Dissident Writing, the Cold War, and the Decolonizing World

Srimati Ghosal is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She works on Afro-Asian solidarities in the mid 20th century and the postcolonial print cultures in 20th century South Asia. She works with Hindi, Bengali and Urdu social realist and socialist literary genres and translations from and into the region.

Dr. Yiwen Liu is a postdocotral fellow at Simon Fraser University. She is a literary scholar concerned with decolonial epistemologies represented in Sinophone literatures. Her book manuscript entitled "Cold War Hong Kong: Genres of Everyday Resistance in Sinophone Literature" exposes the often invisible complicity between British-American imperialisms and the Chinese authoritarianism in the everyday life of Hong Kong during the Cold War.

Amanda Su is a Ph.D. candidate in English UC Berkeley. Her dissertation argues that during the Cold War, novelistic figurations of Chinese womanhood were used by the US and the PRC in order to further their respective projects of state capitalism or socialism. Part of this project is forthcoming in Post45, in an article that received the 2024 Mary Esteve Emerging Scholar Prize. Her criticism and fiction have been published in Guernica, Amerasia, the Journal of Asian American Studies, ASAP/J, and the edited collection Breaking the Bronze Ceiling: Women, Memory, Public Space (Fordham UP 2024).

Laetitia Zecchini is Director of Research at the CNRS and heads the new joint CNRS / University of Chicago research lab in the humanities. She works on contemporary Indian poetry, Indian modernisms, the politics of literature and free speech in South Asia. She has worked extensively on the Cultural Cold War in India. Among her more recent publications are two co-edited and co-authored volumes, PEN International: An Illustrated History in 2021, and with Neelam Srivastava and Francesca Orsini The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures in 2022. She coordinates the International Research Network on Postcolonial Print Cultures and is working on a monograph on the alternative forms and genealogies of literary activism in India.

Kodai Abe is an assistant professor at U of Tsukuba, Japan. He has published in American Literature, Journal of Asian American Studies, Journal of Asian Studies, among other journals.

Hadji Bakara is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. He is the editor of a special issue of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory on “Refugee Literatures,” and his writing on human rights and migration has appeared in PMLA, American Literary History, German Quarterly, The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. With Charlotte Sussman and Josephine McDonagh, he is co-editing the Oxford Handbook to Literature and Migration (OUP 2025). He has recently completed his first book, Governments of the Tongue: A Literary History of Human (University of Chicago Press) and is at work on a second, Refugee Futures: A Political Theory of Time.

Thuyen Viet Truong (he/him) is a doctoral student in the Department of English with general interests in world literature and the Global South, diaspora and decolonization, Asian-Pacific and African literatures. His research centers on Cold War cultural diplomacies—from para-literary organizations to international awards, from writers’ conferences to book programs—and explores how they re-inscribe the ethos of past civilizing missions only to re-incarnate into developmentalist practices and policies in the twenty-first century. A through-line is Afro-Asianism, not solely as cultural alliance and political solidarity, but also how and why the literatures of Asia animate and agitate a range of transformative movements in Africa, from Négritude to Pan-Africanism to African socialism.

Jini Kim Watson is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Transpacific Literatures at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her scholarship and teaching focus on postcolonial literature and theory; decolonisation and the global Cold War in Asia; the urban humanities; and transpacific migration. Her most recent books are Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (Fordham UP, 2021), and The Cambridge Companion to the City and World Literature (Cambridge UP 2023), co-edited with Ato Quayson.

Brian K. Goodman is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. His first book, The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers across the Iron Curtain (Harvard UP, 2023), received the Pamela Jensen Award from APSA and Honorable Mention for the USC Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies from ASEEES. His writing on issues related to censorship, dissent, and free expression has appeared in Public Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Preeti Singh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. Her research straddles postcolonial studies and South Asian literature with attention to literary expressions of political and social crises at the the intersection of decolonization and the global cold war. Her book project examines the cultural politics of the widely memorialized national emergency declared by Indian prime-minister Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s.

Jiaxin Yan is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Penn State. She focuses on post-Vietnam War literary and artistic production from East Asia. She is interested in archipelagic theory, decolonization and the Cold War, and transnational feminisms. Her dissertation explores Taiwanese, Okinawan, and zainichi Korean artists’ reflections on islands across the northwestern Pacific Ocean that are often sacrificed by multiple empires. Her articles are forthcoming in The Journal of Japanese Studies and Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature.