Understanding Affect for Political Governance: Infantile Citizenship Through Visuals in Korean Colonial History Education

• In Event: Politics of Affect: The Technologies of Governance in Making Normative Subjectivities in Education

Abstract

Objectives
The research focuses on how affect functions as a technology of governance to make infantile citizens by arousing anger or indignation through visuals of the Japanese colonial era in the Korean social studies curriculum. The affect is used for political governance to create collective desires, which can be referred to as infantile citizenship, and is often framed as nationalism or ethnocentrism, thereby fabricating notions of peace. The research highlights the paradoxical meaning of citizenship by naturalizing the ideal figure of citizens and rethinks teaching history education for peace and recovery.

Theoretical Framework
The research employs Lauren Berlant's concept of infantile citizenship as an affect that shapes normative subjectivity. Infantile citizenship is a mode of reasoning that is overdependent on the immense and tutelary power of the state (Berlant, 1997). It constructs collective bodies and minds by internalizing political governance and obedience to the nation as natural and taken for granted. Berlant further identifies visual politics as a means of enhancing identity and developing a normative image of ideal citizenship (Berlant, 1997). Such visuals arouse the feelings of antipathy or abnormality toward previous colonizers, framing aggression as a righteous indignation. In the research, the politics of emotion becomes the affect as infantile citizenship, operating as a particular mode of reasoning, manifested in resentful or revenge-oriented nationalism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia.

Data and Methods
The data comes from fifth-grade Korean social studies textbooks, supplementary educational resources provided by the Korean government, the national curriculum, and newspaper articles. The research mainly utilizes visuals of "Comfort women" and examines related discourse. The method is Michel Foucault’s historicizing (Foucault, 1972), which analyzes the conditions under which something emerges within certain historical events. Historicizing examines a rupture in postcolonial discourse, characterized by a transition from decolonizing historical narratives to vengeful nationalism, and the affective conditions that shape infantile citizenship.

Findings and Scholarly Significance
The paper analyzes a fifth-grade social studies lesson about Japanese colonial history. The objectives of the lesson are to commemorate colonial victims and to inscribe the importance of human rights in achieving peace and recovery from history. However, showing students traumatic photos of "Comfort women" has the opposite outcome. The feelings of anger, outrage, and a desire for revenge shape the affect to form xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and biased nationalism toward the Japanese. Throughout the lesson, students’ feelings of revenge and hatred is justified as a righteous reaction, which threatens and excludes Japanese immigrant students. These feelings form infantile citizenship, making students submissive patriotic citizens. Infantile citizenship is used as political governance when an international dispute arises between Korea and Japan, and as normalizing national identity to make exclusion and abjection towards foreign immigrants.

This paper contributes to a critical understanding of history education with visual culture and curriculum studies scholarship by examining how visual materials shape the affect to perceive ethnicities and nations. Exploring the conditions of making infantile citizenship highlights the interrelationship between educational materials and normalized social norms, and opens up space to rethink history education for making autonomous subjectivity.

Author

• Younsun Choi, University of Wisconsin - Madison