Jie-Hyun Lim: Victimhood Nationalism: History and Memory in a Global Age (TraCe) | 24 June 2025

Tuesday, 24 June 2025, 2pm CET
Campus Westend, Casino 1.812

Jie-Hyun Lim (Sogang University, South Korea)

The term “victimhood nationalism” is designed to illustrate competing memories of victimhood in the postwar Vergangenheitsbewältigung in the global memory space. I try to investigate global memory culture, focusing on victimhood memories critically. Once put into the dichotomy of victimizers and victims in national terms, the victimhood becomes hereditary and thus consolidates the national solidarity beyond generations. Victimhood nationalism is intrinsically transnational since victims are unthinkable without victimizers. The transnationality of victimhood nationalism demands a histoire croisée to comprehend the entangled pasts of the victimized and victimizers. The vicious circle of victimhood nationalism has been a rock to any historical reconciliation effort globally. Focusing on the nationalist phenomenology that constructs memories upon the present idea of the nation, my book traces the global trajectory of victimhood nationalism through the interactions among Poland, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Korea. It aims to sacrifice the victimhood nationalism globally for history reconciliation and mnemonic solidarity.

Jie-Hyun Lim is CIPSH chair holder of ‘Global Easts,’ Distinguished Professor, and founder of the Critical Global Studies Institute (CGSI) at Sogang University, Seoul. He has served as Principal Investigator of the research project Mnemonic Solidarity: Colonialism, War and Genocide in the Global Memory Space (2017-2024), and has edited the series of “Mass Dictatorship in the 20th Century” & “Entangled Memories in the Global South” at Palgrave/Macmillan, and “Global Easts” at the Central European University Press. His recent books include Victimhood Nationalism: History and Memory in a Global Age (Columbia Univ. Press, 2025), Opfernationalismus. Erinnerung und Herrschaft in der postkolonialen Welt (Klaus Wagenbach, 2024), Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Practicing (Columbia Univ. Press, 2022), Mnemonic Solidarity-Global Interventions, co-edited with Eve Rosenhaft (Palgrave, 2021). 

The fourth TraCe lec­ture series “Trans­formations of Political Vio­lence: New Perspec­tives” will pre­sent new approaches to the changing forms, insti­tutions and inter­pretations of political vio­lence, which are exa­mined in the con­text of TraCe. The lec­ture series com­bines inter­disciplinary perspec­tives from history, sociology, po­litical science and cul­tural studies with ac­tivist voices.