In “Extra-canonical Literary Texts and the Politics of Discarded Texts in Yŏldae Munhwa-Cultura Tropical,” JinAeng Choi analyzes the Korean-Brazilian literary coterie magazine Yŏldae Munhwa-Cultura Tropical (Sao Paulo, 1986–2013) as an extra-canonical archival site where the boundaries of literature are negotiated. Often treated simply as a repository of overseas Korean writing or as evidence of immigrant experience, researchers have tended to focus on a limited set of poems and short stories, while the heterogeneous materials that fill its pages—translations, editorial discussions, and mixed-genre work written in multiple vernaculars—have been overlooked. Choi instead foregrounds these “discarded texts,” arguing that their marginalization reveals the hierarchies of value that structure diasporic print culture and the persistence of monolingual, nation-centered assumptions about literary legitimacy.
Dasom Han in “Who Counts as a ‘Disabled Writer’: Archival Critique of Sottae P’yŏngnon,” examines Sottae P’yŏngnon (2017–), a Korean literary magazine dedicated to disabled literature, as a key site for understanding how the category of “disabled literature” is produced and regulated in contemporary Korea. Han reads the magazine not simply as a venue of inclusion but as a contested archive whose editorial and paratextual practices shape what counts as “disabled literature.” Focusing on the specification of contributors’ disability types, Han shows how the magazine consolidates disability identity and community even as it produces a normative taxonomy that regulates legibility and authorship, exposing the gap between representational inclusion and infrastructural exclusion and revealing how literary periodicals actively constitute and constrain the formation of genre, community, and canon.
Wookyung Jeong, in “Literary Articles in Revue de Corée and the Circulation of Korean Literature in France,” examines Revue de Corée (1969–1997), the French-language journal of Korean studies founded with support from the Korean National Commission for UNESCO. Instead of viewing the journal simply as an information source, Jeong reads it as an archival space that actively shaped the framing and legibility of Korean literature in France. Taking translation as a central axis, Jeong places Revue de Corée within broader institutional networks of overseas Korean studies. By closely analyzing literary articles published in the journal, compiling bibliographic data on literature-related contributions, and identifying the sources of translated texts, Jeong suggests that Revue de Corée served as a crucial archival platform that helped establish and continually redefine the boundaries and place of “Korean literature.”
In “Pahk Induk’s Lecture Series and the Cold War Radio Archive of VOA Broadcasting,” Jina Kim examines the Korean-language desk of the Voice of America (VOA) during the early Cold War and Korean War years (1948–1953) as an archive whose uneven preservation exposes the ways Cold War media institutions shaped what counted as culture. Showing that the VOA archive retains traces of Korean cultural labor while often obscuring the identities of those who wrote, translated, and voiced these programs, Kim reads the VOA Korean desk as a transpacific serial archive whose gaps reveal how Cold War institutions made Korean cultural labor audible yet unevenly legible. Against these broader silences, she reads the surviving lecture series of author and educator Pahk Induk (1896–1980) as a rare instance of legible diasporic intellectual authorship, thereby offering a critical lens on how Cold War institutions such as the VOA produced and constrained Korean cultural legibility.
Together, these papers demonstrate that serial publications are not only sources for literary study but dynamic archival forms that produce—and contest—regimes of visibility, value, and belonging. By shifting the analysis to infrastructures of circulation, the session proposes archival critique as a methodological framework for rethinking periodization, canon formation, and the global contours of Korean literary history.
A primary value of the proposed session is bringing together scholars working on a diversity of archives, across an array of geographic and linguistic areas. Though for this reason we have chosen to invite four presenters, we plan to limit each presentation to 12 minutes each, allowing time for a brief formal response and leaving at least 30 minutes for unstructured discussion