Shaping the Man through Visual Culture: Intertwining Relations between Coloniality and Governmentality under Anti-communism

• In Event: Rethinking "Good Faith" Educational Practices Through Historical Discourses in International Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
The study historicizes the Korean curriculum and visual culture from the Cold War era with a Foucauldian perspective to reveal the format and purpose of Anti-communist educational practices. Visual culture encompasses audiovisual materials that can affect people, and they contain visuality as the system of reasoning that shapes Man. Anti-communist visual culture inscribed the cultural practices of Korean and U.S. regimes to make "good citizens." In fact, they maximized governmentality and U.S. imperialism through anti-communist policy and justified it as Democracy. This research focuses on how visual culture shapes an ideal Man within governmentality and coloniality and frames Man as a "good citizen."

Theoretical framework
The study uses Sylvia Wynter’s concept of Man, who is the one overrepresenting themselves as if they are human and trying to secure the well-being of the present dominant status. Particularly, Man2 overrepresents the West Bourgeois of humanness (white, able-bodied, and propertied) to function as the status-organizing principle of criterion about which the “ism” hierarchies of our contemporary world-systemic order (Wynter, 1995, P. 40). The study expands the idea of Man2 to shape the ideal human who has the dominant social status in society. In the Korean curriculum, Man2 is shaped as a democratic citizen who supports the Korean dictatorship and enchants Westernization.

Data and Methods
The study mainly explores visual culture materials from Korean anti-communism animation called ‘General Ttoli’ (1978). National curriculum documents, textbooks, and related educational resources are also used as data to investigate historical discourses. Data is analyzed by two methodological approaches: One is ‘Visuality’ (Michel Bal) and ‘History of the Present’(Michel Foucault). Visual culture is an affective multi-sensory object containing the social/cultural practices of power and resistance. In this way, visuality is the possibility of performing acts of seeing, not the materiality of the object seen (Bal, 2003a, P. 11), which means visuality is a system of reasoning, not only created on physical visibility but also historically shaped by ways of perceiving the object. Also, the research applies to ‘History of the Present,’ which destabilizes pre-existing norms and uncovers hidden intentions of power-knowledge relations. The methods enable us to re-evaluate the past by displaying governmentality and coloniality in education.

Findings and Scholarly Significance
The historical discourse shows coloniality of U.S. imperialism and the politics of Korean dictatorship. First, visual culture shapes "Korean Man2" as an idealized democratic citizen, which relates to the 1948 U.S. military government policy in Korea and the U.S. Cold War animations. Second, In 1970s Korea, the dictatorship used anti-communism for political propaganda to justify its regime and framed democracy as an important value in the curriculum. The word democracy was fabricated to make citizens obedient. The techniques of visual cultures strengthen the formation of Man by affecting people and inscribing educational practices. This research contributes to delineating the process of shaping Man by fabricating the idea of good citizens from visual cultures in education and arousing the awareness of using visual cultures critically in the 21st century.

Author

• Younsun Choi, University of Wisconsin - Madison