What does the ‘Asian’ mean in Asian sport celebrity? With a collection of nine essays on Asian sport celebrities variously associated with Australia, Belgium, China, Japan, New Zealand, North Korea, Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States, this book offers a comprehensive understanding of the multi-faceted construction of what it means to be Asian from the perspectives of race, ethnicity and regionality. Sport celebrity, as a modern invention, is disseminated from the West to the rest of the globe including Asia, and so are its functions of symbolizing particular values, desires and personalities idolized and idealized within their respective societies. While Asian athletes were historically depicted as weak, fragile and biologically ‘unsuited’ to modern sport, the emergence of more than a few world-class Asian athletes in the twenty-first century demands an in-depth inquiry into the relationship between sport celebrity and the representation of Asia.
This book is therefore essential for those interested in a range of socio-cultural issues—including globalization, transnationalism, migration, modernity, (post-)coloniality, gender politics, spectacle, citizenship, Orientalism, and nationalism—within and beyond Asia.
It was originally published as a special issue of The International Journal of the History of Sport.
Introduction: Asian Sport Celebrity: The Nexus of Race, Ethnicity, and Regionality
Koji Kobayashi and Younghan Cho
1. 'Ono, oh Yes!': An A-League Tensai (Genius) Made in Japan
Brent McDonald and Jorge Knijnik
2. Globalization, Migration, Citizenship, and Sport Celebrity: Locating Lydia Ko between and beyond New Zealand and South Korea
Ik Young Chang, Steve Jackson and Minhyeok Tak
3. Reading Tiffany Chin: The Birth of the Oriental Female Skater on White Ice
Jae Chul Seo, Robert Turick and Daehwan Kim
4. Disrupting the Nation-ness in Postcolonial East Asia: Discourses of Jong Tae-Se as a Zainichi Korean Sport Celebrity
Younghan Cho and Koji Kobayashi
5. The Absent Savior? Nationalism, Migration, and Football in Taiwan
Tzu-hsuan Chen and Ying Chiang
6. The Heroic White Man and the Fragile Asian Girl: Racialized and Gendered Orientalism in Olympic Figure Skating
Chuyun Oh
7. Reading Yani Tseng: Articulating Golf, Taiwanese Nationalism, and Gender Politics in Twenty-First-Century Taiwan
Daniel Yu-Kuei Sun
8. China’s Sports Heroes: Nationalism, Patriotism, and Gold Medal
Lu Zhouxiang and Fan Hong
9. Sports Celebrities and the Spectacularization of Modernity at the Far Eastern Championship Games, 1913–1934
Lou Antolihao
Biography
Koji Kobayashi is Associate Professor in the Center for Glocal Strategy at Otaru University of Commerce, Japan, and an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at Lincoln University, New Zealand. His research interests include globalization, cultural production, practice of representation, and identity politics as they relate to sport and recreation.
Younghan Cho is Professor of Korean Studies at the Graduate School of International and Area Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. He has published widely on global sports, fans and celebrity, the Korean Wave and East Asian pop culture, and nationalism and modernity in Korea and East Asian society.
