In his lecture professor Lim Jie-Hyun will give a talk about his book “victimhood nationalism-a global history.” The book aims to illustrate competing memories of victimhood in the postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the global memory space across Europe and East Asia. Throughout his book, Lim Ji-Hyun has been exploring the dialectical interplay of global and national memory with a critical inquiry of the dichotomy of: perpetrators vs. victims, collective guilt vs. innocence, national vs. cosmopolitan memory, historical actors vs. passive objects, over-contextualization vs. de-contextualization, historical conformism vs. presentism, etc. With the emergence of global memory space, memories have become entangled, cohabitated, reconciled, contested, conflicted, and negotiated across national borders. Also, unconnected historical actors and memory activists are linked mnemonically a posteriori in the global mnemoscape. Thus, this book is not a mere compilation of victimhood nationalisms surveyed separately within the national history framework. The historical space in this study is not an individual nation but an intersection of the memory loci of entangled history. Assuming the national history of “victimhood nationalism” implies a tautology resulting from and contributing to the nationalist phenomenology that constructs memories upon the present idea of the nation, the book tries to comprehend contested memories of victimhood-nationalism as a global and transnational history phenomenon.

Indeed, memories of victimhood have become more contested with the emergence of the global memory space that appeals to border-crossing connections and shared pasts. The transnationality of “victimhood nationalism” demands a histoire croisée approach to excavate the multi-layered past. By drawing on the entangled past of the political and cultural production, representations, consumption, and distribution of the victimhood memories between Korea and Japan, and between Poland, Germany, and Israel, Lim Jie-Hun is tracing the global trajectory of victimhood nationalism. As a memory activist as well as a historian, who believes memory studies is ultimately an ethical business, he hopes his book would contribute to making mnemonic solidarity beyond national borders by deconstructing the ethnocentric victimhood nationalism, by drawing plural, crossed and parallel comparisons, and by questioning the national division between victimizers and victimized. The book consists of 11 chapters: 1. Mnemohistory, 2. Genealogy, 3. Sublimation, 4. Globalization, 5. Nationalization, 6. De-historicization, 7. Over-historicization, 8. Juxtaposition, 9. Denial, 10. Forgiveness, 11. Solidarity.
 
Lim Jie-Hyun is Professor of Transnational History and director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University, Seoul and visiting professor at University of Warsaw in the fall semester of 2022. He is also Principal Investigator of the research project Mnemonic Solidarity: Colonialism, War and Genocide in the Global Memory Space (2017-2024) and Series Editor of “Entangled Memories in the Global South” at Palgrave/Macmillan Publisher. His recent memory studies books include Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Practicing (Columbia Univ. Press, 2022). Victimhood Nationalism-A Global History (Humanist, 2021, Japanese translation-2022), Mnemonic Solidarity-Global Interventions (Palgrave, 2021) co-edited with Eve Rosenhaft. He will launch a new book series of “Global Easts” at the CEU Press in 2023. As a memory activist, he has been co-curating exhibitions of “Unwelcome Neighbors,” “Naming Forced Laborers” and others.