Global Sports Fandom in South Korea
American Major League Baseball and Its Fans in the Online Community
Authors: Cho, Younghan
Free Preview- Examines the cultural politics of global sports fandom in South Korea
- Offers an ethnographic assessment of the shifting identities and changing everyday lives of Korean MLB fans
- Considers the changing nature of a broadly nationalist sports fandom as well as its compliance with neoliberal values in South Korea
-
Buy this book
- About this book
-
This book explores the transformation of cultural and national identity of global sports fans in South Korea, which has undergone extensive cultural and economic globalization since the 1990s. Through ethnographic research of Korean Major League Baseball fans and their online community, this book demonstrates how a postcolonial nation and its people are developing long-distance affiliation with American sports accompanied by nationalist sentiments and regional rivalry. Becoming an MLB fan in South Korea does not simply lead one to nurturing a cosmopolitan identity, but to reconstituting one’s national imaginations. Younghan Cho suggests individuated nationalism as the changing nature of the national among the Korean MLB fandom in which the national is articulated by personal choices, consumer rights and free market principles. The analysis of the Korean MLB fandom illuminates the complicated and even contradictory procedures of decentering and fragmenting nationalism in South Korea, which have been balanced by recalling nationalism in combination with neoliberal governmentality.
- About the authors
-
Younghan Cho is Professor of Korean Studies at the Graduate School of International and Area Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, South Korea. He has published widely on global sports, fans and celebrity, the Korean Wave and East Asian pop culture, and nationalism and modernity in modern Korea and East Asian society.
- Reviews
-
“A timely and original unraveling of some complexities of the global trajectories of sports fandom. Using the tools of cultural studies, Cho makes important contributions to some crucial debates around popular and online culture, nationalism, and globalization.” (Lawrence Grossberg, the Morris David Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA)
“Sport in the 21st-century is being thoroughly globalized and East Asia is at the center of this process. Cho’s absorbing ethnography of baseball fans in South Korea is a very smartly analyzed account of the local practices, national sentiments, and transnational passions that construct a globalized sport fandom in South Korea.” (William W. Kelly, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Sumitomo Professor Emeritus of Japanese Studies at Yale University, USA)
- Table of contents (8 chapters)
-
-
Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Sports in the Era of Globalization
Pages 1-33
-
Sport and Crisis of Nation Under Globalization
Pages 37-66
-
Glocalization of Sports from Above: A Korean Baseball Player as a National Individual
Pages 67-100
-
Glocalization of Sports from Below: Online Communities Among Korean MLB Fans
Pages 101-129
-
The Making of the National Fandom and Its Discontent
Pages 133-163
-
Table of contents (8 chapters)
Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
-
- Book Title
- Global Sports Fandom in South Korea
- Book Subtitle
- American Major League Baseball and Its Fans in the Online Community
- Authors
-
- Younghan Cho
- Series Title
- Palgrave Series of Sport in Asia
- Copyright
- 2020
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Copyright Holder
- The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
- eBook ISBN
- 978-981-15-3196-5
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-981-15-3196-5
- Hardcover ISBN
- 978-981-15-3195-8
- Series ISSN
- 2662-9348
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- XII, 238
- Number of Illustrations
- 1 b/w illustrations
- Topics
