Abstract
AbstractBy examining relationships between language and race within Bourdieu's theoretical concept of “misrecognition”, this article highlights distinctive ways in which the mental structure of a minority individual becomes Orientalized in relation to a racialized identity construction. Specifically, it examines how English becomes misrecognized asthekey to a desired white identity in the case of one prominent Korean intellectual of the 19th century, Yun Chi-Ho (1864–1945). To this end, this article analyses the English diaries written by Yun, which began during his sojourn in the United States (1888–1893). The analysis of the diaries illustrates how Yun subjected himself to an Orientalized gaze in 19th century America, a society marked by racial and language boundaries and how his inferiority complex led him to pursue a white identity with English as a primary tool. While Self-Orientalism is regarded as both a cause and outcome of Asian participation in the construction of the Orient, this article reconceptualizes Self-Orientalism as a process of misrecognition born out of the colonial context of superior-inferior distinction characterized by the boundedness of language and race. The article concludes by broadening out from the case of Yun to illustrate the impact of misrecognition on the continued covert operation of Self-Orientalism in contemporary times.
Highlights
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (2008) examines how the French language is appropriated in the colonized mindset of black people in the French Antilles as a means to reconstruct their racial identity
The analysis of the diaries illustrates how Yun subjected himself to an Orientalized gaze in 19th century America, a society marked by racial and language boundaries and how his inferiority complex led him to pursue a white identity with English as a primary tool
While Self-Orientalism is regarded as both a cause and outcome of Asian participation in the construction of the Orient, this article reconceptualizes Self-Orientalism as a process of misrecognition born out of the colonial context of superior-inferior distinction characterized by the boundedness of language and race
Summary
In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (2008) examines how the French language is appropriated in the colonized mindset of black people in the French Antilles as a means to reconstruct their racial identity. Much of contemporary discourse on SelfOrientalism interprets the ideology as a strategic choice or “the complicity of ‘orientals”’ (Dirlik 1996: 100, quotation marks original; see Liu 2017; Umbach and Wishnoff 2008), which has been mediated and facilitated by nationalism (see Feighery 2012) and the marketability of exotic Otherness in specific domains such as tourism (see Yan and Santos 2009) This complicity-based view of Self-Orientalism which posits voluntary subjugation of the Others, risks overlooking and simplifying complex internal processes by which the Others come to accept, internalize and recursively use the superior-inferior binary embedded in the Orientalist ideas. The article attempts to reconceptualize Self-Orientalism as a process of “misrecognition” (Bourdieu 1989), which is inextricably linked to the coloniality of language and race
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