Postcolonial Reflections on the Mnemonic Confluence of the Holocaust, Stalinist Crimes, and Colonialism

Abstract

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.

Specters of comfort women: Biopolitical colonial warfare, questions of humanity, and the haunted future

“…This analogy is frequently made to highlight the status of the only nuclear weapon attacks ever perpetrated as crimes against Japanese civilians and as a major mass atrocity on the part of American imperialism. In this regard, it is important to note, as does Jie-Hyun Lim, that in the post-war Japanese memory landscape, “Japan occupied a postcolonial rather than a post-imperial position [within which] the misery and suffering of Japan’s Taiwanese, Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Filipino, and other Asian neighbors [was] consigned to oblivion” (2021: 30). Here, Lim takes up one of the most competitive and conflicting—and yet understudied and effectively obliterated—views of the past in the global memory space to elucidate the knotted interrelations between colonialism and nationalism in Japan and other Asian countries as an example of what he calls “victimhood nationalism in contested memories” (2010).…”

‘The primitive accumulation of capital and memory’: Mnemonic wars as national reconciliation discourse in (post-)Yugoslavia

“…race, gender) and violence, then for memory studies the preoccupation has been with the entity and violence of state (and nation), which has largely ignored economic violence (capital) and different logics of oppression and class exploitation. If Marxist theory long remained embedded in the sphere of the economy and structural violence of capital, then memory studies -and a giant part of Western memory culture -has been shaped by a vague analytic of totalitarian violence and victimhood (for a critique of the universalism of antitotalitarian memory, see Lim, 2021). Juxtaposed to vague analytics, one can find Michael Rothberg's approach that lucidly demonstrates how conventional approaches in memory studies can come to terms with heterogeneous forms of violence and their histories (Rothberg, 2009).…”

“…Juxtaposed to vague analytics, one can find Michael Rothberg's approach that lucidly demonstrates how conventional approaches in memory studies can come to terms with heterogeneous forms of violence and their histories (Rothberg, 2009). Furthermore, for critical memory studies to account for the complexities of time, violence and the field's interdisciplinarity, the plea for memory activism and solidarity with the oppressed should necessarily extend beyond the national frame and the centrality of the state and its apparatuses (Feindt et al, 2014;Lim, 2021;Rigney, 2018).…”