The shining layer of Jie-Hyun Lim's Global Easts is a fearless and expansive critique of memory regimes across the world responsible for producing and sustaining the notion of valorized Americentric/Eurocentric modernity, the politics of isolationist nationalism, and the practice of hierarchized suffering. The layer below offers fascinating glimpses of Lim's own intellectual peregrinations as maybe South Korea's best-known historian to the public (one of the most criticized, too). This journey has inspired his original ideas of mass dictatorship and victimhood nationalism and transformed his own identity from a South Korean leftist historian of Europe, especially of Poland, to a transnational memory activist whose aim now is to forge deterritorialized memory solidarity among various memory makers around the globe.
Both layers are engaging to read. Global Easts is an essential contribution to memory studies and a superb representation of transnational research, particularly at the level of comparative historiographical analysis (which I...
