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Chapter Fourteen - Law's Imperial Amnesia

Transnational Legal Redress in East Asia

from Part III - Inequality and/as Injury

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2018

By
Yukiko Koga
Edited by
Anne Bloom ,
David M. Engel  and
Michael McCann
Anne Bloom
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
David M. Engel
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Buffalo
Michael McCann
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Summary

Since the 1990s, Asian victims of Japanese imperialism have filed lawsuits against the Japanese government and corporations, which became prime sites for redress decades after Japan’s defeat in World War II. This process paradoxically exposes a legal lacuna within this emergent transnational legal space, with plaintiffs effectively caught between the law, instead of standing before the law. Exploring this absence of law, Yukiko Koga maps out a post-imperial legal space, created through the erasure of imperial and colonial subjects in the legal framework after empire. Between the law is an optic that makes visible uneven legal terrains which embody temporal and spatial disjuncture, rupture, and asymmetry. The role of law in post-imperial transitions remains underexplored in literatures on transnational law, legal imperialism, postcolonialism, and transitional justice. Koga demonstrates how, at the intersection of law and economy, post-imperial reckoning is emerging as a new legal frontier, putting at stake law’s imperial amnesia.
Type
Chapter
Information
Injury and Injustice
The Cultural Politics of Harm and Redress
 , pp. 317 - 350
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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