Challenging Postcolonial Racialization in South Korean Multicultural Education

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

Abstract

Objectives:
South Korea, long regarded as one of the most homogeneous countries in the world in terms of language, ethnicity, and culture (Kymlicka, 1995), has experienced an increase in its multicultural population since the 1990s. The national curriculum replaced the official manifestation of “han (one and homogeneous) minjok (mostly translated as ethnicity)” with the term “da (diverse) munhwa (culture)”. This shift assumes the existence of homogeneity, the emergence of differences, and subsequent diversity within the population. This study aims to examine how Western notions of racial and cultural difference and homogeneity have been made in South Korean multicultural education, and how this discourse has produced particular modes of postcolonial identity.

Theoretical framework:
This study will investigate the assumptions, qualities, and mechanisms underlying the production of racial differences that are often taken for granted in multicultural education based on Deleuze’s argument on difference as a simulacrum: “Things are simulacra themselves, simulacra are the superior forms, and the difficulty facing everything is to become its own simulacrum” (Deleuze, 1994; 67).

Methods:
Foucauldian discourse analysis is useful to challenge existing assumptions of policy papers embedded in a larger social context. Through the process of problematizations (Fairclough, 1992), this study interrogates how the notions of racial and cultural difference/homogeneity are formed and how they constitute objects and practices in multicultural education.

Data:
This study examines annual national policy documents titled Educational Support Plan for Students from Multicultural Families or documents with similar titles released by Korea Ministry of Education from 2006 to 2023.

Results:
This study argues that multicultural education in South Korea fabricates identities through the formalized and naturalized ideas of racial homogeneity and differences. For example, the Ministry of Education officially adopts the Western definition of race and culture with the belief of solid and essentialized borders within humans, and identifies students as “regular or normal (Il-ban)” students with the distinction of “multicultural” students, who are defined as “children born in Korea and immigrant children from international marriage family or children of foreign families”. This dichotomous definition implies that Korean unique-supreme differences and homogeneity are made by victimizing and villainizing the multicultural population. The emphasis on respecting differences in multicultural policies and education ironically accentuates the differences derived from the uniqueness of South Koreanness. Moreover, the notion of becoming multicultural implies that multicultural populations are to some degree forced to do something (e.g. learning and developing) to become better members of Korean society as being considered as not having enough essence of South Koreans. Multicultural discourse assumes unique differences/homogeneity through the active production of South Koreanness.

Scholarly significance of the study:
This paper contributes to the fields of multicultural education, racial theory, and East Asian studies by providing an alternative approach to understanding multicultural issues that transcend postcolonial conceptualizations within the socio-historical and political contexts of South Korea. Without critically questioning how “multicultural” is viewed along with the particular production of homogeneity/difference, South Korean multicultural education may lie at the heart of the postcoloniality of identity construction, rendering the people ‘the historical objects of pedagogy (Bhabha, 1990)’.

Author

• Ji Hyun Hwang, University of Wisconsin - Madison