Jie-Hyun Lim

Jie-Hyun Lim (Korean: 임지현; born 1959) is a South Korean historian, writer, and "memory activist." He is a full professor of transnational history and the director of the Critical Global Studies Institute at Sogang University, Seoul, who conceptualized paradigms of "Mass Dictatorship" and "Victimhood Nationalism." Since Lim founded the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture in 2004, he has carried out a series of international projects, including the "East Asian History Forum for Criticism and Solidarity" and the "Flying University of Transnational Humanities."

Lim has written and edited around two dozen books, including Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Mobilizing (Columbia University Press, 2022), Everyday Fascism (우리 안의 파시즘, 2000), and Victimhood Nationalism (희생자의식 민족주의, 2021). He is a co-editor of Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives (2011), Mass Dictatorship and Memory as Ever Present Past: Mass Dictatorship in the 20th Century (2014), The Palgrave Handbook of Mass Dictatorship (2016), and Mnemonic Solidarity: Global Interventions (2021), among other works.

Lately, Lim has been delving into the field of “transnational history [and memory] as an alternative narrative to the national [one],” asserting that memory beneath history should be deterritorialized. He is also conceptualizing "Global Easts" that are neither Global North nor Global South, thereby developing the problem consciousness of his 2022 publication from the perspective of the global history of modernity.

Life

Early life

Ji-Hyun Lim was born in 1959 in Seoul, South Korea, not long after the conclusion of the Korean War (1950⎼1953). At that time, the Military coup d'état in May 1961 established Park Chung Hee’s regime (1961⎼1979) of Development Dictatorship, with its gilded slogans—“Korean way of democracy” and “the National Regeneration” (Yu-shin Constitution). As Lim retrospects, “[t]he shattered Cold War constellation provided the conditions for Park to proclaim a state of emergency, which rationalized the shift from democracy to dictatorship,” in which “the individual selves voluntarily sacrifice[d] themselves for the higher self or absolute ego of the nation.”

In 1977 when Lim was attending Sogang University as a history student and university newspaper reporter, a police investigator visited Lim's house because he was a member of “Red Clay” (황토 [hwang-t'o]), a clandestine anti-autocracy circle of Sogang University. This experience led Lim to learn about his late grandfather’s past as a troika of the Korean Communist Party and an independence fighter during the Japanese occupation. Lim confesses in his autobiography, Doing History (역사를 어떻게 할 것인가: 어느 사학자의 에고 히스토리, 2016), that he has always thought of his academic pursuit as participating in his grandfather's “inner exile.”

After the outbreak of the Gwangju Uprising (1980), Lim felt a strong sense of survivor's shame, which spurred him to study Marxist intellectual history as a graduate student at Sogang University. Above all, Lim wanted to establish "South Korean social science" or "South Korean Western history” based on the problem consciousness of his society, where the aftermath of the Gwangju Uprising came as too heavy a task for South Korean historians.