Global Easts-Entangled Mnemoscape in Postcolonial Perspectives

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The end of the global Cold War has dramatically reconfigured the mnemoscape in the third millennium. In Eastern Europe, released memories of Stalinist terror and Holocaust collaboration unboxed the pandora box of conflictual memories. In East Asia and the other peripheral region, the West could no longer marginalize the memories of colonial genocide and atrocities because the imperative to defend Western civilization against Soviet communism had lost its historical force. Freed from the ideological constraints, the triple victimhood of the Holocaust, colonial genocides, and Stalinist crime together became entangled globally. Their postwar memories are intertwined, even though their stories remained unconnected throughout World War II. With a focus on global Easts-Eastern Europe and East Asia, I will probe for the non-hierarchal comparability and multidirectional interactions among the memories of the Holocaust, colonialist crimes, and the Stalinist terror. Dislocating this triple victimhood from the memorial provincialism and relocating it in the postcolonial perspectives would be the first step towards mnemonic solidarity. Suggesting “critical relativization” and “radical juxtaposition” as conceptual tools, I will try to rescue global memories from remembering provincialism.

Jie-Hyun Lim is Professor of Transnational History and director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University, Seoul. He is now Principal Investigator of the research project 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 Publisher. His recent memory studies books include Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Practicing (Columbia Univ. Press, 2022). Victimhood Nationalism-A Global History (Humanist, 2021, Japanese translation-2022), Mnemonic Solidarity-Global Interventions (Palgrave, 2021) co-edited with Eve Rosenhaft. As a memory activist, he has been co-curating exhibitions of “Unwelcome Neighbors,” “Naming Forced Laborers” and others.