Global Easts

South Korean historian Jie-Hyun Lim, raised under an anticommunist dictatorship, turned to Marxian thought to explain his country’s development, even as he came to struggle with its Eurocentrism. As a transnational scholar working in postcommunist Poland, Lim recognized striking similarities between Korean and Polish history and politics. One realization stood out: Both Korea and Poland—at once the “West” for Asia yet “Eastern” Europe—had been assigned the role of “East.”This book explores entangled Easts to reconsider global history from the margins. Examining the politics of history and memory, Lim reveals the affinities linking Eastern Europe and East Asia. He draws out commonalities in their experiences of modernity, in their transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and in the shaping of collective memory. Ranging across Poland, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Korea, Lim traces the global history of how notions of victimhood have become central to nationalism. He criticizes mass dictatorships of right and left in the Global Easts, considering Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s notion of sovereign dictatorship and the concept of decisionist democracy. Lim argues that nationalism is inherently transnational, critiquing how the nationalist imagination of the Global East has influenced countries across borders. Theoretically sophisticated and conceptually innovative, this book sheds new light on the transnational complexity of historical memory and imagination, the boundaries between democracy and mass dictatorship, and the fluidity of East and West.

Few books have the range and ambition of Global Easts. Lim offers wide-roaming essays written from original spaces to make surprising connections. He finds links between Polish and Korean history, brings comfort women trials in Batavia into conversation with community activists in California, and connects Anne Frank’s reception in Japan to Australian indigenous politics—to name just a few. This is a bold collection of essays. We need more works like it., Jie-Hyun Lim is one of the most original and innovative historians of his generation, wonderfully knowledgeable across Western and East Asian history alike. The connections he draws linking the history of Poland and East-Central Europe with Korea and East Asia are always thought-provoking and provide fresh insights about being ‘on the margins.’ Anyone interested in questions of memory, modernity, democracy, and dictatorship in the global twentieth century will come away inspired from this important book., While demonstrating that 'East' and 'West' are relational categories produced through the logic of historicism, Lim juxtaposes 'Global Easts' in Europe and Asia to produce a brilliant and effective cognitive remapping of global history and memory – in the process disrupting the facile binaries through which we imagine we know our world. A must read.

Jie-Hyun Lim is professor of transnational history and director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University. He is coeditor of Mnemonic Solidarity: Global Interventions (2021), The Palgrave Handbook of Mass Dictatorship (2016), and Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives (2011), among other works. He is also the author of several books in Korean.