David L. Eng, "Reparations and the Human" (Duke UP, 2025)

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 (Duke UP, 2025), 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. This book is a sweeping genealogical investigation that moves from seventeenth-century land dispossession in the Americas to the irradiated histories of the Cold War Transpacific, asking a fundamental question: who is considered deserving of repair?

Deep Acharya is a PhD student and a George L. Mosse fellow of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on the history of fatherhood in 20th century Germany.


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