WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

Drawing on understudied materials including films, photographs, poems, and radio programs, this panel explores spatial and temporal frameworks in transimperial history. Although the field of transimperial history has grown and shed light on the intertwined natures of multiple empires, it tends to focus on “the high age of empire” at the turn of the twentieth century (Hogason and Sexton 2020). Arguably, conceptual distinctions and convergences among different forms of colonialism also remain understudied. Studies of settler colonialism, other colonial formations, postcoloniality, and decoloniality have often developed in disparate scholarly conversations.

By centering on colonial, postcolonial, and Cold War cultures in East Asia and the transpacific spheres, this panel aims to complicate transnational perspectives on the history of empire and colonialism. Through case studies of colonial Korea and its diaspora, US-occupied Okinawa, and Park Chung Hee-era South Korea, we foreground colonial and postcolonial experiences in transimperial cultures. The unexpected, uneven, and frequently violent encounters that unfolded in these spaces force us to investigate connections across the ostensibly closed borders enforced by the US and Japanese empires. Tracing ideas, images, and sound traveled through literature and mass media, this panel questions how decolonial struggles, the discourse of indigeneity, and Cold War cultures shaped, and were shaped by, transimperial politics. In so doing, we will reveal the continuity and specificity of colonial formations across the geographies and temporalities of empire.

This panel brings together a diverse group of scholars to explore the transnational history connecting the Korean peninsula to the international system, through processes of conflict and cooperation engendered by the Cold War and decolonization. While these diverse papers cover a range of perspectives from diplomatic history to media studies, they share a general focus on the early post-war era on the Korean peninsula and ways in which North and South were affected by and integrated into the international system as they attempted to navigate a perilous Cold War landscape. Collectively the panel presents a transnational and world history perspective on modern Korean history that highlights how key historiographical questions are addressed by examining the interests, conflicts, and agency animating the peninsula’s global linkages.