 | Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race Rukmini Pande's examination of race in fan studies is sure to make an immediate contribution to the growing field. Until now, virtually no sustained examination of race and racism in transnational fan cultures has taken place, a lack that is especially concerning given that current fan spaces have never been more vocal about debating issues of privilege and discrimination. Pande's study challenges dominant ideas of who fans are and how these complex transnational and cultural spaces function, expanding the scope of the field significantly. Along with interviewing thirty-nine fans from nine different countries about their fan practices, she also positions media fandom as a postcolonial cyberspace, enabling scholars to take a more inclusive view of fan identity. With analysis that spans from historical to contemporary, Pande builds a case for the ways in which non-white fans have always been present in such spaces, though consistently ignored. Rukmini Pande is an assistant professor at O. P. Jindal Global University, New Delhi. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Fandom Studies and has been published in multiple edited collections, including The Wiley Companion to Fan Studies , Seeing Fans , and Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World , as well as the journals Transformative Works and Cultures and the Journal of Feminist Scholarship . |
