Alice Kurima Newberry
University of Texas at Austin
Actions
Alice Kurima Newberry (she/they) is a graduate student in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Alice's work bridges Direct Action facilitation, decolonial hope, and community-based foodways.
Links
Constellating Empire: (Im)possibilities, Imaginaries, and Living with(in) Militarized Violence
Where do interpretations of empire and militarism in relation to diaspora and future imaginaries emerge as we work across disciplines and forms of knowledge? This panel identifies four sites in which militarism and empire constellate boundaries and sensibilities surrounding everyday life and afterlives. These constellations complicate conventional conceptions of their spatial and temporal demarcations. The papers incisively reveal the military-industrial complex’s interiority as an actor in dispossessing and manufacturing land, knowledge, autonomy, and bodies as entities to be distilled and recycled into empire’s ever-evolving throes. Simultaneously, these papers illuminate how communities continue to live, thrive, and imagine their futures and solidarities.
In line with this year’s theme, we are grounded in multi-disciplinary and transnational approaches that push and complicate the bounds of Asian American Studies. This panel extends understandings of the affective and material conditions shaping the (im)possibilities of the reproduction of militarized violence and alternative futures. Newberry considers how the military-industrial complex polycrises-making is met with self-determination and radical continuums of care in Okinawa. Relatedly, Nham begins to propose how inquiries into toxic exposure around closed and realigned military bases repurposed for carceral functions might help enumerate some of these crises, their dependencies, and their continuations. Yasuda similarly examines the recycled infrastructure, knowledge, and personnel cultivated by empires to explore how imperialism and militarism affects the everyday choices and futures of colonized peoples. Lastly, le asks how to consider lineages of medical historiography as co-constitutive with the historiography of militarism and U.S. empire.
Entangled Histories of Okinawa: Militarism, Mobility, and Memory
In his analysis of military violence in Okinawa, Tomiyama Ichirō contemplates the tensions of what he calls “large and small politics,” arguing that “Peace is not something that we can design through the applied mechanics of international politics. Peace is the social that can only be realized in the process of trying to create it” (353). Following Tomiyama’s call for work that bridges and complicates the divide of theory and practice, this panel examines the convergence of colonialism and militarism in Okinawa through an interdisciplinary engagement with public forms of shared knowledge production. Approaching Okinawa across time and space, this panel addresses U.S. military water contamination and the potentially subversive uses of technology (Saito); legacies of Japanese colonialism between Okinawa and the Philippines (Buyco); the complicated web of shared connections and isolations experienced by Black soldiers stationed in Okinawa (Caldwell); and the poetics of legal testimonies against U.S. military noise pollution caused by Kadena Air Base (Ikehara). In its transnational and interdisciplinary approach, this panel applies pressure to the persistent legacy of Cold War knowledge structures that divide Asian and Asian American studies, asking: How do technologies have the potential to both deepen and obscure our relationship to land? How are memories of colonialism made and remade through public forms of memory? How must we reimagine our conceptions of safety and community across overlapping projects of race and injustice? Through these questions, this panel centers public modes of knowledge to pursue a collective vision of peace through the social.
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top