"Hereditary Victimhood and Post-Colonial Historiography in Korea"

Jie-Hyun Lim explores self-reflexive ways to overcome the current intellectual stalemate between Japan and South Korea created by the recent controversies surrounding the Japanese cabinet members' visit to the Yasukuni shrine, revision of Japanese textbooks, and the “comfort women” issue.  He argues that the production of historical discourses in both South Korea and Japan is deeply implicated with the making of “national history” in each country, and the stalemate stems not only from the geopolitical boundary dividing the two countries but also from our epistemological boundaries. What has governed our praxis is less actual reality than the reality refracted through the preexisting epistemological framework, and the first step toward a new praxis is to problematize the epistemological basis of the historiography in East Asia.  The process of dismantling the “hereditary victim hood” pervasive in post-colonial South Korea and Japan is to make visible the complicit relationship between the state power and historiography in each country.

Jie-Hyun Lim teaches European intellectual history at Hanyang University, South Korea, and is currently visiting scholar at the Harvard Yenching Institute and the University of Glamorgan (Cardiff, UK).  He is the author and editor of numerous articles and books including Nationalism Beyond Nationalism: Neither National Nihilism nor Mythic Present (1999), Fascism within Us (2000), and A History of the Polish Irredentist Movement (2000).

Cost : free

www.international.ucla.edu/korea

Sponsor(s): Center for Korean Studies