Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Lee Hsiao Yen Fiona, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

During the much-televised 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, the world became briefly obsessed by the figure of the aging Third World dictator, stubbornly and anachronistically surviving into the twenty-first century. Yet, the postcolonial authoritarian leader is hardly a distant memory or an isolated phenomenon; from the 1960s to the 1980s, nearly all decolonizing nation-states across Africa, Asia and Latin America experienced military coup d’etats, dictatorships and states of emergency. This paper revisits two authoritarian-capitalist regimes of the 1960s to 1980s—that of Park Chung Hee of South Korea, and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines—to attend to the way cultural producers made sense of the historical transformation to dictatorship, as well as the revolutionary actions that overcame them.

This presentation compares two prominent literary responses to the Park and Marcos regimes—Kim Chi-ha’s narrative poem Five Thieves [O jok] (1970) and Ninotchka Rosca’s novel State of War (1988)—for the way they theorize links between decolonization, capitalist development and dictatorship. Challenging the widespread representational model of the Third World despot who stands in for all that is wrong with the postcolony, these texts delineate a more complex notion of tyranny in terms of the specific technologies of the postcolonial state—a political modality birthed by colonial rule, captured by the political elite at independence, and enmeshed within in the Asia/Pacific Cold War inter-state system. At the same time, by re-envisioning social agency at scales both smaller and larger than the nation-state, these works make visible new terrains and possibilities of liberatory practice that go beyond Western prescriptions for open markets and liberal democracy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jini Kim Watson is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University, and currently Honorary Fellow in the School of Culture and Communications, University of Melbourne. She works on Asia/Pacific postcolonial literature and culture with a focus on urban and political modernities. She is the author of The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (Minnesota, 2011), which has just been translated into Korean. Her articles have appeared in positions: east asia cultures critique, Contemporary Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Studies and other journals. She is currently working on two projects: a book about the literatures of postcolonial authoritarianism, and an inter-disciplinary collected volume entitled Critical Horizons: The Postcolonial Contemporary, co-edited with Gary Wilder.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP to Ms Tay Minghua via email: minghua.tay@nus.edu.sg.