"Wartime atrocities bring personal trauma: the soldier who cannot forget the killing fields; the minority groups who lost loved ones due to persecution; the women forced into prostitution who still bear the physical and emotional scars of their abuse. But nations, too, struggle to see past the trauma inflicted on their collective psyche and civilian body during conflict. In this book, Korean history of memory scholar Jie-Hyun Lim explores the global formation of nationhood in the recent past through the paradigm of victimization. This type of nationalism, which he calls victimhood nationalism, grants a present-day nation moral legitimacy and political alibis through its inheritance of victim status from previous generations. However, it also requires the identification of perpetrator nations that have done harm, creating long-term animosities that underwrite contemporary relations on the global stage long after the damaging incidents between the two nations occurred. Tracing this "negative symbiosis" from the nineteenth century to the present, Lim shows how it moves beyond bilateral, transnational relationships to a global phenomenon, crossing from Asia to Europe to the United States and beyond. This innovative study presents a new way of thinking about the global entanglements that make up memory, history, and a nation's sense of identity"--