Perilous Memories

Perilous Memories

The Asia-Pacific War(s)

  • Author: Fujitani, Takashi; White, Geoffrey M.; Yoneyama, Lisa
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822325321
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822381051
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2001
  • Month: June
  • Pages: 472
  • DDC: 940.53
  • Language: English
Perilous Memories makes a groundbreaking and critical intervention into debates about war memory in the Asia-Pacific region. Arguing that much is lost or erased when the Asia-Pacific War(s) are reduced to the 1941–1945 war between Japan and the United States, this collection challenges mainstream memories of the Second World War in favor of what were actually multiple, widespread conflicts. The contributors recuperate marginalized or silenced memories of wars throughout the region—not only in Japan and the United States but also in China, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea.
Firmly based on the insight that memory is always mediated and that the past is not a stable object, the volume demonstrates that we can intervene positively yet critically in the recovery and reinterpretation of events and experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of the past. The contributors—an international list of anthropologists, cultural critics, historians, literary scholars, and activists—show how both dominant and subjugated memories have emerged out of entanglements with such forces as nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and sexism. They consider both how the past is remembered and also what the consequences may be of privileging one set of memories over others. Specific objects of study range from photographs, animation, songs, and films to military occupations and attacks, minorities in wartime, “comfort women,” commemorative events, and postwar activism in pursuing redress and reparations.
Perilous Memories is a model for war memory intervention and will be of interest to historians and other scholars and activists engaged with collective memory, colonial studies, U.S. and Asian history, and cultural studies.

Contributors. Chen Yingzhen, Chungmoo Choi, Vicente M. Diaz, Arif Dirlik, T. Fujitani, Ishihara Masaie, Lamont Lindstrom, George Lipsitz, Marita Sturken, Toyonaga Keisaburo, Utsumi Aiko, Morio Watanabe, Geoffrey M. White, Diana Wong, Daqing Yang, Lisa Yoneyama

  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama
  • 1: Memory Fragments, Memory Images
    • Marita Sturken, Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the Japanese Internment
    • Daqing Yang, The Malleable and the Contested: The Nanjing Massacre in Postwar China and Japan
    • Ishihara Masaie, Memories of War and Okinawa
    • Lamont Lindstrom, Images of Islanders in Pacific War Photographs
    • Morio Watanabe, Imagery and War in Japan: 1995
  • 2: Politics and Poetics of Liberation
    • Vicente M. Diaz, Deliberating ‘‘Liberation Day’’: Identity, History, Memory, and War in Guam
    • Chen Yingzhen, Imperial Army Betrayed
    • Utsumi Aiko, Korean ‘‘Imperial Soldiers’’: Remembering Colonialism and Crimes against Allied POWS
    • Diana Wong, Memory Suppression and Memory Production: The Japanese Occupation of Singapore
    • T. Fujitani, Go for Broke, the Movie: Japanese American Soldiers in U.S. National, Military, and Racial Discourses
    • Geoffrey M. White, Moving History: The Pearl Harbor Film(s)
  • 3: Atonement, Healing, and Unexpected Alliances
    • Arif Dirlik, ‘‘Trapped in History’’ on the Way to Utopia: East Asia’s ‘‘Great War’’ Fifty Years Later
    • Lisa Yoneyama, For Transformative Knowledge and Postnationalist Public Spheres: The Smithsonian Enola Gay Controversy
    • George Lipsitz, ‘‘Frantic to Join . . . the Japanese Army’’: Black Soldiers and Civilians Confront the Asia Pacific War
    • Toyonaga Keisaburo, Colonialism and Atom Bombs: About Survivors of Hiroshima Living in Korea
    • Chungmoo Choi, The Politics of War Memories toward Healing
  • Bibliography
  • Filmography
  • Index
  • Contributors

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