Individual Paper
5. Transmitting Knowledges: Institutions, Objects and Practices
This paper aims to un-suture common-sense assumptions based on Westphalian international relations (IR) from South Korea’s non-essentialist and situated perspective, in the context of decolonising IR. Toward this end, the paper methodologically investigates a South Korean novel, A Grey Man, published in 1963, during South Korea’s early postcolonial period at the height of the Cold War. Using a non-Western novel to conduct a contrapuntal reading of Westphalian IR, this paper constructs a different type of worlding, conceptualising ‘the international’ from ‘the below’. It explores the following questions: How do ‘yellow negroes’ (the subject race) make sense of themselves and their roles and life-modes in a world defined for them by the white West (the master race)? How do yellow negroes understand and respond to the white West, which is hegemonic in world politics and history? In what ways does the protagonist of A Grey Man resist, engage with, and relate to the hegemonic West, which he has already internalised?
Young Chul Cho
Kangwon National University, Republic of Korea