Postcolonial Reflections on the Global Memory Formation: Holocaust, Stalinist Crime and Colonial Genocide

Wednesday April 17th, 18:00 c.t ., Wilhelmstraße 133, Room 30

Bio

Jie Hyun Lim holds the CIPSH chair of Global Easts and is the founding director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University, Seoul. He has published widely on nationalism and Marxism in comparison, Polish history, transnational history and global memory. He is the principal investigator of the research projects of Mnemonic Solidarity: Colonialism, War, and Genocide in the Global Memory Space (2017-2024) and Series Editor of "Entangled Memories in the Global South" at Palgrave/Macmillan and "Global Easts" at the Central European University Press. His recent books include Victimhood Nationalism-Global History and Memory (Columbia Univ Press, 2024, forthcoming), Opfernationalismus. Erinnerung und Herrschaft in der postkolonialen Welt (Klaus Wagenbach 2024), Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Practicing (Columbia Univ Press, 2022), and Mnemonic Solidarity-Global Interventions (Palgave, 2021 co-edited with Eve Rosenhaft).

Abstract

Victimhood nationalism, in my definition, is a narrative template to grant posthumously the moral superiority, historical legitimacy, and political alibis to a present nation living in a legacy of hereditary victimhood by connecting the postmemory generations to ancestral victims via collective memory In this talk, I will articulate victimhood nationalism as a global phenomenon to explain the victimhood competition in the postwar coming to terms with the past in the global memory space across Europe and East Asia In the age of global memory, the spatial turn of  globalization reconfigured the national mnemoscape dramatically into the global one With the emergence of the human rights regime as a global memory formation, nationalist discourses have shifted from heroes to victims, which intensified globally the nationalist competition over who suffered most. The dialectical interplay of global and national memories in constructing victimhood nationalism demands a critical inquiry into the dichotomy of perpetrators vs victims, collective guilt vs innocence, national vs cosmopolitan memory, historical actors vs passive objects, over contextualization vs de-contextualization, historical conformism vs presentism, etc. I will investigate the entangled memories of victimhood nationalism in the global memory space focusing on the mnemonic nexus of Poland, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Korea.