East/West comparison focused on genres, canons, and concepts of poetics has served to give comparative literature a place in Asian academia. But that model of comparison has its limits. Looking to the long history of writing on the Asian continent, do we not see definitions of "literature" that vary from the European standard, as well as modes of circulation not anticipated elsewhere? The models and logics of comparison offered by the literatures of East Asia, Northeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia not only expands the reach of the discipline but modifies accounts of national literary history that are current on the continent by emphasizing exchange and adaptation rather than offering nativist genealogies. For this panel, case studies of intra-Asian literary relationships, from the beginnings of writing to the present, are invited, with the particular aim of clarifying general dynamics of cultural growth.

In contemporary America, Chinese and African Americans are two significant minority groups with a closely intertwined history of racial power struggles. The memoir Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward, a two-time National Book Award-winning African American author, vividly recreates the life of African Americans in the southern United States during the latter half of the twentieth century. By examining the elements of Chinese kung fu in the book, one can observe how Ward uses martial arts as a philosophy of life and cultural practice to shape Black identity, strengthen community ties, and promote social progress. Ward's work is not only a personal historical reflection but also a tribute to and exploration of how African Americans have harnessed the cultural power of kung fu in their struggle for freedom and equality.

Party document is not simply an ideology but also forms a discourse. The paper examines the debate within the Manchuria Branch of the Chinese Communist Party (MCP) over the nature of collective hamlet (集团部落) during the Japanese colonization of Manchuria. The collective hamlet was a colonial mechanism that controled landless Chinese peasants whose land had been expropriated by the colonial agencies. It describes how the Party was split around the question of the mobilization of the Chinese hamlet residents. What was crucial, as I argue, was the uneasy reconciliation of national revolution with the Party’s rigid borrowing and adaption of class struggle from orthodoxy Marxism represented by Comintern. In the early twentieth century, emphasis on the integration of the masses into anti-imperialist struggle was circulated globally against colonialism and capitalism. This left internationalism discourse, advocated by Comintern, bypassed the orthodoxy Marxist typology of revolutionary class in favor of nationalism nurtured in the local context to galvanize national revolutions against the capitalist world order. The ambiguity arisen created confusion for the MCP in designing its revolutionary strategy with respect to the mobilization of the expropriated Chinese residents, who were loosely tagged as lumpenproletariat and did not belong to orthodox Marxism’s classical interpretation of revolutionary agent. The Party managed to situate the spoiling of collective hamlets at the interstitial space between the sphere of economic social relations and that of the national imaginary. This study reexamines the ideological underpinnings of the Party’s documents compared with orthodoxy Marxism, calling for a nuanced understanding of the complicity between nation and capital that shored up the complicated forms of dominance in the colonized Manchuria.

Literary scholarship has long characterized Korea's colonial period (1910-1945) as an era of modernist literature heavily influenced by mainstream European literary traditions. However, this perspective overlooks significant evidence of transcolonial solidarity during this period. While Korean literary modernism undoubtedly engaged with German, French, Russian, and English literary traditions, this study highlights one of the less acknowledged but crucial influences: Indian literature. Beyond the well-documented impact of Tagore's poem, “The Lamp of the East,” on Korean writers of the time, this research examines the significant role of another Indian poet who was translated and widely read during this period: Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949).

Naidu’s poetry and political activism was widely known internationally during her time. Korea was no exception, and Naidu’s involvement with India’s independence movement as well as her role as a suffragist and feminist was reported in newspapers and discussed by writers in literary magazines. Naidu's influence on Korean modernist writers of the early 20th century demonstrates that the colonial period was not merely an era of blind Westernization. Rather, the patterns of literary study and emulation during this time reveal deliberate expressions of transcolonial solidarity. This framework can be extended to Korean writers' engagement with the Harlem Renaissance or the Irish Literary Revival, which should be understood not as instances of reception of the Western powers, but as manifestations of lateral interest between colonized peoples. Current scholarship often categorizes the study of Indian, Irish, and Black Renaissance literature under the broad umbrella of "English literature," effectively mislabeling these works and obscuring their original anti-colonial intentions. This research thus challenges such notions to reconsider how to categorize and understand colonial Korean writers' approach to global literatures.

This paper examines Naidu’s reception in literary magazines and newspapers of colonial Korea, analyzing how Korean writers engaged with both her poetry and political activism. Choi Young-sook’s travel writing and interview with Naidu and Gandhi (Samcheolli 1932), Lee Ha-Yoon’s survey of Naidu’s work (Dong-A Daily 1930), and Kim Eok’s translations of Naidu’s poetry (Kaebyeok 1922) are examples of cases which reveal how Korean intellectuals selectively translated and interpreted Naidu’s work to construct networks of anti-colonial solidarity. By examining these intra-Asian literary connections, this research contributes to a broader understanding of how colonized nations developed horizontal relationships through literary exchange.