Description Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a boom of interest in the study of war and memory. In the new era of globalization, the fall of Communism and the much vaunted “end of history”, efforts to understand who we are and where we have come from have incited a collective desire for making sense of a period in history that has witnessed, over the past one hundred years, enormous structural change and unprecedented destruction and violence. Commemorative culture and the endless procession of anniversaries throughout the world, beginning of course with the fortieth anniversary of the Second World War and continuing through the sequence of fiftieth anniversaries, D-Day, the conclusion of the Pacific War, to the outbreak of war on the Korean peninsula, has generated an extraordinary amount of commemorative reflections about past conflicts. One interesting feature of this commemorative culture is how memory has been used to shore up nationalist sentiments, as recollections of the past have become fraught with tensions about how this past is to be remembered. Calls from within Japan demanding that the Allies should apologize for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the recent textbook crisis that erupted between China, Korea and Japan over the latter’s “forgetting” of the terrible atrocities carried out by Japanese militarism during the Second World War, is symptomatic of the general problem facing modern commemorative culture, namely: that it has primarily served the interests of the nation. For many, this modern commemorative culture has been utilized as a means either to redress past national grievances or to shore up nationalist sentiments. The aim of bringing together various scholars to Oberlin is to explore the complexities of war and memory from outside the confines of the nationalist paradigm. Such a meeting might raise some fundamental questions about the different cultural processes of memorialization from a comparative and cross-cultural perceptive. What has been the impact of, say, the recent collaborative efforts made by American, Chinese, Russian and Korean scholars on the origins of the Korean War and how has this research informed the way the Korean War will be remembered? In what way has the fall of the Soviet Union been memorialized in both China and Vietnam and to what extent do these “shared” memories of the Cold War also highlight the very real differences between them? How have specific events, like the Nanjing massacre of 1937, brought together scholars of diverse nationalities in the post-Cold War period to create new ways of remembering the Pacific War that cross national boundaries? And how has the end of the Cold War influenced Americans’ “new” remembering of the forgotten war in Korea? By comparing different histories of the memories of war, the aim of the symposium will thus be to probe the ways in which differently remembered pasts are reconciled, conflict with one another, or are amalgamated to create an internationalized history of Asia’s modern wars.
The symposium will be held the weekend of April 26-27, 2003 and will be funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. All lectures will be held at the A.J. Lewis Center on the campus of Oberlin College.
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