Jie-Hyun Lim
Institution: Sogang University
Jie-Hyun Lim is the CIPSH chair of Global Easts and Youngone Professor at Sogang University, Seoul. He is the principal investigator of the research projects of Mnemonic Solidarity: Colonialism, War, and Genocide in the Global Memory Space (2017-2024) and Series Editor of “Entangled Memories in the Global South” at Palgrave/Macmillan and “Global Easts” at the Central European University Press. His recent books include Victimhood Nationalism-Global History and Memory (Columbia Univ. Press, forthcoming), Opfernationalismus. Erinnerung und Herrschaft in der postkolonialen Welt (Klaus Wagenbach, 2024), Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Practicing (Columbia Univ. Press, 2022), and Mnemonic Solidarity-Global Interventions (Palgrave, 2021, co-edited with Eve Rosenhaft).
Reflections Upon “Civilizationisms” in Global Easts
The “Global Easts” is designed for a cognitive remapping of the global past and present through the heuristic juxtaposition of Eastern Europe and East Asia. By investigating the global entanglements of the two Easts, not through the lens of the West, the Global Easts disrupts the complacent Eurocentric binaries of ‘West’ and ‘East. The radical juxtaposition and critical relativization of the hitherto disentangled regions under the rubric of the Global Easts would bring an epistemological breakthrough to the Eurocentric historical imagination. and, thus, problematize methodological Eurocentrism.
East as a strategic position in global modernity is a relational concept. “East” in the Global Easts is neither geographically nor historically fixed to Eastern Europe and East Asia, although these two Easts are the primary fields in focus. Global Easts is a “problem space” in global modernity. It is the specifically trans-peripheral problem space where the East remains underdeveloped. East Asia and Eastern have been constructed and explained “through the dynamics of attraction to and repulsion from the West” in the civilizationist discourses. The conceptual gradation of Oriental and demi-Oriental in the Global Easts depends on its distance to the “West.”
Thus, civilizationism in the Global Easts internalizes Eurocentrism and accommodates self-Orientalism by reformulating the conventional dichotomy of modern ‘civilization’ and pre-modern ‘barbarism.’ The question of ‘What civilization do we need?’ in the Global Easts frequently frames answers in resonance with Eurocentric historicism legitimizing progress from the Orientalized premodern self to the Westernized modern self. The civilizationist discourse of Orientalism, Occidentalism, Toyoshi(東洋史), Seyoshi(西洋史), Ostforschung, Studia Zachodnie essentializes the geographical fixations of East and West into premodern East and modern West and, thus, strengthens the methodological Eurocentrism. My intervention problematizes the civilizationist discourse in Global Easts.