This panel invites papers that offer provocative insights into the Korean concept of han (한/恨) across a wide range of cultural forms and genres. Echoing this year's conference theme, this panel asks: how might we recapture the magic of, and reinstill a sense of wonder and joy in, Asian Americanist work on han? Over the past decade, if not longer, han has arguably become one of the most revisited concepts among Korean American writers, artists, and thinkers. If these overlapping prisms of political, cultural, and academic representation have taught us anything, it is that han, at its best, is conceptually elusive. Yet despite such difficulty, a general consensus that seems to emerge across these varied representations is that han functions as a defining characteristic of the collective Korean psyche, formed by an unresolved entanglement of anger, grief, and sorrow, crystallized through sustained exposure to the historical traumas of Japanese colonialism, the Korean War, US military intervention and occupation, and decades of authoritarian dictatorship (Kim 1993; Willoughby 2000; Cho 2008; Kim 2019; Hong 2020; Cho 2020). As Sandra So Hee Chi Kim (2017) suggests, “the postcolonial afterlives” of han are not confined to the geographical bounds of the Korean peninsula but instead have undergone transpacific mutations, functioning within Korean America “as an expression both of the experience of perpetual foreignness as well as the psychic impact of Korean history on individual lives” (269). Because han, in the Korean American context, is shaped by the paradox of exclusion (from both racial and colonial structures) and the haunting remembrance of that very exclusion and erasure, it has often been invoked in Asian American scholarship as a parallel to what Anne Anlin Cheng (1997) calls “racial melancholia.” Where Cheng makes it remarkably clear in theoretical terms that the interminable loss experienced by racial minorities results from the suspension of subject formation, David L. Eng and Shinhee Han’s joint study (2019) traces how this racial melancholia evolves across generations into what they call “racial dissociation.” As they argue, what was once nameable as the objects of loss for Asian Americans can no longer be named by more recent generations, under the postracial illusions and pressures of contemporary American society. 

Extending the ongoing scholarly conversation on han, both within and beyond the psychoanalytic framework of melancholia, this panel brings together invigorating thoughts on the (im)possibilities of han in the present moment. Crudely speaking, it asks: how is the current generation, locally and globally, holding up han, and to what extent does it still bear cultural, political, and social currency? In framing han as a “genre,” this panel approaches han with and through Sylvia Wynter (2000)’s notion of “the genre of the human” by welcoming papers that unsettle masculine, heteropatriarchal, colonial, and nationalist affects through which han has been rendered a universal, dominant representation. At the same time, this panel also approaches “genre” in its more conventional sense by inviting papers that introduce radical representations of han across various literary, cinematic, and musical genres. 

This panel also welcomes papers that engage with, but are not limited to, the following inquiries:

• How does han relate to other Korean cultural concepts such as chŏng (정/情) or inyŏn (인연/因緣)?

• To what extent has han become a site of cultural exploitation or romanticization within Korean American cultural production?

• To what extent does han resist translation? And despite this, what factors enable the global success of Korean cultural productions centered on han?

• How has han been commodified within the global circulation of K-culture and what possibilities and dangers does it entail?

• How is han nationally represented in contemporary Korea, and to what extent does this representation reinforce or challenge nationalist rhetorics of anger, grief, and sorrow?

• How much cultural, political, and social currency does han still hold for the current generation, if any?

• How might feminist and queer readings of han unsettle its dominant patriarchal and nationalist framings?

• How does han inform Asian American pedagogical practice?

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a CV to jcho@willamette.edu by October 1, 2026.