scholarly journals REWRITING THE HISTORY OF ‘COMFORT WOMEN’

Aletheia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Hu
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Comfort Women ◽  
World War ◽  
New Era ◽  
Japanese Military ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many

Grievabilty, as Judith Butler outlines in Precarious Life, is when individuals are valued, loved, and respected. When they are of value, and thus when they pass, they are worthy of being grieved for. Throughout history, including the present day, we are constantly reminded of those who are ungrievable and those who have been derealized, whether that be Indigenous people, those who died in the war, those exploited by corporations, those who endured slavery, the list is endless. One group, in particular, is that of ‘comfort women’ these are women who were captured by the Japanese military during World War II and unwillingly become sex slaves for the entire army, they are among the many who were lost to this war. Therefore, this paper will be examining the history of ‘comfort women’ during World War II through the lens of Judith Butler's Precarious Life. By applying the concept of greivability, and understanding the process of derealization, this paper was able to not only critically recognize that the circumstances of war and the cruel nature of the Japanese military led to the derealization of ‘comfort women’, but that the survivors were also able to use their trauma as strength, empowering them in a new era, with the help of media and women’s rights groups, to undo their derealization and reclaim their power.

The Demand to Listen to Korean “Comfort Women” and to Two Biblical Women

2020 ◽  
pp. 96-111
Author(s):  
Yani Yoo
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Biblical Text ◽  
Comfort Women ◽  
World War ◽  
Korean History ◽  
Japanese Military ◽  
Biblical Women ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Korean Comfort Women

Correlated to the experiences of Korean comfort women, the story of Solomon’s judgment (1 Kgs. 3:16–28) becomes a resistance narrative to hegemonic powers. The interpretation discusses the literary strategies of the women’s identities and naming, the emerging reversal of power, the issues of mimicry, mockery, ambiguity, and the conspiracy of readers. The Japanese military comfort women of World War II serve as the geopolitical context with which the interpretation justifies its focus on the two biblical women. It becomes apparent that colonizing and patriarchal powers ignore victim-survivors of sexual violence and abuse whether in the biblical text or in recent Korean history. Biblical texts and recent wartime events illuminate each other.

From “catharsis in the text” to “catharsis of the text”

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-339
Author(s):  
Cezary Zalewski
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Characteristic Feature ◽  
Art Criticism ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
World War ◽  
Mimetic Theory ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
History Of ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Many

Roman Ingarden (1893–1970) was a prominent Polish philosopher, phenomenologist, and student of Edmund Husserl. A characteristic feature of his works was the almost complete absence of analyzes from the history of philosophy. That is why it is so surprising that right after the end of World War II, the first text analyzed when Ingarden started working at the Jagiellonian University was Aristotle’s “Poetics.” Ingarden published the results of his research in Polish in 1948 in “Kwartalnik Filozoficzny” and in the early 1960s his essay was translated and published in the renowned American magazine “The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism” as “A Marginal Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics.” As far as I know today, this text does not arouse much interest among the many commentators and followers of Ingarden’s philosophy. Perhaps this state of affairs is justified: Ingarden’s own ideas are only repeated here, and their usefulness in the meaning of “Poetics” remains far from obvious. However, I think that this relative obscurity is worth considering now, because it shows how modern reason tries to control ancient concepts. The main purpose of this article is therefore to recon- struct the strategy by which philosophy tames the text of “Poetics,” especially its concepts such as catharsis and mimesis. The discovery and presentation of these treatments would not have been possible were it not for the mimetic theory of René Girad, which provides anthropological foundations for a critique of philosophical discourse.

scholarly journals A Long Time Ago in a Library Far, Far Away ... The Adventures of the Gladiatoria Manuscript from New Haven

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dierk Hagedorn
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Original Structure ◽  
New Haven ◽  
World War ◽  
British Art ◽  
Long Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
In The Beginning

In this paper I will describe the adventurous history of an important late medieval German fechtbuch—a fighting manual—that belongs to a number of manuscripts known as the Gladiatoria group. In the beginning, the extent and the characteristics of this group of codices are explained; later on I will deal with one specific specimen that formerly belonged to a library in Germany—the Herzogliche Bibliothek in Gotha—from where it vanished during or after World War II. Until quite recently this manuscript was believed to be lost. I was able to identify a Gladiatoria manuscript from the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, as that missing manuscript. The article presents a detailed description of the manuscript; it follows the path of the many places the codex passed through from the days of its creation until the present time; it offers a thorough line of argument that proves on one hand that the manuscript from New Haven is in fact identical to the one that disappeared from Gotha, and that verifies on the other hand an assumption by the renowned researcher Hans-Peter Hils that it is identical to yet another believed-to-be-lost manuscript that was sold by auction in Heidelberg in the 1950s and 1960s as single leaves; and finally it makes an attempt to reconstruct the original structure of the manuscript after it had been pulled apart.

The Deafening Silence of the Korean “Comfort Women”: A Response Based on Lyotard and Irigaray

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-356
Author(s):  
Constance Youngwon LEE ◽  
Jonathan CROWE
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Japanese Government ◽  
Comfort Women ◽  
World War ◽  
Sexual Slavery ◽  
Japanese Military ◽  
Korean Comfort Women ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis article reflects upon the continuing historical denialism concerning the Korean “comfort women” forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. We argue that the refusal of the Japanese government and others to squarely confront this wrong is made possible through the exploitation of adifférendin Jean-François Lyotard’s sense of the term. Thedifférendarises from a complex set of social, cultural, and legal sources, including patriarchal, colonial, and nationalistic constructions of the wrong and its victims. We seek to tentatively expose the nature of thedifférendby identifying these factors. We then sketch the beginnings of a possible response, drawing on Luce Irigaray’s strategy of emphasizing sexual difference and separation to pave the way for reciprocality between the sexes. The testimonies of the “comfort women” must be allowed to speak for themselves before a response can emerge based in other discourses.

Africa in the World: History and Historiography

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esperanza Brizuela-Garcia
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Far East ◽  
Western World ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Modern Era

Since antiquity and through the modern era African societies maintained contacts with peoples in Europe, the Near and Far East, and the Americas. Among other things, African peoples developed local forms of Christianity and Islam, contributed large amounts of gold to European medieval economies, and exported millions of slaves through the Sahara, and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Despite this, by the 19th century historians and philosophers of history thought Africa was a continent without major civilizations, whose peoples passively rested at the margins of history. These ideas persisted into the 20th century when historians undertook the challenge of writing histories that explained how communities around the world were connected to one another. In their early iterations, however, these “world narratives” were little more than histories of the Western world; Africa continued to be largely absent from these stories. After World War II, increasing interest in the history of African societies and a more generalized concern with the study of communities that were both mis- and under-represented by historical scholarship called for a revision of the goals and methods of world historians. Among the most important critiques were those from Afrocentric, African American, and Africanist scholars. Afrocentric writers argued that Africa had in fact developed an important civilization in the form of Egypt and that Egypt was the foundation of the classical world. African American and Africanist writers highlighted the contributions that peoples of African descent had made to the world economy and many cultures around the globe. Africanists also questioned whether world historical narratives, which meaningfully accounted for the richness and complexity of African experiences, could be achieved in the form of a single universal narrative. Instead, historians have suggested and produced new frameworks that could best explain the many ways in which Africa has been part of the world and its history.

Guinea-Bissau Since Independence: A Decade of Domestic Power Struggles

1987 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua B. Forrest
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Guinea Bissau ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Political Thinker ◽  
Domestic Power ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Independence Movements ◽  
Original Concept

Amílcar Cabral was perhaps the foremost political thinker to emerge out of the many independence movements of post-World War II Africa. His insightful theory of class struggle in the continent, his informative analysis of the history of Guinea-Bissau, his original concept of ‘class suicide’, and his notion of the relationship between national liberation and culture,1 helped convince many scholars of the viability of a class and ideological approach to the study of African politics.2

The Night Stalin and Churchill Divided Europe: The View from Washington

1981 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Siracusa
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Diplomatic History ◽  
World War ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
History Of ◽  
Josef Stalin ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Many

Of the many fascinating episodes that punctuate the diplomatic history of World War II, few have intrigued scholars more than the secret Balkan spheres-of-action agreement worked out by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Marshal Josef Stalin at the Anglo-Soviet conference (British code-named TOLSTOY) held in Moscow in the autumn of 1944. It was late in the evening of 9 October. In his first encounter with Stalin since the meeting of the Big Three at Teheran in 1943, Churchill, believing “the moment … apt for business,” appealed to the Soviet dictator to “Let us settle about our affairs in the Balkans.” Specifically, he went on, “We have interests, missions, and agents there. Don't let us get at cross-purposes in small ways.

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