Reclaiming Third-World Radicalism: Palestine, “Comfort Women,” and Zainichi Korean Justice

• In Event: What love and solidarity look like at a neoliberal/imperial university? Teaching Palestine, Third Worldism and gender justice

Abstract

This paper is an auto-ethnographic reflection of my collaboration with and participation in AMED Open Classrooms conceptualized and organized by Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi and what it means to centralize the movement to defend AMED studies for the justice movements, including Zainichi Korean and “Comfort Women” Justice movements, in which I have been involved over a decade prior to my collaboration with AMED. My paper illuminates how building coalitions among those movements have required reinvigorating historical memories of radical anti-colonial, queer, and feminist third-world coalition building since the 1960s and 70s, and their critiques of colluders from within their communities and movements, who misused historical traumas and memories as tools for legitimizing imperialisms and colonialisms, including Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, their genocidal violence, and apartheid, advancing their careers within the system, and ultimately silencing radical anti-colonial narratives. My paper then asks how Zainichi Korean radical praxis of remembering contributes to coalitional defiance against imperial historical denialism, that is funded and maintained by a complex of settler colonial and ethno-nationalist states, such as Israel, US, Japan, India, as well as networks of their lobby industries, including Zionists, white
supremacists, Japanese denialists, and Hindu fundamentalists. My paper concludes
with reflecting upon how our coalitional work would transform our inter-Asianmaginaries, Thirdwordism, gender justice, andborder-crossing practices.

Author

• Tomomi Kinukawa