Shaping silence on colonial victims: cultural politics of emotion in Korean difficult history education

The paper examines the teaching of difficult history in Korea through the 2015 and 2022 lesson plans on the Japanese military ‘comfort women’ and students’ reactions, using autoethnographic and literary analysis. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of affect, in relation to the cultural politics of emotion, the paper conceptualizes how historical archives can traumatize students, serving as a trigger for the formation of collective bodies, represented as exclusionary nationalism. The analysis employs Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation to explore how silence and omission may be uncovered in the pursuit of peace and recovery within education. The lesson examined is social issue education, combined with social studies, provided by the government to commemorate historical topics or figures. However, the lesson can produce unexpected outcomes, such as ethnocentric or xenophobic reactions. The paper aims to explore the conditions that enable exclusionary nationalism, the silence in historical victims, and the omission of historical narratives from photographs of Japanese military ‘comfort women’. The paper contributes to sociopolitical aspects of teaching difficult history, rethinks curriculum as a tool for inscribing social norms that govern thought, and offers a critical perspective for reclaiming human rights and peace through education.