andré carrington talks about the origins of contemporary fandoms, race and gender as its determinants, and its emancipatory potential in the face of cooption by big media conglomerates. Besides andrés book Speculative Blackness, references are made, among other things, to the work of Carolyn Dinshaw, and the popular fandoms of Doctor Who, Star Wars, and Star Trek.

andré carrington is a scholar of race, gender, and genre in Black and American cultural production, and author of Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction. He is Associate Professor of English at the University of California-Riverside. carrington’s writing appears in journals (American Literature, Souls, and Lateral), books (After Queer Studies: Literature, Theory, and Sexuality in the 21st Century, The Blacker the Ink), and blogs (Black Perspectives). With Abigail De Kosnik, he co-edited a special issue of Transformative Works & Cultures journal on Fans of Color/Fandoms of Color.

Image: “Girl Reading Mickey Mouse and the Submarine Pirates Comic Book” by Charles “Teenie” Harris, in Pittsburgh, 1947

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