News/Research

Andrea Horbinski Reviews Fandom: Now In Color

07 Feb, 2022

Andrea Horbinski Reviews Fandom: Now In Color

BCNM alumn Andrea Horbinski reviews Fandom, Now In Color: A collection of Voices, in the January 2022 issue of Strange Horizons. The set of essays, edited by Rukmini Pande, considers the intersection of fandom and race from a variety of perspectives, meaningfully expanding the definition of "fans", "fandom", and "fan studies".

From the review:

Defining race, racism, and racial identity for the purposes of this edited volume, Pande emphasizes that the essays in it “approach these categories as contingent, shifting, and localized” even as they are “structured by a hierarchy of power in the Global North that is progressively being allied with the logics of a globalized white supremacist identity politics” (p. 1). The collection’s definition of “fandom” is similarly situated, acknowledging both the ways in which fandom and fans have been contested by fan studies but also insisting on recognizing the fact that fan studies has constructed white Anglophone fans, particularly those in the United States and United Kingdom, as the unmarked default. Similarly, the overwhelming majority of fan studies scholars have been white, further reinforcing the whiteness of the discipline and relegating scholarship about fandom and race to its sidelines, rather than “making an impact on the foundational texts of fan studies” (p. 4).

Read the entire review here!