Birth of a New Race? Crisis, Methodological Nationalism, and East/West as Problems in Education

• In Event: New Events and Their Implications for Analyzing Social Contexts of Education: Facing Crises, Technology, and Difference

Abstract

Rational and linear thought has influenced much discussion of what to teach for an unknown future or “the 21st century”. This has included appeal to so-called core competencies within the reform of public schools, using terms like risk, needs, and provision. This has redefined the meanings of being an educated Self, nationhood, or ultimately human. I argue in this paper that, an interesting but under-analyzed shift occurs in the process: an homogenized “species” space is refigured through constituting “the human” in a sense beyond the biological. In other words, the boundaries of constituting so-called humans-as-races are delineated not by biological knowledge, but rather by a discursive politics sensitive to contextual knowing, painful memories, and painful circumstances that appeal to “competencies” trades on.

As an example, this paper demonstrates how the concept of race has been rewritten as new formulations of Koreanness within national curriculum reforms. My data-sets and method include deep content analysis of two representative Korean language newspapers. I focus on how the rhetoric of crisis has been used to rewrite race and Koreanness in two ways: a) references to globalization as a political catch-phrase introduced in the early 1990s, and b) the IMF occurrence (major national financial crisis at turn of the 21st century) discussed as severe, lived experiences and memories.

In moving beyond what Kenway and Fahey (2017) identify as “methodological nationalism” and beyond mundane and commonsensical notions of east/west, I draw upon and describe the necessity and inadequacy of Foucault’s concept of biopower. In Foucault’s later work, biopower refers to new ways of generating, governing, and preserving bio-politically sophisticated politics, techniques, and technologies over the human body as a species (Foucault, 1990, 2008). The paper demonstrates the productive orientation Foucault provides, as well as the limits of understanding “race” and “human” in Korea via Foucault. It moves beyond a Foucaultian analytics in education to offer a new path for attending to the complexities of painful memories that are not easily swept away.

The paper concludes with insights that may be useful for thinking through similar events in the broader East Asian region. I posit that Koreanness as a new race was born in the late 1990s, with the conceptual boundaries of “race” shifting from blood-based to performance and now to governance. A sense of crisis was deployed to translate “new Koreanness,” undermining simplistic east/west and right/left philosophical binaries. Intensified references to “excellence” and “equality,” arose at the intersection between the idea of globalization and some new priorities that rewrote race. Excellence-strategies made the “human body” verify differentiated “racial values” by remembering collective historical scars mainly from the Japanese occupation and U.S. military administration, while equality-strategies configured the human body as bound to a sense of community spirit by remembering traditional humanitarian values.

These findings expose the nexus of redeployments of “crisis” experiences and educational reform discourses. They ultimately shed light on the contexts, technologies, and differences struggled with to cope with a “crisis” that is not easily disarticulated from painful memories, their scarring effects, and contemporary notions of belonging.

Author

• Sunhye Kung, Ewha Womans University