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In recent years, several strands of postcolonial and world literary studies have seen a welcome turn to the conjuncture of decolonisation and the global Cold War. As Peter Kalliney puts it in The Aesthetic Cold War, “the literatures of decolonization and the literatures of the cold war are tightly conjoined, not to be separated, contextually or otherwise.” One prominent line of inquiry has interrogated the legacy of the binary between socialist realism—the official style of the Soviet Union—and modernism—as it “was taken into custodianship” by the US, and how these poles were navigated and contested in the decolonising or non-aligned Third World. This presentation furthers these debates by considering two writers from postcolonial Asia—the Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer and South Korean novelist Hwang Sok-yong—whose work, I argue, has been overdetermined by anti-communist reading practices. Famously, the Indonesian state labelled Pramoedya’s historical fictions as unequivocally “Marxist-Leninist” and imprisoned him for 14 years (1965-79), while Hwang was sentenced to five years in prison (1993-1998) by the South Korean state for his “unauthorised” visit to North Korea. Focusing on these two cases of writerly detention, the paper investigates the postcolonial state’s contradictory mode of reading for literary communism, as well as the way these writers were lauded in human rights discourses as “dissident writers”. This study considers to what extent the intertwined practices of “reading communists” and “reading dissidents” have shaped our global literary histories, and the ways in which these powerful interpretive authorities remain with us today. 

Jini Kim Watson is an Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Transpacific Literatures and Head of the ETS Program at the University of Melbourne. Her scholarship and teaching focus on postcolonial literature and theory; decolonisation and the global Cold War in Asia; authoritarianism; transpacific migration; and the urban humanities. She is the author of two monographs: Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (Fordham UP, 2021) – which received honourable mentions from both the Modern Language Association and the American Comparative Literature Association -- and The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (U of Minnesota Press, 2011). She has also co-edited several volumes including, with Gary Wilder, The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (Fordham UP 2018); with Ato Quayson, The Cambridge Companion to the City and World Literature (Cambridge UP 2023); and, with Rashmi Varma, Ends of the Global City (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). Her current book project explores the concept, practice and aesthetics of global anti-communism.