MACMILLAN Global Sports Fandom in South Korea: American Major League Baseball and Its Fans in the Online Community (Palgrave Series of Sport in Asia)

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. Review “The book is an excellent exploration of the historical development of South Korean MLB fans. … This book is well worth reading for researchers and sport 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) Review “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) From the Back Cover 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 Author 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.