Global Whiteness as epistemic coloniality: Delinking the U.S. imperialism in South Korean education reforms through transpacific decoloniality

• In Event: Discourses and Problematization: Considerations of Protest, Healthiness, Whiteness, Propaganda, and Urban-Rural Divides

Proposal

1. Objectives
This paper explores the national education reforms of South Korea, situating their significance as part of transnational education reforms in the broader context of the transpacific. The study problematizes how the postcolonial education reform movements in South Korea (1945-1948) not only de-colonized the national education system from Japanese imperial education but, paradoxically and unintentionally, re-colonized the systems of educational knowledge with Western epistemes, specifically through the global White gaze and its association with the U.S. military government. The global impact of the U.S. on modernizing national education in South Korea took place when Asian countries were in the process of throwing off Western domination. In this context, the study asks two questions:
• First, how can we understand the influence of the United States on South Korean education reforms as a nonimperial world power in the age of decolonization?
• Second, even after the U.S. military government left the Korean territory, how does the image of American democracy keep reshaping new education reform discourses in South Korea while Korean policymakers and researchers propose new agendas for educational change?

2. Relevant literature
The postcolonial and decolonial scholarship helped challenge how the idea of humanity was constructed based on knowledge systems and human categories that Western colonialism produced, which continues to shape relationships in the present (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; de Sousa Santos, 2014; Jules et al., 2022). This decolonizing interrogation of knowledge systems helps rethink the humanitarian ideal in education (Paraskeva, 2016; Zhao, 2020), to challenge the self-evident knowledge politics that is still centered on Western, Eurocentric, and Anglo-American humanism to make the Man as the educated person.
Within Asian contexts, the decolonizing stance can be helpful to explicate how Western-centric modernity has continuously worked, which was complicated due to Asianism. Asianism is the imperial ideology that the Japanese colonial empire used to justify its territorial occupation, torture and sexual violence, material extraction, and education for assimilation in other Asian countries, legitimizing its colonization as the protection of the Asian region from the Western domination and imperialization (Lee, 2019). Asianism explains the unique decolonizing discourses in Korea, which need to be understood not only from the bilateral logic between the West and the East or between the Global North and the Global South, but also through the Asianized coloniality of Western-centric modernity.

3. Methodology
The study redirects the common assumptions and practices for Korean education reforms as the installations of the White-centric epistemic through a genealogical inquiry on transnational education reforms. As Foucault (1984) stated, a genealogical stance is premised on the idea that “humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination” (p. 85). I make similar critiques to elucidate how the good intention of postcolonial education reforms in South Korea was not only about social progress but also involved a shift of epistemic coloniality; that is, from the Japanese imperial domination to the U.S.-centric progressivism as a new epistemic domination in South Korea’s systems of education knowledge. Drawing on research literature and reform documents, the analysis focuses on exploring the “grid of intelligibility” (Foucault, 1978) that makes people believe the right way to educate young citizens in Korean contexts, which continues today. The U.S.-centric educational imperialism (Tröhler, 2022), which showed up after the end of WWII and continued through the development ideology during the Cold War periods, was not to subjugate its epistemic systems on the rest of the world, but this occurred through the nuanced ways of circulating the educational knowledge and its systems as the right way to educate future citizens. The paper presents how the good-intended educational reform efforts in South Korea turned out to accept the U.S. protestant and progressive values of education, which has ethnocentric, racist, white-centric origins of dehumanization (Fallace, 2015; Gould, 1985; Kliebard, 2004).

4. Findings
The study presents how the transnational education reforms (1945-1948) that appeared anti-imperial indeed, paradoxically, re-imperialized the epistemes of the education system in South Korea. It was anti-imperial in that the U.S. military government and Korean nationalists’ efforts for postcolonial education reforms aimed to decolonize and democratize the southern parts of Korea from the Japanese imperial ideology and colonial education (1910-1945). At the same time, the education reforms during this transitional period were also re-imperialized in that the Korean education system was structured not only by emulating the U.S. education system but, more importantly, through the White gaze that determined what should be the right direction of education reforms.
The analysis highlights how the Eurocentric White gaze came to South Korea through the Asianized postcolonial reform movements and continues in national educational reforms today. Challenging the good intention of postcolonial education reforms as the (unintended) persistence of global Whiteness, the study elucidates how the quick turnover of the epistemic foundation of the Korean education system into Western-centric modernity has shaped the national education reform discourses to continuously rely on the U.S.-centric progressivism, particularly John Dewey’s theories of child development and social process, as the reference point of liberal humanism to determine what should be valued as educational knowledge; and, by not questioning its epistemic reliance, the White gaze persists as the universalized theories of education reforms.

5.Implications
The study conceptualizes “transpacific decoloniality” by challenging the “still-Western-centric decoloniality” that relies on the transatlantic locationality and mobility in its critical onto-epistemic stance and peripheralizes the transpacific movements of educational knowledge. Centering the transpacific decoloniality, Korean postcolonial history extends the understanding of how the Cold War politics continues today as global Whiteness that normalizes the contradictory desire that governs the discourses of transnational education reforms. Making intelligible how “new” education reforms have been made within “old” epistemic legacy that has deeply ingrained the modern-colonial-racial nexus with the case of South Korea, the study offers broader implications to de-westernize the epistemic coloniality as dismantling the global Whiteness, calling for post-foundational comparative education research towards transpacific decolonial studies.

Author

• Sun Young Lee, Wichita State University