Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas by Jinah Kim (review)

In this ambitious book, Jinah Kim challenges existing geographies and conceptual frameworks by highlighting what she calls the Pacific Arena as a critical imaginative geography. Instead of residing in the Eurocentric framing that sees US history mainly as part of the Atlantic, Kim reflects on America's history by connecting it with its links across Latin America, Asia, and the Asia-Pacific, which makes the scope of the book wide-ranging. Kim argues that the temporality of neoliberalism silences the violence in the Pacific Arena. Yet the dead of the transpacific refuse to disappear, and their remains live on in multiple temporalities and spatialities as a palimpsest. This argument remains at the core of each chapter; to accentuate this point even further, Kim uses the trope of the dead and their past as lingering and exerting pressure to make themselves felt within our culture. Noting the entangled relationship between the United States and Japanese empire-building in the Pacific, and what she calls the "living on" of colonialism in the Korean and Japanese diasporas in the Americas and the Pacific Arena, Kim contends that postcolonial grief encapsulates a structure of feeling across the Pacific Arena. She discusses Henry Luce's essay that influenced the United States' priorities in the Pacific Arena during the Cold War. Pointing out the rarely mentioned, ill Asian bodies in Luce's essay—where he constructs the American self as a depressed person who can only regain happiness by securing the Pacific Arena—Kim contends that this Asian figure in distress must be produced to be either rescued or destroyed over and over again (6). Kim reads this figure as a structure of feeling across the transpacific.

In the first chapter, Kim maps postcolonial melancholy by reading Hisaye Yamamoto's "A Fire in Fontana" (1985) alongside Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Like Fanon's descriptions of the colonial state, liberal nation-states, Kim insists, pathologize insurgent violence and refuse to recognize rational protest against state violence. Even though Yamamoto's story was published at the height of the Japanese American fight for reparations in 1985, Kim notes that Yamamoto strategically refuses to mention internment or reparations. Instead, the story presents memories of loss deriving from state violence as a palimpsest that arises unexpectedly, linking such memories as the Japanese American internment, Jim Crow, and the fight for reparations. These memories, in Kim's view, challenge the state's desire to coopt narratives of racialized injury. The story's temporality of belatedness declines to move forward and contests state violence.

Chapter 2 highlights the 1992 Los Angeles Riots as a period of interregnum; it features the lives of Korean and Guatemalan immigrants in Los Angeles, which Kim sees as a melancholic city and a "repository for shared traumas across the Pacific Arena and the Americas" (45). Drawing on Fredric Jameson's concept of cognitive mapping, Kim argues that we can "racially cognitively remap" Los Angeles by rethinking its place in terms of the US military domination across the Pacific Arena. For instance, Kim examines Sa-I-Gu (1993), a documentary by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, in which Korean women shopkeepers question why the United States abandoned them soon after the LA Riots. These women learn to critique mainstream representations that pit minorities against each other and come to understand the long history of state violence against black and immigrant communities. Héctor Tobar's novel The Tattooed Soldier (1998) connects Guatemala's civil war and LA in the 1990s. Living undocumented in LA, Antonio discovers the murderer of his family, Longoria. The novel ends with Antonio's murder of Longoria, which takes place during the chaos of the LA Riots. Kim argues that Antonio kills Longoria due to his melancholia (instead of justice) and that the novel absolves Longoria in many ways. In fact, the ending of the novel allows both characters the "possibility of finding absolution" (64). In...