Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas by Jinah Kim (review)

Every argument turns back on America as the evil from where all other evils manifest, the pages become increasingly muddy with the authors partisanship, and the glee becomes palpable with every new call for pound-of-flesh justice. The problem slowly builds into a crescendo, on every page there is a face-value acceptance of not only grief, but of how that grief should be dealt with (always reparations), and of the ‘truth’ claims of victims and victimhood. This is a deliberately dense academic work, but there is nothing ‘academic’ about bludgeoning forward under the conviction that your argument is self-evident, and incontrovertibly true. And yet in trying to build a “critical imaginative geography of the Pacific Arena”, Jinah Kim is successful.