Commodifying Colonial Histories

Abstract

The historic tension and modern reenactments of colonial violence between Korea and Japan during the 2006 and 2009 World Baseball Classic (WBC) tournaments were amplified, exploited, or sensationalized in U.S. and Korean media reports. This reporting, as it invariably served the interests of Major League Baseball (MLB) and its corporate sponsors, resulted in the commercialization of historic and revitalized colonial violence. Furthermore, the pervasiveness of the narrative of colonial tension in the media reports of the tournament results in the commodification, normativization, and trivialization of historical weight of Korea’s tragic narrative and its relation to Japan. Such commodification and normativization enables a discursive formation of Korean subjectivity inseparable from its colonial history, and consequently, in dialectic subservience to the paradigm of Japanese imperialism.