ABSTRACT
The terms ‘fandom’, ‘fan’, and even ‘fan studies’ appear to be, at first glance, self-evident. But considered in the context of both fan cultures and scholarship outside the English language-centered West, we begin to see the assumptions that underlie them. Whether we are talking about Japanese fans of manga and anime (somewhat codified itself, both given the diversity of Japanese fan practices and objects, as well as non-Western fandoms generally), the Korean Wave, Nigerian fans of Bollywood films, and so on, scholarship of ‘transnational media fans’ is often confined to the periphery by virtue of its seeming irrelevance to the work of fan studies proper. It might be argued that such practices and cultures actually were peripheral to English language, Western fandoms of the past, part of an analog era in which transnational media distribution and circulation were firmly under the control of media corporations, and fandoms around the world seldom mixed. Yet, in disregarding even these bygone fan cultures, we demonstrate a somewhat alarming lack of interest in a comparative approach to fan studies; one that, in turn, reifies the foundational concepts of fan studies—transformative works, gift economy, affirmational fandom, among others—to reflect little more than our own English language habitus.
