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I want to give a shout-out to Alexandra Edwards’s Before Fanfiction: Recovering the Literary History of American Media Fandom (Louisiana State University Press, 2023), a book which takes on the admirable task of challenging the “fandom creation myths” that see the beginning of fandom in Star Trek or Sherlock Holmes and instead connects American media fandom back to American women’s literary cultures of the 19th century. This makes for a provocative and fascinating read, especially if you’re a literary type or an English-oriented aca-fan.

Edwards identifies a number of 19th century literary activities and recasts them as fan practices: there are chapters on book clubs, fan magazines, fan mail, and fan tourism. But my favorite chapter is Edwards’s last, “Fandom is Literary, Fandom is Historical.” In it, she reads “Nella Larsen’s 1930 story ‘Sanctuary’ as a proto-example of ‘racebending,’ a practice in which a fanfiction author or artist reimagines the white characters of a text as people of color. Edwards sees Larsen as engaging in “the purposeful transformation of a text, meant to draw out both the similarities and the differences between the lives of the British laboring class and African Americans in the Jim Crow South” (141), rewriting a previous tale with deliberate thought so as to explore “how a narrative changes when its characters are Black Americans instead of poor white British.” This chapter is, I think, an important connection between contemporary ideas of fanfiction and the larger transformation of texts, particularly by marginalized groups in search of representation and understanding. In my opinion, “Fandom is Literary, Fandom is Historical”  is an absolute must-read for fan studies scholars, literary scholars, Americanists and Africana Studies folks alike.

It’s a long and winding road from the ruined plantations between Merton and Shaboro to Wakanda, and Nella Larsen certainly didn’t make the journey alone. “Sanctuary” is just one entry in a body of archontic literature still pushing against the white authority of the culture industry. Moreover, I don’t deny that, as contemporary fan studies scholars assert, “fandom is complicated.” Though I have grouped the above examples together to suggest the shifting ways that corporate media responds to fan practices like racebending, neither racebent fanworks nor “inclusive” casting are inherently antiracist practices. Samira Nadkarni and Deep Sivarajan have explored the “limits of racebending,” a practice they argue “exists parallel to the practice of deraced casting in theatre, television, and film” (122). Both practices, they find, can “inadvertently create or further systems of violence within racial and cultural hierarchies” (124).  Furthermore, as Rukmini Pande points out in the context of the new Star Wars films, even fan communities that see themselves as “progressive” can react to diversified media properties in ways that are implicitly or explicitly racist (9-14) . We do well always to keep in mind that the transformative project that connects Nella Larsen to award-winning Black superhero stories is the same transformative project that made the letter columns of Amazing Stories a gathering place for anti-Semites and white supremacists. (Edwards, 143).

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Special Pre-Tony Awards Post

OK, a little bit of a self-plug here, but there’s so much great work in Theatre Fandom: Engaged Audiences in the Twenty-first Century (2025), edited by Kirsty Sedgman, Matt Hills, and me.  Theatre Fandom is the first book to really cross audience and fan studies and think of theatre fans as fans in a fandom. It’s part of the University of Iowa’s Fandom and Culture Series, which includes books such as Bridget Kies and Megan Connor’s Fandom, the Next Generation (2022), Katherine Anderson Howell’s Disability and Fandom (2024) and Rukmini Pande’s Fandom, Now in Color (2020). In addition to more theoretical essays about what fandom and fannish behavior looks like in theatre as opposed to TV or film, there are also essays on particular theatrical fandoms from a broad array of scholars from the US and the UK. Ruth Foulis writes about how Harry Potter fandom was extended by Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and Louie Lang Norman writes about A Very Potter Musical. Sarah K. Whitfield has an essay on Hamilton fandom as a site of bisexual representation, and Emily Garside writes about being a Rent fan for decades. Laura MacDonald writes about East Asian fans who reproduce and cosplay their favorite Western musical theatre shows, and playwright Dominique Morisseau talks to Kirsty Sedgman about how black fans in particular are policed as theatrical audiences (sadly relevant this week with the Patti LuPone/ Audra McDonald/Kecia Lewis fued flaring up again.) (IYKYK.)

And that’s just some of what’s in the book.  All the scholars involved hope that this book will generate lots more scholarship on theatre and fandom.  Everyone knows that theatre kids (and theatre grownups!) are hugely fannish (this was absolutely why Glee was pitched to media fans), and yet there’s so little scholarly literature about fandom in theatre. What there is is mostly in Shakespeare studies: books like Shakespeare’s Fans: Adapting the Bard in the Age of Media Fandom (2020) by Johnathan Pope and The Shakespeare Multiverse  by Louise Geddes and Valerie M. Fazel.  Agata Luksa has written about Polish theatre fans in the 19th Century. Nemo Martin has written about the construction of race in online Les Mis fandom.  Trevor Boffone is writing about musical theatre fandom on TikTok.  But we need more, much much more!  

As we say in the book’s introduction:

Where, you might be wondering, is the chapter on Phans? What about the Hedheads (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), the Fansies (Newsies), the Fun Homies (Fun Home), the Maggots (Matilda), the Jekkies (Jekyll and Hyde), or the Ozians (Wicked)? Where is the fringe show cum hit BBC TV series cum celebrated theatre production Fleabag? Such absences may inspire future work, we hope, and we certainly call for it.

I mean, Sondheim is totally a fandom, right? (Sing out, Louise!)

–Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer

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