식민지 조선의 야구(Baseball)와 문화번역

Abstract

This study analyzes the process by which baseball was institutionalized and disseminated in colonial Joseon through the lens of cultural translation. Originating in the United States and transmitted via Japan, baseball was introduced as a modern sport in Joseon, where it underwent not merely a transplantation of rules or techniques, but a complex process of appropriation and adjustment across multiple dimensions—language, bodily training, institutional structures, emotional mobilization, and identity formation. The reception of baseball functioned as a cultural practice in which the disciplinary logic, temporal order, and principles of cooperation and competition inherent in Western modernity were translated and recontextualized within the historical and social conditions of colonial Joseon society. First, the linguistic reception of baseball terminology—situated within a multilingual environment of English, Japanese, and Korean—reflected not only lexical adaptation but also the hybrid hierarchies of language, knowledge, and power. Second, baseball clubs formed within schools and local communities served as institutional spaces for bodily discipline and collective emotional formation. These clubs operated as mechanisms of colonial control while simultaneously offering a locus for Joseon agency, identity formation, and cultural negotiation—a site of “translated modernity.” Third, literary representations of baseball by writers such as Moon In-am, Sim Hun, and Choi Byeong-hwa depict how the sport intersected with youth subjectivity, moral discipline, and community solidarity. These texts framed baseball as a cultural device that mediated ethical formation, affect regulation, and imagined social mobility within the ideological landscape of the colonial period. In sum, this study argues that baseball in colonial Joseon was not a passive imitation of foreign culture but an active site of cultural translation, wherein sensory structures and sociocultural conditions were reconfigured through localized adaptation. Baseball operated at the intersection of the body and discipline, emotion and community, literature and institutional practices. It contributed to the formation of modern subjectivity and to the configuration of a colonial cultural-political order. By foregrounding these dynamics, the paper proposes that baseball serves as a productive theoretical lens for interpreting the transformation of modernity, subject formation, and cultural power under colonial conditions.