Worlding through popular culture: Sport as a race/ethno making project in Korean America

Park, Doo Jae

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Description

Title

Worlding through popular culture: Sport as a race/ethno making project in Korean America

Author(s)

Park, Doo Jae

Issue Date

2021-06-04

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Sydnor, Sythia

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Sydnor, Sythia

Committee Member(s)

• Cole, Cheryl
• Giardina, Michael
• McCarthy, Cameron
• Rana, Junaid

Department of Study

Kinesiology & Community Health

Discipline

Kinesiology

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• Korean immigrant
• Korean Americans
• Asian Americans
• racialization, worlding
• cultural citizenship
• sport
• public pedagogy

Abstract

This dissertation explores the social formation of Korean immigrants and Korean Americans in immigrant America. I attempted to articulate how sport works as a public pedagogy that specifies Asian racialization. My argument in this dissertation is straightforward: Sport is what I term a race/ethno-making project that has narrowed the scope of citizenship overdetermined by race. I hold that sport is a sorting apparatus that categorizes people based on biological difference, phenotype, and cultural difference to sort out “unwanted people.” I politicize sport to theorize Asian racialization in sport and physical culture. This means two things: (1) understanding sport provokes historical understanding of U.S. identity politics and (2) identity formation is a consistently moving force, and therefore sport—along with U.S. multicultural discourses—reinforces white ascendency. My dissertation, therefore, is a process of calling the hypocrisy of the epistemological purity of sport into question. I interpret sport as a powerful transmitter of white supremacist logics of raciality and sociality that contribute to white reconstruction. Considering the ontological and epistemological complexity beneath the surface of sport and its culture, I attempted to avoid lineal understandings of “culture.” What I attempted to do was to look at how minoritarian subjects learn, accept, normalize, and reproduce “racially” coded physical culture. I endeavored to understand Asian racialization “through” physical culture to unpack Asian racialization in a particular context. I drew on Physical Cultural Studies (PCS) as a method that allowed me to: (1) use theories to cut into taken-for-granted everyday experiences in physical culture; (2) contextualize how sport centers on whiteness and how sport becomes a metaphor for the success of Americanness; and (3) unpack power and its operations. Particularly, I focused on historical conjunctures that contribute to Asian racialization. Through adherence to Stuart Hall’s conjunctural analysis, I focused on connecting the neglected dimensions that specify Asian racialization. Overall, my argument in the dissertation considers sport in three ways: (1) as a cultural- pedagogical production that inculcates white reconstruction. Through my dissertation, I attempt to interpret white reconstruction as racial and cultural politics that continuously centers on white supremacist logics of sociality, raciality, and/or white national identity; (2) sport’s assimilation in the U.S. is associated with white supremacist logics of sociality. For example, as Chapter 5 explores, a Korean immigrant family became alienated from other Asian groups and simultaneously internalized a conservative political worldview deeply rooted in white supremacy. This assimilation into whiteness resulted in becoming Trump sympathizers; and (3) sport as a colorblind identity politics that solidifies the racial ascendency of whites. Multiculturalism is a common refrain in sport. However, sport is by no means a multicultural site. Rather, it is about a white reconstruction that redefines cultural citizenship. My work looks at, on the one hand, how Korean immigrants and Korean Americans attempt to find entry into predominately white physical culture and, on the other, how sport works as an epistemological practice that specifies Asian racialization, sustaining racially structured epistemologies that cast Asian bodies as others.

Graduation Semester

2021-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

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Copyright 2021 Doo Jae Park

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