DEPARTMENT OF ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

Jeong Eun Annabel We (she/they) specializes in modern Korean literature and culture and decolonial thought with a broader engagement with transpacific scholarship.

If you have media/interview inquiries, please consult this page. She has appeared in Decolonize Futures, Vogue Japan, and Hankyoreh 21. She is on research leave in the 2026-2027 academic year and may be slow to respond to emails.

Her first monograph Decolonial Becoming: Immobility, Indigeneity, and Disability in Transpacific Korea (Duke University Press 2027) approaches the question of decolonization in Korea through an engagement with Korean, diasporic, Native American, and Caribbean thinkers and authors. Tracing how Indigeneity and disability appear as immobility in the margins of multiple empires, Decolonial Becoming considers the relations that are erased and forged under ongoing militarism and settler colonialism in the Pacific.

Her second monograph in progress, Archaepelago, examines the questions of spirituality and environment and how they shape art, literature, and social movements on Jeju, Okinawa, and Hawaiʻi as militarized islands in the Pacific. An early articulation can be found in her article “‘Archaepelago.’” This research is supported by the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs.

She has also engaged the questions of how settler aesthetics of land complicate diasporic expressions and their relation to Indigenous sovereignty across the Pacific in “Minor Settler Grief” and a forthcoming sister article.

She received her B.A. from Northwestern University and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University, New Brunswick from where she also holds a certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies.

At Northwestern, she has offered courses on disaster narratives, feminist, queer, and disability issues, colonialism, decolonial thought, transpacific literature and art, body horror, and research methods. She is affiliated with the Program in Comparative Literary Studies, the Program in Critical Theory, and the Asian American Studies Program. In 2012, she co-founded the Critical Theory Research Workshop at Northwestern with Rafael Vizcaíno and X. Joyce Fan, with the support of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and serves as its faculty sponsor.

Selected Publications:

Book

Decolonial Becoming: Immobility, Indigeneity, and Disability in Transpacific Korea. Duke University Press, 2027. In ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise series.

Edited Issues

“Frantz Fanon, Decoloniality, and the Spirit of Bandung.” (with N. Maldonado-Torres, M. Fanon-Mendès-France, and Z. Radebe). Bandung: Journal of the Global South 6.2. 2019

Articles

“‘Archaepelago’: Island Intimacies (naeryŏk) and Weathered Flesh in Jeju Art.” positions: asia critique 34.1: 61-90. 2026.

“Minor Settler Grief: Korean Diaspora, Settler Colonialism, and the Pastoral Fantasy in Minari (2021).” American Quarterly 76.1: 83-101. 2024.

“Editorial Introduction: Frantz Fanon, Decoloniality, and the Spirit of Bandung.” Co-authored with N. Maldonado-Torres, M. Fanon-Mendès-France, and Z. Radebe. Bandung: Journal of the Global South 6.2: 153-161. 2019.

“Spirit of Bandung Beyond Colonial Mobility.” Bandung: Journal of the Global South 6.2: 190-209. 2019.

“The Transpacific Tempest: Relational Sovereignty and Spiritual Sociogenesis.” Cultural Dynamics 31.4: 375-398. 2019.

Book Chapters

“On Faith and Fabulation: Decolonial Thought, Speculative Fiction.” The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature. Eds. by P. Gopinath and L. Brueck. Routledge Press: 273-284. 2024.

“Decolonising Philosophy.” Co-authored with N. Maldonado-Torres, R. Vizcaíno, and J. Wallace. Decolonising the University. Eds. by G. K. Bhambra, D. Gebrial, and K. Nisancioglu. Pluto Press: 64-90. 2018. Open Access