Performing Alterity: Postcolonial Genesis of Borderland Identity in Japan

Marginalized borderlanders on Tsushima Island now celebrate histories that have been long silenced by Japanese nationalist discourse. Although the emerging alternative past appears to embody regional postcolonial defiance, this ethnographic investigation reveals the complicated, multilayered meanings of an annual festival situated at the crossroads of three interrelated cultural spaces: Japan’s postcolonial global modernity, Tsushima islanders’ racialized border identity, and dislocated emigrants’ creative imagining of the homeland. The paper will investigate this festival’s cultural performance as a touchstone for ideological diversity and social agency. I argue that the cultural performance simultaneously engenders local ideological unrest and new cultural possibilities, and in turn ignites the genesis of new border identities.