Korea, East Asia, and the Cold War Politics of Comparison
Description
This seminar proposes to examine how comparative literature and area studies have delimited possibilities for reading non-Western literatures by considering how Korean literature has been compared to other literatures in and from East Asia. Together, these literatures allow for reflections on the remarkable continuity of the exclusionary logic of comparison subtending these fields of knowledge, a logic that tends to reduce non-Western literatures to the status of evidentiary documents that supposedly reflect a reality about peoples and places that unfailingly agrees with what is already known.
In response to criticism of the continued presence of this logic in comparative literature and Asian studies, some have proposed introducing more East Asian literatures into comparison, expanding the quantity and scope of literary comparisons at large. We contend that these approaches fall short of challenging the problematic logic that remains at work in comparing literatures across fields, as they overlook the imbrication of colonialism and the Cold War at the heart of comparative literature and Asian studies.
Many have already reflected on the colonial tendencies and Cold War origins of both fields. Yet locating the colonial in the Cold War in the context of East Asia requires the recognition not only of colonial power (typically "the West") that forces agreement with a prescribed "what is known," but also of the particular history of modern empire in the region—the distinctive experience of some polities, like Korea, of having been colonized by Japan, a fellow non-Western polity and geographic neighbor. And although the Cold War began with the end of Japanese colonial rule in East Asia, it carried forth a logic of comparison stemming from colonial power, Western and otherwise.
To better understand how Korean and other East Asian literatures evince this continuity of the colonial in and beyond the Cold War, we seek to engage with seminar papers that ask:
- How does the Cold War continue to influence the way that Korean and other East Asian literatures are considered in literary comparisons as non-Western literatures?
- How do comparisons of diverse colonial contexts enable insights about the continuity of the colonial logic into the Cold War and its fields of knowledge?
- How do (re)considerations of Korean and other East Asian literatures allow us to think beyond the exclusionary logic of comparison from the Cold War, built on "selective remembering" of the colonial past?
We welcome papers that, in answering these questions: make evident shortcomings of contemporary approaches to East Asian literatures as non-Western literatures in both comparative literature and Asian studies; theorize the act of comparison through East Asian literary texts and their reception; and/or propose new modes of comparison.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Satoru Hashimoto is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Afterlives of Letters: The Transnational Origins of Modern Literature in China, Japan, and Korea (Columbia University Press, 2023). He is currently working on a second book project on transnational East Asian literatures in the immediate postwar period.
Speaker Bio
HeeJin Lee is Assistant Professor and Marianna Brown Dietrich Breakthrough Scholar Chair of Korean Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a scholar of modern Korean literature with research interests in Cold War cultures and the politics of decolonization in comparative contexts. Lee is currently working on her first book manuscript, which traces how anticommunism in Korea during the early years of the Cold War shaped what we know about modern Korean literature today.
Speaker Bio
Muyun Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate in Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. Her research interest includes global Sinophone literature and arts in the late 20th century and Cold War studies through a transnational/diasporic lens. She is currently studying the Sinophone through locations such as Singapore, the US, and South Korea during the 1960s-70s.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Yonsei University.
Specializes in Korean and East Asian comparative literature, East Asian diaspora, and minority documentary literature.
Current research focuses on female labor and non-human beings (animals, ecology) in East Asian diaspora literature.
Publications: Colonial Encounter(2024, sole author), Acceptance, Isolation, Deprivation, (2024, lead editor)
Article: “Postmemory Beyond Human/Speciesism”, Nov 2024.
Speaker Bio
Aliju Kim (she/her) is a PhD candidate in East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation examines the aesthetic sensibility of decadence as an analytic to index the paradoxical sensibility of modernity in decline in modern Korean literature. Her other research interests include family sagas and memory.
Speaker Bio
Jiyon Byun is a PhD candidate in English at University of California, Irvine, with a graduate emphasis in Asian American Studies. Her research focuses on Korean and diasporic Korean literature, with a particular attention to the affordances of genre, including crime fiction and horror film. She is currently completing her dissertation on Korean and Korean American crime fiction in relation to violence, empire, and neoliberal capitalism in the post-9/11 era.