large number of studies have examined the relationship between women and the military by feminist scholars around the world, little is known about the relationship between women and the SDF.1 ...

12. Genealogies of Unbelonging: Amerasians and Transnational Adoptees as Legacies of U.S. Militarism in South Korea
“Which is better, Korea or America?” a woman asks a group of children. They respond in unison, “America! America!” The Amerasian children sit around a table in the True Love Mission, an alternative educational center run by Yon Ja Kim in South Korea, and represented in the documentary film Camp Arirang. ...

Conclusion: From American Lake to a People's Pacific in the Twenty-First Century
Within hours after a massive tsunami hit eleven countries bordering the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004, U.S. Navy Orion reconnaissance aircraft began flying over the affected areas to deliver emergency relief and to assess the damage. This was the prelude to a massive expedition that eventually came to encompass over twenty-four U.S. warships, ...
E-ISBN-13: 9780816673513
E-ISBN-10: 0816673519
Print-ISBN-13: 9780816665068
Page Count: 376
Publication Year: 2010
OCLC Number: 646068317
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Militarized Currents