Historicizing the Notion of Democratic Citizenship: Revealing Coloniality Through Visuals

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 2:15 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Historical Inquiries to Make “the history”: Unrevealing History from Visuals in the Cold War era

Abstract

Objectives
This paper historicizes the notion of democratic citizenship in the 1970s Korean curriculum through the anti-communist animation General Ttoli, to examine the conditions under which the idea of democratic citizenship was constructed from a postcolonial perspective. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s approach to historicizing the figure of Man through historical ruptures such as the colonial modernity, this paper situates the Korean democratic citizenship within broader colonial epistemologies. This paper aims to explore the conditions of possibility for shaping democratic citizenship within U.S.-Korea relationship, understood as an entanglement of the resistance of Japanese coloniality and the Western exceptionalism.

Perspectives or theoretical framework
The paper employs Sylvia Wynter’s concept of Man, a figure who overrepresents him/herself as if he/she were the ideal human, seeking to secure the well-being of the present dominant order. This overrepresentation—defined through the coloniality of being, power, truth, and freedom—serves as a descriptive statement that perpetuates the Western notion of the human as white, male, able-bodied, and propertied (Wynter, 2003). The notion of Man functions as a status-organizing principle that establishes the criteria for the “-ism” hierarchies in the contemporary world-systemic order (Wynter, 1994). This framework applies to the South Korean notion of democratic citizenship, which embodies anti-communism and coloniality. Wynter’s theory of coloniality reveals what makes the notion of democratic citizenship possible and problematizes the modernity mechanisms that shape coloniality.

Data and Methods
Data is mainly from a Korean anti-communism animation called ‘General Ttoli’ (1978). National curriculum documents, textbooks, and related primary archives are also used to explore the notion of democratic citizenship. This paper's historical inquiry is grounded in Sylvia Wynter’s method of historicizing. The historicizing focuses on historical events rooted in coloniality and reveals how coloniality of knowledge constitutes the social order of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Wynter's conception of history, like Foucault’s, is concerned with discontinuity of history, in other words, the historical rupture. It is the event, an emerging discursive formation, such as the conditions of modernity. However, in addressing the ongoing coloniality, her approach centers more on continuity of history by representing how the notion of Man is overrepresented, perpetuated, and justified within histories.

Findings and Scholarly Significance
The animation General Ttoli illustrates an ideal human figure in Korean society who embodies a sense of community, anti-communism, and nationalism. General Ttoli is adapted from the U.S. Disney movie Mowgli and U.S. anti-communism cartoons. Although it does not directly mention democracy, the figure of General Ttoli aligns with the notion of democratic citizenship, which is rooted in anti-communism written in the national curriculum (1973). The idea of anti-communism originated during the U.S. military government after WWII, when Korea was heavily influenced by the U.S. social systems and epistemology. Consequently, the notion of West was idealized, essentialized, and reinforced through education. This paper contributes to an understanding of how coloniality of knowledge is formed within complicated conversation between various educational materials and social contexts and opens up a space to rethink present educational practices.

Author

• Younsun Choi, University of Wisconsin - Madison