Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Perilous Memories makes a groundbreaking and critical intervention into debates about war memory in the Asia-Pacific region. Arguing that much is lost or erased when the Asia-Pacific War(s) are reduced to the 1941�1945 war between Japan and the United States, this collection challenges mainstream memories of the Second World War in favor of what were actually multiple, widespread conflicts. The contributors recuperate marginalized or silenced memories of wars throughout the region�not only in Japan and the United States but also in China, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea.

Firmly based on the insight that memory is always mediated and that the past is not a stable object, the volume demonstrates that we can intervene positively yet critically in the recovery and reinterpretation of events and experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of the past. The contributors�an international list of anthropologists, cultural critics, historians, literary scholars, and activists�show how both dominant and subjugated memories have emerged out of entanglements with such forces as nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and sexism. They consider both how the past is remembered and also what the consequences may be of privileging one set of memories over others. Specific objects of study range from photographs, animation, songs, and films to military occupations and attacks, minorities in wartime, �comfort women,� commemorative events, and postwar activism in pursuing redress and reparations.

Perilous Memories is a model for war memory intervention and will be of interest to historians and other scholars and activists engaged with collective memory, colonial studies, U.S. and Asian history, and cultural studies. Contributors. Chen Yingzhen, Chungmoo Choi, Vicente M. Diaz, Arif Dirlik, T. Fujitani, Ishihara Masaie, Lamont Lindstrom, George Lipsitz, Marita Sturken, Toyonaga Keisaburo, Utsumi Aiko, Morio Watanabe, Geoffrey M. White, Diana Wong, Daqing Yang, Lisa Yoneyama

AUTHOR BIO:
T. Fujitani is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, San Diego and author of Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan. Geoffrey M. White is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai�i, Senior Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, and author of Identity Through History: Living Stories in a Solomon Islands Society. Lisa Yoneyama is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Japanese Studies at University of California, San Diego and author of Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory.

FROM THE CRITICS

Monumenta Nipponica

[A]n important volume that through its problematic and its broad geographical scope questions the categories and conventions that continue to dominate memory studies. The search for marginalized and counter memories leads to important insights into the production of founding myths, hegemonic narratives, and discursive silences, and highlights the embeddedness of memory in asymmetrical structures of power. It also calls our attention to the need to take account of transnational factors that participate in the generation of memory.—Sebastian Conrad

The Contemporary Pacific

[C]ompelling. . . . [P]resent[s] heartrending stories with effective simplicity. Anyone interested in the Asia-Pacific War, the politics and poetics of memory, how history serves the purposes of the powerful and how it can be made to serve the needs of the powerless, will find something of use in this volume.—Lin Poyer

American Studies International

Perhaps the best way to describe Perilous Memories is as a work of conservation. Rather than striving to protect a rare and endangered species of bird, or to save significant objets d'art from the ravages of time and the elements, the editors of this work have set out to preserve something much more fragile and fleeting-memories, experiences and lessons and World War II. . . . The authors and editors of Perilous Memories have provided us with views of events as we seldom see them. They give us an opportunity to step outside the conventional memories to which we are accustomed, and invite us to see the events of World War II and beyond through different eyes. . . . The narratives are grouped into three broad categories based on general content. The format allows the reader to progress through the readings at a comfortable pace, while the extensive bibliographies and notations direct readers to additional resources. . . . [T]hese works give the reader an opportunity to pause and reflect, to share memories and perceptions we might otherwise not have been privy to, to challenge our views of the past and the future.—Stephen M. Folena,

American Anthopologist

[A] crucial contribution . . . . The accounts will satisfy a variety of interests. . . . [A] very rich volume . . . . [E]ssential reading in our fin de si�cle 'memory work.'—James Peacock

Journal of Asian American Studies

There are many stunning essays included here . . . . But the radical strength of the volume is in the breadth of its reach as a whole, which challenges us to rethink what we already think we know about the Asian Pacific Wars of 1931-1941.—Katherine Kinney Read all 7 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

This excellent interdisciplinary collection of essays gives diverse and heterogeneous voice to many ordinary people who suffered in the Asian wars that began in 1931�wars that, for many of these same people, never really ended. At every turn, Perilous Memories counterpoints the extraordinary elites who have dominated historical memory with the recuperated experience of their victims. This book is a major contribution to what the authors call �critical war remembering.(-�Bruce Cumings, author of Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century) — Bruce Cumings

Unsettling official national accounts with memories of war from Okinawa, Guam, and Taiwan, of the Nanjing massacre, occupied Singapore, and the Hiroshima bombing -PERILOUS MEMORIES provokes a haunting dialectic between familiar history and endangered memories.(-�Lisa Lowe, University of California, San Diego) — Lisa Lowe