This study explores the trajectories of North Korean youth defectors settling in South Korea and receiving educational support from South Korean evangelicals, and examines the different ways that North Korean students construct their identities. This study focuses on student perspectives on missionary English teaching, analyzing how they used categories of language, religion, and nationality in making their identities. Being evangelical myself, I tried to acknowledge and to critically analyze processes of power linked with evangelicalism. I use the framework of Castells (2010) which explains the rise of identity as a social process defining globalization. I also follow Park (2009)’s discussion about the ideology of unspeakable English in the context of Korean nationalism.
This study was based on a two-year ethnography following eight North Korean young adults in evangelical English teaching programs in South Korea. The central contradiction regarding the politics of identity for North Korean students is that they are South Koreans by citizenship but are not South Koreans by their cultural habitus, one indicator being their lack of competiveness in English testing. I observed three distinctive identities among the participants responding to this contradiction: i) English test-takers aspiring (but often failing) to assimilate to South Korea, ii) church members mobilizing their North Korean backgrounds and receiving socioeconomic support, and iii) English speakers in the third-place between South and North Koreans, often attaining social mobility and visibility. I illustrate that these different paths partly had to do with whether English was speakable to them, and with how they viewed the support of the evangelicals.
This study shows how language ideologies shape multilingual practices, particularly for those in the periphery of global English. It also shows how evangelicals provide alternative ideological spaces for non-elites, albeit with different consequences. It suggests the complex relationship between language, religion and globalization, and the place of evangelical Christianity as both legitimizing and resisting globalization.
Castells, M. (2010). The power of identity. The information age: Economy, society, and culture, v. II. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Park, J. S. (2009). The local construction of a global language: Ideologies of English in South Korea. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
