Duncan M Yoon | New York University (original) (raw)

Publications by Duncan M Yoon

Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 2022

This article examines Dennis Brutus's China Poems (1975). A South African poet and anti-apartheid... more This article examines Dennis Brutus's China Poems (1975). A South African poet and anti-apartheid activist, Brutus wrote the volume while visiting the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1973. Brutus imagines revolutionary China through a minimalist form, which was inspired by the traditional Chinese jueju (绝句), as well as Mao Zedong's own poetry. I argue that the volume entangles literary form and a materialist "concept of history" (Jameson) to symbolically recognize the PRC, resulting in a literary realpolitik designed to pressure the apartheid regime. This analysis also points to an Indian Ocean network of world literature by exploring a Cold War trajectory between South Africa and China.

Periodical of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), 2021

Over the past decade or so, Afropolitanism has become a hotly contested term within literary stud... more Over the past decade or so, Afropolitanism has become a hotly contested term within literary studies, celebrated for its capacity to articulate an experience of transnational mobility and success in the West as well as criticized for how it elides the everyday experience of individuals on the continent and for its alleged lack of political critique. Many of these debates focus on the intended audience for Afropolitan texts, which, because of the location of publication houses and distribution networks, remains primarily the Western reader. My purpose in this introduction to alternative networks of Afropolitanism, however, is not to rehash this well-covered debate. Instead I would like to examine the shifting worlds of Afropolitanism as they manifest themselves through an engagement with East Asia, and with China in particular.

Ufahamu a Journal of African Studies, 2011

Journal of World Literature, 2021

This article asks how China has figured as a trope in Congolese literature from the Cold War and ... more This article asks how China has figured as a trope in Congolese literature from the Cold War and to the present. To do so, I analyze three texts: V.Y. Mudimbe’s Entre les eaux (Between Tides) (1973), In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc. (2014), and Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s Tram 83 (2014). I also examine how Mobutu interpolated Maoism into his dictatorship. I argue that whereas the Cold War produces figures such as the Maoist guerrilla, the radical intellectual, and the authoritarian leader, Chinese investment in the DRC facilitates the rise of new figures such as the mondialiste and the economic tourist. As a result, Third Worldism is ironically recast through the lens of a mutual “win-win” for development. This lens masks a new era of extractivism that produces its own social dislocations, which lends Pierre Mulélé’s Maoist-inspired rebellion a paradoxical relevance to DRC-PRC relations at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Keywords: Africa; China; Congo; Mulélé; Maoism

Comparative Literature, 2020

The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) presence in Africa has fundamentally changed globalization... more The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) presence in Africa has fundamentally changed globalization patterns. Most scholarship interrogates whether the Chinese presence is either a “new colonialism” or a “win-win” for development by focusing on economic or social scientific factors. In contrast, this article examines China as a trope in Congo Inc. (2014) by In Koli Jean Bofane. Congo Inc. is one of the first African novels to take the Africa-China relationship as central theme, depicting how Congolese actors negotiate the PRC’s presence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The article examines the unexpected partnership of a trickster, Isookanga, and a stranded Chinese national, Zhang Xia, analyzing their partnership according to the relationship between time and globalization. The argument uses the concept of the postcolony’s durées to demonstrate how the narrative creates a global South temporality, which differentiates Africa-China patterns of globalization from previous instantiations. These durées include Isookanga’s digital consciousness enabled by a PRC-built cell tower; allusions to Chinese history; and Isookanga and Zhang Xia’s collaboration on Eau Pire Suisse. In sum Congo Inc.’s innovative temporality, embodied by the term mondialiste, signals a shift in type of postcolonial narrative toward the global South novel.

Research in African Literatures , 2019

Although most scholarship reads Ousmane Sembène's oeuvre according to the dynamic between coloniz... more Although most scholarship reads Ousmane Sembène's oeuvre according to the dynamic between colonizer and colonized, this article examines his 1981 novel, Le Dernier de l'empire [The Last of the Empire], through an expanded optic: the global Cold War. The trope's complexity manifests in, for example, references to the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and the Vietnam War, as well as to political instability on the African continent. Sembène demonstrates how the Cold War was not simply an American and Soviet affair through repeated use of the catalogue as literary device. In so doing, the novel interpolates Third Worldism into the Senegalese context. Aesthetically, Sembène blends griot storytelling techniques, flashback (analepsis), and Soviet montage to critique neocolonialism in the postcolony. The narrative depicts the threat of military coup to the succession of power according to how postcolonial actors interpret the Cold War's intellectual and geographic multipolarity. In sum, the novel creolizes the Cold War in both content and form.

The Global South and Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2018

Since 1955 there has been a proliferation of publications commemorating the Asia-Africa Conferenc... more Since 1955 there has been a proliferation of publications commemorating the Asia-Africa Conference of Bandung, ranging from official government documents and conferences, to the recent uptick in scholarship in the Western academy embodied in part by the Global South turn (Lee 2010). What explains this continued nostalgia for Bandung over sixty years later? And, moreover, can this “Bandung nostalgia” be at all useful for Global South studies, eschewing the pitfalls associated with an “illusion of utopian idealism” in order to “provid[e] knowledge of legitimate alternatives to present circumstances” (Huffer, qtd. in Su 2005: 8)? This chapter will focus on the mobilization of culture at Bandung, including the citation of a poem by Rabindranath Tagore by the Pilipino delegate Carlos Romulo. Although scholarship on Bandung is often susceptible to the pitfalls of nostalgia, nevertheless this chapter argues that this “Bandung nostalgia” can be mobilized in critical ways, informing contemporary scholarship on the Global South. As such the Global South is understood as a concept rather than merely a geography, accommodating for the opening of “new departures” in geo-cultural patterns, and thereby continuing the “unfinished critique” of postcolonialism.

The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2015

Although most all contemporary studies of China and Africa focus on current economic or foreign p... more Although most all contemporary studies of China and Africa focus on current economic or foreign policy concerns, this article provides a preliminary mapping of Africa-China cultural exchanges during the Cold War. Growing out of the Africa-Asia Conference of Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau forged third world solidarities via an alternative conception of postcolonialism based on the transnationalism of global South cultural struggle. By analyzing the cultural exchanges of the bureau, and in particular their definition of world literature, this article seeks to move beyond postcolonial scholarship that focuses exclusively on a vertical relationship between the colonizer and colonized. In so doing, it both reinterprets the Cold War from outside of an American and Soviet dichotomy and provides a critical cultural historicization to China’s current, and often controversial, presence in Africa.

Journal of Contemporary Thought, 2013

Over a decade into the 21st century, the West is no longer the primary locus of economics, techno... more Over a decade into the 21st century, the West is no longer the primary locus of economics, technology, and culture. With the rise of China, India, Brazil and South Africa as the largest economies within the Global South, development and exchange can often obviate the West. This multi-polar world—as many theorists of globalization have pointed out—represents an unprecedented shift in global power dynamics. How then is this multi-polarity understood? And within the cultural sphere, what kind of theory of knowledge is needed to vocalize the contemporary moment? Although Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s globalectic grows out of an amalgamation of materialism and the negotiations of a Gikuyu and Anglophone Kenyan context, Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation emerges from a poststructural and creolized Francophone Caribbean context. However, both arrive at strikingly similar conclusions concerning the role of orality and literature in the formation of an analytic for the cultural exchanges of a multi-polar world. As a result, the postcolonial emerges as an ethic with which to articulate and engage with definitions of globalization and world literature.

Journal of Contemporary Thought, 2012

If it is likely that there are various forms of modernity, the concept of modernity can be disa... more If it is likely that there are various forms of modernity, the concept of modernity can be disaggregated−that is, its constituent features can be taken apart and imaginatively re-examined in new combinations in different social and cultural contexts. Mohanty’s notion that the components of modernity may be reformulated can be read into the goals of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO). Formed after the Bandung Conference of 1955 in Indonesia, the AAPSO became one of the most vibrant and contentious forums for the creation of solidarity links−economic, political, and cultural−within a rapidly decolonizing Third World. Alternative modernities, understood as intricately connected to questions of alternative paths of development, became one of the main issues during these conferences.

Book Reviews by Duncan M Yoon

Contemporary Literature, 2020

In Dubois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment, Juliana Spahr asserts multiple t... more In Dubois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment, Juliana Spahr asserts multiple times the book should not be read as a scholarly monograph, pur et dur, but rather as “an autobiography about how my education told me that certain forms of literature were autonomous when they were not and how long it took me to realize this” (110). In her conclusion, she reasserts this position, writing the text is an “auto-ethnographic project, an attempt to describe the way literature circulates in the very scenes in which I also circulate” (191). Read in this way, Spahr’s conversational tone and digressive flourishes embody an auto-ethnographic style, creating a space wherein she turns her subject matter, American literary nationalism, outward facing. She thereby straddles an ivory tower audience and the persistent call to render scholarship more accessible through the public humanities. Spahr is largely successful in creating an informal, stylistic atmosphere for this hybrid readership as she struggles with how literary autonomy seems to always be already infiltrated by nationalistic agendas that reach back into the global Cold War and how the CIA influenced postcolonial national literatures, especially African. Due to this personal struggle for, and ultimate failure of literary autonomy, Spahr’s text is pervaded by a tone of inevitability, which I suggest points to a certain U.S.-pessimism given the challenge to American exceptionalism in the 21st century.

Journal of the African Literature Association, 2020

Papers by Duncan M Yoon

The China Quarterly, Dec 1, 2009

... schaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study), my intellectual engagement with reading groups ... more ... schaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study), my intellectual engagement with reading groups on globalization (the Global Girls) and experience were important in changing my thinking about this book; I am especially appreciative of the con-tributions of Maria Todorova on the ...

The China Quarterly, 2009

This dissertation argues for an alternative history of postcolonial literature anchored in the cu... more This dissertation argues for an alternative history of postcolonial literature anchored in the cultural exchanges of Africa and Asia. The project claims a strong, but tenuous Africa-China imaginary emerged during 1960s decolonization through the Afro-Asian Writers' Bureau founded in 1957. Analysis of their anthologies of world literature reveals an early crystallization of a postcolonial aesthetic rooted in Afro-Asian expressions of solidarity. As a result, the Bureau's Sino-Soviet split in 1966 would magnify Africa as a contested ground of "literary" realpolitik. This dissertation locates the emergence of postcolonial literature outside of a colony's relationship to a colonial metropole. Also, it reexamines Cold War literary networks from a postcolonial perspective. African engagement with Chinese literary theory thereby yields a provocative South-to-South vector of decolonization's aesthetic history.

Verge: Studies in Global Asias

This article examines Dennis Brutus's China Poems (1975). A South African poet and anti-a... more This article examines Dennis Brutus's China Poems (1975). A South African poet and anti-apartheid activist, Brutus wrote the volume while visiting the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1973. Brutus imagines revolutionary China through a minimalist form, which was inspired by the traditional Chinese jueju (绝句), as well as Mao Zedong's own poetry. I argue that the volume entangles literary form and a materialist "concept of history" (Jameson) to symbolically recognize the PRC, resulting in a literary realpolitik designed to pressure the apartheid regime. This analysis also points to an Indian Ocean network of world literature by exploring a Cold War trajectory between South Africa and China.

Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 2022

Periodical of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), 2021

Ufahamu a Journal of African Studies, 2011

Journal of World Literature, 2021

Keywords: Africa; China; Congo; Mulélé; Maoism

Comparative Literature, 2020

Research in African Literatures , 2019

The Global South and Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2018

The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2015

Journal of Contemporary Thought, 2013

Journal of Contemporary Thought, 2012

Contemporary Literature, 2020

Journal of the African Literature Association, 2020

The China Quarterly, Dec 1, 2009

The China Quarterly, 2009

Verge: Studies in Global Asias

Contemporary Literature, 2020

n Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment, Juliana Spahr asserts multiple t... more n Du Bois’s Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment, Juliana Spahr asserts multiple times that the book should not be read as a scholarly monograph, pur et dur, but as “an autobiography about how my education told me that certain forms of literature were autonomous when they were not and how long it took me to realize this” (110). In her conclusion, she reasserts this position, writing that the text is an “auto-ethnographic project, an attempt to describe the way literature circulates in the very scenes in which I also circulate” (191). Read in this way, Spahr’s conversational tone and digressive flourishes embody an auto-ethnographic style, creating a space wherein she turns her subject matter, American literary nationalism, outward facing. The book thereby straddles the expectations of an ivory tower audience and the persistent call to render scholarship more accessible through the public humanities. Spahr is largely successful in creating an informal, stylistic atmosp...

PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2021

DUNCAN M. YOON is assistant professor at New York University. His book manuscript “Alluvial Dream... more DUNCAN M. YOON is assistant professor at New York University. His book manuscript “Alluvial Dreams: China in African Literature” received a Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award from the American Comparative Literature Association in 2020. He was a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea in 2004 and a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress in 2018. Over the past decade or so, Afropolitanism has become a hotly contested term within literary studies, celebrated for its capacity to articulate an African experience of transnational mobility and success in theWest as well as criticized for how it elides the everyday experience of individuals on the continent and for its alleged lack of political critique. Many of these debates focus on the intended audience for Afropolitan texts, which, because of the location of publication houses and distribution networks, remains primarily the Western reader. My purpose in this introduction to alternative networks of Afropolitanism, however, is not to rehash this well-covered debate. Instead I would like to examine the shifting worlds of Afropolitanism as they manifest themselves through an engagement with East Asia, and with China in particular. My goal is less to map Afropolitanism, as it is understood in the West, directly onto Asia than to demonstrate how African literature imagines Asian worlds and, in doing so, redefines what qualifies as “worldliness.” My point of departure, then, is Achille Mbembe’s definition of Afropolitanism as “a cultural, historical, and aesthetic sensitivity” that points to “the interweaving of worlds, in a slow and sometimes incoherent dance with forms and signs . . . , the interweaving of the here and there, the presence of the elsewhere in the here and vice versa” (Mbembe and Chauvet 59–60). If there is one clear takeaway from my essay, it is that the Western subject is no longer the only Other against which postcolonial African identities conceptualize themselves. While such a relational identity is nothing new, I argue that it is time for a radical decentering of the West so that it is no longer the primary point of comparison for postcolonial literature. The two novels I use to support this reading are taken fromWest and East Africa: Guinea-Conakry and Kenya. The first is Ibrahima Soumah’s L’Afrique, un continent en voie de “chinisation” (Africa, a

Comparative Literature, 2020

Research in African Literatures, 2019

Although most scholarship reads Ousmane Sembène's oeuvre according to the dynamic between... more Although most scholarship reads Ousmane Sembène's oeuvre according to the dynamic between colonizer and colonized, this article examines his 1981 novel, Le Dernier de l'empire [The Last of the Empire], through an expanded optic: the global Cold War. The trope's complexity manifests in, for example, references to the Soviet Union, Maoist China, and the Vietnam War, as well as to political instability on the African continent. Sembène demonstrates how the Cold War was not simply an American and Soviet affair through repeated use of the catalogue as literary device. In so doing, the novel interpolates Third Worldism into the Senegalese context. Aesthetically, Sembène blends griot storytelling techniques, flashback (analepsis), and Soviet montage to critique neocolonialism in the postcolony. The narrative depicts the threat of military coup to the succession of power according to how postcolonial actors interpret the Cold War's intellectual and geographic multipolarity. In sum, the novel creolizes the Cold War in both content and form.

Safundi, 2020

The question undergirding Bhakti Shringarpure’s Cold War Assemblages is a deceptively simple one:... more The question undergirding Bhakti Shringarpure’s Cold War Assemblages is a deceptively simple one: why is theorization of the Cold War mostly absent from postcolonial studies? The reason for that ab...

The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2015

Although most all contemporary studies of China and Africa focus on current economic or foreign p... more Although most all contemporary studies of China and Africa focus on current economic or foreign policy concerns, this article provides a preliminary mapping of Africa-China cultural exchanges during the Cold War. Growing out of the Africa-Asia Conference of Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, the Afro-Asian Writers Bureau forged third world solidarities via an alternative conception of postcolonialism based on the transnationalism of global South cultural struggle. By analyzing the cultural exchanges of the bureau, and in particular their definition ofworld literature, this article seeks to move beyond postcolonial scholarship that focuses exclusively on a vertical relationship between the colonizer and colonized. In so doing, it both reinterprets the Cold War from outside of an American and Soviet dichotomy and provides a critical cultural historicization to China’s current, and often controversial, presence in Africa.

Journal of World Literature, 2021

Ufahamu a Journal of African Studies, 2011