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Books by Jini Kim Watson
Cold War Reckonings Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization, 2021
How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to... more How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form of liberal democracy, but rather the result of Cold War entanglements with decolonization.
Focusing on East and Southeast Asia, the book scrutinizes cultural texts ranging from dissident poetry, fiction, and writers’ conference proceedings of the Cold War period, to more recent literature, graphic novels, and films that retrospectively look back to these decades with a critical eye. Paying particular attention to anti-communist repression and state infrastructures of violence, the book provides a richaccount of several U.S.–allied Cold War regimes in the Asia Pacific, including the South Korean military dictatorship, Marcos’ rule in the Philippines, illiberal Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, and Suharto’s Indonesia.
Watson’s book argues that the cultural forms and narrative techniques that emerged from the Cold War-decolonizing matrix offer new ways of comprehending these histories and connecting them to our present. The book advances our understanding of the global reverberations of the Cold War and its enduring influence on cultural and political formations in the Asia Pacific.
Cold War Reckonings is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.
Recommended Citation
Watson, Jini Kim, "Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization" (2021). Literature. 23.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/lit/23
In The New Asian City, Jini Kim Watson provides an innovative approach to how we might better und... more In The New Asian City, Jini Kim Watson provides an innovative approach to how we might better understand the gleaming Asian Tiger metropolises of Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore. In doing so, Watson demonstrates how reading cultural production in conjunction with built environments can enrich our knowledge of the lived consequences of rapid economic and urban development. (From U Minnesota Press description)
Papers by Jini Kim Watson
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jul 31, 2023
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jul 31, 2023
American Literary History
This essay analyses Harsha Walia’s 2021 book Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and t... more This essay analyses Harsha Walia’s 2021 book Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. It discusses the way Walia boldly recasts today’s “migration crisis” less as a problem “at the border,” and more in terms of its enmeshment with the logics of neoliberal capitalism. Deploying a framework of global comparativity and interdisciplinarity—and written in a steady tone of outrage—Walia reads the operations of contemporary border regimes through, on the one hand, global histories of racial exclusions and, on the other, modes of neoliberal labor exploitation. While valuable for its global scope and the synthetic labor of its analyses, Walia’s study devotes less attention to the nature of resistances and solidarities needed to combat the interlocking regimes of bordering, citizenship exclusions, extractive violence, ecofascisms, and renovated racisms. Nevertheless, Walia raises pertinent questions for literary studies about how different disciplines...
The Postcolonial Contemporary
To invoke the “postcolonial contemporary” is simultaneously to offer a proposition and to raise a... more To invoke the “postcolonial contemporary” is simultaneously to offer a proposition and to raise a question. It is an invitation to recognize and reflect upon the emphatically postcolonial character of the contemporary conjuncture as well as to inquire into whether postcolonial criticism can adequately grasp it. This introductory essay explores, on the one hand, how new historical situations require different analytic frameworks and, on the other, that grasping the political present requires close attention to historical continuities, repetitions, and reactivations. Neither simply for nor against postcolonialism, the volume seeks to cut across this false alternative. Our aim is to think with postcolonial theory about political contemporaneity.
The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, 2016
The Postcolonial Contemporary
The Postcolonial Contemporary, 2018
This chapter analyzes recent cultural production that "looks back" on the Cold War capi... more This chapter analyzes recent cultural production that "looks back" on the Cold War capitalist-authoritarian postcolonial regimes of South Korea and Singapore: Hwang Sŏk-yŏng’s fictionalization of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising in The Old Garden [Oraedoin Chŏngwŏn] (2000), and Tan Pin Pin’s banned documentary on political exiles, To Singapore with Love (2014). Both texts invite us to reckon with state violence, imprisonment and political exile from “the wrong side of history,” that is, from the perspective of political dissidents, communists, and student leaders whom neoliberal History can only view as anachronistic and superfluous to the arrival of capitalist modernity. The essay argues for the figure of anachronism as an aesthetic strategy which indexes the fraught continuities between an apparently “past” era of decolonization and our neoliberal present. It rethinks the tasks of postcolonial theory in light of Cold War bipolarity, and explores the way residues of imagined fut...
Negotiating Normativity, 2016
This essay argues for a turn to literary representation as a means to scrutinize the ideological ... more This essay argues for a turn to literary representation as a means to scrutinize the ideological forms and effects of postcolonial indebtedness. Drawing also from the insights of anthropology, gender studies, and legal scholarship, I explore the way that aid mechanisms have restructured ‘First World’ and ‘Third World’ hierarchies in the wake of formal colonialism, producing a new reckoning of guilt, debt, and burden for the postcolonial era.
Cold War Reckonings Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization, 2021
How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to... more How did the Cold War shape culture and political power in decolonizing countries and give rise to authoritarian regimes in the so-called free world? Cold War Reckonings tells a new story about the Cold War and the global shift from colonialism to independent nation-states. Assembling a body of transpacific cultural works that speak to this historical conjuncture, Jini Kim Watson reveals autocracy to be not a deficient form of liberal democracy, but rather the result of Cold War entanglements with decolonization.
Focusing on East and Southeast Asia, the book scrutinizes cultural texts ranging from dissident poetry, fiction, and writers’ conference proceedings of the Cold War period, to more recent literature, graphic novels, and films that retrospectively look back to these decades with a critical eye. Paying particular attention to anti-communist repression and state infrastructures of violence, the book provides a richaccount of several U.S.–allied Cold War regimes in the Asia Pacific, including the South Korean military dictatorship, Marcos’ rule in the Philippines, illiberal Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, and Suharto’s Indonesia.
Watson’s book argues that the cultural forms and narrative techniques that emerged from the Cold War-decolonizing matrix offer new ways of comprehending these histories and connecting them to our present. The book advances our understanding of the global reverberations of the Cold War and its enduring influence on cultural and political formations in the Asia Pacific.
Cold War Reckonings is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.
Recommended Citation
Watson, Jini Kim, "Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization" (2021). Literature. 23.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/lit/23
In The New Asian City, Jini Kim Watson provides an innovative approach to how we might better und... more In The New Asian City, Jini Kim Watson provides an innovative approach to how we might better understand the gleaming Asian Tiger metropolises of Seoul, Taipei, and Singapore. In doing so, Watson demonstrates how reading cultural production in conjunction with built environments can enrich our knowledge of the lived consequences of rapid economic and urban development. (From U Minnesota Press description)
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jul 31, 2023
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jul 31, 2023
American Literary History
This essay analyses Harsha Walia’s 2021 book Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and t... more This essay analyses Harsha Walia’s 2021 book Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. It discusses the way Walia boldly recasts today’s “migration crisis” less as a problem “at the border,” and more in terms of its enmeshment with the logics of neoliberal capitalism. Deploying a framework of global comparativity and interdisciplinarity—and written in a steady tone of outrage—Walia reads the operations of contemporary border regimes through, on the one hand, global histories of racial exclusions and, on the other, modes of neoliberal labor exploitation. While valuable for its global scope and the synthetic labor of its analyses, Walia’s study devotes less attention to the nature of resistances and solidarities needed to combat the interlocking regimes of bordering, citizenship exclusions, extractive violence, ecofascisms, and renovated racisms. Nevertheless, Walia raises pertinent questions for literary studies about how different disciplines...
The Postcolonial Contemporary
To invoke the “postcolonial contemporary” is simultaneously to offer a proposition and to raise a... more To invoke the “postcolonial contemporary” is simultaneously to offer a proposition and to raise a question. It is an invitation to recognize and reflect upon the emphatically postcolonial character of the contemporary conjuncture as well as to inquire into whether postcolonial criticism can adequately grasp it. This introductory essay explores, on the one hand, how new historical situations require different analytic frameworks and, on the other, that grasping the political present requires close attention to historical continuities, repetitions, and reactivations. Neither simply for nor against postcolonialism, the volume seeks to cut across this false alternative. Our aim is to think with postcolonial theory about political contemporaneity.
The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, 2016
The Postcolonial Contemporary
The Postcolonial Contemporary, 2018
This chapter analyzes recent cultural production that "looks back" on the Cold War capi... more This chapter analyzes recent cultural production that "looks back" on the Cold War capitalist-authoritarian postcolonial regimes of South Korea and Singapore: Hwang Sŏk-yŏng’s fictionalization of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising in The Old Garden [Oraedoin Chŏngwŏn] (2000), and Tan Pin Pin’s banned documentary on political exiles, To Singapore with Love (2014). Both texts invite us to reckon with state violence, imprisonment and political exile from “the wrong side of history,” that is, from the perspective of political dissidents, communists, and student leaders whom neoliberal History can only view as anachronistic and superfluous to the arrival of capitalist modernity. The essay argues for the figure of anachronism as an aesthetic strategy which indexes the fraught continuities between an apparently “past” era of decolonization and our neoliberal present. It rethinks the tasks of postcolonial theory in light of Cold War bipolarity, and explores the way residues of imagined fut...
Negotiating Normativity, 2016
This essay argues for a turn to literary representation as a means to scrutinize the ideological ... more This essay argues for a turn to literary representation as a means to scrutinize the ideological forms and effects of postcolonial indebtedness. Drawing also from the insights of anthropology, gender studies, and legal scholarship, I explore the way that aid mechanisms have restructured ‘First World’ and ‘Third World’ hierarchies in the wake of formal colonialism, producing a new reckoning of guilt, debt, and burden for the postcolonial era.