ABSTRACT

While the chapters in this section demonstrate the importance of studying race and transcultural fandom, these areas of fan studies remain underdeveloped. We asked Bertha Chin, Aswin Punathambekar, and Sangita Shresthova to help illuminate the benefits, pitfalls, and future directions of these areas of study. Bertha Chin serves on the board of the Fan Studies Network and the editorial board of the Journal of Fandom Studies; she has written widely about social media, crowdfunding, and science fiction fandom. Aswin Punathambekar writes about media and political culture with a focus on South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, and his book, From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry, explores the transnational growth of the Bombay media industry, including a discussion of fandom; he is co-editor of Global Bollywood, Television at Large in South Asia, and associate editor of Media, Culture and Society. Sangita Shresthova is director of the Media Activism & Participatory Politics (MAPP) project based at the University of Southern California and the founder of Bollynatyam’s Global Bollywood Dance Project; she has written about Bollywood dance culture in her book, Is It All About Hips? Around the World with Bollywood Dance, and about youth activism, popular culture, new media, and civic life in numerous publications. These three scholars discuss the challenges that language, citational practices, and immersion present to the practice and impact of transcultural scholarship; the merits of ethnography for transcultural fan studies; the ways a more robust incorporation of transcultural scholarship into fan studies would broaden and strengthen scholarship on fan cultures; and future directions for race and transcultural scholarship in fan studies.