Jie-Hyun Lim | Sogang University (original) (raw)
Papers by Jie-Hyun Lim
Klaus Wagenbach, 2024
Lassen sich Holocaust, Stalinismus und Kolonialismus miteinander vergleichen? Wie soll in einer g... more Lassen sich Holocaust, Stalinismus und Kolonialismus miteinander vergleichen? Wie soll in einer globalisierten Welt erinnert werden? Ein nuanciertes Plädoyer für eine Öffnung der geschichtspolitischen Debatte – ohne Opferkonkurrenz.
Während der Nationalismus seine Begründung früher in Heldengeschichten des unbesiegbaren Volkes fand, schöpfen heute weltweit immer mehr Staaten und Nationen ihr Selbstbewusstsein aus einer Opfergeschichte – und leiten daraus einen Status ab, der sogar vererbt werden soll.
Mit vergleichendem Blick auf Polen, Deutschland, Israel, Japan und Südkorea zeigt Jie-Hyun Lim scharfsinnig, welche Probleme ein solcher Opfernationalismus mit sich bringt, wenn er sich als Machtpolitik formiert: Vergangenheit wird verfälscht, die Opfer selbst werden mitunter unsichtbar gemacht und Herrschaft legitimiert. Indem er dabei konsequent die Perspektive vom europäischen Zentrum löst und in den Globalen Osten verlagert, wird deutlich, wie die historischen Katastrophen im Gedenken weltweit in Beziehung gesetzt und abgeglichen werden, sich erklären und in Konkurrenz zueinander geraten.
In seinen wegweisenden Überlegungen entwirft Lim die Grundzüge für einen globalen Erinnerungsraum, der auf Anteilnahme und Diversität beruht und zugleich historisch trennscharf bleibt. Ein unverzichtbarer Beitrag für die Debatten um eine Geschichtspolitik der Zukunft in der postkolonialen Welt.
An interview with the Global Asian Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Todai. About ... more An interview with the Global Asian Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Todai. About the ideas and activities of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University
Transcription of my lecture on victimhood nationalism in the East Asian Mnemoscape at the Center ... more Transcription of my lecture on victimhood nationalism in the East Asian Mnemoscape at the Center for Korean Studies at Tokyo University, dated December 16, 2022. Delivered via zoom from Warsaw.
Transasian Mnemoscapes Conference Program at the CGSI, Sogang University, June 20-23, 2023.
conference program:
The Global East is the trans peripheral problem space where the East remains underdeveloped compa... more The Global East is the trans peripheral problem space where the East remains underdeveloped compared to the developed “West” in the trajectory of global modernity. The supposed solution for this problem space is to become a “West.” This co-figuring of underdeveloped East and developed West has regulated our historical imagination echoing Eurocentric Orientalism. Viewed from the East as a trans peripheral problem space, the divide between East and West does not equal the boundary of Asia and Europe. Neither is geographically fixed. The strategic location of each is constantly in flux in historical discourse. Each is a relational concept that takes shape and gains coherence only when
configured in relationship to the other in the discursive context of the “problem."....
space.”
Routledge Handbook of Memory Acitivism, 2022
This chapter will trace how transnational memory activism has ended up with the performative nati... more This chapter will trace how transnational memory activism has ended up with the performative nationalism. Some transnational memory actors intended to perform nationalism by spreading their national agenda in the global memory space. In many a case, however, transnational memory activists perform the mnemonic nationalism unconsciously. The global memory space tends to de-territorialize national memories. It intensifies the international competition among contested national memories, too. The de-territorialization of memories in the global memory space coincides with the performative nationalism. Japanese anti-nuclear memory activists' march to Auschwitz, Korean comfort women activists in the transpacific, and Polish memory activists patronizing the Holocaust Jewish victims exemplify the performative nationalism in the global memory space.
Science & Society, 1992
The Irish national question is located on a turning point in the evolution of Marx's and Engels' ... more The Irish national question is located on a turning point in the evolution of Marx's and Engels' thoughts concerning national and colonial issues. Discussing the Irish national question, Marx and Engels succeeded in escaping from their earlier Eurocentric view. Rudimentary recognition of imperialism as the new historical reality helped them to overcome the Eurocentric and capitalocentric view inherent in the earlier historical materialist conception of the nation. It presaged Lenin's theory of national self-determination, which formalizes the dialectical relationship between nationalism and proletarian internationalism in the ear of imperialism.
Science & Society, 1997
The breakdown of the bureaucratic socialist system opened the door to new possibilities in the st... more The breakdown of the bureaucratic socialist system opened the door to new possibilities in the study of the Polish socialist past, as well as to the outburst of suppressed anti-Soviet patriotism. Freed from the yoke of Party censorship, the Polish Left historians have tried to rediscover the historical inheritance of the socialist past that had been dis¬torted and disregarded both by the Party and by the rightist opposition. Their probing for the “good old cause” is based on a common conviction that the Polish socialism has not exhausted its historical possibilities; that it can be resuscitated, along with the democratic-patriotic vision of the Polish socialist heri-tage. Polish Left historians are trying desperately to wield the “weapon of criticism” against the return of capitalism in triumph, by reviving the forgotten concepts of socialist humanism, democratic socialism and “good” (non-xenophobic) left patriotism.
Science & Society, 1995
Red Rosa wasn't a national nihilist at all. She was well aware of the intrinsic value of the nat... more Red Rosa wasn't a national nihilist at all. She was well
aware of the intrinsic value of the national language and national culture. Her concept of territorial autonomy stood on a broader scale than even the Austro-Marxists' concept of cultural autonomy. In the final instance, however, she failed to advance to the dialectical recognition of evolutionary internationalism and social patriotism because of a deeply rooted anti-PPS schematism in practice and proletarian solipsism in theory. Rosa didn't recognize ultimately what the right of national self-determination meant to the mass of oppressed nationalities. That is why Luxemburgism has no good
reputation among Marxists of peripheral countries still strug-
gling with the national question. Rosa's universalist stance of
Enlightened Marxism, however, implies a valuable criticism of
the Third Worldly socialism, what may be termed 'Fanonism' degenerated into populist socialism. I suggest that Luxemburgism's historical evaluation should be freed from the international nihilist view of some rightist social patriots and the Eurocentric view of classical and contemporary Western Marxists.
Memory and Religion from A Postsecular Perspective, 2022
This essay traces the trajectory of how memory of Saint Maksymilian Kolbe at Auschwitz and memory... more This essay traces the trajectory of how memory of Saint Maksymilian Kolbe at Auschwitz and memory of the Catholic A-bomb victims of Nagasaki have been juxtaposed in postwar Japan. A simple juxtaposition of Auschwitz and Nagasaki through the figure of Saint Maksymilian Kolbe may expose a hidden mnemonic nexus capable of bridging East and West in the global memory space. This essay tries to understand the religious sublimation of victimhood nationalism into the transnational memory formation by investigating the role of the Saint Kolbe cult in the promotion of Catholic sanctification of the Nagasaki atomic bomb victims in postwar Japan.
Western Historiography in Asia , 2022
This paper investigates the co-figuration of East and West in the historical imagination of the G... more This paper investigates the co-figuration of East and West in the historical imagination of the Global East. Focusing on the German Ostforschung, Polish Studia Zachonia, Japanese Toyoshi, and Korean Western History, it traces the process of making the imaginative geography and impossibility of overcoming the East and West binary opposition in the global chain of national histories. The invention of Eastern Europe and East Asia have been a part of the intellectual project of demi-Orientalization over the globe.
Asiajiho, 2021
An interview with the Mainichshinbun editorial writer on Victimhood Nationalism.
문학사상Literature and Thought, 2022
A historical-literary essay on Czesław Miłosz's poems of "Poor Christians looking at Ghetto" and ... more A historical-literary essay on Czesław Miłosz's poems of "Poor Christians looking at Ghetto" and "Campo di Fiori."
역사학보, 2020
This article starts with a premise on how to appropriate “the Polish Bishops’ Appeal to the Germa... more This article starts with a premise on how to appropriate “the Polish Bishops’ Appeal to the German Colleagues (1965)” as a cross-reference for the history reconciliation in East Asia. Once spread, the Polish Episcopate’s letter became a historical event for its message of “we forgive and we ask for forgiveness.” The letter signaled the shift of the conventional dichotomy of the collective guilt and innocence from the nationalist political instrumentalism into an ethical vision of forgiveness and reconciliation. With the compliments of the ‘avant-garde of reconciliation’ and ‘the greatest foresight in the postwar Poland,’ the “Appeal” showed how the Catholic Church as a transnational agency could be a paradigm changer for the history reconciliation. The “Appeal” carries an empathy for the misery of not innocent German refugees and self-criticism of the transgression of the Polish revenge, which gives transnational memory activists some leeway to overcome the old antagonism between guilt and suffering, and the zero-sum game of the victimhood nationalism. “What would it mean to transpose the Polish Bishops’ Letter from Central-Eastern Europe of 1965 into present-day East Asia?” needs to be answered thoughtfully yet, despite some try in this article.
서양사론/The Western History Review, 2013
Mass dictatorship as a working hypothesis was designed to challenge the antithetical comparison o... more Mass dictatorship as a working hypothesis was designed to challenge the antithetical comparison of dictatorship and democracy inherent to the old school of totalitarian scholarship and the political common sense of the demonological dichotomy in the Cold War era. Initiated by the problematics of how to democratize democracy, the mass dictatorship thesis raises a set of questions: what if majoritarian democracy in the modern nation-state is based on the categorization of minorities as 'Others' in terms of nation, class, gender, race, ethnicity and so on? What if the majority tyrannize minorities? Is that democracy or is it dictatorship? In answering these questions, it tries to comprehend the common ground between twentieth century mass dictatorships and mass democracies in their attempted mobilization of masses to participate voluntarily in and to support the regime. By locating the Holocaust in the context of the continuity of 'Western' colonialism rather than by recourse to German peculiarities, the mass dictatorship thesis bridges between the Western modernity and German peculiarity in perpetrating the genocide. What I mean is not that dictatorship is same to democracy, but that the dividing line is blurring much more than what has been thought. That critical overview of the interwoven history of mass dictatorships and mass democracies in the twentieth century would lead us to a self-reflexive question of how to democratize democracies in the twenty first century.
Toynbee Prize Foundation, 2020
JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH, 2020
This reflection article scrutinizes the mnemonic confluence and entanglements of the triple victi... more This reflection article scrutinizes the mnemonic confluence and
entanglements of the triple victimhood- the Holocaust, the crimes
of colonialism, and Stalinist terror- on a global scale. The thaw of
frozen memories in the post-Cold War era released the oppressed
memories of Stalinist terror and Nazi collaboration in Eastern
Europe. In the tri-continent of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the
fall of communism also signalled the release of suppressed
memories of the atrocities perpetrated by colonial powers. The
mnemonic confluence of the triple victimhood, often with the
Holocaust as a memory template, merged the divided memory
space of the bipolar Cold War system into a single global memory
formation. This essay will place the temporal focus on the post-
Cold War era with its spatial dimension of the global memory
space. Against the model of the cosmopolitanization of the
Holocaust, Jie-Hyun Lim argues for the non-hierarchical
comparability of the triple vicimhood, exploring global memory
formation from the postcolonial perspective. He concludes this
essay by suggesting the “critical relativization” and “radical
juxtaposition” as ways of both de-hegemonizing and deterritorializing
historical memories.
Postwar Japanese Culture, 2019
This paper investigates a Maksymilian Kolbe cult in the postwar Japanese mnemoscape. In retrospec... more This paper investigates a Maksymilian Kolbe cult in the postwar Japanese mnemoscape. In retrospect, it is an extraordinary coincidence that saint Kolbe, a future Polish Catholic martyr in Auschwitz, had engaged in the missionary work in prewar Nagasaki, the historic center of the Japanese Catholic martyrdom. It is a coincidence also that the atomic bomb detonated in the sky over the Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, to whose ideas saint Maksymilian Kolbe was committed by founding the monastery of Niepokalanów. In the course of constructing the postwar memory of Japanese Catholics’ suffering and victimhood in Nagasaki, this coincidence became the mnemonic nexus of the Polish Catholic martyr in Auschwitz and Japanese Catholic victims in Nagasaki. By probing the sublime metamorphosis of the A-bomb Catholic victims into martyrs through the Maksymilian Kolbe cult in Nagasaki today, I will look into the religious sublime of victimhood nationalism in the transnational memory space.
The Global Impacts of Russia’s Great War and Revolution, Book 2: The Wider Arc of Revolution, Part 2. Choi Chatterjee, Steven G. Marks, Mary Neuburger, and Steven Sabol, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2019
Asianization, Africanization or Latin Americanization of Marxism involves more than a mere transp... more Asianization, Africanization or Latin Americanization of Marxism involves more than a mere transposition of Marxian ideas to non-European countries. When revolution came to East, events contradicted the ideology. The Bolshevik revolution seemed to deny Marx’s famous dictum of ‘the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.’ Based on a divergent mode of capitalist development from the ‘West’, the Russian revolution represented ‘a revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital.’ However, revolution in Russia was not a derivative one wherein the historical authenticity of the Marxian revolution in the developed capitalist countries is tested. Viewed from entangled histories of capitalism, colonialism, nationalism and socialism as competing visions of the global modernity, the Bolshevik revolution was the field of political contests of those competing visions. As the development of the global socialism showed in the twentieth century, socialism was not consequent to capitalism but constitutive of it. Confronting subaltern everydayness, all that solid division of the revolution and counterrevolution, and colonial modernity and national subjectivity melts into the air. This is to trace the socialist revolution moving to East from the combined optic of the global modernity and local everydayness with a spatial stress on Asia.
Klaus Wagenbach, 2024
Lassen sich Holocaust, Stalinismus und Kolonialismus miteinander vergleichen? Wie soll in einer g... more Lassen sich Holocaust, Stalinismus und Kolonialismus miteinander vergleichen? Wie soll in einer globalisierten Welt erinnert werden? Ein nuanciertes Plädoyer für eine Öffnung der geschichtspolitischen Debatte – ohne Opferkonkurrenz.
Während der Nationalismus seine Begründung früher in Heldengeschichten des unbesiegbaren Volkes fand, schöpfen heute weltweit immer mehr Staaten und Nationen ihr Selbstbewusstsein aus einer Opfergeschichte – und leiten daraus einen Status ab, der sogar vererbt werden soll.
Mit vergleichendem Blick auf Polen, Deutschland, Israel, Japan und Südkorea zeigt Jie-Hyun Lim scharfsinnig, welche Probleme ein solcher Opfernationalismus mit sich bringt, wenn er sich als Machtpolitik formiert: Vergangenheit wird verfälscht, die Opfer selbst werden mitunter unsichtbar gemacht und Herrschaft legitimiert. Indem er dabei konsequent die Perspektive vom europäischen Zentrum löst und in den Globalen Osten verlagert, wird deutlich, wie die historischen Katastrophen im Gedenken weltweit in Beziehung gesetzt und abgeglichen werden, sich erklären und in Konkurrenz zueinander geraten.
In seinen wegweisenden Überlegungen entwirft Lim die Grundzüge für einen globalen Erinnerungsraum, der auf Anteilnahme und Diversität beruht und zugleich historisch trennscharf bleibt. Ein unverzichtbarer Beitrag für die Debatten um eine Geschichtspolitik der Zukunft in der postkolonialen Welt.
An interview with the Global Asian Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Todai. About ... more An interview with the Global Asian Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Todai. About the ideas and activities of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University
Transcription of my lecture on victimhood nationalism in the East Asian Mnemoscape at the Center ... more Transcription of my lecture on victimhood nationalism in the East Asian Mnemoscape at the Center for Korean Studies at Tokyo University, dated December 16, 2022. Delivered via zoom from Warsaw.
Transasian Mnemoscapes Conference Program at the CGSI, Sogang University, June 20-23, 2023.
conference program:
The Global East is the trans peripheral problem space where the East remains underdeveloped compa... more The Global East is the trans peripheral problem space where the East remains underdeveloped compared to the developed “West” in the trajectory of global modernity. The supposed solution for this problem space is to become a “West.” This co-figuring of underdeveloped East and developed West has regulated our historical imagination echoing Eurocentric Orientalism. Viewed from the East as a trans peripheral problem space, the divide between East and West does not equal the boundary of Asia and Europe. Neither is geographically fixed. The strategic location of each is constantly in flux in historical discourse. Each is a relational concept that takes shape and gains coherence only when
configured in relationship to the other in the discursive context of the “problem."....
space.”
Routledge Handbook of Memory Acitivism, 2022
This chapter will trace how transnational memory activism has ended up with the performative nati... more This chapter will trace how transnational memory activism has ended up with the performative nationalism. Some transnational memory actors intended to perform nationalism by spreading their national agenda in the global memory space. In many a case, however, transnational memory activists perform the mnemonic nationalism unconsciously. The global memory space tends to de-territorialize national memories. It intensifies the international competition among contested national memories, too. The de-territorialization of memories in the global memory space coincides with the performative nationalism. Japanese anti-nuclear memory activists' march to Auschwitz, Korean comfort women activists in the transpacific, and Polish memory activists patronizing the Holocaust Jewish victims exemplify the performative nationalism in the global memory space.
Science & Society, 1992
The Irish national question is located on a turning point in the evolution of Marx's and Engels' ... more The Irish national question is located on a turning point in the evolution of Marx's and Engels' thoughts concerning national and colonial issues. Discussing the Irish national question, Marx and Engels succeeded in escaping from their earlier Eurocentric view. Rudimentary recognition of imperialism as the new historical reality helped them to overcome the Eurocentric and capitalocentric view inherent in the earlier historical materialist conception of the nation. It presaged Lenin's theory of national self-determination, which formalizes the dialectical relationship between nationalism and proletarian internationalism in the ear of imperialism.
Science & Society, 1997
The breakdown of the bureaucratic socialist system opened the door to new possibilities in the st... more The breakdown of the bureaucratic socialist system opened the door to new possibilities in the study of the Polish socialist past, as well as to the outburst of suppressed anti-Soviet patriotism. Freed from the yoke of Party censorship, the Polish Left historians have tried to rediscover the historical inheritance of the socialist past that had been dis¬torted and disregarded both by the Party and by the rightist opposition. Their probing for the “good old cause” is based on a common conviction that the Polish socialism has not exhausted its historical possibilities; that it can be resuscitated, along with the democratic-patriotic vision of the Polish socialist heri-tage. Polish Left historians are trying desperately to wield the “weapon of criticism” against the return of capitalism in triumph, by reviving the forgotten concepts of socialist humanism, democratic socialism and “good” (non-xenophobic) left patriotism.
Science & Society, 1995
Red Rosa wasn't a national nihilist at all. She was well aware of the intrinsic value of the nat... more Red Rosa wasn't a national nihilist at all. She was well
aware of the intrinsic value of the national language and national culture. Her concept of territorial autonomy stood on a broader scale than even the Austro-Marxists' concept of cultural autonomy. In the final instance, however, she failed to advance to the dialectical recognition of evolutionary internationalism and social patriotism because of a deeply rooted anti-PPS schematism in practice and proletarian solipsism in theory. Rosa didn't recognize ultimately what the right of national self-determination meant to the mass of oppressed nationalities. That is why Luxemburgism has no good
reputation among Marxists of peripheral countries still strug-
gling with the national question. Rosa's universalist stance of
Enlightened Marxism, however, implies a valuable criticism of
the Third Worldly socialism, what may be termed 'Fanonism' degenerated into populist socialism. I suggest that Luxemburgism's historical evaluation should be freed from the international nihilist view of some rightist social patriots and the Eurocentric view of classical and contemporary Western Marxists.
Memory and Religion from A Postsecular Perspective, 2022
This essay traces the trajectory of how memory of Saint Maksymilian Kolbe at Auschwitz and memory... more This essay traces the trajectory of how memory of Saint Maksymilian Kolbe at Auschwitz and memory of the Catholic A-bomb victims of Nagasaki have been juxtaposed in postwar Japan. A simple juxtaposition of Auschwitz and Nagasaki through the figure of Saint Maksymilian Kolbe may expose a hidden mnemonic nexus capable of bridging East and West in the global memory space. This essay tries to understand the religious sublimation of victimhood nationalism into the transnational memory formation by investigating the role of the Saint Kolbe cult in the promotion of Catholic sanctification of the Nagasaki atomic bomb victims in postwar Japan.
Western Historiography in Asia , 2022
This paper investigates the co-figuration of East and West in the historical imagination of the G... more This paper investigates the co-figuration of East and West in the historical imagination of the Global East. Focusing on the German Ostforschung, Polish Studia Zachonia, Japanese Toyoshi, and Korean Western History, it traces the process of making the imaginative geography and impossibility of overcoming the East and West binary opposition in the global chain of national histories. The invention of Eastern Europe and East Asia have been a part of the intellectual project of demi-Orientalization over the globe.
Asiajiho, 2021
An interview with the Mainichshinbun editorial writer on Victimhood Nationalism.
문학사상Literature and Thought, 2022
A historical-literary essay on Czesław Miłosz's poems of "Poor Christians looking at Ghetto" and ... more A historical-literary essay on Czesław Miłosz's poems of "Poor Christians looking at Ghetto" and "Campo di Fiori."
역사학보, 2020
This article starts with a premise on how to appropriate “the Polish Bishops’ Appeal to the Germa... more This article starts with a premise on how to appropriate “the Polish Bishops’ Appeal to the German Colleagues (1965)” as a cross-reference for the history reconciliation in East Asia. Once spread, the Polish Episcopate’s letter became a historical event for its message of “we forgive and we ask for forgiveness.” The letter signaled the shift of the conventional dichotomy of the collective guilt and innocence from the nationalist political instrumentalism into an ethical vision of forgiveness and reconciliation. With the compliments of the ‘avant-garde of reconciliation’ and ‘the greatest foresight in the postwar Poland,’ the “Appeal” showed how the Catholic Church as a transnational agency could be a paradigm changer for the history reconciliation. The “Appeal” carries an empathy for the misery of not innocent German refugees and self-criticism of the transgression of the Polish revenge, which gives transnational memory activists some leeway to overcome the old antagonism between guilt and suffering, and the zero-sum game of the victimhood nationalism. “What would it mean to transpose the Polish Bishops’ Letter from Central-Eastern Europe of 1965 into present-day East Asia?” needs to be answered thoughtfully yet, despite some try in this article.
서양사론/The Western History Review, 2013
Mass dictatorship as a working hypothesis was designed to challenge the antithetical comparison o... more Mass dictatorship as a working hypothesis was designed to challenge the antithetical comparison of dictatorship and democracy inherent to the old school of totalitarian scholarship and the political common sense of the demonological dichotomy in the Cold War era. Initiated by the problematics of how to democratize democracy, the mass dictatorship thesis raises a set of questions: what if majoritarian democracy in the modern nation-state is based on the categorization of minorities as 'Others' in terms of nation, class, gender, race, ethnicity and so on? What if the majority tyrannize minorities? Is that democracy or is it dictatorship? In answering these questions, it tries to comprehend the common ground between twentieth century mass dictatorships and mass democracies in their attempted mobilization of masses to participate voluntarily in and to support the regime. By locating the Holocaust in the context of the continuity of 'Western' colonialism rather than by recourse to German peculiarities, the mass dictatorship thesis bridges between the Western modernity and German peculiarity in perpetrating the genocide. What I mean is not that dictatorship is same to democracy, but that the dividing line is blurring much more than what has been thought. That critical overview of the interwoven history of mass dictatorships and mass democracies in the twentieth century would lead us to a self-reflexive question of how to democratize democracies in the twenty first century.
Toynbee Prize Foundation, 2020
JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH, 2020
This reflection article scrutinizes the mnemonic confluence and entanglements of the triple victi... more This reflection article scrutinizes the mnemonic confluence and
entanglements of the triple victimhood- the Holocaust, the crimes
of colonialism, and Stalinist terror- on a global scale. The thaw of
frozen memories in the post-Cold War era released the oppressed
memories of Stalinist terror and Nazi collaboration in Eastern
Europe. In the tri-continent of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the
fall of communism also signalled the release of suppressed
memories of the atrocities perpetrated by colonial powers. The
mnemonic confluence of the triple victimhood, often with the
Holocaust as a memory template, merged the divided memory
space of the bipolar Cold War system into a single global memory
formation. This essay will place the temporal focus on the post-
Cold War era with its spatial dimension of the global memory
space. Against the model of the cosmopolitanization of the
Holocaust, Jie-Hyun Lim argues for the non-hierarchical
comparability of the triple vicimhood, exploring global memory
formation from the postcolonial perspective. He concludes this
essay by suggesting the “critical relativization” and “radical
juxtaposition” as ways of both de-hegemonizing and deterritorializing
historical memories.
Postwar Japanese Culture, 2019
This paper investigates a Maksymilian Kolbe cult in the postwar Japanese mnemoscape. In retrospec... more This paper investigates a Maksymilian Kolbe cult in the postwar Japanese mnemoscape. In retrospect, it is an extraordinary coincidence that saint Kolbe, a future Polish Catholic martyr in Auschwitz, had engaged in the missionary work in prewar Nagasaki, the historic center of the Japanese Catholic martyrdom. It is a coincidence also that the atomic bomb detonated in the sky over the Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, to whose ideas saint Maksymilian Kolbe was committed by founding the monastery of Niepokalanów. In the course of constructing the postwar memory of Japanese Catholics’ suffering and victimhood in Nagasaki, this coincidence became the mnemonic nexus of the Polish Catholic martyr in Auschwitz and Japanese Catholic victims in Nagasaki. By probing the sublime metamorphosis of the A-bomb Catholic victims into martyrs through the Maksymilian Kolbe cult in Nagasaki today, I will look into the religious sublime of victimhood nationalism in the transnational memory space.
The Global Impacts of Russia’s Great War and Revolution, Book 2: The Wider Arc of Revolution, Part 2. Choi Chatterjee, Steven G. Marks, Mary Neuburger, and Steven Sabol, eds. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2019
Asianization, Africanization or Latin Americanization of Marxism involves more than a mere transp... more Asianization, Africanization or Latin Americanization of Marxism involves more than a mere transposition of Marxian ideas to non-European countries. When revolution came to East, events contradicted the ideology. The Bolshevik revolution seemed to deny Marx’s famous dictum of ‘the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.’ Based on a divergent mode of capitalist development from the ‘West’, the Russian revolution represented ‘a revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital.’ However, revolution in Russia was not a derivative one wherein the historical authenticity of the Marxian revolution in the developed capitalist countries is tested. Viewed from entangled histories of capitalism, colonialism, nationalism and socialism as competing visions of the global modernity, the Bolshevik revolution was the field of political contests of those competing visions. As the development of the global socialism showed in the twentieth century, socialism was not consequent to capitalism but constitutive of it. Confronting subaltern everydayness, all that solid division of the revolution and counterrevolution, and colonial modernity and national subjectivity melts into the air. This is to trace the socialist revolution moving to East from the combined optic of the global modernity and local everydayness with a spatial stress on Asia.
International Affairs, 2023
To my contemporaries in East Asia, the ‘transwar’ is a lived history more than an analytical cate... more To my contemporaries in East Asia, the ‘transwar’ is a lived history more than an analytical category to understand transnational Asia between 1920 and 1960. While reading this book, I remembered the everydayness of the discipline-power and (self-)mobilization of the mass dictatorship in South Korea. It brought me to a pale memory of how embarrassed I was to find out that the dominant discourses, everyday practices, and population management of the mass dictatorship in postcolonial South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s were similar to the Japanese total war system in the 1930s and 1940s. Resident registration cards, compulsory saving accounts, national gymnastics, mass games, paramilitary parades, collectively reciting the national charter of education, and other collectivist activities in postwar Korea were Deja Vu of the workings of power in the Japanese empire. I, a South Korean youth in the 1960s-1970s, had been living the afterlives of colonial Japan and Manchukuo modern.
Connections, 2020
Jie-Hyun Lim: Rezension zu: De Baets, Antoon: Crimes against History London 2018. ISBN 978-11385... more Jie-Hyun Lim: Rezension zu: De Baets, Antoon: Crimes against History London 2018. ISBN 978-1138574229, in: Connections. A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists, 17.07.2020, <www.connections.clio-online.net/publicationreview/id/reb-28422>.
International Review of Social History, 2005
International Review of Social History, 2008
What pushed the daughter of the late dictator to the position of the president in post-dictatoria... more What pushed the daughter of the late dictator to the position of the president in post-dictatorial Korea? Mass Dictatorship as a tool to explain the political landscape in contemporary Korea.
The 9th FUTH traces the processes of global memory formation and its profound influence on people... more The 9th FUTH traces the processes of global memory formation and its profound influence on people’s life by investigating how the holocaust meets the postcolonial. We look at how these violent and destabilizing events can be traced in places, stories, objects, and practices. It intends to illuminate how nations’ territorialized collective memories have been interwoven with one another beyond the confines of nation-states by way of cross-referencing, imitating, confronting and competing. The 9th FUTH explores the significance of entangled memory formations in diverse regions, which allow us to deconstruct the monopoly of Eurocentrism in memory studies and helps building forms of global memory formation fostering mnemonic solidarity and dialogue.
Conference Poster of 'Mnemonic Solidarity: Colonialism, War, and Genocide in the Global Memory Sp... more Conference Poster of 'Mnemonic Solidarity: Colonialism, War, and Genocide in the Global Memory Space'
Global Easts, 2022
South Korean historian Jie-Hyun Lim, raised under an anticommunist dictatorship, turned to Marxia... more South Korean historian Jie-Hyun Lim, raised under an anticommunist
dictatorship, turned to Marxian thought to explain his
country’s development, even as he came to struggle with its
Eurocentrism. As a transnational scholar working in postcommunist
Poland, Lim recognized striking similarities between
Korean and Polish history and politics. One realization stood out:
Both Korea and Poland—at once the “West” for Asia yet “Eastern”
Europe—had been assigned the role of “East.”
This book explores entangled Easts to reconsider global history
from the margins. Examining the politics of history and memory,
Lim reveals the affinities linking Eastern Europe and East Asia.
He draws out commonalities in their experiences of modernity,
in their transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and in the
shaping of collective memory. Ranging across Poland, Germany,
Israel, Japan, and Korea, Lim traces the global history of how
notions of victimhood have become central to nationalism. He
criticizes mass dictatorships of right and left in the Global Easts,
considering Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s notion of sovereign dictatorship
and the concept of decisionist democracy. Lim argues
that nationalism is inherently transnational, critiquing how the
nationalist imagination of the Global East has influenced countries
across borders.
Theoretically sophisticated and conceptually innovative, this
book sheds new light on the transnational complexity of historical
memory and imagination, the boundaries between democracy
and mass dictatorship, and the fluidity of East and West.
희생자의식 민족주의(Victimhood Nationalism), 2021
This book articulates “victimhood nationalism” as a global phenomenon to explain the victimhood c... more This book articulates “victimhood nationalism” as a global phenomenon to explain the victimhood competition in the postwar “coming to terms with the past.” The spatial turn of globalization reconfigured the national mnemoscape dramatically into the transnational and global one. With the emergence of global memory formation, nationalist discourses have shifted from heroes to victims to intensify globally the nationalist competition over who suffered most. Victimhood nationalism, constructed in the dialectical interplay of global and national memories, is transnational more than national. This book critically investigates the entangled memories of victimhood nationalism beyond the national dichotomy of perpetrators vs. victims and collective guilt vs. innocence, focusing on the mnemonic nexus of Poland, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Korea. This project ultimately attempts at the global history of victimhood nationalism beyond a mere compilation of case studies, with the methodological accent on the transdisciplinary memory studies.
Mnemonic Solidarity-Global Interventions, 2021
This book introduces “mnemonic solidarity” as a scholarly and political program, situating it in ... more This book introduces “mnemonic solidarity” as a scholarly and political program, situating it in the context of the wider project and publication series “Entangled Memories in the Global South”. Their programmatic approach arises from the observation that a global memory formation has emerged since the late twentieth century, which has been addressed in various ways by scholars under the rubrics of “cosmopolitan,” “multidirectional,” “traveling,” “prosthetic,” “transnational,” and “agonistic” memory. But the new field of memory studies remains Eurocentric and relatively insensitive to the double-edged character of globalized memory – the interplay between de-territorialization and re-territorialization. This open access book provides a concise sketch of the global memory formation since the 1990s. Memories of traumatic histories in different parts of the world, often articulated in the terms established by Holocaust memory, have become entangled, reconciled, contested, conflicted and negotiated across borders. As historical actors and events across time and space become connected in new ways, new grounds for contest and competition arise; claims to the past that appeared de-territorialized in the global memory formation become re-territorialized – deployed in the service of nationalist projects. This poses challenges to scholarship and practice: How can we ensure that shared or comparable memories of past injustice continue to be grounds for solidarity between different memory communities? In chapters focusing on Europe, East Asia and Africa, five scholars respond to these challenges from a range of disciplinary perspectives in the humanities.