Description
Book SynopsisFirmly based on the insight that memory is always mediated and that the past is not a stable object, this title 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.
Trade Review“
Perilous Memories is a major statement in current discussions concerned with assessing the problematic relationship of history and memory. The authors gathered in this volume edited by T. Fujitani, Geoffrey White, and Lisa Yoneyama forcefully rescue the memories of other wars and genocides in the arena of Asia-Pacific to remind us of the dangerous but necessary task of the present to actualize the past in order to remember the forgotten yet unforgettable. With this volume we have an incomparable guide to what Walter Benjamin once described as the ‘copernican turn to remembrance.’”—Harry Harootunian, New York University
“This excellent interdisciplinary collection of essays gives diverse and heterogeneous voice to many ordinary people who suffered in the Asian wars that began in 1931—wars that, for many of these same people, never really ended. At every turn,
Perilous Memories counterpoints the extraordinary elites who have dominated historical memory with the recuperated experience of their victims. This book is a major contribution to what the authors call ‘critical war remembering.’”—Bruce Cumings, author of
Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century“Unsettling official national accounts with memories of war from Okinawa, Guam, and Taiwan, of the Nanjing massacre, occupied Singapore, and the Hiroshima bombing—
PERILOUS MEMORIES provokes a haunting dialectic between familiar history and endangered memories.”—Lisa Lowe, University of California, San Diego
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction / T. Fujitani, Geoffrey M. White, and Lisa Yoneyama 1
1. Memory Fragments, Memory Images
Absent Images of Memory: Remembering and Reenacting the Japanese Internment / Marita Sturken 33
The Malleable and the Contested: The Nanjing Massacre in Postwar China and Japan / Daqing Yang 50
Memories of War and Okinawa / Ishihara Masaie 87
Images of Islanders in Pacific War Photographs / Lamont Lindstrom 107
Imagery and War in Japan: 1995 / Morio Watanabe 129
2. Politics and Poetics of Liberation
Deliberating “Liberation Day”: Identity, History, Memory, and War in Guam / Vicente M. Diaz 155
Imperial Army Betrayed / Chen Yingzhen 181
Korean “Imperial Soldiers”: Remembering Colonialism and Crimes against Allied POWs / Utsumi Aiko 199
Memory Suppression and Memory Production: The Japanese Occupation of Singapore / Diana Wong 218
Go For Broke, the Movie, Japanese American Soldiers in U.S. National, Military, and Racial Discourses / T. Fujitani 239
Moving History: The Pearl Harbor Film(s) / Geoffrey M. White 267
3. Atonement, Healing, and Unexpected Alliances
“Trapped in History” on the Way to Utopia: East Asia’s “Great War” Fifty Years Later / Arif Dirlik 299
For Transformative Knowledge and Postnationalist Public Spheres: The Smithsonian
Enola Gay Controversy / Lisa Yoneyama 323
“Frantic to Join . . . the Japanese Army”: Black Soldiers and Civilians Confront the Asia Pacific War / George Lipsitz 347
Colonialism and Atom Bombs: About Survivors of Hiroshima Living in Korea / Toyonaga Keisaburo 378
The Politics of War Memories toward Healing / Chungmoo Choi 395
Bibliography 411
Filmography 435
Index 437
Contributors 461
