Collective Memory, Nationalistic Curriculum, and Subjectivity: The Birth of "Absolute Enemy" as Governmentality

• In Event: Reimagining Equitable Education Through Cross-Cultural Conversation: Toward an Equitable New Normal in the Era of Post-Pandemic

Abstract

This presentation explores how ethnocentric nationalistic curriculum is created by objectifying historical trauma and normalizing the self-other dichotomy as governmentality. The author problematizes the process in which collective memory is institutionalized and thus reiterated to emphasize collective we-ness. This presentation also investigates the construction of self-other drawing from Korea's jarring stories of Japanese colonization and comfort women. The creation of self and other is not a random construction as it purposefully entails the othering process.
This paper provides a frame through which to investigate how nationalistic self-other is constituted through curriculum and schooling, regardless of which nation-state a person is from. The purpose of this paper is to interrogate the process of the self-other dichotomy is operated as governmentality. I problematize current cultural politics that collective identity is formulated and operated to reinforce the otherness.
I use performativity theory (Butler, 1999) as the major theoretical framework. This theory opens possibilities to imagine identity research as moving beyond discovering and understanding the “essence” of self. Through performativity theory, identity categories become performative “effects” of discourses. This theoretical perspective provides a particular lens in the process of examining, reviewing, and rethinking identity as well as exploring possibilities of conceptualizing ethnic/racial identity “differently.”
I utilize autobiographical inquiry as a mode of inquiry. I engage with Miller’s (2005) poststructuralist versions of autobiographical inquiry as both a research methodology and a literary genre. According to Miller, poststructuralist versions of autobiographical inquiry are ways of theorizing the subject’s life experiences and narratives within the socio-cultural, political, and economic milieu of space and time. Both as the researcher and the researched in this study, I, the autobiographical subject, use my lived experiences and narratives as a way of exploring my subjectivity that is always being-in-the-making (Miller, 2005).
I select “memory writing” as a major data gathering process and source (Haug, 1987). Via memory writing, I attempt to explore the autobiographical subject’s discursive construction of the world, multiple realities, subjectivity, and others.
Grounded in ethnocentric nationalism, the dominant discourse views comfort women as the victims of Korea’s “weak” political power under the Japanese Empire. This historical analysis of curriculum from a political lens challenges what is not heard and what remains unspoken in mainstream discourse. This historical, political analysis of curriculum is applicable not only in the context of Korea but also other nation-states in that the notion of "absolute enemy," or "evil" is widely utilized in curriculum to reinforce exclusionary nationalistic ideology.
The compulsive repetition of nationalistic perspectives constituted my Korean subjectivity. The creation of Koreanness at school and in Korean society has been solidified by the repetitive reiteration of social norms such as the “superiority” of the Korean ethnic group. Traumatic memories became a tool for curriculum developers to stress the importance of strong political power against other nation-states. This paper provides opportunities for broadening the discourse of multicultural education, while including the huge influx of transnational flows and mobilities in the construction of students’ and teachers’ identities.

Author

• Seungho Moon, Loyola University Chicago