This session investigates Cold War Hong Kong as a unique literary and cultural space where Chinese exiled writers simultaneously negotiated political constraint, economic survival, and personal creative agency. Situated between the ideological poles of Communist China and the U.S.-led liberal capitalist world, British Hong Kong became a liminal territory that hosted displaced intellectuals, editors, and translators who sought to preserve cultural continuity while adapting to the realities of exile. Through examining the intersection of politics, economics, and literary production, this panel asks how writers crafted emancipatory narratives as both existential projects and negotiated compromises under Cold War conditions.

The proposed session aligns with the MLA 2027 Presidential Theme,Emancipatory Narratives, by exploring how exiled writers in Cold War Hong Kong fashioned literary projects that negotiated political constraint and material precarity while imagining, scripting, and enacting forms of cultural and personal emancipation. Rather than understanding “emancipation” as a simple escape from politics, the session highlights incremental, contingent forms of freedom sought through publishing, translation, and editorial work.

Organizing a session on this topic is timely for several reasons. First, despite growing academic interest in Cold War cultural studies and Sinophone modernities, the Hong Kong dimension remains comparatively underexplored within literary scholarship. Much existing work on Cold War cultural diplomacy focuses on East Asia’s metropolitan centers—Tokyo, Taipei, or Seoul—leaving Hong Kong’s hybrid colonial environment and multilingual literary production marginal. Second, by foregrounding Hong Kong’s exiled literati, the session reframes the colony not merely as a peripheral refuge but as a critical mediator within transpacific intellectual circuits, where narratives of emancipation were negotiated through everyday practices of writing for hire, editing journals, and translating texts. Third, the panel expands the understanding of “literary agency” under Cold War conditions by revealing how acts of translation, editing, and publishing constituted forms of survival and subtle resistance that complicate conventional binaries of collaboration versus dissent.

This session will feature four 12-minute papers followed by at least 15 minutes of open discussion, ensuring direct engagement among speakers and attendees.

Each paper examines a different facet of how Cold War Hong Kong’s literati balanced political limitation with personal pursuit, collectively offering a layered account of emancipatory cultural work across ideological lines.

The first paper,“Taking Advantage of the Dollar: A Case Study of Platitude Press in the Cold War Context, 1950–1954”, analyzes the Platitude Press as a case of local intellectuals navigating U.S.-commissioned literary translation in early Cold War Hong Kong. Rather than viewing American financial support as a one-way imposition, it reconstructs the interactive, negotiated relationship between the U.S. and Hong Kong translators, revealing a more complex history of cultural diplomacy in Cold War Hong Kong.

The second paper,“Co-opted Resistance: The Translation of Surrealism in Cold War Hong Kong’s Wenyi Xinchao (1956–1959)”, focuses on a self-consciously nonaligned literary magazine that sought to resist both left- and right-wing propaganda organs. By tracing its translations of Surrealist poetry and their later reception, the paper shows how acts of resistance to dominant power structures could be subtly co-opted—feeding a depoliticized modernism that converged with U.S.-promoted narratives, even as recent mainland scholarship retrospectively recodes these translations as a continuation of Chinese modernism.

The third paper,“Negotiating ‘Freedom’ in Cold War Hong Kong: Exiled Chinese Intellectuals and the Translation of Freedom and Culture (1954)”, examines the USIS-sponsored Chinese translation of John Dewey’s Freedom and Culture by exiled translators Lin Yiliang and Lou Yizhe. Through archival, paratextual, and textual analysis, it shows how “freedom” was rearticulated as a contingent, locally mediated practice that addressed refugee intellectuals’ concerns with censorship, livelihood, and cultural continuity in a liminal colonial entrepôt.

Extending the timeline into the era of decolonization, the fourth paper, “Translation as Decolonial Praxis: The Eastern Horizon’s Intercultural Mediation in Postcolonial Hong Kong (1960–1981)”, turns toThe Eastern Horizon as a platform for translating non-Western literatures and publishing original Hong Kong and overseas Chinese writing. It argues that the journal’s multilingual, cross-regional editorial practices enacted translation as decolonial mediation, challenging Eurocentric hierarchies and fostering solidarities among postcolonial subjects.

Chronologically arranged, the four papers trace a trajectory from early Cold War patronage to nonaligned aesthetic experiment, to the localization of liberal thought, and finally to explicitly decolonial translational practice. The panel brings together scholars at different career stages and based in multiple regions, working across literary history, translation studies, and intellectual history, thereby incorporating a diversity of institutional locations, methods, and perspectives on Hong Kong’s long Cold War and its aftermath.