Monday, February 29th, 2016 Ghosts and Rocks: The Past That Would Shape the Future in Northeast Asia

Description

The talk will consider various examples of the region’s memory wars and interrogate the possibilities for the production of history in the mix. Of particular concern is the matter of the islands in the region left up for grabs in the Treaty of Peace with Japan, signed in San Francisco in 1951. Through claims to these islands today, the memory wars have the potential to spark actual conflict and render treacherous the ongoing political manipulation of both victims and survivors of the Japanese Empire.

Alexis Dudden is professor of history at the University of Connecticut. She publishes regularly about Japan and Northeast Asia, and her books include Troubled Apologies Among Japan, Korea, and the United States (Columbia) and Japan’s Colonization of Korea (Hawaii). Dudden received her BA from Columbia University in 1991 and her PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 1998. She has lived and studied for extended periods of time in Japan and South Korea, with awards from Fulbright, ACLS, NEH, and SSRC and fellowships at Princeton and Harvard and is the recipient of the 2015 Manhae Peace Prize. She is currently completing a book about Japan’s territorial problems called, The Shape of Japan: Islands, Empire, Nation (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).

She is on the advisory council of Harvard University’s Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies’ Research Project on Constitutional Revision and was the recipient of the Chosun Ilbo’s 2015 Manhae Peace Prize.