Speaker: Eno Pei-Jean Chen (Associate Professor, Taiwanese Literature at the National Chengchi University)

Description:

This talk speaks to the existing scholarship on "Cultural Cold War" and "Affective Turn" in gender/East Asian Studies, explores the dynamics of intra-East Asian literary contact nebulae. Building on the research approach conducted in my resent monograph Cold War Feelings (2024), this talk will first theorize affect/feeling/emotion as method and historicize it as research subject, for the better understanding of the post-war Taiwanese and South Korean societies, with the issues of the (re)construction of female subjects and Cold War ideology. Furthermore, this talk will demonstrate the historical specificity of 3 kinds of emotion--happiness, shame, and melancholia--and their intersectionality with each other, and the female subjects. Finally, I propose to analyze the historical impact in an intersectional manner in Taiwan and South Korea, with the transnational approach of inter-referencing Taiwan and Korea. My research shows that a broad archive of texts that have mediated the entanglement between East Asian societies, however, were routed through and interrupted by imaginative geographies incommensurate with the nation-state. This approach expects to explore the articulation of the specificities of the Taiwanese and Korean socio-historical situation, and to contrast it against the existing geopolitical referencing systems, as well as the division of gender and feelings.

Speaker's Bio:

Eno Pei Jean Chen is Associate Professor of Taiwanese Literature at the National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. She received her PhD degree from the Dept. of Asian Studies, Cornell University in May 2016. She is the author of Cultural Politics of Love: Colonial Genealogy of Modern Intimate Relationships in Taiwan and Korea (2023) and Cold War Feelings: Politics of Gender and Affect in 1950-1980s’ Taiwan and South Korea (2024). Her current research projects focus on the Cold War genealogy of feminism, and the archival nature of queer cultural history in Taiwan and South Korea.

This lecture is sponsored by a grant from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York and co-organized by the East Asia Program and the Department of Asian Studies.