TWC aims to provide a publishing outlet that welcomes fan-related topics and promotes dialogue between academic and fan communities. Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC, ) is an international peer-reviewed online Gold Open Access publication of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works, copyrighted under a Creative Commons License.
Audience/fan response to Black-cast remakes and recasting non-Black-cast texts with Black actors.Interactions between Black fans and media producers.Black fan practices imbricated in a politics of representation.Black fans and deployment of (anti)fandom.We hope the following suggested topics will inspire wide-ranging responses. This issue seeks to center Blackness and (anti)fandom in all of its permutations. We are not interested in comparative studies of Black fandom practices, because Blackness is enough. We invite submissions that contribute to a conversation that centers Black audiences, fans, antifans, and global Blackness itself. We encourage work that engages, nuances, and challenges this foundational work, leading to novel reconsiderations of how fan studies defines and understands Black fandoms. This corpus of work on Black audiences and fandoms provides a base for further theorization about the experiences and meanings of Black fandom. It also engages and with and builds on our Black feminist foremothers, including bell hooks (1992), Jacqueline Bobo (1995), and Robin Means Coleman (1998), who showed us ways to think about how Black audiences engage with media. We want essays that build on the relatively small but groundbreaking scholarly work that centers Black fandoms, including work on young Black male (Brown 2000) and female (Whaley 2015) comic readers Black gay sitcom fans (Martin 2021a) Black fan “defense squads” that protect fictional characters’ Blackness (Warner 2018) Black fan labor (Warner 2015) Black antifandom (Martin 2019b) Black fans’ enclaving practices (Florini 2019b) Black female music fans (Edgar and Toone 2019) and Black acafans (Wanzo 2015). If, as the title of Audre Lorde’s famous 1984 essay reminds us, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” then it is time to willfully ignore white fandoms, just as Black fandoms have been willfully ignored.įor this special issue, we seek to privilege and celebrate Blackness, not as a comparative but as enough on its own. In this way, those considered marginal expend energy trying to be granted access to the center while citing, reifying, and expanding the supposed universality of the center that fails to engage the margin because it is too particular. But as Toni Morrison (1975) asserts, that is the work of racism: it keeps those at the margins busy, trying to prove that they deserve a seat at the center table.
Indeed, fandom studies has done lots of things-except deal with its race problem. It has largely co-opted the language of race, difference, and diversity from the margins and recentered it around white geeks and white women. Fandom studies has gestured toward race generally, and Blackness in particular, from its alleged white center while always keeping race at its margin. This special issue centers Blackness in fandom studies.
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