Strategic Occidentalism: Navigating Global Racial Hierarchies through Education and Mobility among South Korean Migrants

Abstract

This article introduces strategic Occidentalism as the labor of pursuing, translating, and calibrating Western-coded forms of value under contexts where their recognition is uneven and contingent. Drawing on longitudinal multi-sited ethnographic research, it examines how lower-resourced South Korean youth engage in English study and/or work abroad as a pathway to acquire such markers, including standardized test scores, accents, and credentials. The analysis situates these practices within South Korea’s legacies of U.S. military occupation, developmental state-building, and state-led globalization, which together institutionalize Westernness as a structural benchmark. As overseas study expands to lower-cost hubs such as the Philippines, these youth access more attainable routes while confronting uncertainty over how their experiences will be read upon return. By bringing together postcolonial theory and critical race scholarship, this article offers a window into how migrants on the global margins labor within systems of recognition whose standards are defined elsewhere and whose returns were never guaranteed, a condition that extends beyond South Korea where postcolonial hierarchies and neoliberal restructuring converge.