STUDIES OF THE WEAI BOOK SERIES
Yukiko Koga
(University of Chicago Press, 2016)
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Winner, 2017 Francis L. K. Hsu Book Prize, American Anthropological Association
Winner, 2017 Anthony Leeds Book Prize, American Anthropological Association
How do contemporary generations come to terms with losses inflicted by imperialism, colonialism, and war that took place decades ago? How do descendants of perpetrators and victims establish new relations in today’s globalized economy? With Inheritance of Loss, Yukiko Koga approaches these questions through the unique lens of inheritance, focusing on Northeast China, the former site of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo, where municipal governments now court Japanese as investors and tourists. As China transitions to a market-oriented society, this region is restoring long-neglected colonial-era structures to boost tourism and inviting former colonial industries to create special economic zones, all while inadvertently unearthing chemical weapons abandoned by the Imperial Japanese Army at the end of World War II.
Inheritance of Loss chronicles these sites of colonial inheritance––tourist destinations, corporate zones, and mustard gas exposure sites––to illustrate attempts by ordinary Chinese and Japanese to reckon with their shared yet contested pasts. In her explorations of everyday life, Koga directs us to see how the violence and injustice that occurred after the demise of the Japanese Empire compound the losses that later generations must account for, and inevitably inherit.
Yukiko Koga is assistant professor of anthropology at Hunter College of the City University of New York.
“Most discussions of coming to terms with the past have taken the Holocaust as their paradigm. Koga’s important new book looks elsewhere and comes to strikingly original conclusions. Focused on three cities in Northeast China and set in the aftermath of Japanese empire, Inheritance of Loss goes beyond familiar references to the politics of postwar memory and points us toward the political economy of redemption in the wake of colonial modernity. This is a fresh and brilliant intervention that will be of interest to scholars of trauma and memory as well as globalization and postcolonial studies.”
—Michael Rothberg, UCLA
