Cold War Ruins
Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Duke University Press
Published:8th Sep '16
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
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- Paperback£22.99(9780822361695)
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.
"Yoneyama critically analyses the normative discourses surrounding Japanese wartime criminality and exposes how the Cold War power relations between Japan and the US continue to influence the terms in which international redress culture is enacted. The book offers a highly critical dissection of the political sensitivities of the post-Cold War era in the Japanese context. . . ."
-- Teemu Laulainen * LSE Review of Books *
"Readers interested in geopolitical spheres beyond Asia Pacific should find Yoneyama’s approach to transnational cultural critique useful in exposing institutionalized forgetting in a wide variety of situations.... Given the metastasizing violence throughout the post-9/11 world, we can only hope that the methodologies and commitment to unflinching critical analysis evident in Cold War Ruins will find a wide audience." -- Geoffrey White * American Ethnologist *
"At a time when no single narrative can now monopolize the 'truth,' a global memory culture is coalescing around a human rights discourse that also monopolizes its own 'truth' originating in the West. Yoneyama's work is a valuable reminder that a multilayered perspective is crucial to discerning the political exploitation of such a paradigm as well." -- Akiko Hashimoto * Monumenta Nipponica *
“Tracking ruins across the longue durée of the twentieth century, this impressive study explores the historical forces that have delimited the possibilities for justice for survivors of colonial and military violence in Asia and the Pacific. . . . The methodological and analytical depth of Cold War Ruins provides an exemplary transnational approach to the study of historical justice, which should appeal broadly to researchers and graduate students.” -- Wendy Kozol * Journal of American History *
“Cold War Ruins is an innovative and provocative work. It contextualizes and builds connections between a host of thorny issues often receiving separate treatment. . . . A book filled with new questions and fresh answers about facing the past.” -- Dayna Barnes * Journal of American-East Asian Relations *
"Cold War Ruins takes readers beyond polities, geographies, histories, spaces, and times: a book of rare interdisciplinarity and range. Yoneyama has completed a work of fierce advocacy, abstract reasoning, and historical merit. . . . Yoneyama’s most important contribution is connecting post-war Occupation policies to the myth of US exceptionalism . . . The reader is left painfully aware of justice’s ephemerality, yet inspired by human resilience." -- James Burnham Sedgwick * Pacific Affairs *
ISBN: 9780822361503
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 590g
336 pages