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Viewing the Past through the Lenses of History and Memory
MARCH 5, 2003--The current debate in South Korea over Kim Il Sung and his legacy as an anti-Japanese patriotic fighter is just one example of how new "memories" of the past have been created and reconfigured in recent years. How Koreans will come to terms with the colonial period, and the division of the nation after the unification of the two Koreas, is anybody's guess. However, the current debates in South Korea about Kim Il Sung's place in Korean history can provide us with an indication of just how contentious this debate will be during the coming years.
Since finishing my book, Narratives of Nation-Building in Korea: A Genealogy of Patriotism (M.E. Sharpe 2003), I've become interested in understanding why the Korean War was "forgotten" in American national memory. What kinds of new "remembering" have emerged since the end of the Cold War?
With the end of the Cold War, new documents from the archives of the former Soviet Union and China have become available. With the release of these materials, a more complex picture is emerging about this conflict, and is changing the way in which the Korean War is viewed in China, South Korea, and the United States. Memories of the war also have changed according to different social and political contexts in these nations. Now that the Cold War is over, people are remembering this past century of wars in a completely new way.
Although I'm trained as an anthropologist, I consider myself more of a historian, with a culturally based approach to my studies. It is important for me to consider issues of gender and race in the fields I am researching, even within diplomatic and military history, my new fields of interest. These issues are ones that traditional diplomatic historians don't often consider in the course of their research.
In my current work, I am interested in tracing American orientalist discourse to the patterns of ideas, beliefs, fears, and aspirations that have shaped American power and its Cold War strategic vision in Asia. While some noted historians have looked at these patterns of cultural beliefs, few specific parallels have been made that link American interests in Asia with the historical record of Native American diplomacy. Accompanying the reconfiguration of Puritan America as a "redeemer nation" that made the world safe for democracy were numerous cultural comparisons between Korean and Native American "savages," as well as parallels that were routinely drawn between the war in Korea and America's Indian Wars.
In other words, culture and cultural beliefs have a great deal to do with how and why we got involved in the conflict in Korea. To understand America's involvement in Korea from 1950 to 1953, historians must examine U.S. Cold War policies in Korea in terms of a whole body of cultural values and beliefs that go beyond the question of agency and causation as the only factors that determined the war's origins.
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Miyoshi Jager has organized an international symposium to explore the complexities of war and memory in a transnational and cross-cultural perspective. The symposium, War and Memory in Post-Cold War Asia, will take place at Oberlin College April 26 and 27, and will feature prominent scholars working in the field of war and memory in Japan, Korea, China, and Vietnam. More information about the symposium is available online. |
Please send comments, questions, and suggestions about Oberlin Online news and feature articles to online.news@oberlin.edu.
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