Description

In Cold War Ruins Lisa Yoneyama argues that the efforts intensifying since the1990s to bring justice to the victims of Japanese military and colonial violence have generated what she calls a “transborder redress culture.” A product of failed post-World War II transitional justice that left many colonial legacies intact, this culture both contests and reiterates the complex transwar and transpacific entanglements that have sustained the Cold War unredressability and illegibility of certain violences. By linking justice to the effects of American geopolitical hegemony, and by deploying a conjunctive cultural critique— of “comfort women” redress efforts, state-sponsored apologies and amnesties, Asian American involvement in redress cases, the ongoing effects of the U.S. occupation of Japan and Okinawa, Japanese atrocities in China, and battles over WWII memories—Yoneyama helps illuminate how redress culture across Asia and the Pacific has the potential to bring powerful new and challenging perspectives on American exceptionalism, militarized security, justice, sovereignty, forgiveness, and decolonization.

Yoneyama is Professor of Women and Gender Studies Institute and Department of East Asian Studies at University of Toronto. She is the author of Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space and the Dialectics of Memory (University of California Press, 1999), Violence, War, Redress: Politics of Multiculturalism (published in Japanese, Iwanami Shoten, 2003), and a co-edited volume, Perilous Memories: Asia-Pacific War(s) (Duke University Press, 2001).

Books will be available for sale. Event runs 3 PM – 5 PM, reception follows.