Description:

East Asia is at war over historical memory, and not just over recent memory. The acts of remembering the past, or selectively recollecting and forgetting parts of it, in contemporary East Asia are so charged with heat and intensityand so mired in controversyas probably nowhere else in the world today. More than perhaps anywhere else, historical memory is entangled with a wide range of projects of identity construction, political mobilization and (re)definition of the present. For any outside observer, it is of utmost importance to understand the nature of these processes in the region which has enormous relevance for the world in the 21st century. This research project harnesses the interdisciplinary synergy of a group of experts in the humanities and social sciences with strong backgrounds in Chinese, Japanese and Korean studies, to provide a structured view on the dynamics of the processes of remembering and forgetting in the East Asian region.
The borders of nationalist discourse in East Asia have historically subsumed the actions of individuals under binary logics such as that of national hero versus national enemy. This means that the most easily erased and forgotten part of historical memory and individual experience is the one that opens a more border-crossing and globalised space of alternative memory of a past that, although it is certainly driven by conflicts and enmities, does not support the stale formulaic dichotomies by provincial nationalisms. It is these spaces of ambiguity in selective recollection and forgetting that, above all, stand in need of urgent exploration and critical documentation. We are especially aware that the selective purging of historical memory disproportionately affects female protagonists in most historical contexts in East Asia. That is why a relevant part of the purpose of our work is to try to correct this imbalance and resurrect the voices of individual women who articulate their own version of memory and forgetting. We consider it essential to build on case studies of the past to document how the modes of construction of memory, as well as selective forgetting, have changed throughout the long evolution of history at the hands of different actors, most of whom were obviously not governments or nation states. In focusing on non-state actors and non-national modes of memory-making, we make the cross-border transfer of memory and the memory of border crossing an explicit theme and primary focus of our research. Despite the rush to legislate and monitor certain forms of memory of the collective past - from prohibiting various forms of holocaust denial to erecting and removing statues or street names by political decree, to interfere with the content of exhibitions and textbooks - the memory of the past is never the property of the states or of the supposed national collectivities that give contemporary states their legitimacy. States have considerable power to fix particular forms of memory and to support or impose particular forms of silence and forgetfulness. Ultimately, despite its socio-political contexts, memory in its fundamental form is an individual act of relating one's perceived experience to present circumstances and future prospects.