Book Review Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas, Jinah Kim. Duke University Press, 2019. 185 pages. ISBN: 9781478002796. US$23.95. With her sights narrowed onto a complex target, Jinah Kim in Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas tries to do something special. Tracing the literature, art, and films of U.S. based Asian diasporic writers, Kim looks at an understated, lost-in-development, and still grieving community. Central to everything here is the feeling of a lack of resolution, a wilful or naïve failure to address the pain of recent history. The challenge, of course, is how this continued suffering (“Melancholia”) should be defined (“Afterlives”) and understood (“transpacific subjectivities, aesthetics”); how you designate a perpetrator from complex interactions (“U.S. imperialism and militarism”), and what responsibility you insist should be owed for this (“generate transformative antiracist and decolonial politics”). It is the kind of work that implies new moral explanations, new breakthroughs in knowledge, a new understanding of the world, and our place in it. The relationship between grieving and memory, pain and history, is not a new topic—not even close. There is a worn and uncertain path here. Uncertain, due to the complexities of the human condition, the differences between individuals; and so with this the failures of singular, accurate, universalised approaches. What Kim is trying to do—it is a return to that Korean Studies © 2019 by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved. 1 “collective” element, to understand people, their motivations, their morality, and their suffering, through the groups they belong to. It doesn’t start with the events, but with the “afterlives”—the emotions. The intentions, and circumstances in history are less important than the feelings and the memories. And perhaps there is something in this—ontological versus epistemological truth—but there is also something clearly missing. Postcolonial Grief is largely a literary study, and so its philosophy might understandably be second-hand. But it is still central to the whole enterprise. Kim is not instructing her audience toward a high-brow reading list, but toward the truth she sees in those authors’ works. In any event, it’s not nearly close enough to what she is hoping to achieve. One or two selected works per chapter is helpful in partitioning her work and the readers mind, but also forces the query “what did she leave out?”, “what was the selection criteria?” Every lens here is onto an absolute—a truth that makes the reader think and doubt, but which Kim never offers a proper critical analysis of. Sentences like “The fear that prolonged and unchecked grief will lead to violence is one of the reasons grief is pathologized and surveilled by the state,” stop the reader dead in their tracks. It is laden with presuppositions—what is meant by “pathologized” and “surveilled”?—but the time is never given, and the language just moves forward. Occasionally ideas are built from the ground-up, but the language remains tautological and gimmicky: “the diagnosis of melancholia against the Algerians paradoxically authorizes violence as the sole provenance of the colonial state and now the post-colonial liberal nation-state’s domain.” Kim is consciously trying to be “intersectional” here—and as is the risk with such an approach, it comes across as scattergun. The solution? Segway to authority statements, phrases like “ . . . has argued,” “ . . . demonstrates” dominate the prose and hinge the book in new directions; but again it is also used as a way to introduce new ideas without spending the necessary time explaining or justifying them. There is a motivation, an ideological sense, behind this. Kim entertains the claim, at multiple places in the book, that the problem she faces might just be knowledge itself. That knowledge is not universal, but specific to people and places (“as endemic to U.S. knowledge production”). Yet regardless of the victim, the perpetrator here is always capitalism and modernization; as if these are only dogmas and never synonyms for freedoms, progress, and improvements. And with this, history begins to bend: the downfall of imperial Japan becomes an American aggression; a moment of ruthless opportunism...

书评《殖民后的悲伤：美洲太平洋战争的来世》，金娜·金（Jinah Kim）。杜克大学出版社，2019年.185页。书号：9781478002796。23.95美元。吉娜·金（Jinah Kim）将目光瞄向了一个复杂的目标，他在《后殖民悲伤：美洲太平洋战争的来世》中尝试做一些特别的事情。金在追踪美国驻亚洲流散作家的文学，艺术和电影时，发现了一个低调的，失落的，仍在苦恼中的社区。在这里，所有事情的中心都是缺乏解决的感觉，故意或天真的未能解决最近历史的痛苦。当然，挑战在于如何定义（“来世”）和理解（“跨太平洋的主观性，美学”）这种持续的痛苦（“忧郁症”）；您如何从复杂的互动中指定肇事者（“ 帝国主义和军国主义”），以及为此您应承担的责任（“产生变革性的反种族主义和殖民主义政治”）。这种工作意味着新的道德解释，知识的新突破，对世界的新理解以及我们在世界中的位置。悲伤与记忆，痛苦与历史之间的关系并不是一个新话题，甚至还不是很紧密。这里有一条破旧的，不确定的道路。由于人类情况的复杂性，不确定个体之间的差异；因此，单一，准确，通用化方法的失败。金正试图做的事情，是对夏威夷研究©2019夏威夷大学出版社的回归。版权所有。1个“集体”元素，用以了解人们，他们的动机，他们的道德和他们的苦难，通过他们所属的群体。它不是从事件开始，而是从“来世”（即来世）开始。历史的意图和环境比感情和记忆重要。也许其中有些东西-本体论与认识论的真相-但也显然缺少某些东西。后殖民悲伤在很大程度上是文学研究，因此其哲学可能是二手的。但是对于整个企业来说，它仍然是至关重要的。金并不是要让听众去浏览高调的阅读清单，而是要告诉她在这些作者的作品中看到的真相。无论如何，它离她希望达到的目标还远远不够。每章选出一到两部作品有助于划分她的作品和读者的思想，但也可以强制查询“她遗漏了什么？”，“选择标准是什么？” 这里的每一个镜头都是绝对的，这是一个使读者思考和怀疑的事实，但是Kim从来没有对它进行适当的批判性分析。诸如“担心长期无休止的悲伤会导致暴力是国家对悲伤进行调查和监视的原因之一”这样的句子，使读者不再迷路。它充满了预设，即“病态化”和“监视化”是什么意思？但是从来没有时间，语言只是向前发展。有时想法是从头开始的，但该语言仍然是重言式和花哨的：“针对阿尔及利亚人的忧郁症诊断自相矛盾地证明，暴力是殖民地国家的唯一出处，现在是后殖民自由民族国家的领土。金正有意识地试图在这里成为“交叉路口”，而这种方法所带来的风险就像散弹枪一样。解决方案？赛格威（Segway）权威声明，类似“”的短语。。。争论过，”“。。。展示”在散文中占主导地位，并使书向新的方向发展；但同样，它也可以用作引入新想法的方式，而无需花费必要的时间来解释或证明它们。这背后有一种动机，一种意识形态的意义。金在书中的多个地方都提出了这样的主张，即她所面对的问题可能仅仅是知识本身。这种知识不是普遍的，而是特定于人和地方的（“是美国知识生产所特有的”）。然而，无论受害者如何，这里的肇事者始终是资本主义和现代化。好像这些只是教条，而不是自由，进步的同义词，和改进。随之，历史开始弯曲：日本帝国主义的沦陷成为美国的侵略。片刻残酷的机会主义...