Jini Kim Watson

Jini Kim Watson is the author of Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization (Fordham UP, 2021) and The New Asian City: Three-dimensional Fictions of Space and Urban Form (Minnesota UP, 2011). She has also co-edited, with Gary Wilder, the collected volume, The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present (Fordham UP, 2018). Her new book Cold War Reckonings explores the way the Cold War shaped both political power and cultural forms of decolonization, tracing a genealogy of authoritarianism in the so-called “free world." Her first book, The New Asian City examined the rise of so-called “Asian Tiger” metropolises through the lenses of colonial history, national imaginaries and Cold War hegemonies. Watson received her PhD from Duke University and undergraduate degrees in architecture and liberal arts from, respectively, the University of Melbourne and University of Queensland, Australia. She teaches literature at New York University.