This post is mostly a placeholder for after the podcast episode I’m doing airs. Podcasts, am I right?!
Two items:
High Theory with Saronik Bosu
How Are You Liking it So Far? with Henry Jenkins, Abigail De Kosnik, and Rukmini Pande
First: ideas from my conversation with Saronik Bosu, where we settled on the topic of fandom. I was like, “please, think of a topic,” they were like, “what are some topics?” and i was like, “oh no.”
But this one makes total sense! So here are the touchstones I thought would be most relevant to mention. I may or may not have time to discuss them in the interview, so lest you think the ideas represented are mine and mine alone, let me disabuse you of that notion straightaway.
First, my co-editor Abigail De Kosnik really gave me an opportunity to get up to date in my thinking in 2019 as we collaborated on a special issue of Transformative Works & Cultures about Fans of Color/Fandoms of Color. Since then, I’ve continued to think about how we, as Black folks and as people of color writ large, shape the meanings of popular culture as we contribute to it and process it through the distinct perspectives of our social situations. We’re all different, to be sure, but I think it’s important to recognize that everything that takes on significance for popular culture, whether it garners. Recently, I had some encounters with film studies folks who will be the first to point out that all Black films are cult films, in a way. That… is fascinating.
Second: I loved The Safe Negro Guide to Lovecraft Country, Kinitra Brooks’s blogged series on the HBO series. I mean, just look at the imagery. The articles and interviews in this series unpacked the cultural work done by the show wherein Black period television met the challenging (racist) H.P. Lovecraft’s horror universe, as an extension/adaptation of the novel by Matt Ruff that interprets Lovecraft’s phantasmagorical (racist) world through its least likely (Black) human inhabitants. It was like fanfiction on fanfiction, which is the way TV adaptations of fiction do, and vice-versa–it really generated this multidimensional, layered, culturally-specific but varied engagement with the so-called Lovecraft (racist) mythos.
Finally: This article was 🔥🔥🔥. It’s exactly what I love about historical research on fandom and fan cultures! In this little historical vignette, Bobby Derie revisits the travels of SF fans in the 1950s who, we should remember, are making use of public accommodations during the climactic phase of Jim Crow segregation. What did happen when cons took place in the South, say, New Orleans (NoLACon I) in 1951? Or in the North, you know, south of Canada, where they really didn’t have to pay attention to what Black people wanted or whether we felt like we should be able to stay any place we pleased, either? Black people are implicitly excluded from fandom at its inception, not just at the point of rejection from segregated conference venues, as if it’s geographically specific, but really, if you think about it: taking part in a nationwide entertainment pastime that involves freedom of movement, we’re reminded by its tentative inclusion of white women in those early years, was a white privilege. When I think about the memory of fandom and segregation that Derie reconstructs through this journey into the archives, I also think of how the memory of this era is refracted through other pastimes, other traditions.
Namely, I watched 42 not long ago, on the occasion of talking about Chadwick Boseman’s legacy after his passing… not long ago in pandemic time, anyway. The thing is: Jackie Robinson’s integration of major league baseball is big, no doubt, it was a cultural reset that reverberates through our memory of the whole era. So, if we remember integration so powerfully that we can reconstruct it in the form of spectacle, as a theory of the event, then where do we even start talking about the cultural presets? the status quo? Because I bet–just as much as Forrie Ackerman remembers being aggrieved at the sight of Whites Only/Colored signs on the way to NoLACon and in its environs, just as much as Harlan Ellison (drink!) raised a memorable stink about the incident–no doubt Bev Clark remembers the sting of rejection when she and her whole party (recounted by Buck Coulson) were unable to stay at Beatley’s Hotel, notwithstanding the cute fannish nickname white fans had devised for it, not because it was so special, though it was a distinct disappointment, but because it turned out to be just like everything else you might want to do in America while you were Black and the country was determined to stay racist.