Prologue
During the summer of 2005, I returned to South Korea to interview several Korean fans of Major League Baseball (MLB). When I heard that an informal meeting of fans would be held in Busan, a southern city about 5 hours by car from Seoul, I immediately made plans to be there. I was nervous and excited about this gathering. It was my first face-to-face experience with people I had initially gotten to know online, although I had already met up with several interviewees whom I had contacted online. At 7 p.m. on the appointed evening, about 20 fans showed up and stayed until after midnight. Upon arrival, the group shook hands and introduced themselves by their user IDs or online nicknames rather than their ārealā names. All but a few were meeting for the first time; most resided in Busan; and all but three were male. The majority was in their mid-twenties but several were in their thirties and forties; the oldest had a daughter in high school. When they began to recognize how they ranked from the eldest to the youngest, instead of addressing each other by their online user IDs, they began to use very informal titles such as hyeong [older brother] and dongsaeng [younger brother]. Such labels are typical of lad culture and patriarchy in South Korea. The attendees also ate pork-belly barbeque and drank soju (Korean distilled liquor), both of which are stereotypically favored in all-male gatherings. To my surprise, instead of focusing on MLB, they enthusiastically chatted about their local franchise team, the Lotte Giants, and the Korean Professional Baseball League (KBO). āWhat the heck are they doing?ā I wondered, āAre they really MLB maniacs?ā The intensity of their conversations and their strong Southern accents bewildered me, almost as if I had stepped into the wrong party.
Although it was small and informal, this gathering revealed much about how Korean fans enjoy their favorite sporting league, MLB, in their local spaces. Many of the conversations that night did not include or necessitate vast knowledge or the latest news about MLB teams and players. Despite their shared interest in MLB, these fans also expressed strong attachment to and passion for their own local baseball teams and players. Nor did these fans display their distinct loyalties in the ways devoted sports fans might be expected to: only one attendee showed off his fan allegiance by wearing a team jersey. These fans do not easily match up with the typical image of global fans in any kind of pop culture, including global sports, who are supposed to exhibit their fandom via special costumes, cosmopolitan manners, professional knowledge, and relevant jargon.
This book was motivated by the surprise and curiosity I felt when I began to compare the informality and local flavors of this meeting to how Chan-ho Park, the first Korean MLB player, was received in South Korea in 1997, when South Korea was about to plunge into an economic crisis. As my fieldwork progressed between 2005 and 2006, I also began to reflect on my own experiences and memories of watching MLB games on domestic television channels as well as my observation of MLBās sudden popularity in the late 1990s. During the economic crisis, which was caused by the shortage of foreign funds and was habitually represented as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) intervention, Parkās great success in the U.S. attracted massive public attention and made him a national celebrity. Considering the countryās economic devastation and frustrations at the time, his great performance in the U.S. was heralded and accepted as a stellar example of Korean national competitiveness in a global contest and as proof of Koreansā ability to overcome the ongoing shameful and confusing conditions of South Korea in the era of globalization.
This book has also developed along with my personal transitions from South Korea to the U.S. (and subsequent return to Asia and South Korea), from a local baseball fan to a MLB fan, and from an indifferent observer to an engaged ethnographer of an online fan community. I came to consider global sports and its fandom as a serious topic of research upon my sojourn to the U.S. at the age of 29, a shift that I regard as a physical movement in pursuit of a doctorate at an American university rather than a perpetual migration. My change of residence and in particular my geographical distance from my home country gave me sufficient time and space to tackle the issue of cultural globalization especially via global pop cultures, including MLB, and its impact on national identity , citizenship, as well as the domestic government in South Korea. Simultaneously, I also struggled with an ontological and epistemic dilemma between my compassion for my countryās cultural phenomena and as a researcher in media and cultural studies, whose theories are based on Euro-American contexts. Several dominant and influential theories and concepts, which have often originated from the field of postcolonial studies, are not necessarily applicable to the cultural phenomenon and issues of South Korea which I experienced and observed in person. In particular, studies on global sports and fandoms have been largely discussed and developed in Western contexts and by Western scholars. The more I learned about the existing research on global sports, the more I seemed to be confused and at a loss when it came to applying such studies to my particular research objects.
In any case, I am a sport fan for life who enjoys both playing and watching sports games. When I stayed in the U.S. (mostly in Chapel Hill, North Carolina) for five years, I came to increase my interest in various U.S. sporting events in general as well as MLB in particular. Before my sojourn, I used to be a big fan of Korean Baseball Leagues (KBO) and watched mostly Parkās games or his franchise team, i.e., the L. A. Dodgers in MLB. As I developed my interest and expertise in MLB in the U.S., for better or worse, I became a fan of MLB in general rather than of any specific franchise team. Because the town I lived in is a small university town, it is not affiliated with any professional sports teams: even in North Carolina itself, there is no city that hosts MLB franchise teams. At home, I used to watch the program Baseball Tonight on ESPN, and I often watched the games of the Atlanta Braves and the Chicago Cubs, which are broadcast nationwide on cable television. As time passed and I had watched more MLB games, my memories of enjoying Parkās games and MLB almost a decade ago in South Korea began to coalesce into a recognition of subtle and undiscernible issues around Park and MLB, as well as nationalist sentiments and some divergent voices.
Besides Park, my initial interest in MLB was connected to video games such as the MVP series for the PC and MLB The Show for the PlayStation. Also, I happened to find and visit an online community for Korean MLB fans, e.g., MLBPARK (www.āmlbpark.ācom) in early 2002, just before moving to the U.S. As a novice fan of MLB in general, I was able to familiarize myself with information about and knowledge of MLB players and some baseball history as well as the latest news. While in the U.S., I also felt an immediate sense of connection to South Korea by reading Koreansā responses to MLB and updates about local news and events through MLBPARK. To put it in slightly exaggerated terms, participation in the online community provided me with ordinary but precious moments of pleasure and a break from my painstaking and agonizing life as a grad student in a foreign land. As visiting and spending time in this community became a routine, I began to realize MLBPARKās potential as an object of study: the interactions among Korean MLB fans appeared to me as a wonderful resource through which to explore some of the intriguing and complicated research issues and questions that I had in mind. As long-distance fans, these Koreans heavily utilized and relied on the internet for obtaining news about their favorite leagues and for exchanging their thoughts with other fans. At the same time, their responses and agendas were still engaged with their local or national sentiments within the fabric of their daily lives in South Korea. By being there myself, virtually, and by participating in Korean fansā interactions, I was able to develop my research questions and eventually decided to conduct internet ethnographic research on the Korean MLB fandom.
Since returning to South Korea after a short stopover in Asia, I was able to watch another MLB game recently in which Hyun-Jin Ryu, another Korean player in MLB, played as a starting pitcher for the L. A. Dodgers in a very important game of the 2019 postseason. As Ryu was having another wonderful season, MLBPARK was swarming with Korean MLB fans. Writing this book sounds like an over-due project, but at the same time, it has been a lengthy process of re-visiting my ethnographic notes and conversations that happened in 2005 and 2006, as well as re-examining my previous analyses during the past decade.1 Using the words of Kelly, this book also āturns what had been for me an ethnographic present into an ethnographic pastā and vice versa (2019, p. 28). Since the late 1990s, the Korean MLB fandom has changed, and the fansā online communities have also undergone several transformations, but I am still able to observe continuing patterns and iterating controversies amidst the cheers for Korean players in MLB and surrounding fansā enjoyment of MLB in their own homes and on any corner of the street. I hope that this book will be a useful documentation of the past as well as a platform for imagining various and emerging forms of fans and their communities around global sports and any other kinds of global pop cultures.
Identity Politics and Global Sports Fandom
This book aims to investigate the other side of identity politics by focusing on people who encounter, experience, and undergo globalization in their original and local spaces, i.e., without either temporary or permanent physical movements. Identity politics in the global era continues to be a central topic in many disciplines including literature, cultural anthropology, media studies, critical studies, and cultural studies. Despite the vibrant and abounding studies on identity under the banner of postcolonialism, most of them tend to pay attention to people who migrate from their original homes to new placesāmostly metropolitan cities in the West. Under the rubric of Americanized postcolonial theory, recent rhetoric employs descriptors such as hybrid, subaltern, transnational, or even cosmopolitan to describe the transformation of identities of migrants. Yet, the images that I gleaned from my online and in-person fieldwork in South Korea revealed the gaps that cannot be fully grasped by the current frameworks. In South Korea, most of the MLB fans and others who continue to have their own careers and lives in their local spaces are commonly exposed to the changes brought on by globalization. Irrespective of their willingness, they are forced to either confront or voluntarily embrace globalization and its influences on their local societies. As Tomlinson observes, āfor the majority, the cultural experience of globalization is not a matter of physical mobility, but of staying at homeā (1999, p. 150). In order to fill the gap in the existing research, this book pays serious attention to the identities of people who undergo globalization without physical mobility, which will expand the scope and perspectives in the search of identity transformation in various manners and places.
Since 1980, under the banner of postcolonial theory, many theoretical concepts that attempt to explicate issues of identity and interconnections between the global and the ...