Few would disagree that in the contemporary world, sport is one of the most powerful sites that produces and reproduces nationalism. At mega sporting events, such as the Olympics, that draw global attention, athletic bodies symbolize the power of nation-states and help (re)build a sense of imagined national communities. This may perhaps be even more the case now than during the Cold War era, given the ubiquity, popularity, and simultaneous accessibility of media sport, which knows no national boundaries. Rachael Miyung Joo's Transnational Sport is a fine-grained ethnographic foray into the close collaboration between media sport and the construction of Koreanness in an age of globalization and transnationalism. Her multi-sited study, intricately connecting Seoul to Los Angeles, illuminates the future potentiality and the current landscape of Korean/global media sport and spectatorship at the juncture of the transnational migration of elite athletes and audiences, expanding sport markets, capital flows, and die-hard nationalism.

According to Joo, media sport is “competitive sports that are structured by commercial mass media and manufactured for mass consumption” (p. 3). Media sport over the last two decades, Joo argues, has had a tremendous impact on the making of what she calls “global Koreanness” both within South Korea and in overseas Korean diasporic communities such as Korea Town in Los Angeles. In Korea, Joo traces the rise of media sport and ties it with Korean “developmental nationalisms.” From Korea under Japanese rule (1910–45) to the onset of the new century, sport has been a pivotal site where Korea waged an anticolonial fight through sport journalism; sought to earn an international reputation through the promotion of elite sport within international sport during the Cold War; promoted professional sports leagues (professional baseball in particular) to divert public attention from military dictatorship; and made the Korean nation the center of global attention by hosting a number of the world's most watched sporting events, such as the Olympics in 1988 and the FIFA World Cup in 2002, events that have paved the way for a massive influx of foreign athletes, sport officials, and sport-related corporations into Korea. Amidst all of this, media sport has closely orchestrated an epic drama of the Korean nation by visualizing and narrating national development and economic growth via sport. At the same time, Joo draws attention to a number of athletes, both Korean nationals and American citizens of Korean heritage, who have enjoyed a striking presence in U.S. media sport. These athletes, to name only a few, include the South Korean baseball player Chan Ho Park, the female golfer Se Ri Pak, the Korean American golfer Michelle Wie, and Toby Dawson, a U.S. skier who was born in Korea but adopted by American parents. The conspicuous appearance of Korean and Korean American athletes, Joo argues, owes to U.S. culture, which celebrates multiculturalism, and U.S. media sport, which seeks the commodification of racial diversity. Images of media sport athletes, then, become transnational floating signifiers of the Korean nation, race, and sport.

Korean and Korean American media sport athletes, Joo further maintains, have also become a “transnational metacommodity,” as media sport exercises power to create spectatorship and thus sponsorship on a massive scale in the era of the new media (e.g., the Internet) and instant social mobilization of voluminous crowds that it mediates. Korean and Korean American female golfers dominate the leagues of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (43 of a total of 123 international players were South Korean as of July 2012). Korea has become the largest merchandiser of the LPGA logo. The LPGA celebrity athlete Se Ri Pak has become a sport conglomerate (sŭp'och'u chaebŏl) and an exemplar of a “transnational metacommodity,” and has made endorsement deals with a number of South Korea and U.S.-based companies, including Samsung, CJ, Adidas, and Taylor Made Golf (p. 139). In arguing so, Joo demands special attention to the gendering of such metacommodity making. Korean media sport highly celebrates an image of hard-muscled bodies of male star athletes (e.g., the midfielder Kim Nam-il's naked torso during the 2002 FIFA World Cup) as a new form of bodily expression. For female athletes, especially female golf stars, Korean media sport, however, seeks to promote a traditional, heterosexual femininity and manage, in line with the LPGA, the “image problem” of female sport and the LPGA as a domain of female masculinity and lesbianism. The same goes for the media construction of hypersexualized images of female national crowds and spectators during the 2002 World Cup. In this, Joo would probably agree with the contention of British sociologist Eric Dunning, who argued of “sport as male preserve.” Nonetheless, Joo also chooses to focus on the potentiality of media sport in making possible intergenerational as well as interethnic spectatorship and dialogue at the time and in the aftermath of global sporting events (e.g., the World Cup) and the enormous festivity that they create.

Although readers might wish that the author would unpack, a bit further, the meanings of “global Koreanness,” they would likely join me in saying that Transnational Sport is an accessible yet rigorously written book that will help closely investigate the world that transnational/Korean media sport has made. Thus, the book is highly recommended for courses on, as well as for scholars and students in the fields of, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies of sport; Asian American studies; and Asian studies.