Panel 3: Memory and Legacy

Deokhyo Choi is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the decolonization of the Japanese empire, the U.S. occupation of Japan and Korea, and the Korean War. He received his Ph.D. in History from Cornell University in August 2013. His dissertation, “Crucible of the Post-Empire: Decolonization, Race, and Cold War Politics in U.S.-Japan-Korea Relations, 1945-1952,” won the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) Best Dissertation Prize 2015 in the Humanities. He is currently working on his first book that explores transnational linkages of politics, social movements, and the so-called “Korean minority question” between U.S.-occupied Japan and Korea.

Post-Imperial Anxiety: Race, Violence, and the Korean Minority Question at the Birth of a Pacifist Japan, 1945-1947

Christina Yi is Assistant Professor of Modern Japanese Literature at the University of British Columbia. She received her Ph.D. in Modern Japanese Literature from Columbia University. Her research focuses on the rise of Japanese-language literature by Korean colonial subjects during the 1930s and 1940s and its subsequent impact on discourse regarding “national” and “ethnic minority” literature in postwar Japan and Korea. She is currently working on a book manuscript that investigates how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons in East Asia.

Language Ideology and Colonial Memory in Postwar Japan

Ji Young Kim is a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago who specializes in modern Korean literature and culture. She is currently writing a dissertation about the postcolonial representation of colonial collaboration and its negotiation with the emerging Cold War and the national division in the immediate postcolonial Korea (1945-1950). Her project explores the complexity and perplexity of (post)colonial writers in living through the interstices between colonialism, decolonization and the Cold War, and additionally questions what postcoloniality means in the context of Korea.

Two Confessions of Collaboration: Before and After the Republic of Korea

Leo Ching teaches Japanese and East Asian cultural studies at Duke University. He is the author of Becoming Japanese: The Politics of Identity Formation in Colonial Taiwan. He is currently completely a manuscript on anti-Japanism and the politics of sentimentality in postwar Cold War East Asia (under contract with Duke University Press).

Reconciliation Otherwise: Intimacy, Indigeneity and the Taiwan Difference

Michael Bourdaghs is a professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on modern Japanese literature with a special focus on popular music, intellectual history and literary theory. His publications include Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Prehistory of J-Pop and The Dawn That Never Comes: Shimazaki Toson and Japanese Nationalism.

Mariko Asano Tamanoi received her doctorate in anthropology from Northwestern University. She is currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of Under the Shadow of Nationalism: Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women (1998) and Memory Maps: The State and Manchuria in Postwar Japan (2009) as well as editor of Crossed Histories: Manchuria in the Age of Empire, which has been translated to Japanese. Her publications also include articles in the Journal of Asian Studies, Ethnology, Annual Review of Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Critical Asian Studies, Japan Focus, and American Ethnologist.