A Cut in the Tongue

Opening with stories about tongue surgery performed on children to correct their English accent in contemporary South Korea, chapter 1 revises memories of postcolonial languaging, whose severance from the mother tongue metonymizes its prostheticity. It retheorizes postcolonial languaging as racializing and gendering somatechnology of being human by tracing Black bodies in the works of Judith Butler, Toni Morrison, and Sylvia Wynter. In this light, the absurdity of tongue surgery betrays the West’s onto-epistemological norms that render certain somatechnologies of the speaking (human) subject legible over others in the postcolonial neoliberal world. Thus, while Korean mothers are blamed for the disloyal nonsense of tongue surgery, this chapter attends to inhuman maternity as a matrix of countermemories in postcolonial languaging—as shown in M. NourbeSe Philip’s and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s diasporic memories that engender new relations for the mother/tongue dislodged from the pedagogical and reproductive institutions of the origin.