Authors, artists, and activists of the generation of postmemory insist on their rights to represent, remember, and shape public memory of the comfort women atrocity through cultural productions such as literature, the visual arts, and protest. They engage with the atrocity through what Marianne Hirsch has called postmemory or "affiliative identification" with victims and survivors based on gender, ethnicity, and or, panethnicity. Some literary critics, however, argue that they risk rendering these women as powerless and voiceless subjects by claiming to speak for them and by replacing the women's experiences through their exploration of their own cultural identities and subjectivities. Can the generation of postmemory receive and represent the traumatic histories of both victims and survivors of the comfort women atrocity without over-identifying with and or appropriating their experiences in their aesthetic responses? I participate in this ongoing intellectual debate in my reading and analysis of Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman through the framework of the postcolonial trauma novel and contemporary theories memory, trauma, and feminism. Keller demonstrates the dangers of over- identification, the shared yet distinct violence experienced by former comfort women and Asian American women, and how the generation of postmemory can identify with these women's experiences while maintaining a distance from the women's experiences and the atrocity itself. I argue that Keller demonstrates both the deficiencies in and applicability of western theories, models, and treatments of trauma in the postcolonial contexts of Japan and North and South Korea. I then argue that Keller presents alternative methods of bearing witness and mourning through bodily language, testimonial objects, and Korean female-centered shamanism, which I read through Marianne Hirsch's postmemory from The Generation of Postmemory and Seo-Young's postmemory han from "Science Fiction and Postmemory Han in Contemporary Korean American Literature". I argue that the novel challenges the efficacy of reparations, redress, and restitution in facilitating healing for former comfort women. Akiko and Beccah instead create alternative futurities for themselves through their resistance to the nation-state, patriarchal nationalism, colonialism, and racism and sexism, institutionalized heterosexuality, and heternormative structures of kinship and reproduction, which I read through Gayatri Gopinath's and David Eng's queer diasporas from Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures and The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy respectively.
