Memory of Forgotten Wars
About the Cluster
In tandem with the new Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) and in order to boost the latter’s profile and reach across campus, this cluster brings together Humanities faculty with expertise in Korea, the Philippines, the former Yugoslavia, Okinawa, Palestine, indigenous North America, north Africa, the U.S. prison-industrial complex, and COINTELPRO and graduate students pursuing research on U.S. wars and militarism in Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, North America, and Africa, placing them in interdisciplinary conversation around the phenomenon of “forgotten” covert, informal, and unresolved asymmetrical wars. With some emphasis on the Korean War as a “forgotten war” for the first year and the Philippine-American War for the second, we will convene for a series of traditional and experimental events (scholarly talks, reading groups, artin-action events, resource-sharing workshops) to explore manifestations of imperialist war beyond battlefield spectacles and customary legal definitions—war on the lower frequencies, if you will. Some questions that will drive our collective inquiry: what accounts for imperialist war’s illegibility? Domestically and abroad, what constellated forms of unfreedom do such wars give rise to? Can peace be imagined with regard to imperialist war? How do we understand the often-ephemeral mnemonic traces of imperialist violence against its weighty structural legacies?
Recognizing that imperialist war as a cognitive structure is rarely neatly mapped onto geographic sites or national peoples, thus exacerbating the problem of legibility, this cluster will explore the possibility of knowing such war otherwise. Along these lines, we will consider what constitutes a people’s archive of imperialist war and militarism through public historical events, open-access syllabi projects, and political educational initiatives. By also exploring CRJ’s inaugural theme, “No Liberation in Isolation,” we will consider how imperial war and police power’s yoking of disparate communities in lethal subterranean ways creates the grounds for imagining solidarity.
The practice of asymmetrical war, cognitively mapped as limited for some yet total for others, forgotten in one setting yet seared into consciousness in others, has ensured discrepant experiences of imperialist warfare as a differentiated, multi-sited structure not just of historical ruin but also of feeling, perception, memory, and knowledge. In the seventieth year of the unresolved Korean War, a war paradoxically best-remembered as “forgotten,” this THI cluster invites the critical remembering and memorialization of forgotten wars in Korea, the Philippines, Laos, Central America, Eastern Europe, and North America.
Principal Investigator
Christine Hong (Literature)
Affiliated faculty
Ronaldo Wilson (Literature)
Neda Atanasoski (Feminist Studies)
Nick Mitchell (CRES)
Jenny Kelly (CRES)
Alan Christy (History)
Felicity Amaya Schaeffer (Feminist Studies)
Muriam Davis (History)
Lindsey Dillon (Sociology)
Affiliated PhD students
Talib Jabbar (Literature)
Xindi Li (History of Consciousness)
Ka-eul Yoo (Literature)
Kiley McLaughlin (Literature)
Noya Kansky (Feminist Studies)
Trung Nguyen (History of Consciousness)
H. Darline Kim (Film & Digital Media)
Jane Komori (History of Consciousness)
Boyeong Kim (Latin American & Latino Studies)
Anny Mogollón (Literature)
Debbie Duarte (Literature)
Kyuhyun Han (History)
Yuki Obayashi (Literature)
Nathan Osorio (Literature)
Natali Schwartz (Politics)
Saugher Nojan (Sociology)
Yasheng She (Film & Digital Media)
Xafsa Ciise (History of Consciousness)
Stefan Yong (History of Consciousness)
Emily Padilla (Feminist Studies)
Alexyss McClellan (History)
Bailey Samuel Roberts (History)
Joe Alicea (Literature)
Kelsey McFaul (Literature)
Angie Sijun Lou (Literature)
Isaac Blacksin (History of Consciousness)
Luling Osofsky (History of Art & Visual Culture)
Sintia Issa (History of Art & Visual Culture)
Willie Guerrero (Sociology)
Natalie Ng (Anthropology)
Ingy Higazy (Politics)
Suzy Halajian (Film & Digital Media)
Yulia Gilichinskaya (Film & Digital Media)
Meleia Simon-Reynolds (History)
Christina Ayson (History of Art & Visual Culture)
Michelle Yee (History of Art & Visual Culture)
Zoe Weldon-Yochim (History of Art & Visual Culture)
Marion Cadora (History of Art & Visual Culture)
Halima Kazem (Feminist Studies)
Events
Coming Soon