I want to give a shout-out to Alexandra Edwards’s Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom (Louisiana State University Press, 2023), a book which takes on the admirable task of challenging the “fandom creation myths” that see the beginning of fandom in Star Trek or Sherlock Holmes and instead connects American media fandom back to American women’s literary cultures of the 19th century. This makes for a provocative and fascinating read, especially if you’re a literary type or an English-oriented aca-fan.
Edwards identifies a number of 19th century literary activities and recasts them as fan practices: there are chapters on book clubs, fan magazines, fan mail, and fan tourism. But my favorite chapter is Edwards’s last, “Fandom is Literary, Fandom is Historical.” In it, she reads “Nella Larsen’s 1930 story ‘Sanctuary’ as a proto-example of ‘racebending,’ a practice in which a fanfiction author or artist reimagines the white characters of a text as people of color. Edwards sees Larsen as engaging in “the purposeful transformation of a text, meant to draw out both the similarities and the differences between the lives of the British laboring class and African Americans in the Jim Crow South” (141), rewriting a previous tale with deliberate thought so as to explore “how a narrative changes when its characters are Black Americans instead of poor white British.” This chapter is, I think, an important connection between contemporary ideas of fanfiction and the larger transformation of texts, particularly by marginalized groups in search of representation and understanding. In my opinion, “Fandom is Literary, Fandom is Historical” is an absolute must-read for fan studies scholars, literary scholars, Americanists and Africana Studies folks alike.
It’s a long and winding road from the ruined plantations between Merton and Shaboro to Wakanda, and Nella Larsen certainly didn’t make the journey alone. “Sanctuary” is just one entry in a body of archontic literature still pushing against the white authority of the culture industry. Moreover, I don’t deny that, as contemporary fan studies scholars assert, “fandom is complicated.” Though I have grouped the above examples together to suggest the shifting ways that corporate media responds to fan practices like racebending, neither racebent fanworks nor “inclusive” casting are inherently antiracist practices. Samira Nadkarni and Deep Sivarajan have explored the “limits of racebending,” a practice they argue “exists parallel to the practice of deraced casting in theatre, television, and film” (122). Both practices, they find, can “inadvertently create or further systems of violence within racial and cultural hierarchies” (124). Furthermore, as Rukmini Pande points out in the context of the new Star Wars films, even fan communities that see themselves as “progressive” can react to diversified media properties in ways that are implicitly or explicitly racist (9-14). We do well always to keep in mind that the transformative project that connects Nella Larsen to award-winning Black superhero stories is the same transformative project that made the letter columns of Amazing Stories a gathering place for anti-Semites and white supremacists. (Edwards, 143)