Misty Copeland, Black Panther, Tyler Perry and the Contours of US Black Fandoms
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ICS0010.1177/1367877919854155International Journal of Cultural StudiesMartin 854155research-article2019 International Journal of Cultural Studies 2019, Vol. 22(6) 737–753 © The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI:https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877919854155 10.1177/1367877919854155 journals.sagepub.com/home/ics Article Fandom while black: Misty Copeland, Black Panther, Tyler Perry and the contours of US black fandoms Alfred L Martin Jr University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA Abstract Using 50 interviews with black people about their fandoms (and anti-fandoms) of Tyler Perry’s media output, the blockbuster film Black Panther and the African American ballerina Misty Copeland, this article illuminates black fandom’s four interlocking discourses. First, must-see blackness describes black fans’ “civic duty” to see blackness in all of its forms. Second, economic consumption drives “must-see blackness” in the sense that black fans are cognizant of the precariousness of blackness’s existence in spaces that are either historically white and/or have been hostile to the presence of blackness. Third, black fandoms (and anti-fandoms) are driven by their pedagogical properties: how fit are fan objects for learning and role modeling? Finally, the pedagogical fitness of fan objects intersects with economic consumption and must-see blackness, which, in turn, illuminates black fans’ attentiveness to the machinations of the culture industries. Keywords audience studies, blackness, culture industries, fandom studies, race Stardate: 45466.5, or 1992, the year Henry Jenkins’ book Textual Poachers and John Fiske’s essay “The cultural economy of fandom” were published. For much of fan stud- ies, these two pieces of scholarship, which engage with Star Trek among other fandoms, are considered ground zero. These works functioned to set fandom’s agenda – one that is overwhelmingly white and male. That is not to say that Jenkins and Fiske completely Corresponding author: Alfred L Martin Jr, University of Iowa, 127 Becker Communication Studies Building, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA. Email: [email protected] 738 International Journal of Cultural Studies 22(6) ignore race. Quite the contrary: they both acknowledge that race exists and that it should be studied. However, they only offer apologies for failing to engage with “diverse” fan- doms and half-hearted calls for more studies of racialized fandoms (Fiske, 1992; Jenkins, 2014: 97). Yet, as the volumes devoted to fandom increase, there remains scant attention to race. When attention is paid to race, it is usually “ghettoized” into its own “specialty” section while leaving white fandoms exnominated and normative, thus positioning race and fandom as fundamentally different from “regular” fandom. To be sure, several scholars have conducted studies of race and fandom while simul- taneously calling out the discipline’s whiteness. Mel Stanfill (2011) argues that fandom has continued to imagine fans as “white people, particularly white men.” Rukmini Pande (2018: 11) maintains that fandom misses “any sustained examination of the racial makeup of [fan] communities, both in terms of participants and in the choices of charac- ters and texts that form” its focus, resulting in a veritable whitewashing of how we under- stand fandom. Sarah Gatson and Robin Reid (2011: 4.1) forward that neglecting the intersections of fandom and race creates “a ‘generic’ or ‘normalized’ fan [… that] is not free of race” but rather simply exnominates it. This article is about black fandoms only. It does not use black fandoms as “deviant” from exnominated white fandoms. Rather, it focuses on how black fandoms of black media texts and personalities operate. This article works against fandom’s “reluctance to delve deeply into topics, communities, and literatures that center around nonwhite […] fans” to highlight the “fragmented and partial […] concepts, definitions, and theories” typically associated with fandom studies (Click and Scott, 2017: 241). At the same time, this article argues that black fandoms are/can be as extrapolatable and useful for white fandoms as the inverse is believed to be. In embarking on an empirical study of black fandom I de-center the utility of “universal” white fan studies for black fandom studies while illuminating what such universal fandoms miss (and could perhaps find if they looked) in only considering whiteness. Concomitantly, I echo Kristen Warner’s (2015: 37) concern that white fandoms have coopted “otherness” while failing to engage with race, LGBTQ identities and the intersections therein. In claiming “otherness” for white fandoms (largely because white fandom was initially studied as a fandom attached to “geeks”), the category “otherness” meant studying white, heterosexual male Star Wars fans, leaving race generally, and blackness specifically, to feed off the scraps it has left in its wake. This study centers, signal boosts and builds upon the pioneering scholarship on race, fandom and audiences. Rebecca Wanzo’s (2015) work forcefully argues that white fan- dom studies have ignored some of the work by/on African Americans that predates the “start” of fandom studies. Wanzo’s “new genealogy of fan studies,” like this article, works to re-center blackness within a discipline that tends to most often ignore or offer excuses around its disengagement with race. I also build on black audience/reception studies to highlight how black people’s fandoms and media reception closely mirror each other across three disparate black media texts/personalities. Robin Means Coleman (2002: 2) argues that studies of black audiences and fandoms “reveal the manner in which African Americans, as members of a media culture, engage with dominant cultural forms [and] work to make sense of their own conditions.” Additionally, Jacqueline Bobo (1995: 2) argues that reception studies’ inattentiveness to black female audiences is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding and misreading of such audiences, ultimately Martin 739 discarding blackness as unimportant within hegemonic white worlds and meaning-mak- ing processes. Together, Means Coleman and Bobo highlight the importance of examin- ing black subject positions within audience studies, and fandom studies by extension. I marry Means Coleman and Bobo’s assertions with Matt Hills’ theorization of “discursive mantras.” Hills (2003: 67) defines such mantras as collections of fan discourses about a fan object activated in order to circumvent fandom’s connection with irrationality. Black fans’ discursive mantras are not necessarily about warding off claims of irrationality but are rooted in a desire for more visual blackness across film and media culture and within ballet. In this way, the economic language of the culture industries becomes a discursive mantra for black fandoms. At the same time, I argue that black fandom is evangelistic. Black fans are typically not just concerned with loving their fan object but are also interested in sharing that love with others while paying attention to blackness’s space within the media industries. In this way, black fans use their fan engagement to not only maintain and cultivate close social ties with friends and family members but also to get others interested in their fan object choice (Edgar and Rudrow, 2018: 656; Martin Jr, 2019: 176). While audience/ reception studies and fandom studies are different disciplines, when blackness is factored in, their differences become less pronounced, particularly because of the collision between black consumption, must-see blackness, the culture industries and evangelism. Using 50 interviews with US-based black people about their fandoms (and anti- fandoms) of black media texts/personalities, this article works to fill in some of the gaps left unattended by studies of white fandoms. In labeling my interviewees as “fans,” I am referring to people who have an “active, enthusiastic, partisan, participatory engage- ment” with Perry’s media output, the film Black Panther (dir. R. Coogler, 2018) and the African American ballerina Misty Copeland (Fiske, 1989: 146–7). To be sure, as Jonathan Gray (2003: 77) claims, “the very nature of fandom suggests willing informants: they feel strongly about the text(s) in question and have considerable interest in them.” As such, I recognize that the people I interviewed are specially interested in discussions about these fan objects and differ from Gray’s (2003: 74) theorization of non-fans who “view or read a text, but not with any intense involvement.” In addition, some of my interviewees are anti-fans of Perry’s work and “strongly dislike” his films but neverthe- less possess great knowledge of them (Gray, 2003: 70; 72). The black people I inter- viewed were 60% women and 40% men, and mostly heterosexual (with two lesbians, one gay man and two people who identify as pansexual). They reside in major US met- ropolitan areas and smaller towns across the Northeastern, Midwestern, Southern and Western regions, and range in age from 23 to 66 years old. Some interviewees have completed high school while others hold advanced degrees, although the majority of interviewees have earned a Bachelor’s degree. Their incomes ranged from less than $25,000 to more than $200,000 per year, although roughly 60% of interviewees earn between $100,000 and $149,000 per year. Studying high, low, and middle (brow) black fandoms In this article, I illuminate the contours of black fandoms across a set of texts that can be reductively (and problematically)