Unequal Power Relations, Feelings of Ambivalence, and the Postcolonial Agency

As studies of lasting and unequal political relationships show, complex and even contradictory feelings of ambivalence have long been an integral aspect of such relations that complicate the neat boundary between the dominant and the dominated. In his classical critique of French colonialism in Martinique, Franz Fanon (Reference Fanon and Markmann[1952] 1967) illuminates the ambivalent working of superiority and inferiority complexes that generate attraction and repulsion between the colonizer and the colonized. He discusses internalized racism among (colonized) black women and men in their (heterosexual) desire for (colonizing) white men and white women, respectively. His discussion of the desire for white men and women is intriguingly gendered. For black women he attributes such desire simply to aspiration to be admitted to the white world—representing wealth, beauty, intelligence, and virtue—but for black men he attributes it to multiple and indeterminate motivations, including European upbringing, satisfaction of dominating a white woman, unconscious effort for revenge, or aspiration to be raceless (chap. 2 and 3). He also discusses white men and women's fear of and fascination with black men's bodies, including their putative sexual prowess. Through these analyses, Fanon aspires to release both the colonizers and the colonized from “the inhuman voices of the respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born” (206).

In line with this critical inquiry but in contrast to Fanon's focus on the colonized, Robert Young (Reference Young1995), a literary scholar of British colonialism, focuses on colonizers. He approaches the British colonial empire not only as a mechanism of capitalist expansion for wealth and profit, but also as a mechanism that generates desire through collective fantasy (174). Focusing on racial theories of the nineteenth century as a constitutive element of the geopolitics of colonialism, he discusses the ambivalent feelings that colonial power relations generated. He argues that colonial rule engendered the desire of the white for the nonwhite, as well as children of such unions who disrupted racialized boundaries between the colonizer and the colonized. Hence, inalienable differences between races and paranoid fantasy around racial adulteration permeated the colonial discourses of various kinds.

In her psychohistory of modern imperialism, Anne McClintock (Reference McClintock1995) also discusses such ambivalent feelings among imperialists who vacillate between megalomania and engulfment. She identifies this ambivalence of megalomania and paranoia as the underlying mechanism of imperial rule over the colonized. This dual feeling suggests “a crisis in masculine imperial identity, suspended between a fantasy of conquest and a dread of engulfment” and also “between rape and emasculation” (27). She explains the anxiety around sexuality and respectability in terms of perceptions of the imperial self that is supposed to be desirable and superior vis-à-vis the colonized other (71, 72).

Making the notion of ambivalence the hallmark of his theory of postcolonial agency, Homi Bhabha (Reference Bhabha1994, Reference Bhabha, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin1995) elaborates on the centrality of hybridity and mimicry to such agency. Defined as the “strategic reversal of the process of domination through disavowal,” hybridity “displays the necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination and domination” (Bhabha Reference Bhabha, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin1995, 34). In contrast to the colonial paranoia about miscegenation, this postcolonial approach views the condition of being mixed without the negative connotations of impurity and bastardization and recognizes its positive significance as a major mode of resistance to domination. Mimicry is another crucial strategy that turns the colonial power's ability to reform, regulate, and discipline the colonized into a subversive tool to disrupt such authority (Bhabha Reference Bhabha1994, 86, 88). The practice or art of imitating speech, behavior, and appearance is not considered the absence of creativity and therefore inferiority but a mode of resistance (which takes place in hybrid or marginal space) to the authority that claims superiority and originality. In other words, the postcolonial agency characterized by hybridity and mimicry is not automatically oriented toward oppositional consciousness or consistent resistance to imperial power. Against the historical backdrop of conscious or organized anti-colonial political struggle in various colonized societies, Bhabha suggests that postcolonial agency involves opposition that is not necessarily intentional but implicit in the very production of dominance; at the same time such agency paradoxically subverts imperial powers.

Enduring contacts and interactions between U.S. military and local peoples in South Korea and Okinawa have been conducive to the production of ambivalence and postcolonial agency. The civil-military interactions in Japan have been rather different, because close contacts and interactions were mostly displaced to Okinawa. During the period of the Cold War, the U.S. military presence was largely supported and acquiesced by the local populations in these societies, albeit to varying degrees over time. The uneven military alliances with the United States in these societies became compelling through the major hot wars fought in Korea and Vietnam. The Cold War ideology of anti-communism to protect the “free” world and “contain” communism justified the status quo. As social Darwinism and the rhetoric of a civilizing mission legitimized European colonial expansions, the Cold War ideology and the rhetoric of democracy and freedom justified the maintenance of U.S. military bases. To the extent which U.S. hegemony was maintained, local people were fascinated with American culture representing affluence, freedom, and advancement, and this subdued active and organized resistance to military bases in these societies.

This recognition of the popular acceptance and allure of American culture does not have to overlook the underlying tension and conflicts that erupted in these societies; rather it recognizes the complexities of the U.S. military presence in these societies. Although Koza riots in Okinawa, Anjŏngni riots in Korea, and Anpo protests in Japan reveal the limits of U.S. hegemony even prior to the political and economic changes in later decades, local women and men who were marginalized in their societies benefited economically and socially from the presence of U.S. military bases. While Korean society stigmatized residents of “camptowns” (kijich'on) and Japanese society discriminated against Okinawans, the U.S. military provided the means of livelihood and public services in such emergency situations as fire, flood, and other disasters. This vexing symbiosis between local peoples and U.S. military bases serves as a condition that fosters the postcolonial agency that is not necessarily politically organized and consciously oppositional, but symbolically reappropriates various practices and values of the U.S. military and American society.

The demise of the Cold War has not entirely undermined the justification for the continuous global U.S. military presence. Yet socioeconomic and political changes in South Korea (i.e., economic development for three decades and the restoration of electoral democracy in 1987) and Okinawa (i.e., the end of U.S. military rule of Okinawa in 1972 and subsequent economic support from the Japanese government) have modified the deeply hierarchical relationships between these host societies and the U.S. military. Although the Global War on Terror has filled the void left behind after the end of the Cold War, these changes have contributed to the emergence and spread of organized grassroots movements against the U.S. military dominance in South Korea and Okinawa.Footnote ⁴ Accelerated globalization in the post–Cold War era has amplified the power and allure of consumerism and thereby contributed to the working of the postcolonial agency in an unexpected way. At the same time, concerned with preserving the status quo in the face of uncertain change, conservative leaderships and populaces in these societies are reasonably cautious about sudden, drastic change. In these variegated contexts, local women and men who continue to deal with American soldiers directly and indirectly display ambivalent attitudes towards the U.S. military that has been integral to their social landscape for a long time.

Various Workings of the Postcolonial Agency

Covering the entire postwar period in Okinawa, Chris Ames's article, “Amerikamun: Consuming America and Ambivalence toward the U.S. Presence in Postwar Okinawa,” allows us to see the working of the postcolonial agency of Okinawans in their production and consumption of American Village, built on a returned U.S. military base in Chatan City. He aptly situates this contemporary example in the broad historical context of U.S. military–Okinawan interactions marked by ambivalence. While Okinawans have viewed American goods—including food items and Hollywood films—positively and have associated them with high social status and glamour, they have viewed negatively the U.S. military as an institution. Okinawans fully incorporated American food items like Spam, canned tuna, and Campbell's soups into their routine diet and innovated hybrid products like taco rice, but they continue to experience a gross lack of space in the face of sprawling U.S. military bases. This spatial inequality imbues special significance to the construction of American Village, a variation of themed space of commercialized leisure popularized by economic globalization. As the military retreated, global consumer capitalism replaced it with the allure of an American theme park; in this fascinating continuity of militarism and capitalism, Okinawans created a place for themselves as well as tourists from mainland Japan and other Asian countries. In conveying the development of postcolonial agency and its intricate working among Okinawans, Ames captures how the U.S. military as the ruling power had made American products lasting symbols of high social status since the occupation and how this dynamic changed over time as Okinawa was returned to Japan and received economic support for delayed development.

Focusing on the period from U.S. military occupation (1945–48) to the early 1970s, Han Sang Kim's article, “My Car Modernity: What the U.S. Army Brought to South Korean Cinematic Imagination about Modern Mobility,” explores the lasting influence of American automobile culture on the popular perception of desirable modern life among Koreans. In particular, he traces a fascinating cinematic connection between the U.S. Army propaganda films shown to Koreans during the occupation, the Korean War (1950–53), and the postwar decade on the one hand and the P'aldogangsan series, popular commercial feature films produced between 1967 and 1972, on the other hand. Those American propaganda films shown to Koreans via mobile units using military Jeeps and trucks introduced images of an affluent modern society centered around privately owned cars driven by free and independent American men and women. Although Kim does not explicitly discuss ambivalent feelings among Koreans toward the American military,Footnote ⁵ the Korean production and consumption of the P'aldogangsan series implies the working of the postcolonial agency that imitates what became desirable in American culture and selectively incorporates certain aspects of it not only for Koreans' own entertainment, but also for imagining a desirable modern life. For example, while American Working Women, a propaganda film shown to Koreans in the mid-1950s, featured a married woman who was working and driving her own car, the P'aldogansan series showed women in cars driven by their husbands and boyfriends. It appears that in postwar Korea the modern image of a woman as an independent individual was refashioned into a woman embedded in the modern patriarchal nuclear family. Hence the allure of mobility and freedom that the privately owned car embodied is deeply gendered in the Korean films, and the initial message of gender-neutral, modern freedom and independence is subverted.

Covering the period between the U.S. military occupation and the return of Okinawa to Japan, Sarah Kovner's article, “The Soundproofed Superpower: American Bases and Japanese Communities, 1945–1972,” accounts for the persistence of U.S. military bases and local resistance to them in Japan. The article points out that in the main islands, the impact of the U.S. military presence on everyday culture was most felt during the Occupation and the immediate postwar decade. It contends that as such cultural influence declined, the political culture of “soundproofing” developed. This metaphor of soundproofing reflects the converging interests of the U.S. military and the Japanese government in reducing the footprints of the military presence to minimize popular resistance to it. In the postcolonial era, when direct territorial occupation in a country by another became unacceptable, the effort to alleviate the U.S. military footprint and reduce its visibility was a rational maneuver. At the same time, local protests in Japan also contributed to the development of such caution by demanding that leaders protect Japanese society from its negative impacts. Kovner documents such collaborative efforts to insulate Japanese (of the main islands) from the negative impacts of the U.S. military presence, ranging from the containment of sex workers to the concentration of U.S. troops in Okinawa,Footnote ⁶ some 860 miles away from the main islands of Japan, as well as the literal insulation of Japanese from noise from military training and exercises. The political context of Japan (marked by the displacement of most U.S. troops in Okinawa) was not conducive to the development of the postcolonial agency. The Japanese government's identification with the U.S. military interests and its simultaneous attention to local protests did not change or subvert the U.S. military, but contributed to stabilizing its presence.

It is noteworthy that Japanese tourists now join Okinawans and other Asian visitors, including Koreans, in American Village. Mimicry of commercialized leisure originating in the United States in the space reclaimed from the U.S. military conveys ambiguous meanings. While it affirms the power of consumerism in colonizing public and private spaces, it reminds us of a retreat of the U.S. military. Yet this retreat is also complicated; as an isolated event, it is beneficial to local people deprived of space in a congested urban area and a host society as a whole for its autonomous development. However, as Kovner points out in the beginning of her article, the retreat of a U.S. military base does not necessarily mean the permanent withdrawal of the U.S. military, but its strategic relocation elsewhere. A comparable situation is found in contemporary South Korea, where a majority of U.S. military bases has been relocated from Seoul and its north to the city of Pyeongtaek in its south. For instance, the Youngsan Garrison (for which relocation to Pyeongtaek is to be completed by 2016) has been turned into a public park and will be developed into a commercial and residential area (Ŭm Reference Ŭm2015; Yi Reference Yi2015). The area of It'aewon, once an entertainment district outside the garrison almost exclusively catering to American soldiers, has become a trendy dining and shopping district serving domestic and international visitors. At the same time, the city of Pyeongtaek, one of the two major hubs of the U.S. military presence in South Korea, also aspires to be a vibrant shopping and dining area for both domestic and international visitors (Moon Reference Moon2012). Apart from the viability of this economic development plan, realizing the dream of the my car modernity that Kim discusses, a majority of Korean families can drive their own cars to Pyeongtaek to reclaim vicinities of former or current U.S. military bases as avid consumers.Footnote ⁷ Would this be a future of civil–U.S. military relations where political inequality is inadvertently and temporarily subverted by equal access to a leisure and shopping district under consumerism?