Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas

Lea-Henry, Jed

doi:10.1353/ks.2018.0026

Cited by 2 publications

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“…While Freud suggests that the inability to know what has been lost causes a loss interest in the world, I argue that such an inability-to-know functions as a driving force for Korean postcolonial subjects to become more political and to dig into what has been erased from Japanese, US, and Korean histories. 17 Specifically, I find that while brooding over what is absent from the colonial past, 18 Korean postcolonial subjects have been haunted by the unknown lives of comfort women. In the process of tracking their unknown lives, in the 1980s, Korean postcolonial subjects unearthed the Japanese military's forced brothel program during WWII and its victim-survivors called comfort women.…”

Section: Korean Postcoloniality Melancholia (Unending Mourning) and Hauntingmentioning

confidence: 95%

Melancholia is (geo)political! Postcolonial geography in the Wednesday Demonstration in Seoul

Lee

2021

cultural geographies

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This article examines how melancholia constitutes a psycho-geopolitical space interweaving Korean subjects’ psychic and political lives with the dynamics of the (post) Cold War alliance between Japan and the US. The Wednesday Demonstration is the weekly protest in Seoul that calls for an official apology and legal compensation from the Japanese government for comfort women who worked in the sexual slavery system under the Japanese Empire during WWII. The fact that the weekly protests have continued for 30 years since 1992 signifies that the comfort women issue has remained an unresolved (geo)political issue between South Korea and Japan for three decades, despite apologies and monetary compensations by the Japanese government. This article offers a psychoanalytic-geopolitical rationale for the endless grief of Korean postcolonial subjects who cannot accept the measures of the Japanese government regarding the comfort women issue. Based on 1-year’s participant observations and in-depth interviews with Korean activists who engaged in the Wednesday Demonstration from September 2019 to August 2020, this article aims to accomplish three goals. Firstly, this article shows how Korean postcolonial subjects were/are haunted by colonial past. Secondly, I examine why Koreans cannot complete mourning for comfort women in the context of ROK-US-Japan geopolitical relations. Lastly, this article interrogates how ethno-nationalists intervene to turn melancholia into a motivation for ethnic solidarity and how their attempt might have failed by exploring a Korean postcolonial subject’s psychic lives. In doing so, I argue that the wounds of Koreans related to the comfort women issue are not simply from colonial history, but they are postcolonial wounds that have not healed ‘appropriately’ under the (US-sponsored) South Korean/Japanese (post-)Cold War security arrangement.

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Section: Korean Postcoloniality Melancholia (Unending Mourning) and Hauntingmentioning

confidence: 95%

Melancholia is (geo)political! Postcolonial geography in the Wednesday Demonstration in Seoul

Lee

2021

cultural geographies

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“…3 For a critique of liberal humanism and its connections to the Cold War, see Lowe (2015); Yoneyama (2016);and Chuh (2020). 4 For further discussion of affect and Asian American criticism, see Cho (2008); Santa Ana (2015); Kim (2019);and Baik (2020).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Asian Americans Return to Asia: Return Narratives, Transpacific Imagination, and the Post/Cold War

Wang¹

2021

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By focusing on Asian American return narratives as a symbolic indicator of a shift in transpacific relations, this article attempts to address two questions: first, how will a focus on return experiences engage and reframe transpacific imperial geopolitics thatcreated and sustainedAsian American literature, and second, how will a focus on the “post/Cold War”rather than on globalization as a temporal frame challenge the transpacificimagination in American studiesas a cultural and economic narrative of immigration, integration,and salvationthat purports to transcend Cold War divisions.Thearticleanalyses Maxine Hong Kingston’s I Love a Broad Margin to My Life(2011) and Chang-rae Lee’s My Year Abroad(2021)to consider how post-1990s Asian American return narratives rearticulatecontemporary geopolitics. It will conclude with a reflection on the Orientalismof Asian Americanliteraturein the treacherous imaginaryof transpacific futures.

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Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Melancholia is (geo)political! Postcolonial geography in the Wednesday Demonstration in Seoul

Melancholia is (geo)political! Postcolonial geography in the Wednesday Demonstration in Seoul

When Asian Americans Return to Asia: Return Narratives, Transpacific Imagination, and the Post/Cold War

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