Sungshin Kim
Sungshin Kim (Ph.D. UPenn) is professor of history at the University of North Georgia, where she teaches courses on the history of East Asia, China, and Korea, as well as the world history survey. Dr. Kim’s current scholarship is focused on the historical imagination in genre literature.
University of North Georgia
Session
Since the late twentieth century, the memory of war crimes has become increasingly globalized. Commemorative practices easily travel across borders, as those originally developed in one context are adopted and adapted elsewhere (for example the way Holocaust memory has shaped the memorialization of other atrocities). At the same time, the memory of war crimes has often reinforced national narratives or been instrumentalized for the nation. In my paper, I intend to investigate this tension between the global and the national in war-crimes memory through a reading of Ken Liu’s The Man Who Ended History (2011), a novella in which time travel allows for the historical exploration of the atrocities committed by Japan’s Unit 731 during the Second World War. Liu’s story is far from the only work of speculative fiction to engage with historical trauma, but it stands out for its exploration, from a diasporic Chinese-American perspective, of the historian’s role and identity within the politics of remembrance.