ABSTRACT
There is a yawning void in fandom studies where a serious, on-going conversation about race ought to be. Generally progressive folks, fan scholars agree on the importance of engaging questions of race and racialization but we have been somewhat weak on the follow through. As a result, race remains a marked absence in the literature, indicated more by apologies and lampshading than by sustained research or reflection. For instance, within sentences of critiquing Pierre Bourdieu’s failure to foreground gender and race in his analyses of cultural consumption, John Fiske (1992: 32) writes, “I regret being unable to devote the attention to race which it deserves, but I have not found studies of non-white fandom.” More recently, Gray, Harrington and Sandvoss (2007: 16) flag race as an obvious “omission” from their edited collection, along with “comic book fans, telenovela fans, or teen fandom,” seemingly equating the diversity of persons with a diversity of texts. Again and again, race’s significance is affirmed in the abstract while its salience in any concrete instance is deferred. As Henry Jenkins (2014: 97) puts it, fan studies “has been ‘colour blind’ in all the worst senses of the term.” Where race does appear, it is often in response to conflicts about race within fan communities. That work is important, but race is not only relevant when it becomes a “problem.” The racial status quo also demands explanation. As Rebecca Wanzo (2015: ¶1.4) has pointedly suggested, a consideration of how “an investment in whiteness may be foundational to some groups of fans” is long overdue.
