Suchergebnisse

When asked about decolonization and the rights to self- determination of the peoples of the Micronesian islands, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger infamously stated, "There are only 90,000 people there; who gives a dam?." It is in this sort of similar dismissive logic that colonialism today in place such as the island of Guam is regarded. As a colony in a world which has already gotten over colonialism, a place such as Guam is a sad exception to the existing multicultural family of nations. In this sense, Guam and places like it are insignificant, and say or mean very little in terms of describing or defining the global order today. They exist to simply be attached to other larger nations, and are defined primarily through powerlessness and dependency. In this dissertation, these relationships and the way they are dominantly articulated today will be challenged and denaturalized. The notions that Guam is an irrelevant effect of the United States, merely a mistake on sovereignty's journey, or a powerless American territory, will be interrogated to reveal their structure. The core of accomplishing this challenge, which amounts to a process of theoretical decolonization, is to re-imagine and re-articulate the meaning of Guam's ambiguous, exceptional status, from one of irrelevance or powerlessness, and reveal the way in which Guam or other sites like it, actually play constitutive roles in producing the powers that claim them. Therefore this dissertation will seek to decolonization the space between Guam and the United States, and Guam and the concept of sovereignty by showing the structure by which Guam potentially sits at the center of American power, and that there are a litany of ways in which its banality, its geography, its coloniality all intersect to constitute the United States, its power, its authority, its might, its sovereignty. Each chapter will represent a different attempt to re-signify that discursive space between Guam and the United States and sovereignty, and to reverse the conventional way in which the space is assumed meaning, and what the tendencies for power and dependency are, or who constitutes who and who is powerful or powerless?

The title of a 2004 New York Times article sums up well the curious political existence of the island of Guam: "Looking for friendly base overseas, Pentagon finds it already has one." Guam is known as the "tip of America's spear" and has for more than a century played a crucial role in securing US strategic interests in the Asia-Pacific region. Guam is also one of seventeen remaining colonies in the world, as recognized by the United Nations, in need of decolonization. In media representations and critical discourse around US imperialism, Guam also occupies a curious space, where it is a US military colony that somehow does not represent colonialism or imperialism. This essay will use the concept of banality to interrogate how this simultaneous fullness of Guam as a site for American military power, and its emptiness as a site for American critique, enable the US to project force largely unchallenged over a significant part of the globe.

Foreword / Cynthia Enloe -- Introduction: Militarized Currents, Decolonizing Futures / Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho -- Militarized Bodies of Memory -- Memorializing Puʻuloa and Remembering Pearl Harbor / Jon Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio -- Bikinis and Other S/pacific N/oceans / Teresia K. Teaiwa -- The Exceptional Life and Death of a Chamorro Soldier: Tracing the Militarization of Desire in Guam, [overstrike] USA / Michael Lujan Bevacqua -- Touring Military Masculinities: U.S.-Philippines Circuits of Sacrifice and Gratitude in Corregidor and Bataan / Vemadetle Vicuna Gonzalez -- II. Militarized Movements -- Rising Up from a Sea of Discontent: The 1970 Koza Uprising in U.S.-Occupied Okinawa / Wesley Iwao Ueunten -- South Korean Movements against Militarized Sexual Labor / Katharine H.S. Moon -- Uncomfortable Fatigues: Chamorro Soldiers, Gendered Identities, and the Question of Decolonization in Guam / Keith L. Camacho and Laurel A. Monnig -- Militarized Filipino Masculinity and the Language of Citizenship in San Diego / Theresa Cenidoza Suarez -- Hetero/Homo-sexualized Militaries -- On Romantic Love and Military Violence: Transpacific Imperialism and US.-Japan Complicity / Naoki Sakai -- Masculinity and Male-on-Male Sexual Violence in the Military: Focusing on the Absence of the Issue / Insook Kwon -- Why have the Japanese Self-Defense Forces Included Women? The State's "Nonfeminist Reasons" / Fumika Sato -- Genealogies of Unbelonging: Amerasians and Transnational Adoptees as Legacies of US. Militarism in South Korea / Patti Duncan -- Conclusion: From American Lake to a People's Pacific in the Twenty-First Century / Walden Bello