• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.277-296
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• 2023

The South Korean ethnic diaspora US lobby shows efficacy as an interest group in generating influence in American foreign and domestic public policy making. The persuasive portrayal of South Korea as a critical Cold War US ally reinforced US amenability to pro-South Korea lobbying. Also, the South Korean US diaspora is a comparatively recent immigrant group, thus its lingering resistance to assimilation facilitates its political mobilization to lobby the US government. One source of this influence includes the foundational legacy of proselytizing Western and particularly American religious social movement representatives in Korean religiosity and society. US protestant Christianity acquired a strong public association with emerging Korean nationalism in response to Japanese imperialism and occupation. Hostility towards Japanese colonialism followed by the threat from Soviet-sponsored, North Korean Communism meant Christianity did not readily become a cultural symbol of excessive external, US interference in South Korean society by South Korean public opinion. The post-Cold War shift in US foreign policy towards targeting so-called rogue state vestiges of the Cold War including North Korea enhanced further South Korea's influence in Washington. Due to essential differences in the perceived historical role of American influence, extrapolation of the South Korean development model is problematic. US hegemony in South Korea indicates that perceived alliance with national self-determination constitutes the core of soft power appeal. Civilizational appeal per se in the form of religious beliefs are not critically significant in promoting American polity influence in target polities in South Korea or, comparatively, in the Middle East. The United States is a perceived opponent of pan-Arab nationalism which has trended towards populist Islamic religious symbolism with the failure of secular nationalism. The pronounced component of evangelical Christianity in American core community nationalism which the Trump campaign exploited is a reflection of this orientation in the US.

• Iberoamérica
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.1-55
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• 2019

In Brazil, racism exists without the clear definition of race. In other words, because there is racism without a clear concept of race, racial issues are complicated in Brazil. Racism is not just a social problem. It is, above all, a political problem that arises from economic separation, exclusion, and marginalization. From the enlargement process of European colonialism, racism has been the most profound and efficient way of governance of social, material, psychological and political domination of Brazil. From this perspective, this study seeks to research racism in Brazil as a race politics. In conclusion, racial discrimination and racial inequality exist in Brazil. Thus, to study the racial discrimination and racial inequalities in Brazil, Chapter 2 examines the origins of racial politics in Brazil. Chapter 3 explores the relations of Brazilian society and races. Chapter 4 examines Black's resistance to racism as a black movement in Brazil. The first half of Chapter 5 looks at 'racial inequality in Brazil' and the latter sees 'racism in Brazil'. Chapter 6, as a conclusion, discusses the challenges and limitations of racial politics in Brazil.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.63-91
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• 2018

One of the goals of this article is to continue the momentum begun by emerging scholarship on theory and practice of writing about visual culture of and in Southeast Asia. I hope to offer culturally sensitive and embodied ways of looking at images and objects as sites/sights of cultural knowledge as further theoretical intervention. The argument put forward in my essay is three-fold: first, I critique the prevailing logocentric approach in the field of Southeast Asian Studies and I argue that in a postcolonial, global, and transnational period, it is important to be inclusive of other objects as sites/sights of social, political and cultural analysis beyond written and oral texts. Second, I argue that although it has its own political and theoretical problems, the evolving field of Visual Studies as it is practiced in the United States is one of many ways to decolonize the prevailing logocentric approach to Southeast Asian Studies. Third, I argue that if one reads these Euro-American derived theories of vision and visuality through the lens of what Walter Mignolo calls "colonial difference(s)," then Visual Studies as an evolving field has the potential to offer more nuanced local ways of looking at and understanding objects, vision, and visuality. Last, I point out that unlike in the West where there is an understanding of pure, objective and empirical vision, local Southeast Asian perspectives on objects and visions are more embodied and multi-sensorial. I argue that if one is ethically mindful of the local cultural ways of seeing and knowing objects, then the evolving field of Visual Studies offers a much-needed intervention to the privileged, lingering logocentric approach to Southeast Asian Studies. Moreover, these alternative methods might help to decolonize method and theory in academic disciplines that were invented during the colonial period.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.56 no.3
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• pp.487-500
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• 2010

In the history of colonization, how and to what extent the colonizer interacted with the local population differed according to race relations in specific periods. Generally speaking, social or sexual contact between two communities was tolerated when race relations were relatively relaxed. When the racial relationship became aggravated, however, such contact between the colonizer and the colonized was discouraged in order to forge and maintain ethnic solidarity. In Ireland, the colonizer's interaction with the colonized was not different from that of colonized countries in the Third World. Unlike those colonies, however, the settlers, that is, Protestants, simply could not be treated as the colonizer because they had lived in Ireland long enough to assert their Irishness. Joyce is keenly interested in intergender ethnic boundary crossings. In his works, two kinds of ethno-sexual interactions are presented from two totally different perspectives. As shown in the cases of the young lady in the street stall, Polly, Milkwoman, Sheila, and Cissy, Joyce describes the interaction of Irish women with Englishmen from a skeptical viewpoint. All of those cases demonstrate typical relationships epitomizing power relations in a colonial society. They reflect the turbulent time at the beginning of the century when Ireland had to fight with England to gain its independence. At such a transitional time, the ethnic relationship became aggravated and boundary crossings were discouraged. On the other hand, through the relationship between Stephen and Eileen, Girty and Reggy Wylie, Browne and Irish ladies, and Mr. & Mrs. Kernan, Joyce presents the interaction between Protestants and Catholics in terms of romantic or human relationships rather than power relations. From his description of those interactions, we can assume that Joyce, in the time of nation building, provided a blueprint for the future Irish nation, where Protestants and Catholics could build a nation and live harmoniously.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.177-198
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• 2009

How are we approach the fourteenth chapter of Ulysses known as 'The Oxen of the Sun' in this globalized age of hyper-theorization? My paper argues that examining the wide reverberations set off by Derrida's comment in "Ulysses Gramophone"-"Everything has already happened to us with Ulysses"-in relation to the central textual theme of cosmopolitanism may provide a reading that not only pays due respect to the critical legacy of the early structuralist interpretations but equally takes into account the political sensibilities of our time. The neologism 'chaosmopolitanism,'in fact, serves as that very critical measure designed to bridge the gap separating the long tradition of Western Eurocentric discourse on cosmopolitanism on the one hand and the geopolitical background conditioning its discursive possibility, namely, the chaotic condition of international colonialism on the other, whose exemplary, and exemplarily creative, fusion bears none other name than Ulysses. But the idea of chaosmopolitanism gains its conceptual leverage on yet another, no less pivotal register, for, just as with Derrida's first-person plural pronoun, the trope leads us to reflect on our own situatedness in the East Asian region in light of Joyce's unabashedly universalist vision, whose over-arching textual purview nonetheless leaves the space called the Far East in the singular position of virtual exclusion. What does it then mean to enjoy Joyce's "chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle" in light of our East Asian perspective? To this second question, my inquiry turns to the dual theme of enjoyment and debt as they are problematized by Stephen Dedalus' telegram to Mulligan, which reads, "the sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done." Itself a quotation from George Meredith's novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, the transcribed message invites us to reconsider the scrupulous endeavor underwriting Joyce's signatory gusto, but at the same time forcing us to confront and reassess our own debt to the problematic heritage known as Western literature or, to borrow Derrida's expression, Abrahamic language.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.5
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• pp.903-941
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• 2012

This essay examines Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism focusing on the concepts of 'culture,' 'empire,' and 'nation'. The approach is critical, theoretical, and historical rather than explicatory. Consequently, the range of the essay is not limited to Said's own explanation and argument about Western imperialism and its culture presented in the book. In doing this, this essay finally purposes to be a discursive resistance to the current global empire, the United States, via a critical reading of Said's work. Said's notion of culture is set upon to disclose the function of culture as an apparatus of ideological consent of the dominated to the dominant. When applied to imperial practice, Western culture functions to subject the colonized to the colonizer. Said's geographical approach to imperialism complements the historical understanding of imperialism. Imperialism is not only the practice of Western-centered historicism but also the spatially mutual interaction between the West and the rest of the world. Along with European imperialism, Said poses the current global empire of the United States as his main target of criticism. Said's problem is that he takes the United States as a nation-state. When examined, the United States is not a nation-state, but today's empire. The empire in the appearance of the nation-state United States does not work for the interest of the American nation, that is, the American people. The empire is the transnational and postnational political and economic institution that works for the interest of global capital. In order to resist the current global empire, this essay suggests that the building or restoration of nation-states with its basic principle of people's sovereignty is in need.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.17-53
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• 2016

Debates continue to multiply on the definition and rationale of Southeast Asia as a region and on the utility of the multidisciplinary field of area studies. However, we have now entered a post-colonialist, post-Orientalist, post-structuralist stage of reflection and re-orientation in the era of globalization, and a strong tendency on the part of insiders to pose these issues in terms of an insider-outsider dichotomy. On the one hand, the study of Southeast Asia for researchers from outside the region has become fragmented. This is for very obvious reasons: the strengthening and re-energizing of academic disciplines, the increasing popularity of other non-regional multidisciplinary studies, and the entry of globalization studies into our field of vision. On the other hand, how has the local Southeast Asian academy addressed these major issues of change in conceptualizing the region from an insider perspective? In filling in and giving substance to an outsider, primarily Euro-American-Australian-centric definition and vision of Southeast Asia, some local academics have recently been inclined to construct Southeast Asia in terms of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN): a nation-state-based, institutional definition of what a region comprises. Others continue to operate at a localized level exploring small-scale communities and territories, while a modest number focus on sub-regional issues (the Malay-Indonesian world or the Mekong sub-region are examples). However, further reflections suggest that the Euro-American-Australian hegemony is a thing of the past and the ground has shifted to a much greater emphasis on academic activity within the region. Southeast Asia-based academics are also finding it much more important to network within the region and to capture, understand, and analyze what Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scholars are saying about Southeast Asia, its present circumstances and trajectories, and their increasingly close involvement with the region within a greater Asia-Pacific rim. The paper argues that the insider-outsider dichotomy requires considerable qualification. It is a neat way of dramatizing the aftermath of colonialism and Orientalism and of reasserting local priorities, agendas, and interests. But there might be a way forward in resolving at least some of these apparently opposed positions with recourse to the concepts of culture and identity in order to address Southeast Asian diversities, movements, encounters, hybridization, and hierarchies.

• The Southeast Asian review
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.1-52
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• 2017

This study aims to compare the state building process focusing on the founding presidents of South Korea, which was a colony of the defeated state of World War II and the Philippines, the colony of the victorious state. To this end, it compares the lives of the presidents, mainly the founding president of Korea Syngman Rhee and Manuel Quezon who led the autonomy of the Philippines and established the Commonwealth government, in the contexts of the state building process of the two countries. In each country, the leaders had to address the core tasks for founding the states in common. Firstly, after the independence or the acquisition of state autonomy, both countries adopted a constitution based on the presidential system with the strong authority of the presidents influenced by the United States. Secondly, the two countries after the independence were operated on the basis of anti-communism at the forefront of the Cold War. In addition, they also carried out land reform to bring the peasants into the system for supporting anti-communism. Lastly, the two countries also faced the same issues of liquidating the Japanese colonial legacies. Therefore the study examines the establishment of the constitution, settlement of anti-communism line, the land reform issues, and liquidation of Japanese colonialism or occupation in each country. The Philippines attained 'constitutional independence' in 1935 and experienced political development faster than any other post-colonial country in Asia. However, except for the establishment of the constitution, the early leaders were not able to address the principal issues for state building. As land reform failed, landowners became economically and politically dominant. The Philippines, where the modern citizen class has not arisen suffered from the political and economic recession. In Korea, despite the Korean War and division of the country, the founding president Syngman Rhee attempted to solve the tasks. As a result, he was able to lay the track of liberal democracy against communism and also settled Japanese colonial legacy as much as it was allowed. In particular, through land reform, he has laid the basis for the nation-state and economic development and has set up the girders of Korean economy by adopting the market economy system. Although there are merits and demerits, compared with the leaders of other countries especially with the Philippines, it is no doubt that Syngman Rhee has played an essential role in establishing the state as a founding president.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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• v.64 no.7
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• pp.172-183
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• 2014

The term "new woman" (신여성 [Sinyeoseong], 新女性) refers to an idealized image of contemporary women during the so-called modern period in East Asia. In Korea, these "modern girls" were also referred to as modan (毛斷), or "cut-hair", reflecting changes in appearances that rejected the traditional value system in favor of "the new" in everyday life. Although it was used to refer to the perceived educated leaders of this new period, it also had the negative connotation of referring to frivolous women only interested in the latest fashion. The popular discourse on this "new woman" was constantly changing during this early modern period in East Asia, ranging from male-driven women's movements to women-driven liberal and socialist movements. The discourse often included ideals of what constituted female impeccability in women's domestic roles and enlightened views on housekeeping, yet in most cases the "new woman" was also expected to be a good wife and mother as well as a successful career woman. The concept of the "new woman" was also accompanied by an upheaval in women's social roles and their physical boundaries, and resulted in women repositioning themselves in the new society. The new look was a way of constructing their bodies to fit their new roles, and this again was rapidly reproduced in visual media. Newspapers, magazines, and plays had gained immense popularity by this time and provided visual material for the age with covers, advertisements, and illustrations. This research will explore the fashion of the "new woman" through archival resources, specifically magazines published in the 1920s and 1930s. It will investigate how women's appearances and the images they pursued reflected the ideal image of the "new woman." Fashion information providers, trendsetters, and levels of popular acceptance will also be examined in the context of the early stage of the fashion industry in East Asia, including production and distribution. Additionally, as the idea of the "new woman" was a worldwide phenomenon throughout the 19th and early 20th century, the effect of Japanese colonialism on the structure of Korean culture and its role as a cultural mediator will also be considered in how the ideal image of beauty was sought, and whether this was a western, colonial, or national preference.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.4
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• pp.181-202
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• 2006

"When it comes to art, nationalism is a goodticket to ride with", says the title of a report in the Indian Express (Mumbai, 29 Oct 2000). The newspaper report goes on to say that since Indian art was kept "ethnic" by colonialism, national liberation meant opening up to the world on India's own terms. Advocacy, at the tail end of the 20th century, would contrast dramatically with the call by Rabindranath Tagore, the founder of the academy at Santiniketan in 1901, to guard against the fetish of nationalism. "The colourless vagueness of cosmopolitanism," Tagore pronounced, "nor thefierce self-idolatry of nation-worship, is the goal of human history" (Nationalism, 1917). This contrast is significant on two counts. First is the positive aspect of "nation" as a frame in art production or circulation, at the current point of globalization when massive expansion of cultural consumers may be realized through prevailing communication networks and technology. The organization of the information market, most vividly demonstrated through the recent FIFA World Cup when one out of every five living human beings on earth watched the finals, is predicated on nations as categories. An extension of the Indian Express argument would be that tagging of artworks along the category of nation would help ensure greatest reception, and would in turn open up the reified category of "art," so as to consider new impetus from aesthetic traditions from all parts of the world many of which hereto fore regarded as "ethnic," so as to liberate art from any hegemony of "international standards." Secondly, the critique of nationalism points to a transnational civic sphere, be it Tagore's notion of people-not-nation, or the much mo re recent "transnational constellation" of Jurgen Habermas (2001), a vision for the European Union w here civil sphere beyond confines of nation opens up new possibilities, and may serve as a model for a liberated sphere on global scale. There are other levels of collectivity which art may address, for instance the Indonesian example of local communities headed by Ketua Rukun Tetangga, the neighbourhood headmen, in which community matters of culture and the arts are organically woven into the communal fabric. Art and collectivity at the national-transnational level yield a contrasting situation of, on the idealized end, the dual inputs of local culture and tradition through "nation" as necessary frame, and the concurrent development of a transnational, culturally and aesthetically vibrant civic sphere that will ensure a cosmopolitanism that is not a "colourless vagueness." In art historical studies, this is seen, for instance, in the recent discussion on "cosmopolitan modernisms." Conversely, we may see a dual tyranny of a nationalism that is a closure (sometimes stated as "ethno-nationalism" which is disputable), and an internationalism that is evolved through restrictive understanding of historical development within privileged expressions. In art historical terms, where there is a lack of investigation into the reality of multiple modernisms, the possibility of a democratic cosmopolitanism in art is severely curtailed. The advocacy of a liberal cosmopolitanism without a democratic foundation returns art to dominance of historical privileged category. A local community with lack of transnational inputs may sometimes place emphasis on neo-traditionalism which is also a double edged sword, as re kindling with traditions is both liberating and restrictive, which in turn interplays with the push and pull of the collective matrix.