Decolonial Becoming: Immobility, Indigeneity, and Disability in Transpacific Korea

Decolonial Becoming reimagines decolonization by centering questions of Indigeneity, disability, and the settler diaspora in modern Korea from the 1930s to the present. Jeong Eun Annabel We traces the ways that South Korean military and economic practices in the Pacific have functioned as a subempire of US settler colonialism and how South Korea’s nationalist ideology of monoethnicity as Indigeneity under US and Japanese occupations has come at the expense of myriad Indigenous and disabled peoples. Arguing that Korea must grapple with its place in this transpacific colonial order, We challenges the binary of mobility as freedom and immobility as unfreedom through what she calls “decolonial becoming,” a polyrhythmic theory of dialectics in which immobility is a condition of occupation as well as a critical site of relationality. She places Asian, diasporic, and transpacific theories and literatures of decolonization in conversation with Caribbean and Latin American decolonial thought and Native and Indigenous studies to show how immobility can offer a means of unlearning settler colonial logics.