Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory / Edition 1

by Lisa Yoneyama

Overview

Remembering Hiroshima, the city obliterated by the world's first nuclear attack, has been a complicated and intensely politicized process, as we learn from Lisa Yoneyama's sensitive investigation of the "dialectics of memory." She explores unconventional texts and dimensions of culture involved in constituting Hiroshima memories—including history textbook controversies, discourses on the city's tourism and urban renewal projects, campaigns to preserve atomic ruins, survivors' testimonial practices, ethnic Koreans' narratives on Japanese colonialism, and the feminized discourse on peace—in order to illuminate the politics of knowledge about the past and present. In the way battles over memories have been expressed as material struggles over the cityscape itself, we see that not all share the dominant remembering of Hiroshima's disaster, with its particular sense of pastness, nostalgia, and modernity. The politics of remembering, in Yoneyama's analysis, is constituted by multiple and contradictory senses of time, space, and positionality, elements that have been profoundly conditioned by late capitalism and intensifying awareness of post-Cold War and postcolonial realities.

Hiroshima Traces, besides clarifying the discourse surrounding this unforgotten catastrophe, reflects on questions that accompany any attempts to recover marginalized or silenced experiences. At a time when historical memories around the globe appear simultaneously threatening and in danger of obliteration, Yoneyama asks how acts of remembrance can serve the cause of knowledge without being co-opted and deprived of their unsettling, self-critical qualities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520085879
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	05/16/1999
Series:	Twentieth Century Japan: The Emergence of a World Power , #10
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	301
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Lisa Yoneyama is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies and Cultural Studies in the Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Introduction
Phantasmatic Innocence
Tropes of the Nation, Peace, and Humanity
On the Politics of Historical Memory

PART ONE: CARTOGRAPHIES OF MEMORY

I. Taming the Memoryscape
Remapping History
Festivity
2. Memories in Ruins
Postnuclear Hyperreal
Contemplative Time

PART TWO: STORYTELLERS

3· On Testimonial Practices
Speaking the Unspeakable
Naming the Testimonial Subjects
Survivors, Hibakusha, Shogensha:
Multiple Subjectivities
4· Mnemonic Detours
Narrative Margins and Critical Knowledge
Fabulous Memories: The Temporality
of the "Never Again"
Narratives of and for the Dead

PART THREE: MEMORY AND POSITIONALITY
5· Ethnic and Colonial Memories: The Korean
Atom Bomb Memorial
Contentious Memorial
Monument to Homeland
Excess of Memory
The Absent Majority
Memory Matters: "Minzoku"
6. Postwar Peace and the Feminization of Memory
Peace, Nation, and the Maternal
Feminine Dissidents
On Rewriting "Women's" Histories

Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index