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KK 1 2024-2025 CFP Reading Fredric Jameson in Asia

Call for Papers: Forum Kritika on Reading Fredric Jameson in Asia: Marxism, Literature, and Postmodernism

Kritika Kultura, the online peer-reviewed international journal on literary and cultural studies, invites interested scholars to submit manuscripts to a Forum Kritika special section on the theme “Reading Fredric Jameson in Asia: Marxism, Literature, and Postmodernism.” It welcomes contributions from a broad range of interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives deploying current or innovative methodologies to develop new insights into its theme.

In 2024, Fredric Jameson, the influential American literary critic and political theorist, passed away at the age of 90. His death prompted numerous retrospectives on his intellectual legacy across various publications. This Forum Kritika seeks to examine that legacy from perspectives coming from Asia highlighting often-overlooked aspects of Jameson’s work. In his career, “Asia” and the “Third World” played a palpable if often invisible role in shaping Jameson’s theory and criticism, a contribution that deserves greater recognition and analysis.

Even posthumously, Jameson remains a towering Marxist figure in contemporary critical theory whose work has profoundly influenced postwar Asian comparative literature and cultural studies. Known for his incisive analyses of postmodernism, capitalism, and cultural production, Jameson’s theories have resonated deeply within these fields, offering scholars robust frameworks for understanding the complex relationships between culture, ideology, and economic systems—particularly within the context of global capitalism. Central to his contributions is the concept of the “political unconscious,” which argues that all cultural texts are inherently ideological and must be interpreted in relation to their socio-economic contexts. This concept has become an essential tool for scholars analyzing literature and cultural artifacts, enabling them to uncover the deeper ideological underpinnings of cultural expressions.

Before World War II, part of the intellectual landscape of critical theory in Asia was heavily influenced by European philosophers such as Georg Lukács and Martin Heidegger, whose ideas eventually shaped the region’s intellectual discourse. However, the postwar era brought significant changes. The neo-colonial and decolonization processes and the formation of new nation-states in Asia led to the emergence of ethnographic and anthropological concerns, which were often accompanied by ideological distortions as nations struggled to define their postcolonial identities while grappling with the pervasive influence of Western thought. In this context, Jameson’s work has become historically significant. His critique of Western modernity, coupled with his insights into the global spread of capitalism, provided alternative frameworks that resonated with scholars seeking to understand the cultural and ideological shifts taking place in postwar Asia. The continued influence of pre-World War II literary studies in Asia likely contributed to the growing interest in Jameson’s theories, as scholars looked for new ways to engage with the complexities of the postwar world and struggled to define “World Literature” which had also been geopolitically carved-up by the Cold War.

The reception of Jameson’s work in Asia, however, has not been without challenges. In South Korea, for example, the stringent censorship of the Cold War era rendered much of Jameson’s work, especially his Marxist inclinations, politically unacceptable in its original form. Translations were often altered to remove references to Marxism or Lenin, reflecting the political sensitivities of the time. Despite these obstacles, Jameson’s ideas have had a lasting impact on Asian comparative literature and cultural studies. His work is particularly valued for its critique of capitalist culture and its provision of alternative critical perspectives on existing systems of representation, especially in the context of the U.S.-dominated postwar world order. Southeast Asia, including the Philippines and Indonesia, was equally inhospitable to Jameson’s works owing to the Cold War ideology that dominated the region in the wake of international upheavals like the war of liberation in Vietnam, the 1965 coup in Indonesia, and the Martial Law in the Philippines. With the introduction of new theoretical approaches in literary studies from European thinkers, literary studies in the Philippines began to take a critical turn in certain sectors of local intellectuals in academia. This turn moved away from the “formalist” and empirical bent of Anglo-American Criticism which dominated English and Literature departments. With the anti-fascist, anti-feudal, and anti-US imperialist calls of the mass movement fighting for national liberation, “activist” criticism broke open the dominant practice of “close reading” to the winds of history, which would plant the seeds for broadening the horizons of literary studies into critical theory and cultural studies. Erstwhile deep in Mao’s “Talks on the Yenan Forum on Literature” in the early 1970, activist criticism began to be inspired by theories from intellectuals and artists from other national liberation movements even as ideas started to be drawn from the “West,” like German and French philosophical ideas in general, and in particular, from Jameson’s Marxism and Form in the mid-1970s and eventually, to The Political Unconscious in the 1980s with his dialectical method, interpretive framework, and historical perspective, as the Marcos dictatorship began to teeter toward its end.

Nevertheless, Jameson’s exploration of the cultural logic of late capitalism has equipped Asian scholars with the tools to challenge dominant narratives and to investigate the intersections of global and local cultural dynamics. His influence remains potent as scholars continue to engage with his theories to better understand the complexities of postcolonial identity, cultural representation, and the ongoing impact of globalization.

Against this rich intellectual backdrop, this special issue aims to shed light on the theories of Jameson, whose 90th birthday is celebrated in 2024, from the vantage point of Asia. The construction of the postwar world system was deeply intertwined with U.S. dominance in the Asia-Pacific region, and the subsequent processes of globalization cannot be fully comprehended without considering the geopolitical dynamics involving Northeast and Southeast Asia. This issue seeks to explore how Jameson’s critical trajectory engages with these geopolitical realities and to assess the tangible impact of his theories on comparative literature, cultural studies, and the broad field of interdisciplinary studies across these regions.

We invite contributions that explore, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• The application of Jameson’s theories to the analysis of Asian literature and cultural artifacts.
• Jameson’s influence on the development of postcolonial theory in Asian contexts.
• The intersection of Jameson’s critiques of late capitalism with the socio-economic realities of Northeast and Southeast Asia.
• Comparative studies examining the reception of Jameson’s work across different Asian countries.
• The role of censorship and political climate in the translation and adaptation of Jameson’s Marxism in Asia.
• Case studies exploring how Jameson’s concept of the “political unconscious” has been used to analyse specific cultural texts in Asia.
• The relevance of Jameson’s discussion of postmodernism to contemporary Asian cultural production.
• The possibilities and limits of Jameson’s critical theory in the understanding Asia’s historical and cultural diversity, specificity, and complexity.

We welcome submissions that engage with these themes and contribute to a deeper understanding of Fredric Jameson’s impact on Asian comparative literature and cultural studies.

Timeline:

1. December 31, 2024: submission of abstract (200 to 250 words) and a bionote (100 to 150 words). Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be informed by January 2025. Abstracts should be submitted to Maria Luisa Torres Reyes (lu2reyes3x@gmail.com) and Alex Taek-Gwang Lee (tglee@khu.ac.kr), cc kk@ateneo.edu. Use the subject heading Reading Jameson in Asia.
2. April 30, 2025: deadline of completed manuscript; manuscripts (7,000 to 8,000 words) should be in MLA 9th ed, and be submitted in a Microsoft Word file.
3. May to August 2025: evaluation and revision period
4. September 2025: deadline of final version of articles
5. October 2025: production work
6. Target publication date: November 2025

Maria Luisa T. Reyes        Alex Taek-Gwang Le
lu2reyes3x@gmail.com       tglee@khu.ac.kr
University of Santo Tomas     Kyung-Hee University
Manila, Philippines         Seoul, South Korea

PUBLICATION ANNOUNCEMENT: KK 44 and New Website

The editors of Kritika Kultura are delighted to announce the publication of its 44th issue (July 2024) and its new website. Composed of ten entries, KK 44 may now be read on Archium (archium.ateneo.edu/kk).

The regular section, edited by Ma. Gabriela P. Martin and Jocelyn Martin, has four articles. It includes “Green Buddhism’ and W.S. Merwin’s Eco-poetry” by Jiyong Gen and Jie Zhang, “Give My Heart Ease: Filiality and Responsibility in Clarissa in Light of Levinasian and Confucian Ethics” by Ying Xiong, “Photographic Power: Scenes from the United States and the Philippines” by Vicente L. Rafael, and “The Importance of Bearing Witness in Edwin Cameron’s Witness to AIDS (2005)” by Oscar Ortega Montero. These articles respectively delve into ecological interconnectedness, rejection of anthropocentrism, and importance of nature; conflicts and confluences between Levinasian and Confucian thought; the “dialectical workings of photographic images”; and the connections “between whiteness, privilege, and access to life-saving drugs” and their roles in the “on-going construction of democratic and transparent post-Apartheid South Africa.”

The New Scholars Forum features Nguyen Dang Huu’s ethnographic fieldwork and interviews among members of the Danang estuary in Central Vietnam. The work argues for “the importance of intersubjectivity, communication, and social interaction in the agency and transition of the sacred” and underscores the constancy of the sacred in human life.

The second part of Forum Kritika on Mobility in Islandic Geographies and Textual Representations in Literature, Culture, and Media Forms brings together a batch of articles from the 2023 Global Mobility Humanities Conference held at Konkuk University (Seoul, ROK). Guest edited by Maria Luisa Torres Reyes and Luisa L. Gomez, the forum publishes “YouTube Digital Storytelling of Korean Uninhabited Islands” by Jooyoung Kim, “A Phenomenological Study of Islandness as a Global Sense of Place: Focusing on the Animated Film Moana” by Taehee Kim, and “The Geopolitical Configuration of Okinawa in Post-War Japan: Focusing on Tatsuhiro Oshiro’s The Cocktail Party” by Yeonhee Woo. In their introduction, Reyes and Gomez underscore the intersection between island studies and mobility studies, an emerging interdiscipline that promises to trace how “historical, cultural, political, and digital forces shape the experiences and representations of island inhabitants in dynamics that are multiple and complex” as illustrated by the authors in their respective analyses of digital representations of uninhabited islands; the islandic sense of place, which may be located between “isolation and connectedness;” and the literary indexing of fraught geopolitical history of islands.

Completing KK 44 is the literary section edited by Martin Villanueva, which features “Water Memory” by Jessa C. Suganob. The work interfuses personal history, engagements with photography, and a reflection on the hazards of climate change deforestation in Misamis Oriental.

The editors are also pleased to inform the contributors and readers of Kritika Kultura that the old issues (i.e., KK 1 to 43) will also be available soon on the new website (archium.ateneo.edu/kk). For inquiries, please contact the editors at kk@ateneo.edu. Acknowledged by Asian and Asian American Studies libraries and scholarly networks, Kritika Kultura is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Clarivate), Scopus, EBSCO, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP). Kritika Kultura is published thrice a year by the Literary and Cultural Studies Program in the School of Humanities, Ateneo de Manila University and is a founding member of the Asian Journals Network.