Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes - Softcover

Yoneyama, Lisa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822361698 ISBN 13: 9780822361695

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2016

Synopsis

In Cold War Ruins Lisa Yoneyama argues that the efforts intensifying since the 1990s 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Lisa Yoneyama is Professor of East Asian Studies and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Toronto, the coeditor of Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s), also published by Duke University Press, and the author of Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory.

Review:

"In this monumental book, Lisa Yoneyama analyzes the predicaments and possibilities of redressing war violence in Asia and the Pacific Islands, considering military tribunals, truth commissions, laws, historical debates, and museums. No other scholar has examined with such rigor and clarity the Cold War politics of knowledge that divides aggrieved and aggressor, the redressable and unredressable, the forgiven and unforgiven. With the publication of this book, the fields of East Asian Studies, American Studies, and Asian American Studies will be forever changed." (Lisa Lowe, author of The Intimacies of Four Continents)

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0822361698
• ISBN 13: 9780822361695
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336