Non-Western Colonization, Orientalism, and the Comfort Women
The Collective Memory of Sexual Slavery under the Japanese Imperial Military
Ako Inuzuka
Non-Western Colonization, Orientalism, and the Comfort Women
The Collective Memory of Sexual Slavery under the Japanese Imperial Military
Ako Inuzuka
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Description
Non-Western Colonization, Orientalism, and the Comfort Women examines the collective memory of sexual slavery under the Japanese Imperial Military, a topic euphemistically known as the "comfort women." Examining various artifacts in Japan, the author argues that Korean women were exoticized similarly to "Orientals" by Western Orientalists.
"This beautifully written book unpacks the works of memory constructions of ‘comfort women,’ a highly contentious issue in East Asia. Deeply engaged with influential popular texts in Japan over the span of past seven decades, Inuzuka illustrates how one of the harrowing atrocities that occurred during the Asian-Pacific war has been collectively remembered and forgotten in competing public discourses. This book will attract researchers in the fields of Asian studies, history, intercultural communication, and women & gender studies."
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” so goes one of the most memorable lines in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In this searing, extraordinary work, Ako Inuzuka powerfully demonstrates the constitutive role of rhetoric in the construction of Japanese memories of the sexual enslavement of Korean women during World War Two. Inuzuka’s book does more than make a powerful intervention in fields as varied as intellectual history, critical race studies, gender studies, and rhetorical criticism. It’s courageous archaeology of her own experience invites readers into a collective practice of re-membering; that is, of knitting together a new politics of justice, solidarity, and freedom.
Ako Inuzuka is associate professor of communication at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.