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The Stakes of Historical Revisionism in Trump's America: Teaching about the Comfort Women Atrocity in the Japanese Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

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This is the first in what we hope will be an ongoing series devoted to teaching sensitive historical and contemporary issues in an era in which ‘trigger warnings’ and competing nationalisms shape educational experiences throughout the Asia-Pacific and the world. We invite contributions.

The 2016 presidential campaign was hardly the starting point for surging neo-nationalism centered on a normative white male identity. Yet the election of Donald Trump reinforced certain links among racism, sexism, and neo-nationalism in the contemporary United States (and beyond). No less than the general public, universities across the nation have felt the impact of our forty-fifth president's supremacist and exclusionary rhetoric. Many students, faculty, and staff reacted to last November's results with shock and despair, while some felt acutely threatened by attacks on minorities, documented and undocumented immigrants, and other at-risk groups. In response, a number of universities have declared themselves “sanctuary campuses,” pledging to shield students and employees of uncertain immigration status. Many others, including the University of Colorado Boulder, where I teach, have issued statements of support for diversity and have mounted various formal and informal discussions of how to meaningfully support impacted members of the community.

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Research Article
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
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Copyright © The Authors 2017