Bodies, Borders, and Belonging: Comparative Perspectives on South Korean and Italian Women Writers (Nemla)
Newport, RI
Organization: NEMLA
Event: Nemla
This panel explores the intersections between contemporary South Korean and Italian women’s writing through the lenses of memory, gender, trauma, migration, and post-national identity. While these literary traditions are often studied separately within distinct geopolitical and linguistic frameworks, the panel proposes a comparative and transnational approach that foregrounds shared concerns surrounding patriarchal structures, historical violence, intergenerational memory, and the negotiation of belonging.
Bringing together scholars working on Italian and Korean women writers, the panel examines how literature becomes a space for articulating marginalized experiences and challenging dominant national narratives. The selected texts engage with themes such as family silences, colonial and postwar legacies, diaspora, racialization, feminist activism, labor, and the body as an archive of memory. Through memoir, autofiction, and experimental narrative forms, these writers construct alternative genealogies and forms of counter-memory that complicate homogeneous understandings of identity and nationhood.
The panel seeks to foster an interdisciplinary conversation between Asian Studies, Italian Studies, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, and Migration Studies. By placing South Korean and Italian women writers in dialogue, the session highlights the productive possibilities of comparative feminist methodologies across different cultural contexts while emphasizing shared strategies of resistance, care, and narrative reconstruction.
Dora Labate