[This article is part of a special dossier on fandom and politics in the Southwest Asian/ North African (S.W.A.N.A.) region. This installment is the introduction. Other articles will be published progressively, and links will be added to this introduction.]
Using a wealth of case studies from a variety of locations in the Southwest Asian/North African (S.W.A.N.A.) region, this dossier examines how fandom and politics intersect and the issues that arise from such intersections. It contributes to a growing critical scholarship examining racial and cultural identities in global online fandom spaces (Chin and Morimoto, 2013; Pande, 2018). Earlier dominant understandings of fandom posited fans as irrational and fanatical audience members; however, as corporations have undertaken to co-opt fans’ engagement for financial benefits, fandoms have emerged as more than merely subordinate (Bay, 2020). In many cases, they have proved themselves far less subject to control than was previously imagined. Recent critical scholarship has focused on the affective qualities of fandom and defined fans as “a group of people with a shared affect toward a given source material or idea” (Reinhard and Miller, 2020, p. 2). This dossier builds on such understandings to study Turkish, Pakistani, Syrian, Lebanese, and general Arabic-speaking fan communities.
In her piece, Katty Alhayek reflects on her experience with the field of fan studies and how she became interested in researching the affective qualities of fandom and the complex ways in which fandom and politics intersect. She shares her encounters with two groups of fans: the Arab fans of Game of Thrones and its prequel House of the Dragon; and displaced fans of Syrian TV drama serials. The case studies she explores show how fandom can be integrated into people's sense of identity, and how studying displaced populations can challenge the stereotypes of who can be considered fans and active audiences of entertainment. Alhayek demonstrates the need to examine racial and cultural identities in global online fandom spaces and shows how relations of class, race, education, gender, and nation affect fans’ online engagement with “Prestige TV.”
Şebnem Baran writes that as Turkey approached the Spring 2023 parliamentary and presidential elections the struggle for elected offices went hand in hand with clashes related to popular culture. With their indispensable place in popular culture, sports, and media fandoms have long been a part of these clashes. Baran argues that the politicization of fandoms against the AKP rule since 2021 resembles the period between 2011 and 2013. By revisiting the politicization of sports and media fandoms between 2011 and 2013, she draws insight into the intense polarization leading to the elections held in Turkey this May. Furthermore, surveying the previous cases of the convergence of fan activism and political activism from the 2011–2013 period offers a chance to understand the more recent interactions between fandoms and politics and what they might look like after the AKP and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s newly minted win.
Rafay Mahmood analyzes the state-supported Pakistani fandom of the Turkish historical drama Diriliş: Ertuğrul, which Prime Minister Imran Khan, before his ouster, had celebrated as a felicitous Muslim alternative to the cultural hegemony of non-Muslim Bollywood. Specifically, he looks at how the state’s sanctification of the production as more than just a TV show complicated Pakistani fans’ relationships with the actress Esra Bilgiç in particular. Bilgiç plays the pious and proper wife of the eponymous Ertuğrul and became the object of extreme moral policing on social media by, especially, the Pakistani fandom for what they saw as her failure to live up to the values represented by the character she played on the show. Mahmood shows how this policing itself became an issue within the fandom in an ideological clash that played out along the lines of generation and gender.
Centering Lebanese fan communities, Dima Issa explores Arab fandom in two ways. First, she explores fans’ varying and sometimes conflicting re-figurations of the iconic singer Fairuz as a kind of narrator of major community experiences, drawing on her oeuvre to express reactions to events as they were unfolding (namely, the uprisings of 2011 and 2019, and the port explosion of 2020). Next, she describes an intergenerational clash occasioned by the Lebanese death metal band Kimarea covering the classic Majida Al Roumi/Nizar Qabbani song ‘Beirut Set El Donya’ in the midst of the 2019 uprising.
Together these essays give visibility to the experiences of fans in the global south as fan studies is still a field largely dominated by examining the experiences of fans who identify as “white” and “female” in the United States or the United Kingdom with US- or UK-centric popular media texts. They show how understanding narratives about fandom can highlight the importance of affect in politics and how that relates to broader systems of heteropatriarchy, racism, authoritarianism, capitalism, and classism.
Articles
- Reflection on Researching Fandom, Politics, and Arabic-Speaking Audiences by Katty Alhayek كاتي الحايك
- Fandom, Fairouz, and Lebanon by Dima Issa
- Transnational and Cross-Generational Flows: Pakistani Fandom, Piety, and Turkish Period Dramas by Rafay Mahmood
- The Resurgence of Politicized Fandoms in Turkey by Şebnem Baran
References
Bay, J. (2020). Corporate fandom: Re-creating media fans as a public. Journal of Fandom Studies, 8(3), 321-331.
Chin, B., & Morimoto, L. H. (2013). Towards a theory of transcultural fandom. Participations, 10(1), 92-108.
Pande, R. (2018). Squee from the margins: Fandom and race. University of Iowa Press.
Reinhard, C. D., & Miller, J. (2020). Academic dialogue: Why study politics and fandom?. Transformative Works and Cultures, 32, 1-8.