“Nah, Imma do my own thing”: Performing Remix Pedagogy Grounded in Hip-Hop Culture and Black Feminist Thought

• In Event: Hip Hop in the Margins: Hip Hop, Comics, and Critical Speculative Pedagogies

Abstract

andom shapes our performances of everyday life and how we make sense of ourselves within our larger sociocultural world. Katherine Anderson Howell (2018) argues that teaching fandom as a classroom practice demands remix pedagogy or creating an affinity space that encourages playful learning, creative invention, embodied participation, community building, mutual respect, empowerment and resistance. More specifically, the remix classroom encourages resistive readers that not only challenge the authorial meaning of texts through individual intertextual interpretations but also through the appropriation and transformation of texts into new fanmade texts or fanart (Jenkins, 2014). Fanart is an immersive performance and postmodern practice that welcomes the appropriation, juxtaposition, and recontextualization of popular culture to create new ways of thinking and being (Hetrick, 2018; Manifold, 2009; Manifold, 2013). Fanart takes many forms: digital, literary, visual, audio, video, fan-play, etc. Fanart can function as homage, collaboration, and intervention (Seymour, 2018).

In this paper, I will discuss the radical possibilities of inviting undergraduate and graduate students to participate as fans, antifans, and cultural producers in a Fandom and Performance classroom. We considered the following questions throughout the course:

How can we engage fandoms from a performance studies lens?
How can our fanart function as the creation of self-identity and social identity?
How can our fanart function as cultural production?
What are some ways we can analyze fanart?
How can our fanart invite opposition and cultural critique?
How can we participate in worldmaking through our fanart?
What role can fans play in transmedia storytelling?

In this paper I extend conversations about remix pedagogy in the fandom classroom by grounding remix pedagogy in Black feminist thought and hip-hop culture. I argue that critical fanart invested in identity formation and critiques of power can shape early engagement with Black feminist practices such as oppositional gaze, subversion, counter storytelling, self-definition, collective empowerment, consciousness raising, and radical imagination (Collin’s, 2000). Students learn how to “remix canonical Eurocentric ways of producing knowledge [and] make room for [their] voice to be heard” (McFerguson, 2020, p. 303). Fanart is especially important for historically minoritized communities often underrepresented and/or misrepresented in media texts. To see ourselves authentically represented in media and popular culture “is not a luxury, it is a vital necessity of our existence” (Lorde, 1984). In this paper, I highlight how various elements of hip-hop culture are honored in my approach to remix pedagogy, such as performing cyphers in the form of improvised comic jams as our daily warmup. Comic jams ask students to do what fans do best, “poach” cultural texts (Jenkins, 2014), appropriate, innovate, and extend story worlds in collaboration with others. Remix pedagogy, Black feminist thought, and hip-hop culture center self-knowledge and empower students to do their own thing, even if it is not canon.

Author

• Sasha Sanders, California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo