Upcoming Events
Past Events
Paving The Road Away From Reconciliation: The Anatomy Of Injustice In Post-WWII Japanese War Crimes Trials
Zoom
The Tokyo Trial, 1946-1948, and the lesser BC class war crimes trials throughout East Asia of former Japanese soldiers, never get mentioned with the same hushed tones of legal reverence as the Nuremberg Tribunal of Nazis. Why did justice seemingly fail in East Asia when theoretically the same international law was pursued on both sides of the globe? Put another way, if Nuremberg bequeathed an academy to carry forth into the next generation the Nuremberg Principles, what happened in war crimes courts in East Asia that rendered such notions legally impotent? This talk investigates how a history of injustice developed in postwar East Asia and how it came to wield the potent political force it manifests today. READ MORE...
The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan
Zoom
The Great Exodus examines the forced migration from China to Taiwan in 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime collapsed on the mainland. The migration has largely been understood as a military withdrawal operation or a relocation of government. As such, this mass emigration remains one of the least understood population movements in modern East Asia. Peeling back layers of Cold War ideological constructs on the subject, Yang breaks new ground in Chinese Civil War historiography. He lays bare the traumatic aftermath of the Chinese Communist Revolution for the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who were forcibly displaced across the sea and for the local Taiwanese who were compelled to receive them. The book underscores displaced population’s trauma of living in exile and their poignant “homecomings” in both post-Mao China and post-liberalization Taiwan. It presents a multiple-event trajectory of repeated traumatization with recurring but different memory productions through time in search of home, belonging, and identity. This trajectory challenges established notions of trauma, memory, and diaspora. It speaks to the importance of subject position, boundary-crossing empathic unsettlements, and ethical responsibility of historians in writing, researching, and representing trauma. READ MORE...