Global Sports Fandom in South Korea

Beschreibung

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.

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Younghan Cho

Themen in »Global Sports Fandom in South Korea«

politics of global sports fandom in South Korea identities of Korean MLB fans nationalist sports fandom neoliberal values in South Korea and sports Sport, cultural globalization and nationalist discourse fragmenting nationalism in South Korea

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“It is an important milestone to seek such development, and I believe many suggestions are included in this book for further research. … The author’s exquisite interpretive skill will let the reader anticipate further development of the research in this field.” (Masaki Tosa, Pacific Affairs, Vol. 95 (3), September, 2022)
“Global Sports Fandom in South Korea allows the reader to see sports from a more nuanced perspective and to gain a more immediate insight into actual sports fans in ways that much of the current literature simply fails to do. … It is an important work that suggests a far richer approach to research on fan cultures and communities than many of its predecessors and, as such, it is deserving of our serious consideration.” (Lin Man-Hsu, Acta Koreana, Vol. 25 (1), June, 2022)

“The book is an excellent exploration of the historical development of South Korean MLB fans. … This book is well worth reading for researchers andsport studies experts from a range of fields including anthropology, critical and cultural studies, economics, history, media studies, politics, and sociology.” (Mark Brooke, idrottsforum.org, December 16, 2021)
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“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)

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