In the late 18^th century, people enjoyed magic lantern shows, which were regarded as phantasmagoria, with their visual and sound effects to arouse certain emotions. The magic lantern slides later became an educational resource and were used in many ways to teach geography, history, and science. Within the visuals of the magic lantern, specific social norms naturalized social practices and perpetuated marginalization and standardization by shaping the mode of reasoning, such as Racial hierarchy or Eurocentrism. Interestingly, the technology of visuals keeps repeating a similar mode of reasoning within the different techniques, even in the 21^st century. AI visuals become a new phantasmagoria, making students excited about the visuals but naturalized about the image itself without questioning.

The research examines how visual cultural materials in the curriculum portray the ideal human and shape people’s thoughts through a postcolonial perspective. Visual cultural materials in the curriculum contain dominant social norms. When students engage with visual cultural materials, these materials shape students' thinking, becoming a cultural experience. The discourse based on dominant norms circulates students’ thoughts and leaves a mark on their thinking. The mark in thinking shapes the affect, and it is created or solidified by cultural experiences. Although the ways of forming the affect are different, the dominant norm circulates among people and shapes the collective mindsets. This research aims to explore the circulation of the notion of the ideal human and how visual discourse can become the dominant norm. Here are three research questions: 1) How can visuals function as curriculum and inscribe social practices onto individuals? 2) What is the coloniality of visuals in the late 19^th-century curriculum, and how do they shape the ideal human figure? 3) What are the educational implications of visuals in the 21^st century? 

The research uses two concepts from Sylvia Wynter’s concept of Man (Wynter, 2003) and Sara Ahmed’s concept of affect (Ahmed, 2014)to understand how the ideal ‘figure of Man’ is justified and perpetuates racial hierarchy in the curriculum via visuals. Sylvia Wynter highlights the overrepresentation of Man, who is depicted as white, male, able-bodied, and propertied, in particular historical colonial events. Sara Ahmed emphasizes the importance of the impression the object makes, which can shape collective bodies. The visual impression of the body inscribes the notion of Man, circulating the surfaces of bodies to shape the dominant social norms. The notion of the Man embedded in the curriculum, representing the idealized human figure, becomes the grid of intelligibility for students to follow. The process of impression from visuals to create the grid of intelligibility (Foucault, 1978) is a form of epistemic colonialism, a technology that shapes the self in a particular way by entangling with related cultural experiences. In education, visual materials are used to shape subjectivity, which is not autonomous but rather passive and subjugated. This is the way of producing a colonial subject. 

Research methodology is based on historicizing, grounded in Sylvia Wynter, which criticizes the monolithic reasoning of humanism for classification, standardization, and normalization, and focuses on the conditions of the figure of Man within continuous historical rupture based on coloniality. Wynter identifies a rupture rooted in coloniality and reveals how coloniality of knowledge, shaped by the notion of modernity, constitutes the group of race, class, gender, and ethnicity (Wynter, 2003). As she explores the notion of Man, there are two descriptive statements: one from the evangelizing mission of the Church and the other from the imperializing mission of the state, based on territorial expansion. The creation of Man is a political subject of the state within a secularizing Judeo-Christian framework and the constitution of Western imperialism. Later, the descriptive statement of Man 2 is also within the Judeo-Christian narrative, but the genres of Man differ, which is justified by modern science. With this coming to shape two types of Man, their epistemes are like respective genres of being human, but the descriptive statements are within the same Judeo-Christian framework, which shows both discontinuous and continuous aspects of historicizing (Wynter, 2003, p. 318). Wynter addresses that different types of humanness, including religious, social, and economic changes, create the figure of Man. Man which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, tries to secure the well-being of a present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) The overrepresentation, defined in the coloniality of being/power/truth/ freedom, becomes the descriptive statement to perpetuate the Western notion of the human (white, male, able-bodied, and propertied), being as the foundational to modernity (Wynter, 2003). Wynter problematizes the classificatory logic in overrepresenting Man by using subjective understanding or “inner eyes” generated from the representation of the human as an evolutionarily selected organism. Her historicizing enables us to examine the continuity and discontinuity of coloniality within historical artifacts to see what makes the coloniality of knowledge. As data, the research analyzes two historical artifacts: One is Joseph Boggs Beale’s magic lantern slides, performed in Philadelphia (1860~1900), with the related textbooks used during the same period. The other is 21st-century AI visuals with teacher interviews in both the U.S. and the Republic of Korea. The research examines the phantasmagoric features of two historical artifacts and how they generate particular grids of intelligibility by shaping affect.

Some of Beale’s magic lantern slides depicting Biblical stories illustrate racial hierarchies and stereotypes by representing Black people as servants to White figures—despite the original texts making no mention of race. Furthermore, Black individuals were often portrayed as lower-class or parodied, effectively essentializing racial stratification. These slides propagate a specific 'notion of Man' and entrench racial hierarchies by impressing these images onto the viewers’ consciousness. The magic lantern slides served as an affective trigger, entangling with students' formal educational experiences. As these hierarchies circulated through visual media, the impressions left a mark on the affect, molding collective thought into racial stereotypes. This exemplifies the process of epistemic colonialism, a technique employed to construct colonial subjects. In the 21st century, AI-generated images produce similar tropes by drawing on historically accumulated data. Based on teacher interviews, students often find the process of creating and viewing AI visuals in class exciting. However, both teachers and students frequently naturalize these AI outputs, assuming the machine is merely following human direction without bias. This reflects a tendency among some educators to naturalize AI’s biased outputs as an inevitable reflection of its origin. As Ruha Benjamin (2019) argues, race itself can function as a technology to naturalize racialized notions, potentially trapping individuals in stigmatized categories under the guise of colorblind ideology. By uncritically utilizing historically biased data, AI can perpetuate and reinforce these racialized norms. Nevertheless, a crucial distinction exists: AI visuals are co-constructed by humans and machines. While individuals risk becoming colonial subjects of this new technology, decolonial thinking offers a pathway to enhance racial sensitivity and critical engagement with information. Future education must prioritize discerning the coloniality of knowledge and navigating the tensions of decolonizing knowledge as a core component of digital literacy."

Ahmed, S. (2014). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh University Press. Benjamin, R. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality, Volume 1: An introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1976) Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after Man, its overrepresentation—an argument. The Centennial Review, 3(3), 257-337.