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Korean Americans Enter the Historical Memory Wars on Behalf of the Comfort Women

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

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Immigrant groups in the United States routinely build monuments and memorials to commemorate historical traumas in their homelands. Plaques and statues that recall the Nazi destruction of Jewish communities throughout Europe in the middle of the 20th century together with commemorative stones dedicated to Ireland's 1972 Bloody Sunday are as American as California rolls (to name but two examples). Collectively, these monuments mark a particular group's ascendant political power, which, by American definition, comes about through economic success. Moreover, such testimonials weave a common narrative that binds people of disparate backgrounds within the same group in a diffuse land. The history involved is as much about the present as the past.

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Research Article
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Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2012

Footnotes

Between 2012 and 2014 we posted a number of articles on contemporary affairs without giving them volume and issue numbers or dates. Often the date can be determined from internal evidence in the article, but sometimes not. We have decided retrospectively to list all of them as Volume 10, Issue 54 with a date of 2012 with the understanding that all were published between 2012 and 2014.' As footnote