Masters Thesis

The politics of comfort women in Asian American memory

Scholarly literature and historiographies have analyzed the deployment of the historical memory of the Comfort Women in the decades following World War II. However, there is little scholarship that traces the deployment of the historical memory of the Comfort Women specifically in the U.S. and in Asian American activist communities. This thesis provides a glimpse into such formation of the historical memory of Comfort Women in the U.S. and in Asian American activists from the 1970s to the 2010s. How have the social, geopolitical, racial and economic contexts of the 1970s, 1990s and the 2010s shaped the deployment of the memory of the Comfort Women within Asian American activists? How have these activists articulated their deployment of this memory and what ideologies and practices were bolstered in such deployment? Using oral history interviews and documents written by activists, this thesis conducts a historical tracing of this deployment and suggests an activist model that weaves together the practice of institutional memorialization and a critique of imperialism.

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