WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

How do global connections persist when borders harden — through war, empire, and coercive social orders? This panel examines three forms of circulation that survive under constraint: information, gendered labor, and cultural memory. Emma Allen reconstructs Operation Mincemeat (1943) to show how wartime deception moved through indirect channels — neutral Spain, forged documents, and carefully staged credibility — and evaluates Montagu's postwar memoir as a curated account shaped by censorship and self-presentation. Sarah Bryant Genung argues that patriarchy is a historically constructed system maintained through coercion and the control of women's labor, developing this claim through two comparative case studies: the formalization of gender hierarchy under Roman imperial law and the Japanese military comfort women system as state-organized sexual exploitation. Daniel Mayfield traces the biwa — a traditional Japanese lute and storytelling medium — from its courtly and martial traditions through its postwar decline and contemporary revival through cross-genre adaptation, arguing that the instrument's portability made it a durable vehicle for cultural memory across disruption. Dylan Deman grounds the panel in lived experience, drawing on oral testimony and survivor accounts to examine how ordinary Japanese civilians narrated the destruction wrought by war and the atomic bombings, arguing that civilians bear the true cost of imperial ambition. Together, these papers reveal a shared dynamic: when borders close, networks do not disappear — they reroute through shadow systems, coerced dependencies, and resilient cultural forms that sustain connection, memory, and identity across time.