To silence the mourning of dead victims is to legitimize the violence against them. In Postcolonial Grief, Jinah Kim refuses such a closure of the settler colonial Pacific Arena order by revealing the “missing Asian bodies” as spectral beings of insurrection. The existing framework for dealing with the victims of Japanese and American militarism in the Pacific Arena has focused on seeking closure and reconciliation. Kim pungently criticizes this neoliberal framework for co-opting biopolitical narratives of healing that legitimize state violence and for muffling the dissenting narratives of colonialism. Drawing on theories of Fanonian anticolonial psychoanalysis and neoliberal biopolitics, Kim offers a comparative analysis of grief and mourning practices as a resistance to imperial reconciliation, drawing from examples including Los Angeles, Japan, Peru, and South Korea. This book is well suited for scholars and students in Asian American and postcolonial studies, as well as readers who are interested in...

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