“How do we change imaginations?”: Engaging Race-bent Fanart as a Tool for Widening Literary Imaginaries

• In Event: Making Space for Youth-Produced Digital Texts as Remedy in a Time of “Crisis”: Inviting in Joy and Artistic Flourishing

Abstract

The fan practice of racebending is a form of restorying (Author & Colleague, 2016). Restorying can be taken up as a method of critical engagement with the problem of collective literary imaginaries centered on Whiteness (Morrison, 1992; Thomas, 2019). In this paper, we will explore applications of restorying through race-bent fanart as a tool for widening literary imaginaries.

This study, a social design experiment (Gutiérrez, 2018), took place in an unscreened, untracked public high school which has an explicit focus on equity and serves several historically vulnerable populations. At this school, the subject of English is taught through semester-long themed courses inspired by students’ interests. The 12th grade course was designed in collaboration with the teachers of record and the researcher with a critical focus on Black texts, art, and culture.

The data for this paper include daily observations and memos; written student work; and recordings of class discussions. For our analysis, we identified a proleptic bid (Iser, 1972; Enciso & Krone, 2022) for the disruption of White literary imaginaries in classroom discussion around normative superhero stories. We analyzed the complexities of how three Black focal students students negotiated this bid and worked toward proleptic gaps allowing for more expansive imaginaries in literature as well as the real world.

As part of an ongoing class protocol for youth-centric literary seminars (Author & Colleague, 2018), Cee brought in a DC Justice League Unlimited poster to class, leading to a discussion about representation in the DC universe. To further this discussion, Author2 introduced a fan-made poster that race-bent the characters, asking the class: “What do you think about this fan version of the same poster we just saw?” We identify this pedagogical move as a proleptic bid, a storytelling interruption which “sets the familiar against the unfamiliar" (Iser, 1972, p. 293).

Engaging with the fan’s proleptic bid for a different imaginary from the DC canon, the class considered how Batman’s storyline might change if he were Black (see Table 1), noting how fans can disrupt normative narrative structures that media companies continue to perpetuate. Author2 then assigned Morrison (1992) for the class to continue discussing disruption of White literary imaginaries. Our presentation will explore how students both considered ways that racist imaginaries affected current discourses and ways that such imaginations might be purposefully widened through diversified textual engagement.

Table 1: Engaging proleptic bid for a race-bent Batman

Authors

• Karis Michelle Jones, Baylor University

• Scott Storm, University at Albany - SUNY