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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2024
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. Towards this end, the paper methodologically investigates a South Korean novel, A Grey Man, published in 1963 during South Korea’s early post-colonial 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’ through ‘the cultural’. 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? In addressing these questions, the paper attempts to access different IR words to think with, such as race, white supremacy, intimacy without equality, sarcastic empathy, and disengagement. These provide an arena in which we can think otherwise, while un-suturing dominant Westphalian IR thinking.
This article has been updated since it was originally published. A notice detailing this has been published.
1 Westphalian common sense originated in Europe and, although it is still a powerful IR belief, it has been questioned recently from a critical and historical view. See Benjamin de Carvalho, Halvard Leira, and John M. Hobson, ‘The big bangs of IR: The myths that your teachers still tell you about 1648 and 1919’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39 (2011), pp. 735–58; Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648 (London; New York: Random House, 2003); Sebastian Schmidt, ‘To order the minds of scholars: The discourse of the Peace of Westphalia in International Relations literature’, International Studies Quarterly, 55 (2011), pp. 601–23; Turan Kayaoglu, ‘Westphalian Eurocentrism in International Relations theory’, International Studies Review, 12 (2010), pp. 193–217.
2 Jungmin Seo and Young Chul Cho, ‘The emergence and evolution of International Relations studies in postcolonial South Korea’, Review of International Studies, 47 (2021), pp. 619–36.
3 Young Chul Cho, ‘Inadvertent reproduction of Western-centrism in South Korean IR theorization: Epistemological, teleological, and complicit Western-centrism’, The Korean Journal of International Studies, 21 (2023), pp. 1–25.
4 Young Chul Cho, ‘Colonialism and imperialism in the quest for a universalist Korean-style International Relations theory’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 28 (2015), pp. 680–700; In Tae Yoo and Young Chul Cho, ‘Middle power diplomacy knowledge production in South Korea: A critical interpretation’, Asian Perspective, 46 (2022), pp. 627–53.
5 We borrow the concept of ‘un-suturing’ from George Yancy with one modification. In this paper, to un-suture is to create a sort of split, white hegemonic IR identity or common sense, making it possible for the white West to scrutinise the ways in which they sealed themselves off. It also helps the marginalised/oppressed to think otherwise and act differently for the better. See George Yancy, ‘Introduction: Un-sutured’, in George Yancy (ed.), White Self-Criticality beyond Anti-Racism (New York: Lexington, 2015), pp. xi–xxvi.
6 In-hoon Choi, A Grey Man, trans. Kyung-Ja Chun (Seoul: Si-sa-young-o-sa, 1988).
7 He was born in 1936 in North Hamgyong Province, which is now part of North Korea, during the Japanese occupation. During the Korean War, he travelled on a US Navy ship to take refuge in South Korea with his family. He experienced the tumultuous history of modern Korea, including Japanese imperialism and colonialism, violent right–left ideological feuds, the fratricidal Korean War, a popular revolution, a military coup, authoritarianism, dictatorship, rapid economic development, and democratisation. As a novelist, In-hoon Choi was both prolific and polemic. His oeuvre consists of 15 books, with most of his novels focusing on individuals who suffer from structural, ideological conflicts that link the division of Korea to great power international politics. In-hoon Choi is considered to have launched a new age in Korean modern literature. He passed away in 2018 at the age of 84. The South Korean government posthumously decorated In-hoon Choi with the Geumgwan Order of Cultural Merit, the highest honour of its kind, for his contribution to Korean literature. In-hoon Choi’s life is an example of post-colonilaity in South Korea.
8 Mun-jung Kim, ‘A study on “revolution” and “writing” in the Grey Man’ [in Korean], Bipyeongmunhak [Critique Literature], 35 (2010), p. 47–66 (p. 47).
9 A Grey Man is an unusual novel, in the sense that it does not contain a well-organised, conventional plot, shaped around a particular event. Instead, it presents the in-depth reflections of its main protagonist, Tokko Chun, a northern-refugee-cum-university-student in South Korea, who wrestles with various topics, including love, time, imperialism, colonialism, communism, war, national division, nationalism, authoritarianism, and democratic revolution. Tokko Chun is A Grey Man. He undertakes an honest and intelligent act of self-questioning while talking with other characters in the novel. The content of the novel is personal, historical, and social, capturing the personal perspectives of Tokko Chun and other characters on Korean politics and society in a world of Western great powers. It is a novel of diverse ideas without a clear storyline. The temporal background of A Grey Man moves from autumn 1958 to summer 1959, just before the South Korean Democratic Revolution on 19 April 1960.
10 Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005); The Association of Korean Teachers, A Korean History for International Readers (Seoul: Humanist, 2014).
11 Charles K. Armstrong, The Koreas (New York: Routledge, 2014).
12 Joonseok Yang and Young Chul Cho, ‘Subaltern South Korea’s anti-communist Asian cooperation in the mid-1950s’, Asian Perspective, 44 (2020), pp. 255–70.
13 Choi, A Grey Man, p. 11, emphasis added.
14 Ibid., p. 228, emphasis added.
15 Ibid., pp. 27–8, emphasis added.
16 Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam, Race and Racism in International Relations (New York: Routledge, 2014); Navnita Chadha Behera, ‘Globalization, deglobalization and knowledge production’, International Affairs, 97 (2021), pp. 1579–97; Geeta Chowdhry and Sheila Nair (eds), Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations: Reading Race, Gender and Class (London: Routledge, 2002); Sankaran Krishna, ‘Race, amnesia, and the education of International Relations’, Alternatives, 26 (2001), pp. 401–24; Cecelia Lynch, ‘The moral aporia of race in International Relations’, International Relations, 33 (2019), pp. 267–85; Chengxin Pan, ‘Racialised politics of (in)security and the Covid-19 Westfailure’, Critical Studies on Security, 9 (2021), pp. 40–5; Randolph B. Persaud and Alina Sajed (eds), Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations: Postcolonial Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2018); V. Spike Peterson, ‘Critical privilege studies: Making visible the reproduction of racism in the everyday and International Relations’, Security Dialogue, 52 (2021), pp. 17–27; Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa, ‘From the everyday to IR: In defence of the strategic use of the R-word’, Postcolonial Studies, 19 (2016), pp. 191–200; Robert Vitalis, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
17 Ajay Parasram, ‘Hunting the state of nature: Race and ethics in postcolonial International Relations’, in Brent J. Steele and Eric A. Heinze (eds), Routledge Handbook of Ethics and International Relations (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 102–15 (p. 108).
18 For instance, although Japan before World War II was a great power, it was treated as racially different in world politics, evoking the narrative of the ‘Yellow Peril’ in the West. Concerned about racial discrimination in IR, Japan demanded that a ‘racial equality clause’ be included in the League of Nations chapter. This request was denied, confirming Japan’s belief that it would be excluded from the international society of great powers, due to racial bias. See Steven Ward, Status and Challenge of Rising Powers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 100–29; Amitav Acharya, ‘Race and racism in the founding of the modern world order’, International Affairs, 98 (2022), pp. 23–43.
19 John M. Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Sankaran Krishna, Globalization and Postcolonialism: Hegemony and Resistance in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).
20 David Gillborn, ‘Rethinking white supremacy: Who counts in “whiteworld”’, Ethnicities, 6 (2006), pp. 318–40 (p. 318).
21 David L. Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah, ‘International Relations from below’, in Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 663–74; L. H. M. Ling, Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and the West (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Branwen Gruffydd Jones (ed.), Decolonizing International Relations (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Sanjay Seth, ‘Introduction’, in Sanjay Seth (ed.), Postcolonial Theory and International Relations: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 1–12.
22 We the authors thank RIS’s reviewer for this valuable point.
23 Michael J. Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn (New York: Routledge, 2013).
24 Roland Bleiker and David Hundt, ‘Ko Un and the poetics of postcolonial identity’, Global Society, 24 (2010), pp. 331–49.
25 Helen M. Kinsella and Laura J. Shepherd, ‘Well, what is the feminist perspective on international affairs? Theory/practice’, International Affairs, 95 (2019), pp. 1209–13 (p. 1213).
26 Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Roland Bleiker (ed.), Visual Global Politics (New York: Routledge, 2018); William A. Callahan, Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Shine Choi, Re-Imagining North Korea in International Relations: Problems and Alternatives (New York: Routledge, 2015); Jason Dittmer, Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Identity (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010); Michael J. Shapiro, Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject (London: Routledge, 2004).
27 Sungju Park-Kang, ‘Fictional IR and imagination: Advancing narrative approaches’, Review of International Studies, 41 (2015), pp. 361–81 (p. 370).
28 Shapiro, ‘Studies in trans-disciplinary method’, p. 11 and p. xv.
29 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993). See also Pinar Bilgin, ‘“Contrapuntal reading” as a method, an ethos, and a metaphor for global IR’, International Studies Review, 18 (2016), pp. 134–46; Geeta Chowdhry, ‘Edward Said and contrapuntal reading: Implications for critical interventions in International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 36 (2007), pp. 101–16.
30 Nikole Hannah-Jones, Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman, and Jake Silverstein (eds), The 1619 Project (New York: Random House, 2021).
31 Chowdhry, ‘Edward Said’, p. 103.
32 Ibid., p. 105.
33 Edward Said quoted in Meera Sabaratnam, ‘Bring up the bodies: International order, empire, and re-thinking the great war (1914–1918) from below’, European Journal of International Relations, 29 (2023), pp. 553–75 (p. 558).
34 Fiona B. Adamson, ‘Pushing the boundaries: Can we “decolonize” security studies?’, Journal of Global Security Studies, 5 (2020), pp. 129–35; Tarak Barkawi, ‘Decolonising war’, European Journal of International Security, 1 (2016), pp. 199–214; Behera, ‘Globalization, deglobalization and knowledge production’; David L. Blaney and Arlene B. Tickner, ‘Worlding, ontological politics and the possibility of a decolonial IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 45 (2017), pp. 293–311; Zeynep Gulsah Capan, ‘Decolonising International Relations?’, Third World Quarterly, 38 (2017), pp. 1–15; Phillip Darby (ed.), From International Relations to Relations International: Postcolonial Essays (London: Routledge, 2016); Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Decolonizing global ethics: Thinking with the pluriverse’, Ethics & International Affairs, 33 (2019), pp. 115–25; L. H. M. Ling, The Dao of World Politics: Towards a Post-Westphalian, Worldist International Relations (London: Routledge, 2014); Olivia U. Rutazibwa, ‘Hidden in plain sight: Coloniality, capitalism and race/ism as far as the eye can see’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 48 (2020), pp. 221–41; Seo and Cho, ‘The emergence’; Chih-yu Shih, Eros of International Relations: Self-Feminizing and the Claiming of Postcolonial Chineseness (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022); Kosuke Shimizu (ed.), Critical International Theories in East Asia: Relationality, Subjectivity, and Pragmatism (New York: Routledge, 2019).
35 Choi, A Grey Man, pp. 100, 111.
36 Ibid., p. 67.
37 Although Tokko Chun perceived the Cold War as an intra-war within the West, seeing the Soviet Union as part of the West, there are different literatures which show that the West was constructed in relation with the Soviet Union as the other. See Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: ‘The East’ in European Identity Formation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Simon Dalby, ‘Geopolitical discourse: The Soviet Union as other’, Alternatives, 13 (1988), pp. 415–42.
38 Choi, A Grey Man, pp. 192–3, emphasis added.
39 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin, 2013), pp. 88–9.
40 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
41 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 2008), pp. 87, 65.
42 Ibid., p. 172.
43 Ibid., p. 170.
44 George Orwell, Essays (London: Penguin Classics, 2014), p. 30.
45 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.
46 Kyung-Won Lee, Black History, White Theory: The Genealogy and Identity of Postcolonialism [in Korean] (Paju-si: Hangilsa, 2011), pp. 197–208; Michael Tanner, Nietzsche (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 81–8.
47 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 172.
48 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 8.
49 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 42.
50 To unveil the traumatised psychology of the colonised for an analytical purpose, this section tactically uses a binary distinction of the white West vs. the coloured Rest. Yet the authors need to stress that the white West is not a uniformly essentialised entity but rather hybrid and post-colonial entities, though colonialism and imperialism have heavily informed what the (white) West was/is and, why and how it was/is superior. However, colonies also shaped the West in many ways, such as culture, diaspora, trade, and materials. Some in the West also suffered from Western colonising projects. Westphalian IR based on statist ontology has failed to attend to the post-coloniality of the West, and it makes believe that the West is not post-colonial at all, unlike the former coloured colonies. The ignored ontology of race has inflicted social tensions, psychological splits, and political-economic inequalities in the post-colonial West. These sufferings also cross the racial lines. Post-whiteness can replace whiteness. In this sense, Sisyphus’ ass-pushers are not just coloured peoples outside the West but some whites and hybrid race in the white West. This line of relational thinking is indebted to Shih’s discussion of post-Chineseness and post-Westernness. See Chih-yu Shih, ‘Post-Chinese, post-Western and post-Asian relations: Engaging a pluriversal East Asia’, China Report, 57 (2021), pp. 270–88; Chih-yu Shih, Post-Chineseness: Cultural Politics and International Relations (Albany: SUNY Press, 2022).
51 Choi, A Grey Man, pp. 186–7, emphasis added.
52 Ibid., p. 76, emphasis added.
53 Chih-yu Shih, Civilization, Nation and Modernity in East Asia (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 203.
54 Ibid., p. 204.
55 Choi, A Grey Man, p. 193.
56 Ibid., p. 188, emphasis added.
57 Homi Bhabha, ‘Of mimicry and man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse’, Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis, 28 (1984), pp. 125–33 (p. 126).
58 Sankaran Krishna, ‘IR and the postcolonial novel: Nation and subjectivity in India’, in Sanjay Seth (ed.), Postcolonial Theory and International Relations: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 124–43 (p. 124).
59 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), p. 2; Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 3. As for a self-reflexive critique as a decolonial theory-cum-method, the literature on reverse Orientalism, self-Orientalism, reflexive Orientalism, and social dominance is particularly noteworthy. See Chih-yu Shih, Negotiating Ethnicity in China: Citizenship as a Response to the State (London: Routledge, 2002); Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, Social Dominance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Sharmani Patricia Gabriel and Bernard Wilson, Orientalism and Reverse Orientalism in Literature and Film (London: Routledge, 2021); Xiaomei Chen, Occidentalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).
60 Choi, A Grey Man, pp. 2–3, emphasis added.
61 Ibid., p. 28.
62 Ibid., p. 4, emphasis added.
63 Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (New York: Harper & Row, 1982).
64 William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 43.
65 Young Chul Cho and Yih-Jye Hwang, ‘Mainstream IR theoretical perspectives and rising China vis-a-vis the West: the logic of conquest, conversion and socialisation’, Journal of Chinese Political Science, 25 (2020), pp. 175–98.
66 Errol A. Henderson, ‘Hidden in plain sight: Racism in International Relations theory’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 26 (2013), pp. 71–92.
67 Choi, A Grey Man, p. 5, emphasis added.
68 Ibid., p. 103, emphasis added.
69 Ibid., p. 110.
70 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations & the Threat to Global Prosperity (London: Random House Business Books, 2007); Hannah-Jones, Roper, Silverman, and Silverstein, The 1619 Project; Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Pankaj Mishra, Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race and Empire (New Delhi: Juggernaut, 2020); Marcos S. Scauso, Garrett FitzGerald, Arlene B. Tickner, Navnita Chadha Behera, Chengxin Pan, Chih Yu Shih, and Kosuke Shimizu ‘Covid-19, democracies, and (de)colonialities’, Democratic Theory, 7 (2020), pp. 82–93.
71 Krishna, Globalization and Postcolonialism.
72 Choi, A Grey Man, p. 162.
73 Ibid., p. 166.
74 Ibid., p. 170.
75 Ibid., p. 171.
76 Ibid., pp. 174–6.
77 Ibid., pp. 10–11.
78 Ibid., p. 123.
79 Ibid., p. 226.
80 Ibid., pp. 28, 67.
81 Ibid., p. 67.
82 Ibid., pp. 283–4.
83 Bhabha, ‘Of mimicry and man’.
84 Rosalind C. Morris and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
85 Choi, A Grey Man, pp. 27, 100.
86 Ibid., p. 110.
87 Chen, Asia as Method, p. 223.
88 Ibid., p. 223.
89 Ibid., p. 223.
90 Ibid., p. 223.
91 Ibid., p. 225.
92 Choi, A Grey Man, p. 193.
93 Ibid., p. 226.
94 Brent Hayes Edwards, ‘Introduction’, in W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Brent Hayes Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. vii–xxiii (p. xiv).
95 Choi, A Grey Man, no page number.
96 It might be odd or ironic to see that we, the authors, are submitting this paper to a prestigious Western IR journal – Review of International Studies (RIS)– in English, while calling for a disengagement from the colonial script. Nonetheless, the authors treat English, though dominant, as one of many languages which enables us to talk to plural Western and non-Western others who are not familiar with our mother tongue, Korean. Equally we see RIS as an efficient means of engaging with many different actors, particularly subalterns, living in the Global South as well as North. This is a critical appropriation of Western resources for the interest of connecting with others in the globe, whose vernacular languages are different. This can contribute to global solidarity for change for the better. What we reject is not the West but Western-centrism accompanied with Orientalism and racism in knowledge production and everyday lives. The West is one of multiple yet critical ideas.
97 Although there might be different conceptual and normative concerns, disengagement as a personal act of politics in life can be found in Confucian advice, Mahayana Buddhist Nagarjuna’s tetralemma, everyday resistance, and non-cooperation movements. See Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Dennis Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven, CT: London, 1985); James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Kaisa Kärki, ‘Not doings as resistance’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 48 (2018), pp. 364–84; Mathew Varghese, Nagarjuna and the Art of Negation: Discerning Subjectivity, Emptiness, Transcendental Ethics, Tetralemma Logic, Binary Logic, Self-Being and Negations (New Delhi: Sanctum Books); Michael Szonyi, The Art of Being Governed (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Yagyong Chong, Admonitions on Governing the People, trans. Byonghyon Choi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).
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