In National Greens, Rachael Miyung Joo details the rise of golf as a global Korean cultural project in the twenty-first century. While courses began as exclusive domains of the privileged hidden from public view, the sport is now a widespread visible practice popular across communities in South Korea and the Korean diaspora. Based on fieldwork in South Korea, Aotearoa New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United States, Joo aligns this transformation of golfing with shifts in Korean cultural formations, like the rising significance of leisure culture in everyday life, the globalization of Korean media celebrity, and innovative technologies now dedicated to recreation. She also explores the environmental and political repercussions of the sport’s proliferation as an influx in courses radically alters landscapes, and activist attempts to block or slow construction have largely proven ineffective. Highlighting the growth of golf in South Korea, its functions in imperialism and migration, and the effects of golf technologies, National Greens illustrates the game’s symbolic power in shaping ideas of leisure, landscape, environment, nation, and identity.

Rachel Miyung Joo is Professor of American Studies at Middlebury College and is author of Transnational Sport: Gender, Media, and Global Korea, also published by Duke University Press.

Note on Transliteration ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Korean Golf at a Time of Ecological Catastrophe 1
1. Hidden Privilege to National Pastime: A Political Historiography of Golf Courses in Korea 31
2. Screen and Scene: Eco-Believability in the Augmented Natures of Golf in South Korea 55
3. Imperial Golf: Korean Golf in the Clark Special Economic Zone in the Philippines, coauthored with jose s. medriano iii 85
4. Recognition and Resentment: Settling in Aotearoa New Zealand Through Golf, coauthored with mi young kim 113
5. Speculating on Greens: Migration and Money Through Golf in the Korean Diaspora 143
6. Eco-Intimacies in Korean Golf: Environmental Protests, Climate Anxiety, and Greenwashing in Golf 169
Notes 197
References 209
Index