Westernized Racial Order in Korea: The Formation of Hospitality and Performativity in Moral Education

• In Event: Unsettling the Coloniality of Knowledge: Curricula as Inscriptions of Westernized Order

Abstract

Objectives:
This paper aims to understand race in Korean elementary education curricula historically to reveal the Westernized epistemic colonization and how students affect by moral practices. The notion of race, introduced by the Korean enlightenment party, embraced Western ideology that embodies historically a Social Darwinism and White supremacy to Korean moral education through the images of races. Students form stereotypes of other races by doing activities. The paper adduces how the idea of race was formed and expressed in Korean education with a post-colonial perspective.

Theoretical Framework:
The paper explores Jacque Derrida’s hospitality and Judith Butler’s performativity to analyze epistemic colonization. Hospitality underlies the hierarchy between the host and the guest and highlights the sovereignty of the host, making the guest a hostage (Derrida, 2000, p.55). Therefore, hospitality encompasses the power dynamics to govern foreigners. Butler’s performativity delineates how certain repeated practices within the system of thought form identity. Performativity constitutes subjectivity, which is an act of doing rather than something predetermined, namely, an ongoing process of social and political engagement through which certain performative acts come to be viewed as legitimate while others are disavowed (Zemblyas, 2019, p.3). Moral education textbook with hospitality injects racial hierarchy and justifies the power to govern others. Performativity is the process, inscribing Westernized racial identity by repetitive practices.

Modes of Inquiry:
This paper uses document analysis with post-modernism perspectives with Derrida and Butler. There are three research questions: First, what is race in Korean moral education? Second, how is hospitality embedded in teaching materials, and does it create the notion of race in students? Third, how does the idea of performativity apply to moral education to create racism?

Data:
The paper examines one chapter of the 6th-grade Korean moral education textbook about making a happy global society. In this chapter, students do three activities; watching a video, moral discussion and stepping backward and forward by the teacher’s direction about race. This paper analyzes three activities with concepts of hospitality and performativity and reveals the notion of race in moral education.

Results:
The study demonstrates that the immanent logic of hospitality is inhospitality that implicates superiority of certain races and subjugates others in moral education activities. The activities insert White supremacy, creating fabricated sympathy for others related to hierarchies of differences. The question in the moral discussion underscores the sameness of people’s emotions, not caring about differences or the diversity of others. For example, students perceive the colored races as primitive and inscribe Western racial order. With the concept of hospitality, as students decide to help others, the others’ cultures become inferior and the things to be governed. Therefore Korean moral education formed by epistemic colonization affects students’ thoughts with repetitive practices.

Scholarly Significance:
The paper seeks to understand epistemicide in curriculum and how education creates hospitality, addressing sovereign power to others. This presentation contributes to rethinking curriculum as a colonial residue and understanding curriculum as the creation of social identity with repetitive practices under dominant discourse.

Author

• Younsun Choi, University of Wisconsin - Madison