“Até mesmo após a minha morte, eu não serei capaz de esquecer”: as “mulheres de conforto” Sul-Coreanas entre os martelos da colonialidade, dos revisionismos e negocionismos históricos (1990-2010).

Abstract

This Final Paper analyzes the South Korean “comfort women” who were sexually enslaved during the period of Japanese colonial occupation of the Peninsula, between 1910 and 1945, through the historical revisionisms and denialisms that surround the historiography of the subject in contemporary times, in dialogue with Pierre Vidal-Naquet (1987), Rollemberg and Cordeiro (2021) and others. In order to foster this discussion, we will analyze the existence of a coloniality (of power, of being, of knowledge, of memory, of the media, etc.) present in current Korean society, which constructs discourses and impediments (Paul Ricouer, 2007) so that the memories and traumas of the survivors can be heard and their requests for reparations answered. This debate will have as its theoretical basis the authors Jordi Serrano-Munõz (2021), Luciana Ballestrin (2013); Ramón Grosfoguel (2011), among others who will contribute to the proposal of a decolonial turn in Asia. That said, we will be using national newspaper sources from South Korea and Japan, such as the Korean newspaper The Chosun Ilbo and the Japanese newspaper The Mainichi, to study the narratives present in the texts of the newspapers chosen between the 1990s and the mid-2010s, with the aim of understanding the existence of the denialisms and historical revisionisms that plague the history of the “comfort women” and relations between Korea and Japan.