[KS] CFP for ACLA 2026 Seminar "Korea, East Asia, and the Cold War Politics of Comparison" (Montréal, Canada)

[Lee, HeeJin]

Dear colleagues,

We seek papers for our seminar entitled "Korea, East Asia, and the Cold War Politics of Comparison" for the 2026 Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, to be held at the Palais des congrès de Montréal from February 26 to March 1, 2026. Please make all submissions here by October 2, 2025: https://www.acla.org/<https://www.acla.org/seminar/8d217af9-0c56-49e4-a3b5-648577884efa><https://www.acla.org/seminar/8d217af9-0c56-49e4-a3b5-648577884efa>seminar/8d217af9-0c56-49e4-<https://www.acla.org/seminar/8d217af9-0c56-49e4-a3b5-648577884efa><https://www.acla.org/seminar/8d217af9-0c56-49e4-a3b5-648577884efa>a3b5-648577884efa<https://www.acla.org/seminar/8d217af9-0c56-49e4-a3b5-648577884efa>.

For any questions about the seminar abstract below, please contact co-organizers HeeJin Lee (HEL163 at pitt.edu<https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20124148/(HEL163@pitt.edu>) or Chris Hanscom (hanscom at humnet.ucla.<https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20124148/(hanscom@humnet.ucla.edu><https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20124148/(hanscom@humnet.ucla.edu>edu<https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20124148/(hanscom@humnet.ucla.edu>). For questions about submitting paper proposals to the ACLA, please see https://www.acla.org/<https://www.acla.org/submit-paper-proposal><https://www.acla.org/submit-paper-proposal>submit-paper-proposal<https://www.acla.org/submit-paper-proposal>.
-----
Seminar Abstract for “Korea, East Asia, and the Cold War Politics of Comparison” (ACLA 2026)

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.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20250903/aa7f6c86/attachment.html>