The Holocaust and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki invoked in graphic terms the specter of total human destruction. In response, a new international order of reparations and human rights arose from the ashes of World War II. This legal regime sought to subrogate the sovereignty of the nation-state in order to defend the sovereignty of the human being. While the Holocaust's history is settled-Nazis were perpetrators and Jews were victims-there remains little historical consensus as to the victims and perpetrators of the atomic bombings. In Reparations and the Human, David L. Eng investigates a history of reparations across the Transpacific. He analyzes how concepts of reparation established during colonial settlement and the European Enlightenment shape contemporary configurations of the human and human rights, determining who can be recognized as victims, who must be seen as perpetrators, and who deserves repair. As demands for reparations now occupy center stage in debates concerning unresolved legacies of dispossession and Transatlantic slavery, Eng considers how the Cold War Transpacific provides a limit case for the politics of repair and definitions of the human.
David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Program in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy and Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America and coauthor of Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans, all also published by Duke University Press.
"No other work demonstrates the critical relevance of psychoanalysis to justice more powerfully than David L. Eng's Reparations and the Human. Animating the intersections of postcolonial American studies, Black feminist and Indigenous critique of sovereignty, law, and the human, and Transpacific Cold War critique, Eng theorizes the psychic dimension of reparation with deep literary insight. A book anyone seeking a way beyond the nomos of the post-Enlightenment planet must read." - Lisa Yoneyama, author of (Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes) "David L. Eng upends previous assumptions about what reparation is, showing how the very category of the human is structured by whether subjects are worthy of reparation. A brilliant, creative, learned, and utterly compelling book." - Leti Volpp, Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law in Access to Justice, University of California, Berkeley School of Law
