Global Sports Fandom in South Korea

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.

• Introduction: The Cultural Politics of Sports in the Era of Globalization.- Part I: Sports Governmentality: Glocalization of American Sports in South Korea.- Sport and Crisis of Nation under Globalization.- Glocalization of Sports From Above: A Korean Baseball Player as a National Individual.- Glocalization of Sports From Below: Online Communities among Korean MLB Fans.- Part II: Undoing Nationalism: Ethnography of Korean Major League Baseball Fans.- The Making of the National Fandom and its Discontent.- The Emergence of Individuated Nationalism.- Articulation of the National, Regional and Global.- Postscript The “Here-and-Now” of Global Sports Fandom.

“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)