'Bone and Coral: Ossuopower and the Control of (Future) Remains in Occupied Okinawa' by Nozomi (Nakaganeku) Saito in (2022) 74(3) American Quarterly 567-589 at 572-3 comments
This essay maps the exercise of what I call “ossuopower,” the control over remains. The extraction and excavation of the soil and bones reflect the struc- tures of settler colonialism and settler garrisons, capitalist industrialization, and militarization that shape Okinawa’s past and cast a shadow over its future. Bones bear the material traces of these forces of territorial acquisition that sever the material through-line between the living and the deceased, between human and nonhuman bodies and the ecologies they inhabit. My method focuses on bones in order to “to see objects not just through the lens of human agency but through the lives of nonhuman beings that both shape and are shaped by relationships and processes embodied in material forms is to invite stories—in fossilized bones, decaying tissues, and living flesh.”...
What I call ossuopower names the exercise of sovereignty as the right to control remains. Here, sovereignty extends beyond death into the subterranean domains of indigenous burial grounds. In emphasizing the right to control remains, I offer a paradigmatic shift for conceptualizing sovereignty’s reach in sites of ongoing militarized occupation. Focusing on both human remains and coral as a stand-in for the nonhuman, my analysis of ossuopower seeks to apprehend how settler colonial power is not only the right to expose to death but also the right to control remains after death. More particularly, I suggest that the right to control remains is part of the expansion of US empire in the Pacific, a process that dispossesses indigenous people of their lands and lays claim to the remains of their past and future.
The plunder of burial grounds for human remains furthers the settler removal of the Native. Settler colonialism has exercised the control, theft, extraction, exploitation, and selling of indigenous remains since its inception. James Riding In, a citizen of the Pawnee Nation, explains that in the name of Manifest Destiny, “Europeans claimed that they had preemptive rights not only to our lands and resources, but to our dead as well.” In the process of settlement, European invaders not only stole indigenous lands but also robbed their graves for gold, silver, and other valuable goods, including indigenous peoples’ skulls to sell to researchers of craniology. The process of settler control over remains furthers what Patrick Wolfe calls the “logic of elimination”: in removing the Native from the land, the settlers also erase the material traces of their centuries-long habitation of the land through the theft of indigenous ancestral remains.
This example of settler violence against indigenous remains suggests the need to reframe the current thinking of death as sovereignty’s limit; as in the structure of settler colonialism, the sovereign power to manage life and expose to death also claims the right to remains. In the framework of biopower, Michel Foucault suggests, “death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it.” In the context of the will to make live, death itself is an escape from biopolitical management. However, as Achilles Mbembe’s work on necropolitics in the colony has shown, it is not only the injunction to make live but the right to expose to death that characterizes modern state power. Death is an everyday reality maintained through infrastructural warfare, and the full might of the state’s power is on display in the morbid spectacle of skeletal remains:
What is striking is the tension between the petrification of the bones and their strange coolness on one hand, and on the other, their stubborn will to mean, to signify something. In these impassive bits of bone, there seems to be no ataraxia, nothing but the illusory rejection of a death that has already occurred. In other cases, in which physical amputation replaces immediate death, cutting off limbs opens the way to the deployment of techniques of incision, ablation, and excision that also have bones as their target.
Bones become the symbolic objects of state power, a reminder of the immense cruelty it wields and the capacity of the state that not only can kill or let die but also flaunt the evidence of massacre as a lesson for the living. In this geography of death, Mbembe argues, it is only in the annihilation of the body—the dissolution of the bones and entire corporeal being—that the body “escapes the state of siege and occupation.” Self-annihilation becomes an exercise of agency against the state.
