Minor League, Minor Lit: Baseball and Americanness in David Wong Louie's Pangs of Love and Park Min Gyu's The Last Fanclub of Sammi Superstars

This paper probes into the trope of baseball shown in an Asian American text, David Wong Louie's short story collection, Pangs of Love (1992) and a Korean novel, Park Min Gyu's The Last Fanclub of Sammi Superstars (2003) to analyze how both problematize the validity of rigid binary concepts such as center and margin, copy and original, and major and minor. In the three short stories involving baseball, "Disturbing the Universe," "Birthday," and "Warming Trends," Wong Louie deconstructs baseball as an epitome of Americanness with all its racial and hegemonic underpinnings intact by adopting postmodern narrative techniques such as rewriting history with ludic sensibility. With the comparable postmodern ironic tone, Park highlights the ways in which the hegemonic association between the major league baseball and America casts Korean baseball and literature as a mere copy produced in the minor league. I explore how both texts displace the assumed center, the dominant hegemony of America and baseball, by the subversive mimicry and mirroring to precipitate an unsettling shift of power axis.