(Trans)national Pastimes and Korean American Subjectivities: Reading Chan Ho Park

What do they know of cricket who only cricket know? West Indians crowding to Tests bring with them the whole past history and future hopes of the Islands. ¹

-- C. L. R. James

Discourses around U.S. professional sports have recently become one of the most powerful forms of transnational "ethnic" ² imagining for both Korean Americans and Koreans in South Korea. ³ Sports icon, Chan Ho Park, a Korean "national" who plays in North American baseball, ⁴ has played a major role in generating an unprecedented interest on the part of Koreans and Korean Americans ⁵ in U.S. dominated sports institutions and mass mediated sports. ⁶ As a mass mediated commodity spectacle, ⁷ Park operates as a site around which nationalist discourses are rearticulated in an era of "transnational media, markets, and migration." ⁸ While these nationalist discourses are apprehended by a heterogeneous population of Korean and Korean American subjects in multiple, shifting, and contradictory ways, they effectively construct dominant responses by producing a sense of shared experiences, interpretations, and emotions. In this article, I investigate particular forms of collective imagination ⁹ that might take place through Korean American engagements with discourses of U.S. and Korean nationalisms that circulate in and through sports superstar, Chan Ho Park.

Park, who has pitched for the Dodgers since 1994, ¹⁰ is a locus around which a growing Korean and Korean American interest in American professional baseball, major league baseball, has emerged. ¹¹ Through a critical reading of Park as a discursive production this article attempts to foreground the political questions and theoretical challenges of investigating the construction of Korean American subjectivities through engagements with representations in mass media and popular culture. By "Korean American," I am referring to those subjects of Korean descent ¹² located in the U.S. who are interpellated by both U.S. nationalisms and Korean nationalisms. For subjects positioned within these imbricated cultural ideologies, Park represents a space where discourses of U.S. and Korean nationalism converge. At this site of conjuncture, the on-going "struggles over meanings" call into question the "interested" construction of particular subjectivities within diasporic terrains. ¹³

While Korean Americans are interpellated by both U.S. and Korean nationalisms, an idea of a diasporic Korean "ethnicity" is produced through discourses of historical memory, invocations of cultural essentialism, and transnational articulations of Korean nationalism. Rather than an essential or natural identity, Stuart Hall refers to ethnicity as "constructed historically, culturally, politically." In Hall's formulation, "ethnicity acknowledges the place of history, language, and culture in the construction of subjectivity and identity, as well as the fact that all discourse is placed, positioned, situated, and that all knowledge is contextual." ¹⁴ In my reading of Park, I highlight the political contestations over what comes to constitute this notion of "ethnicity" for Korean Americans. Rather than a facile articulation of Korean ethnicity, I hope to focus on the ways in which powerful articulations of nationalism that work through sports shape current apprehensions of what it means to be Korean for Korean Americans.

Far from static discourses, Korean nationalisms are re-shaped and rearticulated through rapidly changing forms of transnational mass media. ¹⁵ The idea of a diasporic Korean nation is imagined through popular engagements with nationalist discourses that operate in and through transnational sports. In an issue of positions on "Asian Transnationalities," guest editors, Inderpal Grewal, Akhil Gupta, and Aihwa Ong point to the fact that, "Transnational media, markets, and migration are altering the constitutions of subjects by changing how nations are imaged, citizenship is experienced, and identities are formed." ¹⁶ Due to the ubiquitousness and pervasiveness of these transnational flows of information, goods, and people in the everyday lives of Koreans and Korean Americans, participation in the idea of a Korean diaspora cannot be limited to specific elite and/or self-consciously defined groups. ¹⁷ Mass mediated sports, as...