The Biopolitics of Race and Racialization in South Korean Multicultural Education

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: Coloniality of Educational Knowledge and Discourse: Health and Education (Table 1)

Abstract

South Korea has been recognized as one of the most homogenous countries in the world in terms of its language, ethnicity, and culture (Kymlicka, 1995). However, multiculturalism was officially introduced in the 1990s with presidential announcements of ‘‘internationalization’’ and “globalization”. In this context, multicultural education policies have been launched to secure multicultural students’ healthy development and well-being by providing equal opportunities and closing the gaps. This approach presumes that race and racialization suddenly occurred recently regardless of the existing entangled concept, minjok which is a conflation of nation, ethnicity, race, culture, and national spirit (Shin, 2006). Subsequently, multicultural education rarely considers minjok while focusing on U.S pedagogical strategies. The annual policy paper is mostly about the programs for multicultural students who are just defined as international marriage families (domestic-born/immigrated children) and foreign families without explanation of specific criteria, which implies the necessity to see how the coloniality of minjok discourse performs as a racial discourse in multicultural education.
Drawing on Foucauldian genealogy, “from a question posed in the present (Foucualt, 2013)”, this paper traces how the racial ideas that seem to be universal in multicultural education have formed by historicizing minjok discourses in the modern (post)colonial history of S. Korea. To better understand multicultural education regarding coloniality of racial ideas and biopolitical invention, this study investigates how S. Korean minjok discourse in multicultural education can work to govern people to secure democratic, liberal, developmental, and healthy individuals, collectives, and the nation against risky populations. Modern history shows how S. Korean minjok has reinforced the discourse of coloniality despite anti-colonial and decolonizing movements by depending on colonial logic such as “biologization of race and racial formation for the political management of national health and vitality, and of international competitiveness (Rabinow & Rose, 2006)”. Under colonial regimes, the idea of minjok began to be developed in the 1890s to prove that Koreans were already enlightened and civilized with social Darwinism (Shin, 2006) and the rediscovery of the national god-king “Dan-gun” as the progenitor and origin of the Korean minjok was established to highlight the particularity of Koreanness while employing the colonial strategies of eugenics like pure bloodline and the scientific relevance of grand history (Em, 1999).
Coloniality of minjok discourses has been the foundation for multicultural education by performing as standards of distinguishing people in multicultural education; criteria of multicultural students and pure Korean minjok (biologization). Thus, the coloniality of racial ideas reified with the minjok narrative in S. Korean multicultural education fabricates “suspect (Baumgartner, Epp, & Shoub, 2018)” people. While multicultural education becomes more inclusive by announcing “for all”, it does not literally mean that all can be norms when considering the goals of annual multicultural education policy papers. In this sense, this paper contributes to multicultural education, postcolonial studies, and curriculum studies by expanding the scope of racial ideas and questioning how even critical multicultural education with decolonizing goals can paradoxically support coloniality and perform as biopolitics by marking people as desirable/undesirable to secure the national entity of S. Korean nationalistic-exceptional minjok discourses.

Author

• Ji Hyun Hwang, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author