Picturing Island Bodies Under US Imperialism
Picturing Island Bodies Under US Imperialism
Files
(RESTRICTED ACCESS)
Publication or External Link
Date
2022
Authors
Robinson-Tillenburg, Gabrielle
Advisor
McEwen, Abigail
Citation
DRUM DOI
Abstract
Since the end of World War II, the US has maintained the naval occupation of Okinawa,a small island off the coast of Japan. Across the globe in Puerto Rico the US operated
what was at one point the largest naval station in the world during World War II and
through the Cold War until ceasing operations in 2001. Islanders in Vieques, Puerto
Rico face alarming cancer rates, speculated as due to pollution from offshore explosives.
Women of Okinawa experience recurrent acts of sexual violence at the hands of US
servicemen. In both archipelagos, public protests against US occupation have disputed
land ownership and environmental damages. Taking a transnational approach to the
survival of US imperial violence, this paper examines how contemporary video artists,
Okinawan Chikako Yamashiro, Puerto Rico-based duo Allora & Calzadilla, and Puerto
Rican Beatriz Santiago Muñoz picture island bodies both human and geographic. In
Seaweed Woman (2008) by Yamashiro, Under Discussion (2005) by Allora &
Calzadilla, and Post-Military Cinema (2014) by Santiago Muñoz, liminality, as a space
between life and death—a condition particular to colonized bodies, is pictured as an
aesthetic and durational refusal of death and destruction to the island body. The
condition of liminality is portrayed through visual and sonic engagements of
hyperrealism, that is the confusion between the artists’ reproduced images/sounds with
the real experiences of island bodies. In Post-Military Cinema, liminality is used by the
artist to produce a repossession of the island body, and in all artworks, to picture
resistance. Broadly, this comparative study challenges notions of “American Art” and
reflects on how US imperial ideology enacts violence, but via the creation of binary
oppositions creates liminal spaces from which the island body resists and survives.