"Cold War Authoritarianism and the 'Third World' Dissident Novel"

NOVEL THEORY

SPEAKER: Jini Kim Watson, New York University

How did the Cold War shape political modernity in the decolonizing world, and what do literature and literary genres reveal about such political contestations and their afterlives? Jini Kim Watson will give a brief overview of literary-aesthetic genres that emerge from, and reflect upon, the entanglement of the Cold War and decolonization in East and Southeast Asia. She will then consider two novelists from the region: Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Indonesia) and Ninotchka Rosca (Philippines), whose works challenge Cold War liberal, human-rights notions of the dissident Third World writer via their emphases on recursive histories, incomplete decolonization and bipolar economic restructuring. Such an analysis helps parse the way Cold War exigencies reshaped notions of literary and political freedom in postcolonial Asia.

About the Speaker

Jini Kim Watson is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University, and currently Director of Graduate Studies (MA program) and Deputy Chair of English. Her book, Cold War Reckonings (Fordham UP, 2021), received an Honorable Mention for the 2022 René Wellek Prize from the ACLA. She is also the author of The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (Minnesota UP, 2011). In addition, she has co-edited two volumes: The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present with Gary Wilder (Fordham UP, 2018), and The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literature, with Ato Quayson, forthcoming from Cambridge UP.