Toward the Post-Colonial World Connections: Relativizing the Eurocentric Social Movement Theories to Assemblage the Citizenship Beyond Nation-States

This presentation examines the Eurocentric social movement theories from contexts of the genealogies of decolonization, demilitarization and anti-development movements on Okinawa Island. Okinawa has its history of the marginality as a quasi-colonial part of Empire of Japan from 1879, under the occupation of the US Forces from 1945 to 1972, and the continuous concentration of the military bases until the present. Facing on the situation above, the people in Okinawa have been seeking to relativize their ontology and change themselves through the external connections of social movements over the world.

Capitalism and Militarism after the WW2, lead by the US, had a significant influence not merely to Okinawa, but also East Asian countries, and the subjectification of Asian people. As Sakai Naoki (2008, Kibo to Kenpo, Ibunsha) clarifies that the regime of the Post-WW2 imaginary space of Japanese people was the inter-pacific artifact by the US-Japanese homo social “complicity”. In this perspective, the power formation after the WW2 has shifted from the Hegelian understanding of the nation-state with the anthropomorphism to the homo-social complicity among the nation-states. Therefore the (cultural) naturalization of representation of Okinawa, Japan and the US has to be questioned radically from this perspective.

Considering two still dominant streams of the social movement theories, namely the European tradition of Marxism and American tradition of the resource mobilization theories, I want to seek to interweave the theories of the Postcolonialism with them. Postcolonialism here indicates three streams of critiques, cultural studies, internal colonialism critique, and the Orientalism critiques (Shoji, Kokichi, 2006, Shakaigaku no Shatei, Toshindo). By doing so, the effect of the colonialism, imperialism and nation-state can be added to those theoretical models in order to trace the ties and networks of the social movements transcending the time and space, cultural differences, and the nation-state borders.