Paper short abstract:

The presentation argues that Yamashiro Chikako’s recent film, Chinbin Western, presents a subversive decolonial perspective on Okinawan struggles for reclaiming indigeneity and socioenvironmental justice through a parodic champurû opera and an ecofeminist reclaiming of female spiritual agency.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation argues that Yamashiro Chikako’s recent film Chinbin Western: Representation of the Family (2019) provides a subversive decolonial perspective on Okinawan and (implicitly) on transpacific indigeneities (see Dvorak 2020, Iwama 2021). While the film presents a series of easily recognizable articulations of indigenous Ryûkyû culture – ryûka (Okinawan songs and poetry), a play in uchinaaguchi (Northern Okinawan language) inspired by traditional performing arts – it also evokes Native American practices of dialogue with past, present, and future ancestors (Whyte 2021).

The theatrical, parodic representation of the bar where young women in faux “western” attire service locals working in the extraction and construction business evokes the lampooning of the violent masculinist ethos of Hollywood westerns in Spaghetti Western comedies and musicals (Macdonald 2021, Hughes 2010). At the same time this sequence, like the scenes featuring anti-base demonstrations and the quarry near Motobu port where materials for the construction of the "replacement" Henoko base are extracted, also points to the violence, dispossession, and the devastating socioenvironmental impact of US military and Japanese statist colonialism in Okinawa (see Iwama 2021, Akibayashi 2022, Mori 2022). Building on the recent work of postcolonial, decolonial, ecofeminist and indigenous environmental justice scholars, the presentation will show that, while the coloniality of “war as a form of life” and “toxicity as a form of life” (i.e. militarized global capitalism, Anthropocene as war on life and the planet, normalized toxicity) (Grove 2019, Mathur 2022) is designed to produce populations and ecologies “available to be poisoned” (Mathur 2022), it can also be countered by new imaginaries of indigenous resistance, resurgence, and repossession of militarized land (Chibana 2018). By way of a comedic, indigenous champurû opera and a tattooed young artist-cum-reinvented-priestess’s ambiguous ecofeminist agency, Chinbin Western suggests that such imaginaries may be found not only in the often oppressive, mundane details of everyday life but also in artistic practices aiming to generate new techniques for reclaiming indigenous sovereignty and building livable futures.