‘Victimhood nationalism’ is a working hypothesis to explicate competing national memories over the historical position of victims in coming to terms with the pasts. Once put into the dichotomy of victimizers and victims in national terms, the victimhood becomes hereditary and thus consolidates the national solidarity beyond generations. Without a reflection on the victimhood nationalism, the postwar Vergangenheitsbewäeltigung cannot be properly grasped. Victimhood nationalism is intrinsically transnational as victims are unthinkable without victimizers. The transnationality of victimhood nationalism demands a histoire croisée to comprehend the entangled past of the victimized and victimizers. A transnational history of ‘coming to terms with past’ would show that the vicious circle of victimhood nationalisms, based on the antagonistic complicity of nationalisms between the victimizers and victims, has been a rock to any historical reconciliation effort. Focused on East Asia this essay is a part of the plan to write a transnational history of the victimhood nationalism in Korea, Poland and Israel with Japan and Germany as counterparts.
Lim and Rosenhaft introduce “mnemonic solidarity” as a scholarly and political program, situating it in the context of the wider project and publication series “Entangled Memories in the Global South.” Their programmatic approach arises from the observation that a global memory formation has emerged since the late twentieth century, involving interchanges of various kinds between national memory cultures and structured by the terms of Holocaust memory. This development and its political implications have been addressed in various ways by scholars under the rubrics of “cosmopolitan,” “multidirectional,” “traveling,” “prosthetic,” “transnational,” and “agonistic” memory, but the new field of memory studies remains Eurocentric and relatively insensitive to the double-edged character of globalized memory—the interplay between de-territorialization and re-territorialization. This volume aims to reset the agenda.
Lim sets out the origins and progress of the mnemonic confluence of three historical traumas—the Holocaust, the crimes of colonialism, and Stalinist terror. He traces this process back to the “thaw” in memory cultures precipitated by the end of socialism after 1989, and adopts a postcolonial perspective to analyze how victimhood memories arising out of these experiences have become entangled globally. Against the flat model of the cosmopolitanization of the Holocaust, Lim argues for the non-hierarchical comparability of historical traumas. He concludes by proposing “critical relativization” and “radical juxtaposition” as ways of de-hegemonizing and de-centering universal memories and deconstructing mnemonic nationalism.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.