Jini Watson

Jini Kim Watson

Associate Professor of English

Education

Ph.D. 2006 (Literature) Duke University; B.A. 1997 (English, Hons I) University of Queensland; B.P.D. 1994 (Architecture) University of Melbourne

Areas of Research/Interest

Postcolonial literature and theory; decolonization and the global Cold War; spatial and urban theory; questions of sovereignty and political modernity; Marxism and critical theory; Asia-Pacific literature and cultural studies

External Affiliations

Modern Language Association; American Comparative Literature Association

NYU Affiliations

Department of Comparative Literature

Fellowships/Honors

Honorary Fellow, Research Unit in Public Culture 2014-15 (University of Melbourne); Faculty Fellow, NYU Humanities Initiative 2011-2012; Bass Instructorship (Duke) 2004-05; Korea Foundation Fellowship, 2002; Janet B. Chiang Award (Duke) 2001; University Medal (U of Queensland) 1997.

Bio

Jini Kim Watson received two undergraduate degrees, in architecture and literature, in Australia, before doing her doctoral study at Duke’s Literature Program. Her teaching and research investigate the ways that postcolonial cultural production, including literature, film, and theoretical writings, have reckoned with ongoing questions of decolonization, national and global imaginaries, uneven development and political modernity. Her first book The New Asian City (Minnesota UP, 2011) examined the rise of so-called “Asian Tiger” metropolises through the lenses of colonial history, national imaginaries and Cold War hegemonies. With a focus on East and Southeast Asia, her second monograph Cold War Reckonings (Fordham UP, 2021) explores the way the Cold War shaped both political power and cultural forms of decolonization, tracing a particular genealogy of authoritarianism in the so-called “free world." She has also co-edited, with Gary Wilder, a collected volume of essays, The Postcolonial Contemporary (Fordham UP, 2018), which thinks broadly and self-reflexively about the project of postcolonial studies in our current moment. 

In other work, Jini has written on the films of Tan Pin Pin and Singapore as a model city for the global south; on Hwang Sok-yong and the legacy of the divided Korean peninsula; and on Oceanic literature and sovereignty with regard to Australia’s offshore refugee detention centers. 

Jini regularly teaches undergraduate classes on postcolonial literature and theory, globalization, theories and practices of liberation, and Asia-Pacific literature and film. Recent graduate seminars have included "Global Marxisms," “Cold War/Postcolonial,” “The Postcolonial Contemporary,” and “Literary Dictatorships.” Since arriving at NYU she has been co-convener of the Postcolonial, Race and Diaspora Studies Colloquium, which regularly gathers noted and emerging scholars in the field for discussion and conviviality.

 

 

 

Publications

  • Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization. Forthcoming from Fordham University Press, 2021.
    Cold War Reckonings Book Cover
  • The Postcolonial Contemporary. Co-edited with Gary Wilder. Fordham University Press, 2018.
    The Postcolonial Contemporary
  • The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form.
    University of Minnesota Press, 2011
  • “Separate Futures: Cold War Decolonization in Mohamed Latiff Mohamed’s Confrontation and Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye,” in Discourse: Journal of Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 40.2 (2018): 165-87.
  • “Stories of the State: Literary Form and Authoritarianism in Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War.” Contemporary Literature 58.2 (2017). 262-289.
  • "'We Want You to Ask Us First': Development, International Aid and the Politics of Indebtedness." In Negotiating Normativity: Postcolonial Appropriations, Contestations, and Transformations. Eds. Nikita Dhawan, Elisabeth Fink, Johanna Leinius and Rirhandu Mageza-Barthel. Springer Press, 2016.
  • "Aspirational City: Desiring Singapore and the films of Tan Pin Pin." Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 18.4 (2016): 543-58.
  • "From Pacific Way to Pacific Solution: Sovereignty and Dependence in Oceanic Literature." Australian Humanities Review 58 (2015): 29-49.
  • "A Not-yet-postcolonial Peninsula: Rewriting Spaces of Violence, Division and Diaspora." Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1.1 (2014): 29-49.
  • "A Room in the City: Woman, Interiority, and Postcolonial Korean Fiction." The Domestic Space Reader. Toronto: Toronto University Press. (2012)
  • "Authoritarianism, Cosmopolitanism, Allegory." ARIEL 42.1 (2011): 85-106.
  • "Seoul and Singapore as 'New Asian Cities': Literature, Urban Transformation and the Concentricity of Power." Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 19.1 (2011).
  • "The Way Ahead: The Politics and Poetics of Singapore's Developmental Landscape." Contemporary Literature 49.4 (Winter 2008): 682-711.
  • "Imperial Mimicry, Modernisation Theory and the Contradictions of Postcolonial South Korea." Postcolonial Studies 10.2 (2007): 171-190.