Speaker
Description
This ethnography explores the pedagogical forces of sport and physical culture that shape the Korean diaspora's everyday politics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork of the racialization of Korean immigrants and Korean Americans in the Midwestern youth ice hockey community, I hold that sport not only reflects society but also shapes and influences the Korean diaspora’s everyday lives. This ethnography's focus draws on the conjunctural shift that the Korean diaspora experienced in the transformation of knowledge production (i.e., a notion of race, hegemonic white Americanness, and everyday politics), in which a Korean immigrant family became the pro-Trump sympathizer. On the one hand, assimilation into the youth ice hockey community was helpful to mitigate cultural distances and Asian stereotypes (e.g., the model minority) but on the other hand, it led the Korean diaspora into the interpellation of white reconstruction, which is "an ensemble of cultural and political projects, narrative structures, ideological tendencies, and state formation that exhibit the resilient, reformist qualities of white supremacy as an aspirational logic of sociality" (Rodriguez, 2021, p. 216). Referencing the structural theory of racism (Jung, 2015), I suggest that the discourse of multiculturalism in U.S. sport is illusory as it is strategically immune to a process of deracialization; and therefore, it is cruel optimism (Berlant, 2011). In a sense, physical culture consistently situates the Korean diaspora on the margins of physical culture resonated with Asian racialization in the larger society.
