Rethinking "Screen Time" in the Age of Covid-19 (Part Two)

Sangita Shrestova:  I was struck by Henry’s observation that parenting through media calls for a different set of parenting skills.  In reading what has been said so far, I am starting to see some of the contours of what such skills might need to be. Clearly, there is a lot to be said for a mindset that appreciates, rather than denigrates, the important role that popular culture plays in children's lives. We also need to be able to recognize the opportunities for discussion that TV shows, and other media content provide. And, we need to have the tools to encourage the imagination at opportune moments. For me, this all begins with a need for open-minded listening, which was so poignantly captured in Susan’s recounting of the conversation she had with her friend’s daughter about Disney princesses. As Jackson Bird, a trans-activist and former staff member of the Harry Potter Alliance, once said in an interview, “We need to learn to listen, to really listen.” On some level, this may seem to be an almost banal observation, and, yet, I see again and again, that we (adults) often do not really tune into what children are saying, and just as importantly, what they are not saying (but are communicating in other ways) about their relationship with popular culture. 

I am particularly tuned into the non-verbal aspects of “listening” because of my own background in dance and performance. I also spent years working with Bollywood dance fans, whose imagination is activated when they re-choreograph the dances contained in Hindi films. For these dancer fans, choreography becomes the space where the imagination is activated. This is where they engage, critique, re-interpret popular culture content.  I realize that this may be too far afield, but I actually have been thinking a lot about the performative and embodied possibilities for parenting through media, particularly at this moment when our physicality is limited in such profound ways and where I see so much desire for imagined and actual co-presence. Henry described action figures as “authoring tools” for re-imagined stories. I am really interested in encouraging improvised and staged performances inspired by popular culture as moments that allow us to embody and share our imagination.

Henry Jenkins: Amidst the many great questions that Susan posed for us, the one that struck me the most was the question, “When do we feel pride about our relationships to popular culture?” As a culture, we are programmed to feel shame and guilt, but rarely pride. Watching television, one of my mentors used to say, was like masturbation. We all do it sometimes, but we don’t like to talk about it, and never in front of the neighbors. I used to wear a button that said simply “I Love TV” and people would struggle so much to figure out what TV stood for, because it couldn’t possibly mean television. Why would you wear a button proclaiming your love for television?  

I think this is part of the hidden curriculum of the concept of “screen time.” We start from a logic which says this is something we should minimize because it has no intrinsic value and in many cases, is associated with some social harm, if nothing else because it takes time away from other, more valuable activities we should be engaging with, and “Aren’t you ashamed to let your children watch television instead of reading books or socializing with their friends or playing outside?” Well, Covid-19 is shifting our priorities on some of those other things, leading many people around the world to the conclusion that maybe it is better -- for now at least -- for children to socialize with friends (or go to school) through a screen. 

“Screen time” talk starts from a series of normalized assumptions about what it means to consume media. The first of those assumptions is that what happens on screens is completely separate from the other activities in our lives. So, in Sangita’s example above, television is assumed to be a mental activity (of a relative low order) which has little or nothing to do with our physical bodies (or more accurately, it involves bodies at rest rather than in movement.) I wonder if the people who make this mind-body distinction have ever seen children watching (or perhaps playing with) television. They are rarely sitting still, they are only sometimes giving it their full attention, it IS integrated into a range of other activities, and they are often physically moving around in one way or another while they are “watching” the show. One reason they watch the same programs over and over is that they catch different bits each time, though the other reason is that the ritualized nature of certain moments are comforting and familiar. We know that children learn stories through their bodies and their voices, and contrary to our high-low culture assumptions, this is as true for television as it is for children’s books.

“Screen Time” talk assumes that television is socially isolating, ignoring all of the signs that television content becomes a social currency that enables conversations with others and that cutting kids off from shows that are part of the shared mythology of their peer group is going to be far more socially isolating than allowing them the time to watch the show itself. And of course, much of what kids do with screens already involves real time or asynchronous social interaction with others with whom they are chatting or playing games or just hanging out on Zoom.

“Screen Time” talk assumes that watching television is less apt to spark the imagination than reading a book. The logic goes that we have to construct in our mind’s eye the physical world where the story takes place and television’s visuals give us that information too easily. Fair enough, but books often tell us what the characters are thinking and feeling, where-as television requires us to interpret implicit social cues and thus fosters emotional intelligence through perspective taking. 

“Screen Time” talk assumes that television is a site of pure consumption (often understood in passive terms) whereas the research suggests it is often a site of active cognitive interpretation and the starting point for a range of other creative and expressive activities for our children (go back to what I said about action figures as authoring tools.) 

“Screen Time” talk assumes too often that everything kids do with screens is more or less the same, rather than focusing on the range of activities in children’s lives, and what aspects of those activities get conducted on screens under what circumstances, and how those aspects are connected integrally to things that children are doing when they are not focused on screens. 

What I am calling for is that we move beyond the fragmentation and border policing that regulating “screen time” requires and begin to think about our children’s lives in a more holistic manner.

Susan Kresnicka: Funny, as I was reading through the deconstructions of 'screen time' we've been listing in this dialogue, I noticed for the first time how tellingly shallow the term itself is. (I suspect I'm way late to this realization!). We don't call it 'content time' or 'story time' – we've named it after the most superficial and non-dynamic attribute we could identify: the cold, hard, physical screen. Speaks volumes...

I've been incredibly grateful for this conversation over the last few days. It's been a difficult week for my family, with the start of this weird, virtual school year. My son, entering his sophomore year in college, is deeply resentful that we haven't agreed to let him move halfway across the country to live in an off-campus apartment while the school grapples with the intersection of a pandemic, an impulse-driven quasi-adult population, and its own financial realities. My daughter, starting her senior year in high school, has a heightened sense of anxiety surrounding this significant year. At varying moments, this week brought tears, cold silence, door slamming, and awkward dinners. Do you know where we found relief this week? TV. And not because we curled up in front of our respective devices and watched our own things to zone out. Content offered relief during this fraught week because, at moments when we felt disconnected from one another, it created an opportunity to reconnect. After a particularly tense few days, our son began to shift (slowly) into acceptance about the college decision. The very first signal that this shift was underway was when he told me how much he was enjoying watching The Boys. "What do you like about it?," I asked. "Well, it's about this guy whose girlfriend gets killed by a superhero and how he changes as a result. You should watch it." It was the first uncharged conversation we'd had in days, and it served as an invitation: "I'm moving past my anger," he implied, "and I want you to understand the ideas that are speaking to me in this difficult moment." I learned long ago that if my children tell me I should watch something, I should. I'm now on S1E5 of The Boys, and my son and I have a new point of connection to draw upon as we work through this. With my daughter, content has been our relationship salve for years. At the end of a truly wrenching tear-filled night this week, as we tried to patch ourselves (and each other) up, she asked if I would stay in her room and watch TV with her. We crawled under the covers, held hands, and watched Hugh Laurie demonstrate the tension between exceptionalism and human connection in an episode of House ("Sometimes, you just have to watch an episode of House," she told me.)

In my research and in my own life, I see time and again how shared content experiences – whether synchronous or not – help us forge, maintain, deepen, and repair social bonds, including those with the people we love most. When we dismiss and demonize entertainment media, we conveniently ignore this crucial function. An incredibly insightful friend once told me, "You can't understand something if you are judging it." I believe that this chronic cultural judgment of entertainment media, hypocritically embraced and lauded as a measure of responsible parenthood, cuts us off from a full understanding of how entertainment operates in our lives, including its potential for strengthening our relationships with our children

Rethinking "Screen Time" In the Age of Covid 19 (Part One)

This is the first of a series of exchanges where parents, teachers, and researchers share their insights about children and media in the era of Covid-19. How does the concept of “screen time” break down as we are all forced to conduct schooling, work, social relations, and every other aspect of our lives on line? Why is there a residual guilt that many parents are feeling about leaving their children alone with screens under these circumstances? How are people coping with the challenges of working, parenting, and home-schooling within the same limited real estate and same limited time frame? And how might we take advantage of this moment of profound disruption and discomfort in order to construct a new and perhaps better relationship with media in the context of our family life?·  

Sangita Shresthova: As I started to think about media, parenting, and imagination in this moment, I was drawn to a seemingly common-place conversation I had recently with a friend, who is also a parent. We were chatting about current events, supporting each other through our concerns about our own parents, and commiserating on the challenges of having our children be at home all the time, when she suddenly exclaimed almost breathlessly that she felt she was doing one thing right in the midst of all this - she had pretty much eliminated all "screentime" for her kids. As a media scholar with an enduring commitment to the participatory and creative possibilities of media, I felt my body tense up immediately. She went on to explain that she had pretty much banned all shows, all media, all facetime, from her kids day.  “Media is bad for them”, she argued. She then asked me how I was approaching this problem.

“Well”, I responded, “I find measuring screen time useless”. To me, the question isn't whether my five year old son is using a "screen". Rather I am interested in how he, my partner, and I are able to engage with media. My friend was clearly taken aback and shifted topics abruptly, leaving our conversation awkwardly unresolved. I never got to say all that I wanted to say on this topic.

So, I am going to use this blog conversation as an excuse to connect my personal experiences with parenting and media to my work on participatory culture and the civic imagination. 

As a media scholar and practitioner whose work focuses on participatory cultures (think Bollywood dance fandoms), connected learning (think Lego clubs) and participatory politics (think Facebook supported DIY facemask making), I have a deep appreciation for how media can be helpful to communities, educators and others. Of course, I also realize that the challenges that surround our current media landscape and popular culture narratives are very real. In fact, our current work on the civic imagination explores how we may tap, complicate, and remix such narratives to ignite creativity to imagine how we may be able to tackle these, and other, issues.

The work and research I do has helped me take a more nuanced approach to thinking through media in my son’s life. This has been even more true over the past few months when my son’s life outside the home pretty much ceased to exist. Though handling all this is, by no means, easy, making sense of the ways that we can use media to connect, imagine, and learn has helped me and my family stay afloat.

For me and my family, the first days of California's shut down in March triggered a profound sense of isolation and disconnect. Like everyone, we had been abruptly severed from our daily routines. We also felt so, so far away from my family in the Czech Republic, which under normal circumstances was "just a few hours of flight time" away. In fact, we had suddenly woken up to the diasporic person's worst nightmare as the many miles that separate us from our loved ones had become an insurmountable distance overnight. 

I was struggling. My son was struggling. My partner was struggling. Emotions were high. And, then, unexpectedly, Czech public broadcast television (Czech TV) came to our rescue. 

Within days of the lockdown being implemented in the Czech Republic, Czech TV launched a Učí Telka, daily classroom based program for kids in grades 1-5. Pulled together overnight, the program was a valiant effort to provide continuity to children in the country who had, like my son, suddenly had to transition to being at home and not going to school. The build-it-on-the-fly ethos of the program was openly acknowledged by the moderators, teachers and students who were all learning how to do this while on air.  As my son and I tuned in asynchronously everyday, we saw children like my son trying to keep their masks on. We also saw the teachers muddling through how to teach for a TV audience. We saw this confusion transform into resolve as the weeks went on. We too soon found our rhythm.

We learned how to complete the daily lessons. We enjoyed the TV show recesses.  By the time the program ended in mid June, we felt connected to the imagined community that had formed around it.

Czech TV school is only one example of the many ways in which media has helped my family connect over the past months. There are the daily Facetime/Whatsapp storytelling calls that allow my son to spend time with his grandparents. There are also many shows that have sparked his imagination by connecting him to new ideas and information. The Smurfs, a cartoon centered on the village life of small blue creatures, taught him about appreciating every member of the community and inspired him to create imaginary scenes that push past the stories themselves. Wild Kratts, an animated  television series that follows the wild life focused adventures of two brothers, inspired “what if” conversations about the animals, the brothers, and, most importantly, the antagonist Donita. I could go on.

In thinking my experiences, over the past weeks, I am really excited about this exchange. For me, parenting with and through media in the midst of a pandemic is about identifying opportunities for creative exchange, as well as, inspiring a sense of connection and community at this otherwise profoundly isolating time. Media has helped my family feel connected. It has encouraged dialogue, and has inspired our imaginations at a time when we  desperately need to find ways to feel even a little hopeful.

Henry Jenkins:    Sangita's phrase here, "parenting through media," captures something essential about the relationship to "screen time" we want to foster. Most of the time, people who mumble about reducing their children's "screen time" imagine parenting by media: that is, the media functions as an electronic babysitter, they imagine shifting their attention elsewhere and leaving their children to be a feral child of YouTube. This is something all parents do from time to time and they should not feel guilty for doing so if the alternative is to become overwhelmed and lash out emotionally at the children who, under the current circumstances, are constantly under foot.

But parenting through media requires a different set of parenting skills. First, the ideal may be some form of co-viewing where the parent and child are watching a program which provides each of them some degree of pleasure. The parent has the remote in their hand and is willing to stop, rewind, focus on specific details, and ask their children questions designed to prompt their own mental processing of the narrative. Children acquire skills by making sense of complex narratives, taking the perspectives of nuanced characters or distinguishing fiction from fact. They are best able to develop these skills if parents learn to "read" television the way they might read a picture book, even getting playful in asking questions that might take you well beyond what is on the screen. Such exchanges may form the basis for the development of media literacy skills within the home.

But, as Shelby Anne Wolf and Shirley Brice Heath discuss in their study of children's relationship with fictional characters, The Braid of Literacy, children's creative engagement with imaginary worlds ideally does not stop when the parent turns the television off. Again, writing specifically about printed books (and drawing sharp lines away from media and popular culture), Wolf writes about her daughter, "To Lindsey, reading was action and each part must be played. The words of the story were meant not to lie on the page but to leap off and rock back and forth in life." My experience as a parent was more or less the same except what excited my son was content he absorbed from television and films on VHS tapes. 

Listen closely and you will hear phrases from the show enter their everyday speech. You will see them embody the character's personality using whatever props they have at hand. If they have action figures or other toys, they may expand the saga through introducing their favorite characters to characters from other series. I see action figures as authoring tools which empower users to reimagine and retell the stories that matter to them.  When this happens, its clear that something has caught the child's imagination, that the program is providing them with resources to work through some of the emotional conflicts or social challenges they are facing at that moment of their development.

When my son was five or so, we developed the practice of trading stories. Some nights we would read him children's books or we would make up our own stories that incorporated his circumstances into the narrative. On other nights, we would ask him to make up stories. He would dictate and we would record on the computer every word he said. The challenge was to let the story remain his -- to let him work through whatever residue he had from the day and tap whatever resources he might draw from the culture around him. His stories were full of Pee-Wee Herman and He-Man, seemingly contrasting figures of masculinity which he drew upon to make sense of his own identity. 

Those first stories are shapeless blobs which suck in details from all directions and are mostly descriptive or list-like. But in this process, you were hear how the child is making sense of the media they are consuming and how it relates to other life events. We would print out the stories, he would draw pictures or create collages of images cut from magazines and catalogues, and we would send them to his grandparents for their birthdays or holidays. He would have that chance to feel like an author of the culture around him. He would claim for himself the right to push beyond the ending or ret-con the core events in the character's life. It certainly mattered where his stories started so choose wisely what you introduce into your children's life, but know that when the child gets his hands on the story material, he will reshape it like Play-Doh to make it into the kind of story the child needs in their life at that moment. 

As he grew older, we found that the characters on television allowed him to work through, in an indirect way, the issues he faced in his own life. As a family, we have remained committed to Survivor, which gave us a shared set of reference points for talking though social interactions with others at a time when he struggled with social anxiety and had trouble reading how other people related to him. We could talk through what kinds of social interactions produced positive and negative results, understanding the risks of different strategies and recognizing the choices that leaders made in relation to their communities. In his early 20s years, being able to talk about issues in the context of television provided a helpful buffer that would have been harder if we were talking about real people in his life. Perspective taking is a core aspect of emotional intelligence and so being able to step back, lower the risks, and explore different ways of working through problems in social interaction proved extremely valuable for him and for us. Sometimes, we realized he was talking about characters on the screen as a way to talk indirectly about his relationship with us and this made the social distance television provided crucial for avoiding more intense conflicts.

Coming back to where I started, I see these examples as suggestive of what happens when we parent through media, when we use it as a resource in our interaction with children, when we bring it under our control and engage with it on our own terms. Right now, the closure of most real world spaces forces us to work and socialize through technology, so prohibitionist responses make no sense, if they ever did. How do you restrict "screen time" when Mom and Dad spend their entire day working via Zoom Calls and when schooling online remains the safest way to protect your child from the pandemic? No, the goal is not to restrict "screen time" but to use “screen time” in a way which makes sense in the context of your own family life.

Susan Kresnicka: At a family dinner a few years ago, I asked my daughter’s best friend about her Disney fandom. I had known about her love for all things Disney (especially the Princess movies) for quite some time, and, as I was in the middle of conducting a year-long study of fans and fandom, I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. About 12 years old at the time, she described expansively the themes she saw in the movies, considering what they suggested about gender, family bonds, and individuality. She spoke about the close friendships she had made with other fans she had met online and the way her experience as a fan was helping her reflect on her own potential. I was fascinated and overjoyed by the conversation. Towards the end, my daughter’s friend uttered, what seemed to me, a surprising statement: “No one has ever asked me about any of this before.” When I inquired as to whether she ever discussed her fandoms with her parents, she told me, “No, they just call it ‘all that teeny bopper stuff’.”

That discussion has stuck with me. Time and again, my work affirms how deeply we value the entertainment we love, how much meaning it brings to our lives, and how fulfilling it can be to share our entertainment fandoms with our loved ones. Additionally, as a parent, I couldn’t imagine not sharing with my children something so important to them. My daughter’s friend’s parents had missed out on the enriching experience I had with their daughter because they considered her Disney fandom ‘frivolous.’

Frivolous. Waste of time. Mindless. Boob tube. Rotting your brain. As we know, the criticisms typically leveled against entertainment run the gamut from being dismissive of the real value it offers to fearful of the perceived damage it can cause – especially among children. And while boundary-setting around media and entertainment plays an important role in parenting, exclusively focusing on control obscures the bigger picture. Not only will our tech-savvy kids eventually find work-arounds, but such strict policing may be implicitly teaching our children that media consumption can be inherently shameful, something to hide. And, if children feel they need to conceal their entertainment and media consumption from their parents, how likely is it that they’ll seek us out when their favorite content inevitably provokes questions and concerns?

When we don’t appreciate the role of media and entertainment in our own lives, we are less likely to appreciate the role it plays in our kids’ lives – and we are more likely to miss out on invaluable opportunities to connect with them. To talk openly and meaningfully, to learn what they care about, to understand their everyday experiences, and, importantly, to help them process their encounters with media.

So, what would a more open and mindful approach to parenting around media and entertainment look like? How can we help our kids reflect and think purposefully about the content they encounter? First of all, ‘media literacy’ may sound like a topic for the school classroom, but I believe that’s a misconception. The best opportunities for this kind of ‘coaching’ happen outside of school, at home, where kids consume content in everyday life. Furthermore, the last thing we want to do is turn this kind of critical thinking and learning into a homework exercise. If kids see ‘understanding media’ as a threat to their enjoyment of it, they’ll be less likely to embrace it. Finally, like so many things, our kids learn how to relate to media and entertainment by watching us. If we don’t model a mindful approach at home, will our kids really believe it matters?

With that in mind, we can begin by asking ourselves how entertainment and media operate in our own lives:

• When and why do we engage with it?

• How do our media choices relate to our feelings? Our social relationships? Our understanding of who we are?

• How might these answers shift depending upon the type of media or entertainment genre we’re considering?

• About which types of media experiences do we feel the most pride? Judgment? Guilt? Ambivalence? Connection to others? Isolation? 

Beyond reflecting upon the role of media in our own lives, I’ve always found one question incredibly powerful in helping develop a more mindful approach to media: why does this content exist? When we stop for a moment and ask ourselves – and teach our children to ask – this question, we immediately create distance from the content. We frame it as an object of inquiry and curiosity rather than something we mindlessly absorb. Likewise, when we pose this question to our kids about their favorite entertainment, we open up a dialogue and opportunities for connection.

With the door open, we can also create more moments of connection over specific content. We can share shows and movies that convey the values and ideas we most want our children to embrace and, perhaps, even share with their children one day. In my research on family fandoms – fandom that is shared by children and parents (and sometimes even grandparents and extended family) – a shared love for specific content creates an array of benefits for all involved: the transmission of important values, a focal point for shared ideas and experiences, a way to make memories together, and opportunities for ritual and symbolic representation of that which bonds us together. 

My work has taught me that media and entertainment consumption helps us meet core human needs for self-care, social connection, and identity. In many instances, our children are already receiving these benefits from their favorite content. Demonstrating to our kids that we care about how entertainment makes them feel, how it helps them belong, and how it helps them understand and express who they are is a great privilege. And it’s an undertaking that can strengthen family bonds and empower our kids to develop critical thinking skills that will serve them throughout their lives. Rather than operate narrowly as a site of anxiety, media and entertainment can become a springboard for powerful connection and expansive thinking.

BIOS

Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, CInematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California and the founder and former co-director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He has been a dedicated advocate for media literacy education, recently receiving the Jesse McKanse award for his life-time contribution to this field, including the publication of Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century which helped to launch the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Subsequent work here included Reading in a Participatory Culture and Participatory Culture in a Networked Society. His other work on children and media includes The Children’s Culture Reader and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. He is currently writing a book which examines children’s media of the 1950s and 1960s in light of shifting understandings of childhood in Post-War American culture. His most recent books include Participatory Culture: Interviews, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change and Comics and Stuff.

Sangita Shresthova is the Director of Research of the Civic Paths Group based at the University of Southern California. Her work focuses on intersections among online learning, popular culture, performance, new media, politics, and globalization. She is also one of the authors of Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Change (2020) and of  By Any Media Necessary: The New Activism of Youth (2016), both published by NYU Press. Her earlier book on Bollywood (Is It All About Hips?) was published in 2011 by Sage. She is one of the creators of the Digital Civics Toolkit (digitalcivicstoolkit.org), a collection of resources for educators, teachers and community leaders to support youth learning. Her own artistic work has been presented in academic and creative venues around the world including the Schaubuehne (Berlin), the Other Festival (Chennai), the EBS International Documentary Festival (Seoul), and the American Dance Festival (Durham, NC). She enjoys engaging with diverse communities through her workshops, lectures and projects. sangitashresthova.com

Founder and president of research firm KR&I, Susan Kresnicka is a cultural anthropologist with over 18 years of experience in the commercial sector. Specializing in foundational research to establish core human drivers for consumer behavior, Susan has led large-scale, multi-modal research projects for a range of industries. A student of fandom for more than a decade, Susan has conducted fan research for a variety of iconic entertainment IP brands, sports teams, and brands built around passionate hobbyists. Whether she is studying fandom or another topic, Susan specializes in tying consumer behavior to core human needs, allowing clients to establish more enduring and meaningful bonds with the people upon whom their commercial success relies. Susan holds an M.A. in social anthropology from The University of Texas at Austin, sits on the professional advisory board for UCLA’s Master of Social Science program, and regularly speaks publicly on fandom, gender, morality, identity, and the value of anthropology in business. Her work has been covered in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Forbes, Variety, and more. kresnickaresearch.com 

A Personal Statement: How Good Intentions Can Produce Harmful Effects

Over the past weekend, I have been trying to address a bruising controversy brought about by choices I made regarding this blog. In the process, I have caused emotional and reputational harm to several female BIPOC scholars.  What started with the best of intentions has had negative impacts on multiple fronts. More care should have been taken at every stage of the process.

Here’s what happened:

Billy Proctor and I had been discussing plans for the blog this fall. When I did a series of Zoom book clubs over the summer, many had expressed interest in learning more about Black comics. I had been hearing about a wave of new titles released over the past year. Due to the lockdown and some current transportation issues, I had not been able to go to my local comic shop since March and I wanted to know, myself, what I should make sure to read from this new and emerging work. As always, I wanted to use this blog to amplify emerging voices in the field -- in this case, especially Black comic scholars. So, we decided to try to pull together a series. I only briefly discussed the mechanisms for doing so, figuring we would dig into those questions more fully later. But from the first, I had vaguely signaled that we would need a diverse group of editors to make this project viable.

After our initial discussion, my attention was drawn elsewhere leaving Proctor to act on these plans. He was only vaguely reporting what was happening and I was distractedly waving him forward, trying, as always, to do too many things at once. I own my failure to oversee this properly. But I also want to make clear the disconnects in the process. Proctor drafted a call for papers which he posted on several comic studies listservs. I did not review or even know about the CFP before it was posted and not being a subscriber to these lists, I was not aware of what was happening until there was significant pushback against these plans. I also did not read or even know about the reframing of the project, though I had been consulted about expanding the remit to allow other BIPOC participants. When I learned of the criticisms on Friday afternoon, I was sympathetic with many of the critiques of what had happened. The initial approach was deeply flawed and the hasty response to the criticism had only made things worse.

I started working behind the scenes to find a way to substantively address the concerns. Specifically, there was a call for Black scholars to be the curators for such a project, which I acknowledge should have been the case from the start. As I heard of the pushback, I reached out to try to identify some early career Black scholars who might want to take ownership over this project, offering them complete control over the content and contributors and asking them to totally reframe the series to reflect their own perspectives. For technical reasons, I would need to facilitate the actual posting. Otherwise, I was ceding my platform to them. When Billy had told me he had heard from other BIPOC scholars who wondered if the blog might also provide space for them to write about comics by, for and about their communities,. I wanted to also facilitate their participation, but again, I was only vaguely following how he was going to do so. After some false steps, Billy identified someone who volunteered to take ownership over this second series.  As of now, my plan has been to run two series, first one under Black editorship on Black comics, and a second under BIPOC leadership dealing with “multicultural” comics.

In the midst of coming up with these plans, Billy Proctor accidentally posted one email from a back and forth exchange around these topics onto a Comic Studies list-serve. Proctor inappropriately characterized Samira Nadkarni who had been a leading critic (among others) of the original plans and further evoked Rukmini Pande, who has been a key figure critiquing racism in fandom studies. There has been an outpouring of outrage over what Billy said and the fact that he felt comfortable using such a negative characterization in my presence. I am deeply sorry for my role in this exchange. I have publicly apologized on the comic studies list where the email was posted and I also personally apologized to the women involved.  Billy Proctor has since stepped down as Associate Editor of this blog and will have no involvement with any future series we may launch, behind the scenes or otherwise. 

Let me be clear where I stand. I admire Rukmini Pande's contributions to the field enormously. She has transformed fan studies (and to a degree, fandom) by her willingness to challenge orthodoxies, to question our historic silence about race, to model what transformative scholarship might look like, and to call out normalized practices that reflect white supremacist logics that have gone unexamined and unquestioned for two long. I am just getting to know Samira Nadkarni through this exchange but I also deeply appreciate her critical voice in raising questions around the initial framing of this project.  I appreciate her willingness to call me out, even though her critiques have not always been easy to hear. Both women have suffered previous harm as a consequence of other public discussions over racism in fandom studies, and I am sorry that my poor choices may have contributed to further wounding them.

There is very little I can say -- the email in its tone and in its substance was inappropriate. I am horrified that this email was distributed on a public list -- not because it is embarrassing to me but because it did public damage to the women referenced in the exchange. I try to promote the work of younger scholars in my field and even where this is not possible, to above all, do no harm. And in this exchange, I failed at that basic expectation. 

I have read various assumptions being made on Twitter about what I did or did not say to Billy Proctor in response to that email. One of the ways whiteness reasserts itself is through what gets said amongst white people in private conversation. Our mutual support for each other shores up the existing conditions of systemic and structural racism and misogyny. When things get said in our presence and we remain silent or we offer words of encouragement, we become complicit in those attitudes. We say things in private we would NEVER say in public and doing so makes them impossible to combat or challenge the casual racism and sexism that run through everyday conversations even among well-meaning people who are otherwise working for social justice.  I have seen people read Billy’s email as suggesting we were circling the wagons against the BIPOC women. For my part, I was seeking out advice from senior BIPOC women so I could get insights on the best way to de-escalate this situation and figure out how to shift the editorship around this project to empower younger BIPOC scholars. Aware of some of the history, I was trying to find ways to avoid harm to the people involved.

As I was working to quickly address the core concerns that had been raised, I also allowed a sense of defensiveness to enter our exchange without fully realizing it myself. I work hard to hear, respect, and act on criticism, but I do have some feelings to work through when I am publicly called out. I should have slowed down to process those feelings. Instead, a certain degree of distrust entered my language and it enabled Proctor to write what he did. Systemic racism runs deep, it can reassert itself in unexpected ways, it transmits itself through unexamined assumptions and we need to correct each other when racist modes of thought enter our conversations.  We need to guard against our raw emotional responses which often surface unprocessed assumptions. I let everyone down by not making the right choices in the moment as I was trying to resolve a complex and tangled set of concerns. For this, I am really and truly sorry. I will do better.

Structural racism enters the conversation in other ways also. Because of structural racism,  Billy Proctor was already in my social circle and Samira Nadkarni was not. Because we knew each other, Proctor volunteered to help me with the grunt work on the blog, when others — for a multitude of reasons — would not have felt comfortable doing so. Because we were both white men, I felt comfortable in my interactions with him. Because I knew him, I did not want to harm him even as it was clear that his mistakes were making it impossible to continue to stand behind what he had done.  The social patterns created by structural racism also mean that I was more likely to respond defensively to Samira Nadkarni criticizing our project because I did not already know her. I recognize that such an impulse is wrong, because it contributes to those lacking access and power not being taken seriously when they risk speaking out. As a personal blog rather than a publication with an organization behind it, I have been personally trying to identify younger scholars to promote. But this means that, again, those people already inside or adjacent to my circles have structural advantages in getting asked to contribute. One reason I wanted us to have a call for papers was because I recognize this issue and wanted to expand access and identify new contributors not already in my network. As a consequence, I feel even worse that these efforts to reach out were so badly handled.   Again, I want to do better.

I owe this apology not simply to the women who were unfairly evoked in this specific incident but more broadly to young women, especially women of color, in the academic world, who so often are struggling to find their own voice as scholars, who are so often mischaracterized and dismissed when they pose important critiques of institutional, systemic and structural racism and misogyny. I admire these women’s courage in calling out senior scholars and entrenched assumptions in their fields. I would hate if anything I have done here has the effect of discouraging them from full throated participation in the core debates of their chosen fields. We need your contributions, even if it can be sometimes hard for older white male scholars, myself among them, to hear and process your critiques.  We all need to do better.

Where does this leave the two series? I honestly do not know. I am still working with some younger scholars who wanted to participate in overseeing them and still hoping to develop a framework under which they might move forward. I still believe something positive can come from this, but I want to go slow and find the most constructive way that this blog might address these topics. Whatever happens, I will be as open as possible in soliciting participation so that involvement goes beyond my pre-existing networks. I welcome any and all constructive feedback on the best way to proceed.

Identity, Power, and Soiled Storytelling: Examining the Contemporary Politics of Authorship through American Dirt (3 of 3)

Identity, Power, and Soiled Storytelling: Examining the Contemporary Politics of Authorship through American Dirt (3 of 3)

Olivia González

For Whom is Embodying a Cultural Bridge a Mechanism of Oppression and Liberation? 

Cummins’ reported motivations for authoring American Dirt further highlight the privileged position from which her novel was written and read. In explaining her decision to write American Dirt, Cummins has repeatedly claimed that she aimed to act as a “bridge,” presumably between Mexican migrants and an Anglo-American readership. For example, in the author’s note of American Dirt, Cummins claimed that she was “worried that, as a non-migrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants”; however, she ultimately chose to write the book because “I thought, ‘If you’re a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?’” (p. 382). Additionally, in interviews addressing the controversy around American Dirt, Cummins has rearticulated this rhetoric, sharing that she wrote the novel with the hope that it “would be a bridge” (cited in Boyagoda, 2020). While Cummins’ efforts to serve as a cultural bridge have been commended by some of her supporters, putting her rhetoric in conversation with Moraga & Anzaldúa’s (1981; 1983) Bridge highlights the damaging effects and distance from which Cummins wrote about and aimed to “bridge” her subjects and readers.  

As the anthology’s title signals, Bridge (1981; 1983) interrogates and reimagines the bridges that have historically been built along the backs of women of color by those with varying levels of privilege and power (including, but not limited to, white men and women) in their attempts to explore and understand those situated as “Other.” Presented in the opening of the anthology, “The Bridge Poem”—penned by acclaimed Black poet Kate Rushin—highlights the burdens that embodying a bridge imposes on Black women as they are expected to connect, educate, and translate across difference.Through this work, Rushin expresses her fatigue and frustrations as a bridge, declaring: “I've had enough / I'm sick of seeing and touching / Both sides of things / Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody / …I'm sick of filling in your gaps / Sick of being your insurance against / The isolation of your self-imposed limitations” (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983, p. xxi). Bridge (1981; 1983) explores interventions in the building of these bridges, highlighting the liberatory power deployed when women of color develop their own bridges to one another: “bridges of consciousness” connecting them in solidarity (Moraga, 2015, p. xvi). As Moraga (2015) shares in the preface to the fourth edition of Bridge, the first edition (1981) of this anthology was the product of “women of color, who had been historically denied a shared political voice, endeavor[ing] to create bridges of consciousness through the exploration, in print, of their diverse classes, cultures and sexualities” (p. xvi). Thus, as Moraga & Anzaldúa (1983) claim, constructing these bridges of solidarity emerges through women of color “naming our selves and by telling our stories in our own words” (p. 23). 

I argue that in authoring American Dirt—a work that is not rooted in her personal experiences with oppression or liberation, and a work not designed to connect herself to women of color in solidarity—Cummins, and her rhetoric around “bridging,” are ultimately, like the book itself, hollow and harmful. In authoring an apolitical and impersonal work, Cummins not only fails to construct the bridge of consciousness envisioned in Bridge, but reproduces the toxic notion that bridges between those with oppressive power and women of color must be constructed in order for the former to learn and comprehend the humanity of the latter. Further, Cummins appears unaware of where the burdens of her attempts to be or build a bridge fall. As Cummins (2020) reveals in American Dirt’s afterword, her novel was made possible by migrants and deportation victims who “patiently” taught her about things “I never would’ve understood without their insight” (p. 385). Therefore, while Cummins’ attempts to be a bridge may reflect a “social justice” ethos (Markowicz, 2020), she failed to build a bridge along her own back; instead, (re)constructing them on the backs of those who “patiently” taught, and translated for, her.

For Whom are Borderlands Stories Profitable? 

Lastly, as many American Dirt critics have highlighted, Cummins’ success in selling American Dirt represents the inequities embedded within mainstream cultural production structures in the U.S. For example, responding to Cummins’ lamenting that “I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it,” other writers have reminded her that authors who are “browner” than her have written stories about their experiences (Grady, 2020a).However, many of those stories have not received the same visibility or capital; “authentic stories by Mexicanas and Chicanas are either passed over or published to significantly less fanfare (and for much less money)” than American Dirt (Bowles, 2020). Thus, as her critics suggest, Cummins’ early acclaim epitomizes the lack of equitable opportunities for Mexicanas and Chicanas to tell and sell their own stories within present publishing structures in the U.S.

Indeed, as many writers of color have discussed, the U.S. publishing industry has sustained a “historic and systemic whiteness” (Ho, 2016), with industry gatekeeping positions dominated by cis-het, able-bodied white women. As a survey by Lee & Low Books (2020) revealed, as of 2019, 76% of literary agents and publishing and review journal employees working in the U.S. were white, while only 6% identified as “Hispanic/Latino/Mexican.” Further, the majority of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) folks represented in publishing houses hold positions with little to no gatekeeping power, constituting nearly half of interns (49%), while remaining chiefly excluded from executive (22%), editorial (15%), and marketing and publicity (26%) positions (Lee & Low Books, 2020). 

These substantial inequities in publishing power consistently produce a lack of opportunities for authors of color to publish and sell their work. As established publishing industry professionals have asserted, addressing inequities within the industry requires addressing representation in all gatekeeping positions, not simply seeking out “diverse” authors (Ho, 2016). For example, according to accomplished editor Sulay Hernandez, “the majority of books that are published in the US are not by people of color. The majority of high-profile authors are not people of color,” but changes need to be made to not only ensure that “more voices of color [are] being published” but that “more voices of color [are] being published well. And, very importantly, selling well” (cited in Masad, 2016). Thus, disrupting publishing industry inequities requires addressing the dearth of employees of color in all gatekeeping positions, with a particular focus on marketing and publicity, as these divisions substantially determine authors’ ability to sell their work (Ho, 2016).

Thus, with Latinxs and Mexicans occupying only 5% of marketing and publicity positions in the U.S. (Lee & Low Books, 2020), Mexican, Latinx, and Chicanx writers must fight to market themselves, and get stores to sell, and readers to buy, stories that may be considered marginal or “niche.” As Marcela Landres claims, the lack of Latinxs in “key” publishing positions is a primary contributor to the “paucity of published books written by Latinos” (cited in Cubias, 2015). And as Bowles (2020) shares, he has “seen my Chicana and Mexicana colleagues struggle to get their stories told, to get their manuscripts into the hands of agents and past the publishing industry’s gatekeepers;” thus, they remain “horribly underpaid” and “suffer marginalization in the US market.” 

Meanwhile, Cummins received a million-dollar advance from Flatiron Books for the rights to American Dirt, a film production deal with Imperative Entertainment, and enjoyed substantially effective pre-release publicity and marketing. Despite the widespread backlash that the novel received after its publication, American Dirt’s sales continued to grow to over 362,000 copies by July of 2020 (Milliot, 2020), and maintained a place on the New York Timesbest-sellers list for twenty-six weeks straight. I argue that this success further demonstrates the privileges that Cummins was afforded in telling and selling this story. Unlike so many women of color striving to publish their own stories, Cummins was not rejected or silenced by dominant publishing structures, was not “horribly underpaid,” and did not struggle to have the story she told marketed and sold well. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, I posit that critiques of American Dirt must be guided by a politics of authorship that recognizes the inequities represented by, and reproduced through, Cummins’success in telling and selling this story. Engaging with work fromMoraga (1983; 2015), Anzaldúa (1983; 1987), Moraga & Anzaldúa (1983), and Hurtado (2020), and examining the broader sociocultural and political economic contexts in which American Dirt was produced and published, reminds us that women writers of color contend with mechanisms that silence and delegitimize their storytelling, have historically been tasked with serving as cultural bridges, and are consistently denied opportunities to tell and sell their own stories in the U.S. publishing industry. Thus, while Cummins has now publicly claimed her identity as a Latina, I argue that as the author of American Dirt, she was ultimately read and afforded the same privileges as a white writer. 

But American Dirt as a phenomenon speaks beyond one particular story and storyteller; it reflects, and has helped reify, a publishing system that privileges and perpetuates whiteness. This is particularly evinced by the success with which Cummins was able to tell and sell a story filled with harmful, stereotypical portrayals of Mexicans and migrants, whichwere unquestioned by publishers but quickly recognized and critiqued by Mexican and Chicanx writers and readers. Further, as reflected in Cummins’ representations of, and rhetoric around, “brownness,” Black and Afro-Latinx writers and immigrants are erased from Cummins’ conceptions of authorship and immigration respectively—contributing to the continued exclusion of Black immigrants from narratives about the United States’ southern border and the atrocities afflicted by its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Thus, Cummins not only benefits from the whiteness of the U.S. publishing industry, but simultaneously reinforces the anti-black racism and nativism pervading narratives about immigration in the United States writ large. 

So what does this mean for other authors and scholars writing in the U.S. publishing industries or academia? To address (note: not answer) this question requires that I interrogate my own power and privilege. While I am highly critical of Cummins, hearing her trepidations about authoring American Dirt—“I don’t know if I’m the right person to tell this story” (Alter, 2020)—sunk like a rock in my own chest; I know these fears, they flood my mind with every research project that I pursue. Like Moraga (1983) in her piece “La Güera,” I find myself asking: as a white Chicana, “what is my responsibility to my roots—both white and brown, Spanish-speaking and English?” (p. 34), and what does it mean for me to claim the label of woman of color? Like Moraga, I recognize that I have to “look critically at my claim to color” and “must acknowledge the fact that, physically, I have had a choice about making that claim, in contrast to women who have not had such a choice, and have been abused for their color” (p. 33–34). Thus, I offer the following considerations:

To writers who are looking to tell stories with or about communities of color, but have—like myself—benefited from whiteness: Interrogate your power and privileges, and situate this in your own work; rejecthetero-masculinist tendencies to feign objectivity through distance.Seek out silenced storytellers—versus stories—and give them your ears, your heart, and your platform. Listen to, celebrate, and honor them. And ask not just “who am I to tell these stories?” but “who am I to hear them?” We are not entitled to their knowledge, their stories, their perspectives; they are not yours, nor mine to hold in my güera hands or heart.

And so I write this for the mujeres de color

escribiendo sobre su esperanza y su enojo, su alegría y su dolor

Proclaiming with tongue and heart, key and pen

voces que otras no quieren oír, realidades que no ven.

Olivia González is a doctoral student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and a former Ronald E. McNair scholar. Working at the intersections of critical media industry studies and education studies, Olivia’s research examines the politics of race and gender within contemporary structures of media education and production. Her current work and dissertation center on the storytelling practices and professional socialization of aspiring film and television creators of color.

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quiet beliefs about migrants. NBC News. Retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/american-dirt-bestseller-because-it-reflects-guilty-liberals-quiet-beliefs-ncna1127366

Von Essen, L. R. [reading_while]. (2020, January 21). This is disappointing given how much of 

the book community has spoken out against this novel's disingenuous portrayal of the immigrant experience. There are so many marginalized voices you could be lifting instead. [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/reading_while/status/1219657189641662464

Winfrey, O. [Oprah]. (2020, January 21). Like so many of us, I’ve read newspaper articles and 

watched television news stories and seen movies about the plight of families looking for a better life, but this story changed the way I see what it means to be a migrant in a whole new way. [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/Oprah/status/1219618257411493890

Wood, J. (2019, January 28). Writingabout writing about the border crisis. The New Yorker. 

retrieved fromhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/04/writing-about-writing-about-the-border-crisis

Identity, Power, and Soiled Storytelling: Examining the Contemporary Politics of Authorship through American Dirt (2 of 3)

Identity, Power, and Soiled Storytelling: Examining the Contemporary Politics of Authorship through American Dirt (2 of 3)

Olivia González

Silencing, Censorship, and Identity “Policing”?: Interrogating Cummins’ Concerns

Like several of her supporters, Cummins has suggested that identity politics, silencing, and censorship are responsible for the backlash that American Dirt has received. For example, Cummins has maligned critiques of American Dirt that are centered upon her identity, claiming that while she is a privileged, white, U.S. citizen, “I am also Puerto Rican” and “that fact has been attacked and sidelined by people who, frankly, are attempting to police my identity” (Martin, 2020). Additionally, Cummins has expressed concerns over cultural appropriation conversations that go “too far toward silencing people” (Alter, 2020, para. 17–18), and suggested that“telling people what stories they are allowed to write” is a “dangerous sort of slippery fascist slope” (Conroy, 2020).However, through engaging with Chicana feminist scholarship, I argue that these claims are not only unfounded but also—communicated from Cummins’ now substantial platform—mislead the public about which writers are prevented from telling their own stories. As work by Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Aída Hurtado reveals—contrary to claims about contemporary “cancel culture”—efforts to silence and censor storytelling are not new phenomena, and it is women of color whose stories and storytelling have consistently been silenced and censored, and for whom writing is a powerful tool in the pursuit of liberation.

While first created in considerably different social and political contexts, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s (1981) widely acclaimed anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (hereafter referred to as Bridge) embodies a powerful work through which the controversy surrounding American Dirt can be productively read. As discussed and demonstrated in Bridge, writing can play a powerful role in mujeres of color’s development and expression of a feminist politic that is shaped by their embodied experiences. Specifically, as Moraga (2015) suggests, Bridge presents U.S. women of color’s “theory in the flesh”—a politic formed through exploring, recording, and honoring their complex, even contradictory, lived experiences as women at the “crossroads” of multiple, intersecting identities (p. xxii). And according to Moraga (2015), it is through writing about these experiences—“telling our stories in our own words” (p. 19)—that women of color can “bring into consciousness what only the body knows to be true” and pursue the liberatory potential of their “theory incarnate” (p. xxiv). Thus, as Moraga & Anzaldúa (1983) discuss in the anthology’s second edition, Bridge—comprised of art, essays, poems, and other writings by women of color—contains “non-rhetorical, highly personal chronicles that present a political analysis in everyday terms" (p.xxiv). 

Similarly, in her text Intersectional Chicana Feminisms, Aída Hurtado (2020) asserts that Chicanas “use writing as the most powerful weapon at their disposal to voice their feminisms, to fight injustice” (p. 93). And as discussed and demonstrated in Bridge, Hurtado (2020) affirms that this writing can take many forms, voices, and tongues. According to Hurtado (2020), Chicana feminist writers insist that “we use everything,” from poetry to social science, “whatever it takes to voice a reality that has never been properly addressed” (p. 59). Additionally, Hurtado (2020) cites Chicana poet Elba Sánchez, who claims that her tongue is “‘a gift, my power,’” through which she “‘names injustices I witness, a veces en voz de poeta, a veces en mi native lengua pocha, from my pocha perspective’” (p. 93). 

Moreover, in her work “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,” Anzaldúa (1983) claims that writing is a mechanism through which mujeres de color “reclaim” their voices and tongues, and negotiate their survival and selfhood. In particular, according to both Moraga & Anzaldúa (1983), Third World women—a term used by U.S. women of color to “align ourselves with countries bearing colonial histories and still suffering their effects” (Moraga, 2015, p. xxv)—"wield a pen as a tool, a weapon, a means of survival, a magic wand that will attract power, that will draw self-love into our bodies” (p. 163). Thus, Anzaldúa (1983) shares that she herself writes to “record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you…To discover myself, to preserve myself, to achieve autonomy” (p. 169). 

However, Anzaldúa (1983) also emphasizes that mujeres of color must contend with mechanisms that silence them and delegitimize their voices and tongues, revealing that the difficulties and “dangers we face as women writers of color are not the same as those of white women” (p. 165). For example, through her work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa (1987) decries the “tradition of silence” that suppresses her many voices as a queer Chicana: “my voice: Indian, Spanish, white” and “my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice” (p. 59). Additionally, Anzaldúa (1987) describes the burdens of translation that she endures when speaking in her “‘home’ tongues,” such as “Standard Mexican Spanish” and “Spanglish” (p. 56)—a process that renders her multilingual tongue “illegitimate” (p. 59). 

Drawing from these works, and examining the sociocultural and political contexts in which American Dirtwas authored and acclaimed, I argue that identity “policing” and “cancel culture” are not the driving forces behind the novel’s negative reception. Instead, I posit that American Dirt must be critiqued through a politics of authorship that is guided by three critical questions: For whom are stories about the U.S.-Mexico borderlands political and personal? For whom is embodying a cultural bridge a mechanism of oppression and liberation? And for whom are borderlands stories profitable?

 For whom are stories about the U.S.-Mexico borderlands political and personal?

Despite its engagement with topics bearing highly politicized tenor in current U.S. discourses—including the “norteño president” and his rhetoric about “bad hombres” (Cummins, 2020, p. 235)—many reviewers have characterized American Dirt as apolitical. Some have criticized American Dirt for being “determinedly apolitical,” decrying Cummins’ failure to address the political factors fueling the “forced migrations ” she depicts (Sehgal, 2020, para. 15), and her attempts to separate “‘policy issues’” from “‘moral and humanitarian concerns’” (Arce, 2020). However, other reviewers, such as John Grisham (n.d.), have praised American Dirt for being apolitical, applauding that “its message is important and timely, but not political.” Similarly, some positive reviews of American Dirt have alluded to the novel’s political implications while refraining from labeling it a political piece. For example, Sarah Blake (n.d.) claimed the book is “urgent and unforgettable, [it] leaps the borders of the page and demands attention, especially now,” while Stephen King (n.d.) deemed American Dirt “an important voice in the discussion about immigration and los migrantes… put[ing] the lie to the idea that we are being besieged by ‘bad hombres.’” 

I argue that reviews praising American Dirt as an apolitical work highlight the privileged position from which Cummins wrote—and was read and reviewed—compared to mujeres of color writing about and from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Specifically, through juxtaposing responses to American Dirt with responses to recent writing by Chicana and Mexicana authors, and drawing from Moraga (1983; 2015), Anzaldúa (1983; 1987),Moraga & Anzaldúa (1983),  and Hurtado’s (2020) claims about both the power and difficulties that women writers of color navigate, I highlight the distance from which Cummins authored American Dirt, and the dangers posed by the novel’s positive reception as an “apolitical” piece. 

For example, like American Dirt, Mexican immigrant writer Valeria Luiselli’s (2019) Lost Children Archive—a novel tracing a woman’s journey as she embarks on a road trip from New York to Arizona with her family and documents the child refugee crisis along the southern U.S border—explores issues tied to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through a fictional narrative. However, unlike American Dirt, Lost Children Archive was substantially shaped by Luiselli’s personal experiences, including Luiselli’s own road trip from New York to Arizona with her family, and her work as an interpreter for child migrants in federal immigration court (Wood, 2019). And in further contrast with American Dirt, Luiselli’s work has been repeatedly deemed “political.” In particular, reviewers have called Lost Children Archive a work that “drifts almost dreamlike between the personal and political” (Greenblatt, n.d.), is “both personal and global, familial and political” (McGinty, n.d.), and is “political without being propagandistic” (Malone, n.d.).

While Lost Children Archive does address the political forces fueling the injustices it depicts, these reviews highlight that even as a work of fiction, Lost Children Archive is a powerful reminder that for women writers of color, “the political is profoundly personal” (Moraga, 2015, p. xxi). Juxtaposing these reviews with those celebrating American Dirt for being “apolitical” thus illustrates the privileged distance from which Cummins wrote her work, including her limited personal stakes in the discourses and policies shaping the lives of the migrants she aimed to portray. Thus, I argue that praising American Dirt as “apolitical” does more than address Cummins’ lack of engagement with policies or partisan politics; this label reveals—and rewards—Cummins’ distance from the subjects of her story. 

Further, like Lost Children Archive, Myriam Gurba’s critique of American Dirt was intimately shaped by her personal experiences, and received responses that deviated substantially from American Dirt. Throughout her review, Gurba grounds her critiques of the novelin her personal experiences and affective responses as a Chicana “living en el Norte.”Forexample, Gurba compares Cummins to a college roommate who wore Gurba’s clothes as an “ill-fitting Mexican costume,” and describes her visceral reactions to Cummins’ reported efforts to give a face to the “‘faceless brown mass’” at the southern border, which “pissed me off so bad my blood became carbonated.” While Gurba has been praised by many readers for her incisive and personal writing, others have criticized the personal nature, as well as the language and tone, of her critique.

For example, as Gurba shares in the opening of her work, she originally wrote her review of American Dirt at the request of Ms., a feminist magazine.However, Ms. later denied Gurba (2019) the opportunity to publish her finished critique, as its editors suggested that she “lacked the fame to pen something so ‘negative.’” Gurba subsequently published her review online via the academic blog Tropics of Meta, where several readers similarly critiqued Gurba’s tone, as well as her use of language and personal stories. For example, readers suggested that Gurba was 

“negative,” “mean,” “vulgar,” and “whin[y].” As one reader stated, Gurba is “mean y harsh,” and her writing is “an over-worked exercise in meanness,” and “pierde fuerza in being so vehemente, y sobre todo in being so vulgar” (Moreno, 2019).

Some readers also criticized Gurba’s use of Spanglish in her review, asserting that it was unimpressive, “poorly-used” (Pablo, 2020), and that “Spanglish es solo un inglés malo y un castellano peor…” (Leftbanker, 2020), Further, according to several readers, through grounding her review in her personal experiences, Gurba diminished the credibility of her arguments. As one reader claimed, the “worst” parts of Gurba’s review are “about Gurba,” and not truly “about the book” (Tyrer, 2020). And others “challenge[d]” Gurba to write a new, positive and impersonal critique: “to take yourself out of the picture…and find something, anything positive about this book from another person’s perspective” (Julia, 2020). 

These responses to Gurba’s work thus illustrate the silencing, delegitimizing mechanisms and dangers with which contemporary women writers of color penning personal, multi-lingual works (Anzaldúa, 1983; 1987) must still contend. Using what some of her critics seem to suggest is her “lengua pocha” and “pocha perspective,” Gurba wields her writing as a “weapon” to fight the injustices she sees reflected in, and reproduced by, American Dirt (Hurtado, 2020, p. 93); to “rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you” (Anzaldúa, 1983, p. 169). However, in doing so, Gurba and her voice and tongue were deemed illegitimate by many readers, as well as threatened by others—Gurba received death threats in response to her piece (Grady, 2020b).

Thus, I argue that juxtaposing responses to Gurba’s review, as well as to Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, with those celebrating American Dirt for being “apolitical” suggests that, while Cummins has now publicly claimed her identity as a Latina, she was read and reviewed as—and held the privileges of—a white woman writer. Cummins was not only able to tell and sell a story about highly polarizing, politicized topics without being considered political in the process, but was rewarded for doing so in a system that continues to discourage mujeres of color from telling their own stories and speaking in their many voices and tongues.And I posit that reviews celebrating American Dirt for being “apolitical” help sustain this system, as they suggest that stories about immigration and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands can, and should be, told from a “neutral,” impersonal perspective; a dangerous precedent that heightens women of color writers’ risk of being deemed “mean,” “negative,” “whiny,” or “propagandistic” in drawing from their personal experiences and writing “our stories in our own words” (Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1983, p. 23).

Olivia González is a doctoral student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and a former Ronald E. McNair scholar. Working at the intersections of critical media industry studies and education studies, Olivia’s research examines the politics of race and gender within contemporary structures of media education and production. Her current work and dissertation center on the storytelling practices and professional socialization of aspiring film and television creators of color.

Identity, Power, and Soiled Storytelling: Examining the Contemporary Politics of Authorship through American Dirt (1 of 3)

Identity, Power, and Soiled Storytelling: Examining the Contemporary Politics of Authorship through American Dirt (1 of 3)

Olivia González

Who am I to tell their stories, if I cannot tell my own?

Of uncertainty, ambiguity—what are you? Where do you call home? 

I straddle the line between neighboring worlds, un pie plantado en cada lado. 

Soy Mexicana like my papá. And like my mama, I am Anglo. 

But blurring the borders of these worlds is unacceptable. I am pushed out and in. 

Painted with the labels of others, I am “Gringa.” “Pocha.” “Exotic.” “Foreign.”

My tongue twists to speak their languages, but theirs only twist to spit:

“You’re a Hispanic, aren’t you? You don’t look white.”

“No eres una Mexicana auténtica. Eres gringa. You’re not a real Mexican. You’re a white chick.”

But in these discursive borderlands, my güera hands hold privilege and power. 

And through my access to higher education, my own voice can be made even louder. 

So I take up this platform and pass it to las mujeres: Chicana, Latina, y Mexicana.

To amplify the stories of those seeking la liberación, justicia, y esperanza.

—"¿quíen soy yo?”, Olivia González

Introduction

As I leaf through the pages of Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt, I oscillate between feeling engrossed and repelled; navigating a simultaneous sense of intimate closeness with, yet distance from, the characters. Published in January 2020, American Dirt traces the fictional journey of Lydia, a Mexican bookstore owner, and her young son, Luca, as they flee cartel-bred and led violence in their hometown of Acapulco, Mexico, and attempt to emigrate to the United States. In a multitude of jarring moments, I find myself rubbing my eyes and cheeks to remove the saline stains that have appeared there—tears that fell as Luca’s formed atop a dusty northbound train passing a town near Jalisco.

I am shocked and angered by every moment of my own sorrow. These feel like the tears of a traitor, of a woman transfixed by a spectacle of suffering about those in Mexico and the borderlands—about those like her own familia. I feel a deep part of me ache, struggling to process the haphazard similarities: of the journey that my own papá made around the same age as Luca’s character, traveling from a town in Jalisco across the border into an unfamiliar and unwelcoming land. But as I swallow the lingering sting of sorrow in the back of my throat, I recall that this isn’t my papá’s story. Nor is it my own. In fact, according to myriad critics, it isn’t anyone’s story. As critics have suggested, Luca and Lydia’s narrative is a “hollow, harmful” fiction (Bermudez, 2020a), soiled by its non-Mexican and non-migrant author’s telling and selling of a story that—not rooted in her own experiences, and inaccurately depicting the experiences of her subjects—does not belong to anyone.  

Since its publication, American Dirt has garnered considerable attention and controversy, landing squarely in the center of debates about authorship and appropriation. American Dirt initially received substantial pre-release acclaim from various critics and creatives, such as authors Stephen King and Sandra Cisneros, and actresses Salma Hayek and Yalitza Aparicio. However, criticisms of the noveland of Cummins have since surged and widely circulated, with audiences and authors alike decrying American Dirt as an exemplar of cultural appropriation, and a formidable reminder of extant inequities in the U.S. publishing industries. Some early supporters of the book have thus rescinded their praises, while others have sustained their support—joining Cummins in defending her work, and critiquing the role that “cancel culture” and identity politics have purportedly played in fueling the backlash the book has received. 

As many of those caught in, or reporting on, this controversy have acknowledged, these diverging responses to American Dirt revolve around an increasingly contested question in contemporary discourses: who gets to tell and sell what stories? As a doctoral student researching the storytelling practices of minoritized filmmakers, this question permeates my own writing and reckonings with my power and positionality. Thus, I find myself tangled in complicated ties to Cummins. While I agree with the aforementioned criticisms of American Dirt, I see some of my own anxieties about identity, power, and authorship reflected in a key question that Cummins has repeatedly raised: who am I to tell their stories?

Simultaneously, as a white Chicana born to an Anglo-American mother and a Mexican immigrant father, I have also struggled to make sense of my authority as a critic of Cummins’ work. My childhood was filled with my papá’s stories of his own childhood in Mexico where his family made do with little means, of his journey to the U.S., his experiences teaching himself English to survive an Anglo-American school system, and his forced internalization of the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” narrative. These stories are not my own; I was born in the U.S. and raised in a California suburb, I had the luxury of learning English at a very young age, and I have spent the past seven years in higher-education classrooms where my time has been spent critiquing ideologies like the “bootstraps” narrative, rather than living them for hope and survival. However, as celebrated Chicana feminist scholar Cherríe Moraga (1983) describes in reference to her Chicana mother, my papá’s stories “crept under my ‘güera’ skin” and his life “into my heart” (p. 28), shaping who I am and how I engage with other stories about immigrants and the U.S.-Mexico border. And yet, contending with the norms of the academic spaces that I inhabit—in which the autobiographical may be considered illegitimate for straying from norms of “neutrality” or objectivity—I find myself questioning what role my güera heart, skin, and voice can and should play in my analyses ofAmerican Dirt. I question: who, and how, am I to critique this story?

Through this work, I take up these questions, and embrace my angry, aching güera heart and pocha tongue to examine American Dirt and what it tells us about the contemporary politics of authorship. Specifically, I examine discourses around American Dirt—including arguments posed by Cummins and her critics and supporters, and my own reactions to the novel and the controversy surrounding it. I inquire: What do the debates about American Dirt tell us about identity, power, and literary production and reception in the United States? What do these debates reveal about the current politics of authorship in the U.S.? And what implications do the creation, reception, and critiques of American Dirt have for audiences and authors, and for students and scholars, such as myself?

 “Timely” Page-Turner or “Trauma Porn?”: Debating American Dirt

Before its official release, American Dirt garnered substantial acclaim and anticipation. With waves of positive pre-release reviews and reports of a “bidding war” ending in a million-dollar publishing deal, critics deemed American Dirt one of, if not the, “most anticipated release of 2020” (Varela, 2020, para. 2). In the months leading up to the book’s publication, handfuls of writers produced glowing advance reviews, calling American Dirt “extraordinary”(Stephen King, n.d.), “important and timely…rich in authenticity” (John Grisham, n.d.), and“relevant, powerful, extraordinary” (Kristin Hannah, n.d.). Additionally, renowned media executive Oprah Winfrey selected American Dirt to join Oprah’s Book Club—a “coveted and exclusive fraternity” known for bolstering attention and sales for the books inducted as its members (Nielsen, 2011, para. 1). Transmitting the decision via Twitter, Winfrey described American Dirt as “a heart-wrenching page-turner” (oprahsbookclub, 2020) that “changed the way I see what it means to be a migrant in a whole new way” (Winfrey, 2020).  

However, following American Dirt’s release and its selection for Oprah’s Book Club, both Cummins and Winfrey were quickly met with backlash and a widespread call to boycott the book. Twitter users, many of whom identified as Mexicans and immigrants, critiqued the novel’s inaccurate and stereotypical portrayal of its subjects—calling American Dirt, and Winfrey’s decision to promote it, “disappointing” (von Essen, 2020). Others claimed that through this book, Cummins—who had primarily publicly identified herself as white and her family as “mostly” white “in every practical way” (Cummins, 2015) prior to publishing American Dirt—was engaging in cultural appropriation and “brown-face” (Rodriguez, 2020, para. 2). And many Twitter users critiqued the book and the praise it was receiving in relation to the realities of a publishing industry dominated by white authors and critics—an industry that is “so out of touch—that so rarely supports immigrants to tell our own stories—eager to make money off of our suffering with a cheap, stereotypical thrill” (Bermudez, 2020b). 

Additionally, Mexican, Latinx, and Chicanx writers’ critiques of American Dirt—many of which had been published before the novel’s release, but were buried beneath a mountain of positive pre-release publicity—began widely circulating among this ever-expanding chorus of critiques on Twitter. For example, Chicana writer Myriam Gurba’s review of American Dirt, which was originally published in December of 2019, came to the fore of the debates. In a piece titled “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake-Ass Social Justice Literature,” Gurba (2019) describes American Dirt as a “trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf,” and critiques Cummins’ decision to write it—highlighting that while Cummins herself acknowledged that she “lacked the qualifications to write Dirt…she did it anyways. For a seven-figure sum.” And as Gurba claims, Cummins’ lack of qualifications is evident in the book, which reads like it was written by someone who is neither Mexican nor an immigrant. According to Gurba (2019), this is particularly evinced by the novel’s protagonist, Lydia, in whom readers see Mexico “through the eyes of a pearl-clutching American tourist.” 

Similarly, Mexican American author David Bowles (2020) penned a lengthy critique of American Dirt, calling ita “harmful, appropriating, inaccurate, trauma-porn melodrama.” Like Gurba, Bowles published his piece online before American Dirt’s official release, and highlighted the various ways in which Cummins’ perspective as a non-Mexican and non-migrant author lead to inaccurate and stereotypical portrayals of Mexico. Additionally, as Gurba and Bowles’ critiques circulated in the months following American Dirt’s release, they collaborated with immigration journalist and writer Robert Lovato to create a movement named #DignidadLiteraria. Announced on January 26thvia Twitter, #DignidadLiteraria called on the U.S. publishing industry to interrogate and bolster its support for Latinx stories and storytellers. The movement also penned a letter, signed by 142 writers, to Oprah Winfrey, imploring her to remove American Dirt from her book club (Pineda, 2020b). 

However, Winfrey and other early supporters, such as Sandra Cisneros, have “doubled down” on their support for American Dirt (Pineda, 2020a, para. 3), questioning or critiquing the backlash the book has received. For example, Cisneros has reaffirmed her belief that American Dirt is “the great novel of las Americas,” and called critics of the work “exagerados” (cited in Reichard, 2020). Additionally, Winfrey has denied #DignidadLiteraria’s request to remove American Dirt from her book club, claiming that doing so would suggest that “anybody is subject to being rescinded, silenced, erased” (cited in Associated Press, 2020, para. 6). 

Some conservative columnists have also defended Cummins, deeming her avictim of “cancel culture.” For example, in an article titled “American Dirt: ‘Cancel culture’ embraces book burning in the digital age,” Christian Toto (2020) claims that “identity politics” helped fuel the “fury” toward Cummins and American Dirt, and critiques the notion that “only Latino artists can tell stories from their community from a pre-set narrative.” Similarly, New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz (2020) has attributed what she described as “frothing-at-the-mouth criticism” of American Dirt to issues of “political correctness” and “cancel culture.”  Markowicz (2020) suggests that critiques related to Cummins’ identity as a white woman who “wrote about something other than her own lived experience” represents “something strange and ugly,” and asserts that efforts to “cancel” Cummins are fueled by a “trial-by-mob culture.”

Olivia González is a doctoral student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and a former Ronald E. McNair scholar. Working at the intersections of critical media industry studies and education studies, Olivia’s research examines the politics of race and gender within contemporary structures of media education and production. Her current work and dissertation center on the storytelling practices and professional socialization of aspiring film and television creators of color.



Desert Island Comics (Issue 2) Andrew Edwards

It would be easy to choose five comics written by Alan Moore to fill this list. After all, I decided to do my PhD on his work, but it feels a lot like cheating to just rattle of what I think are his five best works (From Hell, Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Miracleman and Swamp Thing, if you’re interested). So I thought it would a bit fairer, and more interesting, to choose my top five single issue comics instead (mostly), and focus on some obscure choices to throw into the mix too. 

Sandman #14

My first experience of reading Sandmanwas buying #1 and #2 when they were first published. I bought them on a school trip to London, along with Black Orchid#1-3 and the trade paperback of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. I religiously bought Sandmanas a monthly comics throughout its entire run, but it’s some of the early issues that stay in my memory the most clearly, and none more so than #14’s ‘Collectors’. I was disturbed by the concept – a serial killer convention – and various moments that have imprinted themselves on my memory ever since. It’s the contextualisation of the serial killer within the quotidian convention that disturbed me then, and still does now. It feel like an uncomfortable possibility. I re-read it a few days ago, for the first time lord-knows-how-many years, and it’s power remains undimmed. I’d place it in Gaiman’s top 10 works easily.

Ghosts #107

Sticking with horror, this issue is one from childhood that I randomly bought from a newsagents in, I think, Bala in North Wales, sometime in the early 80s. Trips to places were my opportunity to call in to random newsagents who often had piles of older American comics cluttering up their shelves, although I distinctly remember this comic being on a spinner rack, probably the first one I ever saw.

I was a reader of British humour comics The Dandy and The Beano, alongside the occasional American comic that I could find on trips (DC dominated my finds). Ghosts#107 was the first non-humour, non-superhero comic I’d ever read and, boy, did it make its mark on me. It was a three part tale of a medieval crown that made its way through history causing tragedy for those who wore it. The stories were scripted by Robert Kanigher, with art by Howard Bender, Rodin Rodriguez and Adrian Gonzales. For a kid used to the slapstick comedy of humour comics, and superhero battles, this comic introduced me to the way that the sweep of history, and historical artefacts, can profoundly influence and change lives. It’s worth checking out the back issue bins for.

Watchmen #4

OK, so an Alan Moore-scripted comic has made it on to my list despite my self-imposed restrictions, but I’ve limited myself to a single issue. And what an issue it was! I first read Watchmenin single issue form, in one sitting, in the late eighties, and #4 really brought home to me just how different this series was going to be. I would have been around 13 or 14 when I read it, and it was the first time that I became consciously aware of how narrative and structure can be used for effect. I showed me that narratives didn’t have to start at point A and move chronologically through B, C, D etc. You could skip, repeat, move backwards and forwards, and experience the use of time in comics in new and exciting ways. All these years later, it is still my favourite issue of the series.

Marvel Superheroes Secret Wars #2 (UK Edition)

Ok, ok – I can almost hear some of you sniggering at the back… For its time, and for an 11 year old boy like I was, this was incredible. My only previous exposure to superhero comics was the odd DC I randomly found on trips from home. I’m not referring to the US version either, but the Marvel UK version. Here I discovered the X-Men, Avengers, Dr Doom, Magneto and more. I loved the bizarre portraits of Marvel heroes created by the Secret Artist, and enjoyed the reprints of John Byrne’s Alpha Flighttoo; both first appeared in #2, which is why I’ve chosen this particular issue. This was the gateway to American super heroes, and American comics, and for that I’ll always be grateful.

Brief Interlude

It’s clear that nostalgia is currently dominating my thinking. Perhaps it’s because I’m getting older, and perhaps its heightened by the new changes we are all experiencing in real life. I do also love modern comics, but it’s the comfort that memories of childhood and comics that have influenced my choices. Even then, another day may have seen me choose something by Harvey Pekar, or Art Spiegelman’s Maus, or even the Giffen - Dematteis Justice League. It was hard to narrow this list down to five, let me tell you. However, in breaking all previous conventions in this list, here’s my final choice.

Black Hammer

I’ve only recently read (binged) all of these comics by Jeff Lemire and artist Dean Ormston, and while I haven’t processed my thoughts on them in any intellectual or critical way, I can say that I loved them on the level of my gut reaction. I found them captivating because it tickles the parts of me that love superhero comic history, alternative worlds in science fiction, Twin Peaks level weirdness, and older and disillusioned heroes struggling to make meaning for their lives and their world. It’s a stone cold contemporary classic that you are compelled to keep reading to find out what happens next.

Dr Andrew Edwards is a writer and scholar. His research interests include comics and graphic novels, science fiction, horror, intertextuality, and representations of gender. He is currently working on a number of writing projects. He is also an Academic Skills Tutor at Wrexham Glyndwr University. He can be followed on Twitter: @AndrewEdwards88  

Desert Island Comics (Issue 1) Joan Ormrod

Image designed by Rutherford.

Like many comics readers, I love hearing recommendations from other scholars and fans. It’s never healthy for the bank balance, but as Henry once said to me, “it’s expensive if you do it right.” (He was referring to superhero comics, but the sentiment is true for the medium in general, I’d say). Over the past two weeks, I’ve been involved in the virtual book-club on Henry’s new monograph, Comics and Stuff, and let me tell you: it’s a dangerous place to be! With so many references and recommendations flying around, I found myself heading frantically to online shops afterwards. (I know, I know, a first-world ‘problem’ to be sure.) One thing is abundantly clear: we’re gonna need a bigger house!

To RSVP for the final panel on Tuesday June 30th at 10 a.m (Pacific ST)/ 18:00 (British ST), head here to register for the Zoom link. We would be honored if you would join us.

When Julia Round and I ran a series on British Comics late in 2019 on this website, I began asking contributors to discuss some of their favorite comics, comic strips, and/ or graphic novels. In today’s first installment, we have Dr Joan Ormod sharing some of her favorites (and it’s great to see Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland in there, which is one of Henry’s case studies in Comics and Stuff).

—William Proctor, Associate Editor.

Joan Ormod

It’s tough deciding on the top five comics and so I tried to have a reasonable spread of comics that have inspired or awed me. The choices are in no particular order but can be viewed in linear time. So, some of the first comics I read to the latest. One thing I noticed is the necessity of the words and images working together and the first of these choices illustrates this really well.

1.     ‘Sandra of the Secret Ballet’ – art by Paddy Brennan, story unknown

Sandra Wilson appeared in Judy from issue #1 (16/01/1060) and for most of the 1960s to the 1980s, the latter in reprints of the earlier stories when Judy merged with Emma. She was a great role model for girls in that era as she was brilliant dancer, created ballets and had adventures (not for her a husband two children and domestic bliss).  

Her first adventure was to be kidnapped by Nina Sierra, a famous ballerina, who spirited orphans away from their abusive homes and trained them to become ballet dancers.  Ok so in the post Jimmy Savile era there would be all sorts of social services and police investigations going on but this was the innocent 1950s.  The stories and the images worked organically – Paddy Brennan was, in my opinion, the best artist at representing ballet. Ron Smith who drew the much more famous Moira Kent, just couldn’t get the feet and the positions right.  It is such a shame that the writer was unknown, but they obviously knew what would appeal to young girls – a secret castle on a secluded island, loads of orphan girls who were fabulous dancers and a heroine who toured the world, saved her ballet teacher from ritual sacrifice in Spain and foiled numerous evil plots.  

There was also a cast of visitors to the castle from Boris Rambine (modelled on Boris Karloff) who hypnotised the girls, a princess in hiding and a Billy Butlin clone who wanted to turn the castle into a holiday park.  Somehow the series lost its magic when Sandra graduated and became a star.

I have included a few pages of Sandra stories. From #30 (06/08/1960), pages 2 and 3 – this is the story that introduces Alicia, queen of an Eastern European country, who happens to be a brilliant dance in hiding in the castle.  

Brennan is a master of the black and white on the comics page and his drawings of the secret passages make you believe this is a real place.

The second story is the culmination of Sandra’s journey to Spain to save her dancing teacher, Nina Sierra from being forced to dance to death in the Ritual of the Flaming Sun.  Gypsies in this story come from a long line of gypsies in British children’s literature.  They were an exotic and ancient people with strange and sometimes cruel customs. Sandra, of course, saves Nina Sierra by taking her place and dancing through the night.  Spain at this time was also an exotic destination as package holidays were only just becoming possible for mass tourists.  Brennan’s use of tonal line work gives this story its atmosphere.  Somehow, when his work was colored, for reprints in the 1980s, it lost some of its magic.

What I said earlier about the organic nature of stories and art can be seen in some of the Sandra stories with artwork by a different artist.  They just weren’t the same.

2.     Lois Lane – art Kurt Schaffenberger, stories diverse

I included Lois Lane because of the art by Kurt Schaffenberger which fit the sappy stories so well.  His style was clean and uncluttered and he seemed to take some of the idiotic stories seriously.  Schaffenberger was one of the writers and artists who transferred to DC after Fawcett was closed when they lost a court battle against DC for copyright to Captain Marvel (now called Shazam).  Some of the Lois Lane stories were written by Otto Binder, also from Fawcett and that innocent vibe from Captain Marvel comes through in a lot of these stories.

Superman and Lois Lane’s relationship was quite toxic. She was always being tested by Superman and punished for the most slight of reasons.  It was similar to the sex comedies of Rock Hudson and Doris Day (without the sex, of course) in a battle of the sexes.  Lois loved Superman but not Clark, Clark loved Lois but wouldn’t reveal he was Superman until she showed him she preferred him. The colour was startling on the news rack and much more glamourous than the UK comics which were often in black and white inside.

The editor of this series, Mort Weisinger, always had the most alluring premises.  This cover from Lois Lane #44, October 1963 shows Lois and Lana Lang, her rival, tricking Superman into taking a lie detector.  When I saw this cover in a newsagent window, I had to have the comic to find out whom he preferred.  In 1964 comics were sold by the yard and you took pot luck which ones were available in any shop.  Unfortunately, by the time I saved enough money to buy it, it had been sold and I never saw it again, until a few years ago when I managed to get a copy. You got your money’s worth too.  There were three stories in each issue.  Here’s the first page with Schaffenberger’s signature telephone panel.  He was also allowed to sign his name – a practice that few artists were allowed to do until Marvel opened up the way for artists and writers to get credits.

3.     Wonder Woman – art and stories George Pérez

I spent several years writing a book on Wonder Woman, a character who fascinated me as she was different from every other female character I’d encountered.  I had a sneaky liking for the early 1960s stories on Paradise Island when she was written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Mike Esposito and Ross Andru.  But she never really came to life until the title was taken over by George Pérez in the 1987 post Crisis reboot under Karen Berger’s brilliant Vertigo line.  For the first time the Wonder Woman I imagined became real. She was a naïve, kind and empathic person who was often bewildered by the cruelty and suffering she encountered in man’s world. 

The stories by Pérez were sensitive and beautifully drawn but the characters came to life when he worked with Mindy Newall. The best of these was ‘Chalk Drawings’ (#46 September 1990) in which there is little superheroic action.  In it, Vanessa, Wonder Woman’s young friend, attends the funeral of her best friend, Lucy Spears, a girl who has it all but who commits suicide.  The story explores some of the toxic themes surrounding fame, fandom, beauty and consumerism.  Lucy’s parent don’t understand why she committed suicide but the subtext tells it all, when someone has it all and its just never enough.  Jill Thompson’s sensitive artwork was just right for this story.

4.     Here – Richard McGuire

Richard McGuire’s ‘Here’ first appeared in Art Spiegelman’s Raw v.2, n.1, 1989.   At first glance ‘Here’ (1989) appears an unremarkable (and rather confusing) account of the history of a space, rendered in a clean line style, each page consisting of 6 panels.  However, the aim of Raw was to produce commix that pushed the boundaries of the medium and challenged the reader.  ‘Here’ is certainly a challenging read for there is no clear cause and effect to direct the narrative and no protagonist to incite action.  Rather, McGuire uses 36 panels to show the formation of the world, to reflect on evolution, vast time spans encompass the rise and decline of human cultures down to the lifespan of a human being.  This comic is as much about time as ‘here’. It is impossible to describe a specific story from the comic but I love it because it show the potential for the form to express more than simple stories.

McGuire claimed he conceived the idea when he saw all the screens open on an Apple computer – a few pages show how this is reflected in the construction of the panels.  He spent several years developing his original six pages into a book. The book does expand the ideas but, in my opinion, its nowhere as powerful as the comic.  You can get the full six pages here 

There is also a film produced by art students attempting to adapt the comic into a film:

An article by Chris Ware on the book Here; and a film of the book. 

5.     Alice in Sunderland, Bryan Talbot

Every Desert Island castaway needs a book that will keep them engrossed for many years (and doesn’t it feel like we’re in that situation at the moment when we are in lockdown?  The one that I would still keep coming back to is Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot.  Like ‘Here’, Alice in Sunderland is more than just an exploration of Alice in Wonderland.  It is about telling stories and is described by Talbot as ‘an entertainment’. He starts off in the Sunderland Empire introducing the reader to his stories.  They span the history of the North East (which naturally draws me in since that’s where I come from), folk tales and legends such as the Lampton Worm (a precursor of Jabberwocky), the history of comics all wrapped into the story of the genesis of Alice. His art styles are gloriously diverse and experimental. His tales something like the Borges ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ with infinite possibilities and often ventures into cul-de-sacs and alternate storylines.  

I enjoyed this so much that after reading it I tried to find some of the places in Sunderland.  I have one disagreement with Bryan and that is in his affirmation that Bede lived in Sunderland.  He lived for most of his life in Jarrow St. Paul’s monastery.  Nevertheless, this book would keep me occupied for many years just in awe of its rich imagery and stories. 

This page shows the complexity of the images as it collages photos, drawings and paintings on the page and shows the plasticity of the comics form.

This page is a mixture of different Bryans as audience member, as actor, as artist.  It captures the fantastic nature of Alice in Wonderland’s dream world.

Returning to my original statement, it was only when I began to compile these comics that I realised how much I enjoy a comic where the art and story work well together.  They are also inspirational.  The list is unadventurous – Alice in Sunderland would likely feature in several top ten lists of any comics reader.  But I make no apologies.  The first two are comics I grew up with and inspired me to think beyond what was expected of me as a girl.  Wonder Woman was meant to inspire women to become empowered.  The last two are inspirational because they prompt me to think and wonder.

Dr Joan Ormrod is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media at Manchester Metropolitan University.  She specializes in teaching subcultures, comics, fantasy and girlhood.  She has published widely on these topics and she has edited books on time travel, superheroes and adventure sports. Her latest monograph, Wonder Woman, the Female Body and Popular Culture was published in February 2020 and is available now.  Joan is the editor of Routledge’s Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and she is on the organizing committee of the annual conference of Graphic Novels and Comics.  She is currently researching girlhood and teenage comics in the UK 1955-1975.

Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (3 of 3)

Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (3 of 3)

Edward B. Kang

User Interfaces: Interactive Library vs. Isolated Metrics 

In this brief section before the conclusion, I navigate the user interfaces of Thematic afforded to both Music Artists and Content Creators to simply exhibit how this inequality between the two groups is embedded into the platform itself. Returning to Terranova’s idea of the translucent commodity, the labor that shines through the platform is truly spectacular for the Content Creator. The main page shows “Recent Pickups” to display songs that were recently used in influencer videos, “Selected for [Content Creator]” and “Top Projects for [Content Creator]” to direct the Content Creator to other songs and playlists based on their previous downloads, “Staff Picks” to let the Content Creator know what the Thematic team is currently backing, and “New Music”, which speaks for itself. Upon clicking the “Browse Music” tab, there is a seemingly endless list of songs, each with their own beautiful album cover provided by Music Artists, which can then be filtered according to genre, community, vocal, tempo, and mood. The “Projects” tab allows the Content Creator to create personal playlists, and the “Downloads” tab lists recent downloads. For the Content Creator, Thematic serves as an easy-to-use, beautiful, and interactive library and personal storage of free songs. 

Music catalogue for Content Creators (hellothematic.com)

Filters for searching music (hellothematic.com)

The interface for the Music Artist is in comparison quite dry. Once logged in as Music Artist, the user no longer has access to any parts of the vast library of music, which even the general unregistered visitor can browse, and only has access to two pages: the submission portal through which the Music Artist submits music to be reviewed by Thematic’s A&R team, and the statistics page, which shows the specific metrics of the number of times their songs were used and the number of views of the videos their songs are featured on. In contrast to the democratic rhetoric of community that Thematic employs in its promotion, Music Artists have no real access to the broader community that their music and Content Creators operate in. They are closed off behind walls of numbers that don’t necessarily directly translate into other forms of valuable quantification like revenue or social media following. The labor that shines through here is anything but spectacular, with most of the services offered being relegated to algorithms. This is not to say that the maintenance and development of algorithms is not labor-intensive, but it pales in comparison to the coupling of both the human-intensive labor of curation, quality control, and organization with algorithmically derived personal picks for Content Creators. With these additional absences of avenues for engagement with the broader community shown through the design of the actual user interface, the uneven terms of participation between the Music Artist and Content Creator as well as the contradictions between promotion and actual user experience become ever more apparent. 

Tracking page for Music Producers

Conclusion

“From the very beginning, I’ve always wanted to empower and give back to creators,” Michelle Phan told us. “Since uploading my first video 12 years ago, I’ve experienced lawsuits and seen first-hand what happens when big music labels come in and make copyright infringement claims.” 

“I understand intimately the challenges facing creators today. Through Thematic, I hope to protect creators and artists and provide a platform where they can connect, safely and free.” (Resnikoff, 2019) 

While I don’t intend this paper to be a direct challenge against Michelle Phan’s motives, I do think that in her efforts to empower Content Creators, such as herself, she overlooks some of the pressing ramifications that those efforts can entail for Music Artists. As I showed through my examination of the forward-facing promotional materials, to the underlying contractual agreements, and finally to the separate user interfaces themselves, the terms of participation on Thematic are not always communal and democratic nor are they mutually beneficial for both Music Artists and Content Creators. Although the broader social conditions in which the cultural industries operate that Terranova, Hesmondhalgh, and McRobbie, among others, have outlined, may have normalized such precarious work to a certain extent, as an influential figurehead of a rapidly growing platform like Thematic that stands to advocate for the democratic production of culture on digital platforms, Michelle Phan has the power to at least begin to veer us in a direction that resists or circumvents those oppressive social conditions. 

Finally, even though I take in this present paper a critical stance towards Thematic, I acknowledge that at the time of writing, the platform is still in public beta testing, and there is thus ample opportunity for improvements to be made. Especially as the platform garners more serious investors, for which the recruitment process has just ended, and the platform inevitably moves from a free one to a paid, most likely subscription-based one, it will be imperative for the Thematic team led by Michelle Phan, CEO Marc Schrobilgen and COO Aubrey Marshall, to be adamant in their support for the increased protection of Music Artists on the platform. This may take the form of technical interventions I suggested earlier to more safely deliver the music content uploaded, a broader application of the approval feature that allows Music Artists to also have a say in which videos their music can be featured, easier access for Music Artists to engage with the broader community, and an overall re-evaluation of the separate Artist and Creator Agreements that more thoroughly hold Thematic responsible in protecting and crediting Music Artists. It may also take the form of introducing new services altogether such as the feature for Content Creators to also provide their video-making services to Music Artists who want content released under their name – i.e. lyric videos or music videos. There are indeed many practical ways for the Thematic team to truly better democratize the platform. To this end, I want to conclude on a more hopeful note and write that, moving forward, I trust Phan and her team will take these many possibilities into consideration, and truly use Thematic to build, in their own words, “a community for the community” (Thematic). 

References

Andrejevic, M. (2009). Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of user-generated labor. In P. Snickars, & P. Vonderau (Eds.), The YouTube Reader (406-423). Stockholm: National Library of Sweden. 

Andrejevic, M., Banks, J., Campbell, J. E., Couldry, N., Fish, A., Hearn, A., & Ouellette, L. (2014). Participations: Dialogues on the participatory promise of contemporary culture and politics: Labor. International Journal of Communication, 8, 1089–1106. Retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/2724/1118

Banet-Weiser, S. (2012). AuthenticTM: The politics of ambivalence in a brand culture. New York, NYU: New York University Press. 

Baym, N. K. (2018). Playing to the crowd: Musicians, audiences, and the intimate work of connection. New York: New York University Press. 

Bruns, A. (2006). Towards produsage: Futures for user-led content production. In Sudweeks, Fay and Hrachovec, Herbert and Ess, Charles, Eds. Proceedings Cultural Attitudes towards Communication and Technology 2006, pages pp. 275-284, Tartu, Estonia.

Demers, J. T. (2006). Steal this music: How intellectual property law affects musical creativity. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977. New York, NY: Vintage Books.  

Hesmondhalgh, D. (2010). User-generated content, free labour and the cultural industries. ephemera, 10(3/4), 267-284.

Hesmondhalgh, D., & Baker, S. (2011). Creative labour: Media work in three cultural industries. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press. 

Jenkins, H. (2012). Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. (Original work published in 1992) 

Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J. (2015). Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. New York, NY: New York University Press.

Jenkins, H., & Ito, M. (2015). Participatory culture in a networked era: A conversation on youth, learning, commerce, and politics. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Kücklich, J. (2005). Precarious playbour: Modders and the digital games industry. Fibreculture,

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Lessig, L. (2004). Free culture: How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity. New York, NY: Penguin Press.

Marx, K. (1976). Capital: A critique of political economy, Volume I. (B. Fowkes, Trans.). New York, NY:Penguin Press. (Original work published in 1867) 

McLeod, K. (2001). Owning culture: Authorship, ownership, and intellectual property law. New York, NY: Peter Lang Inc.

McLeod, K. (2005). Freedom of expression®: Resistance and repression in the age of intellectual property. New York, NY: Doubleday.

McLeod, K. (2011). Creative license: The law and culture of digital sampling. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

McRobbie, A. (2016). Be creative: Making a living in the new culture industries. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. 

Resnikoff, P. (2019, June 7). Thematic Surpasses 1 Billion Song Plays for Repped Artists.

Retrieved from https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2019/06/06/thematic-billion-plays/. 

Sennett, R. (2008). The craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Sinnreich, A. (2010). Mashed up: Music, technology, and the rise of configurable culture. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Sinnreich, A. (2013). The piracy crusade: How the music industry’s war on sharing destroys markets and erodes civil liberties. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. 

Sinnreich, A. (2019). The essential guide to intellectual property. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 

Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons.

Terranova, T. (2012). Free Labour. In T. Scholz (Ed.), Digital labor: The internet as playground and factory (pp. 67-114). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. (Original work published in 2000)

Thematic. (n.d.). Retrieved from: http://hellothematic.com/. 

Thompson, E. P. (1971). The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century. Past & Present, (50), 76-136.

Weiss, G. (2018, July 2). Michelle Phan's Latest Startup Helps Creators Find Free Music For

Their YouTube Videos. Retrieved from:  https://www.tubefilter.com/2018/06/28/michelle-phan-thematic-music-youtube-videos/. 

Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (2 of 3)

Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (2 of 3)

Edward B. Kang

*Contracts: Intellectual Property, Precarity, and Expropriation 

Thus far, my questions primarily concerned the forward-facing aspects of Thematic. What does it claim to do? How is it promoted? Who is it promoted to? In this section, I take as my focus, the underlying agreements and contractual terms that govern the actual rules of operation on the platform. What does using Thematic actually entail? For the Music Artist? For the Content Creator? To what extent is Thematic legally bound to the promises they make on their site? Who gets paid? What are users giving up in exchange for access to the platform? Are there consequences of using Thematic that extend beyond the platform? Does Thematic take responsibility for misuse? I will inevitably touch on all of these necessary and important questions by the end of this paper, but I begin, here, with this generic but powerful line taken from their general Terms of Use agreement: 

All intellectual properties featured on and incorporated into the Website are owned and controlled exclusively by Thematic and/or its licensors, which includes materials protected by copyright, trademark, patent laws and state and federal intellectual property laws. (Thematic, “Terms of Use”, 2019) 

The ramifications of such a statement are far-reaching. Thematic’s primary currency is intellectual property – the music uploaded by Music Artists – so understandably, there’s a lot of it on the site. Apart from the small number of songs actually uploaded by the Thematic team (Michelle Phan produces some of her own lo-fi hip-hop beats), the majority of the tracks that populate Thematic’s vast collection are created and uploaded by independent music producers who sign up for Thematic as Music Artists. This means that by agreeing to use Thematic, those Music Artists are sharing the exclusive rights to their works with both Thematic and Content Creators. This sharing of intellectual property rights, however, is not reciprocal, as Music Artists have no rights to the videos of Content Creators that their music is featured on since the videos exist on channels external to Thematic. If we take a look at the separate user agreements, the uneven terms of participation become more apparent. 

Under the Grant of Rights of the Artist Agreement, it reads: 

… you hereby grant Thematic, and its licensee Creators respectively, a non-exclusive worldwide right and license, on a royalty free basis, to make copies of the Works, and use, license, copy, transmit, broadcast, stream, and publicly perform such Works… Notwithstanding any term of this Agreement, each Creator shall have the right to stream, download and utilize such Works and use all Credit information in Creator Videos and meta data, on a royalty free basis in each case… (Thematic, “Artist Agreement”, 2019). 

The key here is “royalty free” – this directly bars Music Artists from effectively monetizing on Thematic the works they upload to the platform. Read in conjunction with the “free promotion” offered by Thematic in its marketing materials, it’s easy to see that Music Artists are essentially paying for that free promotion by relinquishing the rights to all avenues of possible royalty-related compensation on Thematic. There is, however, an ambiguous component under the Grant of Rights that claims Thematic will collect the Gross Revenue, defined as “all revenue remitted by YouTube and/or Instagram and received by Thematic exclusively in connection with the exploitation of the Works (e.g. their recording and publishing components) on YouTube and/or Instagram” (Thematic, “Artist Agreement”), and transfer it to the Music Artist’s account. I say this is ambiguous because not only is there no option to link any kind of bank account, ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers), or BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.) membership details when signed in as Music Artist, but there are also no mentions of “splits” agreements (industry jargon for how royalties/revenue will be split) between Music Artist and Content Creator. Splits agreements are important here because it has already been established that all of the music on Thematic is royalty-free, which means that the revenue defined by Gross Revenue is primarily dependent on the revenue generated by the video itself, and not by the copyrighted music. This too, however, is unclear because if we recall from earlier, one of the first things marketed towards Content Creators on Thematic’s landing home page is “no rev-shares”. How, then, is revenue split between Music Artist and Content Creator? What is the source of Gross Revenue for Music Artists if not from video and also not from royalties? Thematic suggests the Content ID feature for YouTube, which allows “copyright owners who meet specific criteria” (YouTube Help), to claim and monetize off their intellectual property on that specific platform, but what about for Instagram, the other platform that Thematic allows Music Artists’ music to be featured on? The platform thus does not actually provide a regulated monetization model of its own and outsources this key function to either the stringent qualifications for Content ID on YouTube or Facebook’s Rights Manager for Instagram, for which it also provides no reference or guide. Exactly how this lean platform logic (Srnicek, 2017) operates is left for the users to figure out on their own. In light of this ambiguity, there have yet to be any discernible reports of Music Artists successfully using Thematic as a means of effective revenue despite its industry-wide use as a music market for Content Creators. 

In fact, even Thematic doesn’t see direct monetization as its primary offering – in response to the question “What value do I get from submitting music to Thematic?” in the Artist Help Center, they write: 

Our primary conversion metric for artists is in the value of the promotion and audience reach… That new audience can then be monetized via music streams & downloads, merchandise sales, and live events. 

… Thematic is meant to get artists' music in front of influential creators (who are often paid for their promotion) who will in turn share the music to their engaged audiences. You can even think of the music as "product placement" within these tastemaker videos - but the artist (aka the brand) is securing that placement for free. (Thematic, “Artist Help Center”) 

Although the primary selling point to Music Artists is consistently framed under promotion, based on the Artist Agreement, Thematic actually does not guarantee and sufficiently enforce credits and acknowledgments to Music Artists by Content Creators: 

…no inadvertent failure by Thematic or any Creator to provide such Credit, and after our receipt of formal notice shall constitute a breach hereof, Artist’s only remedy shall be to notify Thematic in writing, and upon which notice Thematic shall use good faith reasonable efforts to cure such failure. (Thematic, “Artist Agreement”, 2019)

Even promotion, which is inherently dependent on proper credit, is apparently not guaranteed. Read next to the barring of royalty-based revenue, the ambiguity of platform-generated revenue, and the lack of guarantee for proper artist credit, the Music Artist unambiguously takes on a precarious position by choosing to participate in the Thematic community. 

McRobbie (2016) thoroughly recounts these developments in the cultural industries, unpacking how the creativity dispositif (Foucault, 1980) or passion ‘ethos’ (p. 74) promoted by the creative economy draws upon neoliberal ideologies to direct individuals to tolerate such precarious positions enticed by the celebratory rhetoric of the ‘dream job’ or ‘pleasurable work’: 

I argue that the call to be creative is a potent and highly appealing mode of new governmentality directed to the young in the educational environment, whose main effect is to do away with the idea of welfare rights in work by means of eclipsing normal employment altogether… this mode of neoliberal governmentality is also a general and widespread process of precarization.(p. 14)

Reframing the creative economy as a mode of labor reform, she points to the current movement as one in which the discursive prioritization of creativity specifically strips the creative class of previously hard-won social welfare and job security benefits. She thus directs us to the brainchild of late capitalist neoliberalism, ‘self-invented work’, emphasizing that “in this rhetorical world it is business and entrepreneurship that now count… [There] is an anticipation of reward and a series of invitations to take part, all of which go some way towards making risky jobs with uncertain outcomes nevertheless appealing and exciting” (p. 61). In foregrounding this entrepreneurial venture capitalist mindset – voluntarily embracing precarity and risk in the present with hopes of greater returns in the future – as an integral component of the workings of the current cultural industries, McRobbie provides a generative starting point from which we can unpack the Music Artists’ precarious position within the Thematic community.

The Music Artist is essentially operating within this same investment logic of high-risk-high-returns. There are no guaranteed rewards in exchange for uploading and providing the rights to their songs on Thematic. It is rather the “anticipation of reward” (p. 61) that Thematic offers and the Music Artist accepts. Perhaps as McRobbie somewhat satirically writes, “the seemingly exciting compensation for work without protection is the personal reward of ‘being creative’” (p. 35). And while this personal reward as Hesmondhalgh reminds us, should not always be discounted, he also points out “that it is in the realms of intellectual property that a more convincing critique of contemporary capitalism might be mounted, rather than unpaid labour” (2010, p. 279). Following this, if we move beyond Terranova’s critique of free labor and acknowledge that Music Artists are, in classic Marxist terms, alienated from the products of their labor (Marx, 1976) – intellectual property – it becomes easier to see how Thematic may indeed be pushing expropriative terms on to Music Artists who do choose to opt in. In fact, looking at Thematic’s response to two similar questions on the Artist Help Center that read, “Can I choose which creators use my music?” and “Can I choose which videos my songs appear in”, it becomes apparent that Music Artists actually have no control over the specific uses of their songs either: 

We currently do not provide a content filtering option for our artists unless you are interested in exploring a paid placement. Any creator in Thematic is allowed to use the music in Thematic in their videos. (Thematic, “Artist Help Center”)

Without additional payment, for which they evaluate all tailored promotions on a “case-by-case basis”, Thematic thus does not even guarantee any form of basic quality control for Music Artists – their music can be used by “any creator” registered with Thematic. Even here, the uneven terms of participation surface, as all music submitted to Thematic is reviewed by the A&R team – i.e. quality control – before it is uploaded to their royalty-free collection available to Content Creators. Content dictates music. There are a few Music Artists who are granted the “Approval” feature, which means their songs can only be used in videos upon their approval, but Thematic unabashedly states that this feature is reserved for “Top 40” artists who are commercially signed to major record labels, effectively excluding the vast majority of all Music Artists on the platform. In this way, the Music Artist, like McRobbie’s artist subject does indeed become a “symbol of labour reform, someone willing to ‘live on thin air’” (p. 86). 

Finally, before I move on to the next section, I also want to briefly mention the lack of protection for the Music Artist in the Artist Agreement against uses of the song beyond intended contexts outlined in the agreement. Although the Artist Agreement does explicitly state that Thematic only sanctions use of any uploaded songs by Content Creators in their content on either YouTube or Instagram, the technical method of delivery of the songs – providing direct downloads to the master tracks as either MP3 or WAVE files – is one that exposes the songs to numerous methods of potential repurposing, none of which can be directly monitored or regulated by Thematic. Considering how easy it is to sign up and download these tracks, the tracks are effectively available as high-quality free audio on the Internet. What can Thematic do other than say “you can ONLY use our music in your YouTube and Instagram videos” (Thematic, “Creator Help Center”)? Is it on the burden of Music Artists to constantly monitor the Internet to see if their music starts to appear, most likely without credit, on other platforms like Vimeo? How does Thematic prevent the use of these audio files in other music projects? It is common industry knowledge that in the hands of a skilled technician, these high-quality music uploads provide valuable source materials to cut close-to-untraceable samples for “original” music. The only measure Thematic takes in trying to prevent such uses is to say it is prohibited in their agreements, without implementing any technical infrastructures to actually forbid them. In this way, Thematic fails to reasonably offer even the little protection that current intellectual property law, which on the most part actually does not benefit independent musicians (Demers, 2006; Sinnreich, 2013), does provide to music producers not backed by major record labels: the right to control the uses of their original songs. 

By examining the contractual terms to which all users of the platform must subscribe, I sought to bring to our attention the inevitably precarious position that the Music Artist is expected to tolerate in the Thematic community. While it is true that the Music Artist voluntarily opts in under these terms, the argument can also be made that the broader social conditions that glorify high-risk work in the cultural industries outlined by McRobbie, among others, play a significant role in pressuring the Music Artist to have little choice but to accept these terms in fear of obsolescence. Even if we try to take a more open-minded approach as urged by Hesmondhalgh, in the absence of guaranteed revenue, recognition and thus opportunity, or protection from misuse or theft provided by Thematic, I find it difficult to push for alternative forms of overall well-being that participation in Thematic provides for Music Artists. To this end, an inspection of these expropriative contractual terms further exposes the lopsided conditions of participation between Music Artists and Content Creators discussed throughout this paper. 

Bio

Edward B. Kang is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Assistant Editor for the International Journal of Communication. His research engages the cultural and infrastructural dimensions of digital media and digital surveillance technologies with a specific focus on the relationship between sound/music, identity, platform logics, and platform anatomies. He is thus interested in navigating the socialities that emerge at these knotty intersections of technology and culture. Apart from his own research, he has served as a committee member for Annenberg’s annual Communication and Cultural Studies graduate student conference Critical Mediations, as well as led Music Production workshops for Annenberg’s Critical Media Project with California Humanities. 

Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (1 of 3)

The following paper was written for my Fall Seminar on Fandom, Participatory Culture, and Web 2.0. I have decided to share this particular paper here because of this blog’s ongoing interest in issues of fan labor and creator rights, because it is timely given the ongoing roll out of this particular platform, and because it does such a fine job combining legal and technical tools to understand what is at stake for participants at various levels.

—Henry Jenkins

Thematic, a Music Marketplace for Influencers and Producers: Digital Labor and the Creative Class (1 of 3)

Edward B. Kang

Introduction

Hi Edward Kang, 

My name is Stephanie and I'm on the team here at Thematic. I wanted to reach out and personally welcome you and tell you that we're so excited to have you be a part of our community! We can't wait to see the videos you create.

If you have any questions or feedback, please don't hesitate to email me.

Best,
Stephanie

This was the welcome email I received from Stephanie Leyva, the community manager of Thematic, when I registered for the platform as “Content Creator”. I then signed up for the platform with a different email as “Music Artist”. I received nothing. 

Founded by YouTuber Michelle Phan along with Chief Executive Officer Marc Schrobilgen and Chief Operating Officer Aubrey Marshall, Thematic launched in 2018 as a “free peer-to-peer music marketplace that seeks to help content creators find music for their videos while concurrently promoting aspiring musicians” (Weiss, 2018, para. 3). It reads on their home page: 

Thematic is all about connecting creators and music artists. You need great songs to soundtrack your videos. Music artists need promotion. Thematic makes it happen. Simple. With songs curated by content type and theme, you’ll spend less time searching for that perfect song and more time creating. Safe. All of our songs are pre-cleared so you are able to fully monetize your videos without worrying about licenses, claims, or disputes. Collaborative. During our public beta, you’ll have access to Thematic for free – no membership fees, no licensing fees, no rev-shares. (Thematic) 

The site quite markedly mobilizes the democratic rhetoric of participatory culture (Jenkins, 2006) to frame the platform as a “safe”, “simple” and “collaborative” space that serves both the interests of Content Creators and Music Artists alike. Content Creators have access to pre-cleared high-quality music for free, and Music Artists get exposure and promotion – it’s meant to be a win-win situation. The “you” in their promotional text (quoted above), however, which directly speaks to the content creator, perhaps hints otherwise. In fact, all of the resourceful things that “you” get, come at the expense of their– “Music Artists’” – labor. “Pre-cleared” songs with “no licensing fees” and “no rev-shares” (revenue shares) can only be achieved if Music Artists surrender significant portions of their rights and ownership of the music they create. Departing from Jenkins’ understanding of participatory culture, then, which explicitly emphasizes the generative potentials of collaboration made possible by the diverse skills and voices accessible through digital user networks, Thematic strategically seems to only mobilize the democratic rhetoricthat accompanies participatory culture without actually allowing for a bi-directionally generative and participatory community to manifest on its platform. It thus ultimately advocates for a digital marketplace in which the generative potentials of collaboration are vastly unequal for the participating members. 

There have been numerous studies since the advent of Web 2.0 that have interrogated these very questions and concerns of uneven participation and digital labor that lie at the intersections of digital technology and the creative industries (e.g. Andrejevic, 2009; Andrejevic et al., 2014; Banet-Weiser, 2012; Baym, 2018; Bruns, 2006; Hesmondalgh, 2010, 2011; Jenkins, 2006; McRobbie, 2016; Sinnreich, 2010, 2013, 2019; Terranova, 2012 etc.). Many of these works have rigorously tried to trace the exploitation-cooperation continuum of arguments that occupy these discussions, while also positioning themselves within it to better nuance and contribute to the complex conversations that are required to parse the entangled web of relationships found at this intersection. 

Jenkins’ (2006) canonical text, Convergence Culture, for instance, elaborates on the notion of participatory culture, further expanded in Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (2013), to describe the productive negotiations and increasingly collaborative and interactive relationships forged between media consumers and producers. It thus critically acknowledges the unequal power dynamics that inevitably emerge in these producer-consumer relations, but ultimately seeks to look beyond a solely economic model of profit, foregrounding the generative potentials of a community of participants, allowing us to focus on the diverse skills, motivations, and incentives of the various players that comprise the network of participants. Nancy Baym (2018) also contributes to this discussion as she explores the newfound intimacy between music artists and their fans afforded by the rise of digital communication platforms as well as the demands and resources of the gig economy that have come to increasingly define the creative industries. In so doing, she offers a nuanced account of the new forms of labor imposed on musicians today by the evolving conditions of the music industry. 

Other scholars like McRobbie and Andrejevic, for instance, contrastingly position themselves closer to the other end of the spectrum. McRobbie (2016) examines the increasing precarity of the gig-economy in correlation with the neoliberalist entrepreneurial ideology that has become part and parcel of working in the cultural industries (elaborated upon later on), while Andrejevic (2009) observes the expropriative data mining practices of digital platforms by pointing out that users’ “free participation is redoubled as a form of productive labor captured by capital” (p. 419), thus shifting the focus away from “user-created content [to] user-generated data” (p. 418). As more and more such studies in the fields of cultural studies, critical information studies, communication studies, and the digital humanities, among others, have come to take this intersection of digital technologies and the cultural industries as their focus, a spectrum comprised of numerous scholarly voices has formed to better nuance and understand both the generative and oppressive potentials of digital communities. In my examination of Thematic as a platform born out of these dynamic interactions between the digital and the cultural, I thus also seek to put myself in conversation with these various scholars. 

I begin by conducting a critical discourse analysis of the Thematic website to examine the way in which the platform is promoted to both Content Creator and Music Artist. In so doing, I specifically shed light on the necessary free labor and uneven terms of participation hidden behind Thematic’s strategic use of democratic rhetoric to frame the space as “safe”, “simple”, and “collaborative”. Once the discursive regime and theoretical frameworks within which Thematic operates are established, I dig deeper into the underlying agreements that range from its Terms of Use to the specific Music Artist and Content Creator Agreements to unearth the lack of protection and expropriative terms that Music Artists subscribe to in their choosing to join Thematic. Finally, I compare the distinct user interfaces of Artist and Creator through a platform analysis to further emphasize this inequality. Ultimately, I hope to shed light on the dependence of Thematic as a representative platform that strategically siphons the neoliberal ideology of the new cultural industries and the outmoded regime of current intellectual property law to mobilize the free labor of its users for its own sustenance, all the while masking these expropriative terms under a democratic and participatory rhetoric of community. 

 “Try Thematic”: Free Labor, Labor as Spectacle, and High-Quality Work

Tiziana Terranova (2012) was one of the first scholars (originally published in 2000) to apply a labor framework to the digital economy, presciently claiming that most of the value in digital spaces is generated by the “voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited” (p. 68) – i.e. free – labor of users. In what is perhaps her most referenced line, she writes that “free labor is the moment where this knowledgeable consumption of culture is translated into excess productive activities that are pleasurably embraced and at the same time often shamelessly exploited” (p. 74). Reductively put, voluntary user activity on a digital platform essentially redoubles as productive activity – labor – vital to the platform’s fundamental maintenance. She does not, however, limit her discussion of labor to that of only the users, and in a comparably less referenced segment of her seminal text, also points to the spectacle of labor that shines through the translucency of commodities in the update culture of the digital economy: 

It is not enough to produce a good website; you need to update it continuously to maintain interest in it and fight off obsolescence… It is the labor of the designers and programmers that shows through a successful website, and it is the spectacle of that labor changing its product that keeps the users coming back. The commodity, then, is only as good as the labor that goes into it. (p. 93) 

By foregrounding both the labor of users in keeping a site alive through their consumptive labor –  “the cumulative hours of accessing the site (thus generating advertising), writing messages, participating in conversations” (p. 94) etc. – as well as the continuous labor of updating these sites required by designers, Terranova points to the digital space-commodity as inherently dependent on a spectacle of rigorously co-operative labor.

Thematic is not exempt from this dependence. Even before one decides to use Thematic as either a Music Artist or Content Creator, the landing home page – i.e. the “Try Thematic” (Thematic) promotional page – cleverly interweaves the different kinds of free labor at play along with the spectacle of labor that its own team provides to urge a potential user to literally tryThematic. Each type of user is enticed with the free labor of her counterpart: “You need great songs to soundtrack your videos. Music Artists need promotion. Thematic makes it happen” (Thematic). The promotion promised to the Music Artist is unavoidably dependent on her uploading of free music to Thematic that is then used by “you”, the Content Creator, in “your” video. Free music for free promotion. It seems here that there is a logical balance of cultural exchange, in which Thematic’s specific “moral economy” (Thompson, 1971) – i.e. “the social norms and mutual understandings that make it possible for two parties to conduct business” (Jenkins, 2013, p. 52) – appears undisrupted. If, however, we examine Terranova’s take on labor as spectacle, it becomes more apparent that Thematic does not position the two parties on equal, or even close-to-equal, terms.

Revisiting the idea of the translucent commodity, a labor as spectacle framework points to the idea that the designers of a platform are also compelled to package their labor to sell to potential users. It thus doubly intensifies the labor required to keep the site alive – the free labor of user activity and the constant updates the platform requires of designers. In the case of Thematic, other than the given labor of maintaining the basic functions of the site, its “spectacular” labor is essentially the continuous update, curation, organization, clearing, and display of songs for Content Creators to browse and download: “Simple. With songs curated by content type and theme, you’ll spend less time searching for that perfect song and more time creating. Safe. All of our songs are pre-cleared…” (Thematic). As is already apparent in its rhetorical use of “you”, Thematic’s spectacle of labor, cleverly repackaged with the democratic rhetoric of “simple” and “safe”, is meant to “keep the [Content Creators] coming back” (Terranova, 2012, p. 93). So where is the labor spectacle for Music Artists? They are, after all, offering up labor-intensive products in their music that serve as the material for the labor spectacle sold to Content Creators. What is meant to bring them, the Music Artists, back? To address this question, we must briefly depart from Terranova’s framework of labor and attend to Hesmondalgh (2010) in his efforts to direct us beyond “wages as the only meaningful form of reward” (p. 278). 

Hesmondhalgh challenges the frequent conflation of free labor and exploitation in extant academic critiques by pointing out that “most cultural production in history has been unpaid, and that continues to be the case today” (p. 277). In speaking directly to Terranova’s discussion of the unpaid labor necessary to functionally maintain the Internet, he writes: 

But it may be said in response that those who undertook such unpaid digital labour might have gained a set of rewards from such work, such as the satisfaction of contributing to a project which they believed would enhance communication between people and ultimately the common good; or in the form of finding solutions to problems and gaining new skills which they could apply later in other contexts. (p. 278) 

In this way he emphasizes the danger of reducing meaningful compensation for work to simply wages, emphasizing that “it would surely be wrong to imply that any work done on the basis of social contribution or deferred reward represents the activities of people duped by capitalism” (p. 278). Although Terranova also acknowledges that “free labor… is not necessarily exploited labor” (2012, p. 93), she explicitly contains it within her description of the construction of early virtual communities where the pleasures of communication and exchange were the fruits of that labor, thus eliding a more nuanced discussion of how such pleasures or non-financial motivations might be meaningful in other contexts. 

To further elaborate on such non-economic forms of compensation Hesmondhalgh moves away from discussions of free labor and shifts his focus to the precarity of the cultural industries: 

Many workers tolerate poor pay, long hours and difficult conditions in order merely to gain jobs with very poor levels of security and protection. In other words, to achieve the possibility of self-realization through creative work seems to require what some recent critics, as I pointed out earlier, have called self-exploitation. (2010, p. 281)

He evidently acknowledges, here, the appropriation by those who hold power in the cultural industries of the “self-realization” aspect of creative work to force workers into tolerating precarious working conditions. That being said, he also further highlights in his book with Sarah Baker, Creative Labour(2011), the importance of high-quality work in these industries as a potentially significant motivator for creative workers. Understood both in terms of Sennett’s (2008) craftsmanship as well as the “opportunities for workers to do work that they consider to be of social, cultural, and political significance” (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2011, p. 21), high-quality work as such a form of meaningful wage-alternative compensation thus forces us to rethink and more rigorously define how exactly self-exploitation manifests in these contexts. In urging us to think about the actual lives of the workers and the meaning they attribute to their work, he reminds us that “to treat these positive components of creative work as mere sugar coatings for the bitter pill of precariousness is surely too dismissive of the genuinely positive experiences that some creative workers have in their jobs and careers” (2010, p. 282). 

At this point we can return to the question: what brings Music Artists back? When understood through Terranova’s framework of labor as spectacle, Music Artists were evidently sidelined in our discussion of Thematic’s promotional landing page, and even, unexplainable with regards to why they would “Try Thematic”. But if we re-examine their position under Hesmondhalgh’s lens of high-quality work, and thus foreground the particularities and diverse motivations of individual Music Artists, it allows us to bring them back into the conversation. This is not to say, in any way, that Hesmondhalgh urges us to see the Music Artist and the Content Creator as operating on equal terms within the Thematic community. Rather, the concept of high-quality work allows us to better frame and situate Music Artists’ participation on the platform beyond an exploitation framework, thus very much in line with Jenkins’ take on participatory culture, and at least speculate in similar fashion to Hesmondhalgh and Jenkins, as to what their incentives might be in the explicit absence of labor as spectacle. Perhaps, the mere satisfaction of receiving credit on well-made YouTube videos is enough, or perhaps they make music anyways as a pleasurable hobby and want to donate the products of their hobbies, similar to what Kücklich (2005) calls playbour, to the creative community accessible via Thematic. While it is difficult to pinpoint what individual Music Artists seek to gain from their participation in Thematic without actually speaking with each individual Artist, Hesmondhalgh reminds us that we should not be too quick to dismiss their activities as self-exploitation (which is, of course, not to say that we should rule it out altogether) and acknowledge the potentially other more meaningful forms of compensation that their participation might entail: “which political projects may best enhance human well-being and social justice with regard to work?” (2010, p. 282) To this end, by putting Hesmondhalgh’s framework of high-quality work and his consequential push to look beyond wage as meaningful compensation for labor in conversation with Terranova’s understandings of free labor and labor as spectacle, it becomes possible to sketch a comparably more coherent, albeit not complete, map of the imbricated relations between Thematic, Content Creator, and Music Artist laid out in Thematic’s promotional materials. 

Bio

Edward B. Kang is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Assistant Editor for the International Journal of Communication. His research engages the cultural and infrastructural dimensions of digital media and digital surveillance technologies with a specific focus on the relationship between sound/music, identity, platform logics, and platform anatomies. He is thus interested in navigating the socialities that emerge at these knotty intersections of technology and culture. Apart from his own research, he has served as a committee member for Annenberg’s annual Communication and Cultural Studies graduate student conference Critical Mediations, as well as led Music Production workshops for Annenberg’s Critical Media Project with California Humanities

Comics and Stuff: A Virtual Book Club

Comics and Stuff: A Virtual Book Club

Please join me and a range of interesting guests for what we hope will be a lively discussion of my book, Comics and Stuff, and more broadly, of comics, comic studies, and living with our stuff. Each sessions will feature voices from multiple disciplinary backgrounds whose work as scholars and artists helped to shape this book.  Those attending any given Zoom session will get the most out of the experience if they have read the relevant passage from the book, but, of course, we welcome people who are encountering these ideas for the first time.

What’s the Big idea?

For most of their history, comics were widely understood as disposable―you read them and discarded them, and the pulp paper they were printed on decomposed over time. Today, comic books have been rebranded as graphic novels―clothbound high-gloss volumes that can be purchased in bookstores, checked out of libraries, and displayed proudly on bookshelves. They are reviewed by serious critics and studied in university classrooms. A medium once considered trash has been transformed into a respectable, if not elite, genre.

Contemporary culture is awash with stuff. Contemporary graphic novels give vivid expression to a culture preoccupied with the processes of circulation and appraisal, accumulation and possession. By design, comics encourage the reader to scan the landscape, to pay attention to the physical objects that fill our lives and constitute our familiar surroundings. Because comics take place in a completely fabricated world, everything is there intentionally. Comics are stuff; comics tell stories about stuff; and they display stuff. In this book, stuff refers not only to physical objects, but also to the emotions, sentimental attachments, and nostalgic longings that we express―or hold at bay―through our relationships with stuff.

Host—Henry Jenkins, Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Art, and Education at the University of Southern California, is the author or editor of 20 books on various aspects of media and popular culture. Among them are Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. 

Moderator—Drew Morton is an Associate Professor of Mass Communication at Texas A&M University–Texarkana. He is the author of Panel to the Screen: Style, American Film, and Comic Books During the Blockbuster Era (University Press of Mississippi, 2016) and cofounder and coeditor of [in]Transition, the award-winning journal devoted to Videographic Criticism. He is currently editing an anthology on the Watchmen sequels.  

Audience Chair—William Proctoris Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film and Transmedia at Bournemouth University. He is the co-editor of the books Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Matthew Freeman) and the award-winning Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception (with Richard McCulloch). William is a leading expert on the history and theory of reboots, and is currently preparing his debut monograph on the topic for publication, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia for Palgrave Macmillan. He has also published widely on a broad array of subjects including Batman, James Bond, Stephen King,  Star Trek, Star Wars, and other forms of popular culture. William is also co-editor on the forthcoming edited collection Horror Franchise Cinema(with Mark McKenna) and he is associate editor of the website Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 

Weds. June 17 10-11:30 a.m. (Pacific)

How to Look at Stuff

(Introduction, Chapter One)

In this session, we will discuss, among other things, how the features of comics as a medium create particular relationships to the objects that are being depicted; what comics scholars can learn from earlier moments of art history about the relationship between material culture and visual representation; how new configurations of knowledge and expertise are forming online as collectors come together to discuss meaningful “stuff.” 

Nick Sousanis

Nick Sousanis is an Eisner-winning comics author and an associate professor in Humanities & Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University, where he runs an interdisciplinary Comics Studies program. He is the author of Unflattening, originally his doctoral dissertation, which he wrote and drew entirely in comics form. Published by Harvard University Press in 2015, Unflattening received the 2016 American Publishers Association Humanities award for Scholarly Excellence and the 2016 Lynd Ward prize for Best Graphic Novel. Sousanis’s comics have appeared in Nature, The Boston Globe, and Columbia Magazine. More at http://www.spinweaveandcut.comor Tw @nsousanis

Lisa Pons

Lisa Pon is a historian of European art, architecture and material culture made between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, and professor of art history at USC.  Her research and teaching focus on the mobilities of art, artistic authority and collaboration, and the Renaissance concept of copia or abundance.  Her most recent book, Printed Icon:  Forlì’s Madonna of the Fire, examined an early print on paper that did not burn in a fire in 1428, and the consequences of that survival.

Will Straw

Will Straw is James McGill Professor of Urban Media Studies at McGill University in Montreal.  His interests include magazine history, theories of collecting and the culture of the urban night. 

Tuesday June 23rd 10 a.m. (Pacific)

Collecting Stories

(Chapters 2-5)

In this session, we will discuss how contemporary graphic novels have explored themes of collecting and accumulation; how collecting comics has been a central aspect of how comics artists orient themselves to their medium’s history; why artists are motivated to pay special attention to the material objects with which they populate their worlds; and how shared experiences of collecting helps to bridge between writers and readers of comics.

Bryan Talbot

Bryan Talbot has written and drawn comics and graphic novels for over 40 years, including Judge Dredd, Batman, Sandman, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, The Tale of One Bad Rat, Alice in Sunderland,Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes(written by Mary Talbot and the winner of the 2013 Costa Biography Award)and five volumes of his Grandville series of steampunk detective thrillers. He is published in over twenty countries, is a frequent guest at international comic festivals, and has been awarded an honorary Doctorate in Arts and an honorary Doctorate in Letters and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. http://www.bryan-talbot.com

Lincoln Geraghty

Lincoln Geraghty is Professor of Media Cultures in the School of Film, Media and Communication at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Major publications include Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe(IB Tauris, 2007), American Science Fiction Film and Television(Berg, 2009) and Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture (Routledge, 2014). 

Jared Gardner

Jared Gardner is Professor of English and director of Popular Culture Studies at Ohio State University, where he spends all the time he can at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. He is the author and editor of a few books on comics, including Projections: Comics and the History of 21st-Century Storytelling.

Bart Beaty

Bart Beaty  is the author, editor, and translator of more than twenty books in the field of comics studies, including Twelve-Cent Archie (2015) and Comics versus Art (2012). He is the general editor of the Critical Survey of Graphic Novels (2012; revised 2018–2019) and the lead researcher on the What Were Comics? project (whatwerecomics.com).

William Proctor

William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film and Transmedia at Bournemouth University. He is the co-editor of the books Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Matthew Freeman) and the award-winning Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception (with Richard McCulloch). William is a leading expert on the history and theory of reboots, and is currently preparing his debut monograph on the topic for publication, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia for Palgrave Macmillan. He has also published widely on a broad array of subjects including Batman, James Bond, Stephen King,  Star Trek, Star Wars, and other forms of popular culture. William is also co-editor on the forthcoming edited collection Horror Franchise Cinema(with Mark McKenna) and he is associate editor of the website Confessions of an Aca-Fan. 

Tuesday June 30 10 a.m. (Pacific)

Object Lessons

(Chapters  6-8, Epilogue)

In this session, we will discuss how scrapbooks helped to inform the aesthetics of women’s graphic storytelling practices; the ways the depiction of “stuff” in graphic stories has been tied to family history and more generally, aspects of the past that sit uneasily in the present; the different kinds of stories women and artists of color have told about their relationships to the material world.

Rebecca Wanzo

Rebecca Wanzo is professor and chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (SUNY, 2009) and The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging (NYU 2020). Her essays have been published in journals such as American Literature, Camera Obscura, differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies,  The Journal of Popular Culture, Women and Performance, and numerous edited collections. Her research interests include popular culture, African American literature, critical race theory, and feminist media studies. 

Hillary Chute

Hillary Chute is Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University. She is the author or editor of six books on comics, including, most recently, Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere(Harper, 2017). She is a comics and graphic novels columnist for the New York Times Book Review. 

Joyce Farmer 

Joyce Farmer has been a cartoonist since the series, Tits and Clits (1972-1987). Controversial at first,  she is now considered a pioneer of underground comix.  Her graphic memoir Special Exits (2010) won the Reuben and was nominated for the Eisner. The book has been translated into five languages.

For more information on registration go to the RVSP link at the following:

Part I: How to Look at Stuff

Part II: Collecting Stories

Part III: Object Lessons

Newsboys in America: An Interview with Vincent DiGirolamo (2 of 2)

What factors led to the rise of the newsboy in America?

Newspaper hawkers first appeared as a distinct urban type in New York in the 1830s. They were products of the penny press—cheap newspapers for the masses, which were themselves products of the Market Revolution—the commercial expansion of agriculture and manufacturethat transformed the American economy, polity, and culture. Newsboys facilitated the flow of goods and information across the country, and they quickly caught the eye of artists and writers who transformed them into symbols of Young America—brassy but virtuous strivers who were always on the lookout for the next main chance. Articles about newsboys appeared in the new penny dailies and the scandalous Sunday papers and flash press, as well as in Whig and Democratic journals like Knickerbocker Magazine and US Magazine and Democratic Review. They also inspired the vogue for what I call “urchin art”—genre paintings of street children by the likes of Henry Inman, J. G. Brown, and many others. These youths proved useful as workers and symbols.

Were newsboys a mostly urban phenomenon?

Newsboys were primarily but not exclusively children of the city. They also worked in small towns and rural areas, distributing local papers and the big city dailies that were shipped in. 

Poverty haunted communities of every size and locale. Sherwood Anderson, for example, grew up so poor in Clyde, Ohio, in the 1880s that he sometimes ate grass. He not only delivered the Cleveland Plain Dealerand Toledo Blade, but he also herded cows, toted water, and acquired, sold, and sublet so many jobs that he earned the nickname “Jobby.” Newsboys also trod the dusty streets and plank sidewalks of western boomtowns, cow towns, and military posts. Some boys serviced their routes on horseback. These kids were key players in the development of the urban frontier because every town needed a newspaper to stimulate settlement. 

Boys also worked for the newspaper distribution firms that supplied small towns. These youths folded, bagged, and hauled papers to the railroad depots, or rode the cars and tossed bundles to carriers waiting at the various whistle-stops. Railroads also gave rise to tramp newsboys who hopped freight and passenger cars to work the crowds at horse races, boxing matches, state fairs, and political conventions. More respectable were the uniformed train boys who sold newspapers, magazines, and other items to rail passengers. These “news butchers” represented the aristocracy of newsboy labor, yet many ended up in debt to their companies for unsold or spoiled goods. Others lost their lives in rail accidents. Their families sometimes received compensation, but a common condition of employment as a train boy was to sign a liability waiver. I found that a few girls did this kind of work disguised as boys, but they were promptly fired when their true identities were discovered.

What were some of the risks of being a newsboy and why did they develop such a reputation for being rough and tumble?

Aside from the daily risk of getting robbed, run over, or run off, newsboys had to contend with the ever-present possibility of "getting stuck"— buying more papers than they could sell. Hence their motivation to hustle and shout, “flip” streetcars and dodge oncoming traffic. Progressive Era reformers enumerated the hazards of newsboy life, dividing them into two categories: physical and moral. Physical hazards included flat feet, curved spines, sore throats, skipped meals, stunted growth, and venereal disease. The moral dangers included a propensity to smoke, swear, steal, gamble, fight, drop out of school, and fraternize with hoodlums and prostitutes. Child labor reformers felt that the excitement and relative autonomy of street hawking ruined children for steady work. All of these concerns raise questions about the differences between working-class and middle-class attitudes and values, which I try to examine fairly, without deifying reformers, demonizing publishers, or censuring parents. 

One of the first stories you share is about a news boy who jumped the gun on announcing the first shots of the Civil War by almost two weeks. This raises the question of what role newsboys played in the sensationalism of the American press or what today we might discuss as “fake news.”

The fake news of today bears no resemblance to the fake news of yesteryear when it was shouted by hungry kids who knowingly sought to make a few extra nickels by bilking a gullible public until someone got wise and thrashed them for their deception. It was a risky business, good for a fleeting thrill more than a steady income, as it would ultimately lead to a loss of credibility and customers.  So yes, some kids falsely announced the sinking of the Atlantic and the murder of General Grant, or prematurely blared the fall of Fort Sumter and the death of President McKinley. It helps to remember that news peddling was a kind show business or street theater. Growing up in Philadelphia, William Dukenfield (W.C. Fields) would juggle rolled-up newspapers to gather a crowd and then invent silly headlines like “Amos Stump Found in an Eagle’s Nest.” It was part of his shtick. Yet newsboys who later took liberties with the facts during World War I faced threats of prosecution under the Espionage Act.

It’s also true that newspapers sometimes printed false news as hoaxes. All journalism students learn about the New York Sun’s moon hoax in 1835. Edgar Allan Poe perpetrated a similar fraud in the Sun in 1844 with a story about a transatlantic balloon crossing. And the New York Herald scared the bejesus out of Gothamites with its 1874 hoax of a mass escape of rhinos, baboons, and jungle cats from the Central Park Zoo. Newspaper publishers usually defended such fictions as satires or entertainments. 

More damaging were the sensationalist reports of Spanish perfidy during the Spanish-American War. William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and other yellow press lords engaged in exaggeration and outright fabrication to bolster nationalist pride and imperialist aims. The 1920s represents another journalistic low point when truth took a backseat to sales. The New York Daily Graphic specialized in doctored photographs it called “composographs.” The National Enquirer continued this tradition with its “coverage” of alien abductions and other nonsense. Even respected papers succumbed to sensationalist strategies. I remember buying a copy of the San Jose Mercury in the 1970s with the banner headline “SOVIET SUB FOUND IN BAY.” It turned out to be a bay in Finland. That was the last time I bought the Mercury, even though I had been a stringer for it in high school.

Today’s fake news, as generated on Facebook by Russian bots and right-wing hacks who make no pretense of journalistic integrity, is more insidious. It’s also the label our tweet-mad president applies to any news item he doesn’t like. These falsehoods are more injurious to democracy than any lie that ever passed the lips of a newsboy.

Most accounts of the struggles over child labor emphasize the stories of children working in factories during the Industrial Revolution. How would this story look different if we centered on the news industry?

I approached newsboys not just as objects of reform, but as complex historical actors who worked, played, swore, gambled, struck, and developed their own occupational subculture. Yet in so doing, I think I shed light on the child labor reform movement as well. Newspaper peddling challenges historians’ tendency to draw clear distinctions between child labor and adult labor, work and play, wages and profit, selling and begging, opportunity and exploitation. News peddlers blur the line between these activities. The fact that their workplace was the street also raises questions about what constitutes endangerment or supervision, not to mention employment. Newsboy labor was also much more romanticized than other forms of child labor due to the influence of novelists like Horatio Alger and artists like J.G. Brown. The newspaper industry participated in this line blurring. Many newspapers sponsored newsboy bands and commissioned newsboy marches and “galops” at a time whena “Breaker-Boy March” or a “Mill Girl Galop” would have been inconceivable. 

The other thing that stands out in studying child street laborers, especially in the Progressive Era, is the prominent role played by socialists in this reform movement. Ardent socialists such as Florence Kelley, Scott Nearing, Robert Hunter, and Upton Sinclair provided much of the intellectual energy and documentary evidence that drove the crusade. Sinclair, of course, went on to write a stinging critique of the capitalist press in his book The Brass Check.

But newspapers were not just exploiters of the children they relied on. We have to take into account that the newspaper industry was, arguably, one of the most influential child welfare institutions in the United States. Newspapers were pioneers of corporate welfare and scientific management schemes. They provided newsboys with banquets, excursions, entertainments, and educations in the form of night schools and scholarships. Indeed, one could argue that newspapers exerted a greater influence on American boys than the YMCA, Boy Scouts, or Little League Baseball combined.

Let’s focus on the boy in the newsboy. What myths about masculinity in America have clung to this figure through the years? Were there newsgirls and if so, how were they perceived?

There were always girls and women who sold papers, but the news trade was dominated by boys and it became a kind of school for masculinity. Boys learned not just how to hustle, make change, and predict sales, but also how to smoke, swear, and fight. They learned about sex on the job, dealing with the sexual advances of co-workers, customers, and bosses. The film director Frank Capra routinely fended off drunk pedophiles while working nights in Los Angeles. Girls in the news trade encountered sexual propositions and assaults as well. They were often blamed for their own troubles. “A girl who starts out selling papers ends up selling herself,” said a police chief in Buffalo, New York.  Their labor was sexualized in prose and pictures, so they were the first targets of reformers, who pressured lawmakers and publishers to remove girls from the streets.

Your book traces a history which runs for more than a century, despite some significant shifts in the news industry over that period. Why did this figure persist for so long and what led to its demise?

Despite the tremendous growth of newspapers throughout the 19th and most of the 20th century, in terms of number, circulation, capitalization, and employees, their proprietors faced the basic journalistic challenge of getting a highly perishable product to market. The cheap labor of children remained integral to this process for several reasons. First, children were abundant; the steady influx of poor immigrant families up to 1924, especially in cities, ensured an ample labor supply. Second, children proved adaptable to new modes of distribution and new sites of retail exchange, such as railroads, streetcars, bicycles, subways, automobiles, and even airplanes. Finally, the emotional appeal of needy children increased their effectiveness as hawkers and carriers, transforming each purchase into an act of charity, especially when accompanied by a tip, which in many cases made up half their earnings. 

The newspaper industry remained largely impervious to child labor reforms, even during the Progressive Era when the removal of youngsters from mines, mills, and factories often sent them into the less regulated street trades.  Despite the tireless efforts of the National Child Labor Committee and its photographer Lewis Hine, the public never really saw newsboys and newsgirls as exploited victims. NCLC investigator Edward Clopper called this misperception the “illusion of the near.” They were too close to us, he said. Conditions changed during the Great Depression. jobs were so scarce that adults now flocked into the trade. But children were still expected to “pitch in” and “help out,” or else make themselves scarce at suppertime. 

Only after World War II did the corner newsboys became less ubiquitous due to the spread of newsstands and vending machines and mandatory school attendance. Suburbanization and Schwinns enlarged the fleet of after-school route carriers in the 1950s, ‘60s and '70s. Many of my friends had paper routes then. They never earned much but they got their pictures in the paper once in a while. Adults deliverers with cars were always more reliable and became increasingly preferable after a rash of newsboy kidnappings and murders in the 1980s and '90s. Declining birthrates, increased youth hiring by fast-food chains, and the siphoning off of readers and advertisers by internet companies (that bear no distribution costs) put the final nail in the coffin of America’s newsboys.

Today, those of us who grew up in the post-war era have a certain nostalgia for kids having their own paper routes. What relationship do you see between newsboys and paper routes? How did the latter become associated with the middle class and its assumed virtues?

The contrasting cultural attributes of route carriers and street hawkers is often exaggerated. Many boys did both jobs in the 19th and early 20th centuries; they delivered (or rented!) papers to regular customers and peddled them on the side to random pedestrians. Yet carriers gradually acquired more positive reputations because they tended to rise early, keep regular hours, and go about their business quietly, while hawkers peddled erratically, often late into the night, and made as much noise as possible. When carriers started to outnumber hawkers in the 1920s and ‘30s, they became the focus of new federal regulations. In response, circulation managers emphasized that the boys’ work was a form of public service and vocational education. They started calling them “newspaperboys” and refused to use the old terms of newsboys or newsies, as these words conjured up images of street arabs and guttersnipes. The industry successfully lobbied Congress to have October 4, 1941 declared the first National Newspaperboy Day. It persuaded the U.S. Postal Service to issue a newspaperboy stamp in 1952. And it established a Newspaperboys’ Hall of Fame in 1960. These tributes were publicized annually in radio broadcasts, newspaper editorials, and galas featuring Abbott and Costello, Red Skelton, and other celebrities. So the virtuous middle-class suburban paperboy of our childhoods is not just a happy memory but the product of a public relations machine working overtime to eclipse the disorderly working-class newsboy. Nostalgia, like newspapers, is a manufactured good. 

Vincent DiGirolamo has published essays on a wide array of subjects, including child vagrants, Wobbly strikes, Ashcan artists, and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. His work has appeared in Labor History, Journal of Social History, Radical History Review, San Francisco Sunday Examiner-Chronicle, and several anthologies. He also co-produced Monterey’s Boat People (1984), an award-winning PBS documentary on Vietnamese refugee fishermen, and published the middle-grade novel Whispers Under the Wharf (1990). His contributions to the digital humanities for CUNY’s American Social History Project comprise essays, podcasts, and teaching modules on the Sand Creek massacre, Jacob Riis, Ellis Island, and the 1934 West Coast maritime strike. DiGirolamo has held research and writing fellowships at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, Woodrow Wilson Society of Fellows, American Antiquarian Society, Bentley Historical Library at University of Michigan, and the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Crying the News also received support from the NEH, PSC-CUNY, and the Eugene M. Lang Foundation, as well as a 2015 Leonard Hastings Schoff Trust Publications Award from the Columbia University Seminar on the City, a 2017 Furthermore Grant from the J. M. Kaplan Fund, and a 2018 Book Completion Award from the CUNY Office of Research.

Newsboys in America: An Interview with Vincent DiGirolamo (1 of 2)

Vincent DiGirolamo's Crying the News is an epic account of the rise and fall, life and times of the American newsboy (and newsgirl) which has already received significant recognition from the scholarly community, including Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians, the Philip Taft Award for the best book on labor and working class history, and the Frank Luther Mott/ Kappa Tau Alpha Award for the best book in journalism and mass communication. I initially approached the book in relation to my current writing project, which is looking at American boyhood, primarily in the 1950s and 1960s, but which has led me to read more extensively in the fields of children's studies and history.  I loved this book because of the wealth of details it offers into working class boyhood across the years and because of the ways that it takes these young workers seriously on their own terms and helps us to read through the myths and approximate their place in the history of American journalism. The writing has a quiet verve -- it makes it pleasurable to read without calling attention to that -- and you can get a sense of that style in his expressive and generative response to my questions here. I have tried to frame my questions with an eye to readers of this blog who are potentially interested in the representation of the paper boy (and in the case of one recent comic series I admire, Paper Girls), the nature of paper boy masculinity, how it models the gig economy, and what glimpse it offers into sensationalism and deception (i.e. fake news) in other historical periods.  Hope you enjoy—

Henry Jenkins

The newsboy became and remains, as you note, a mythic figure in American culture down to the present day, whether embodied as Newsies on Broadway or the comic book series, Paper Girls. What core national values got encoded in that myth? 

That’s part of what intrigued me about these kids, the relationship between the myth and the reality. I wanted to know about their lives on the streets and their economic importance to their families and the newspaper industry. But I was also curious about how these poor, often exploited and self-exploiting children came to represent the spirit of capitalism. What accounts for this irony? Was it the result of some amorphous cultural process or the deliberate attempt of interested parties to define the meaning of their work? And how did this myth affect the children’s actual experience, either by generating sympathy for them, undermining reform efforts, or actually inspiring the children to strive and succeed? Some famous ex-newsboys such as Walt Disney and Eddie Rickenbacker subscribed to the myth and attributed their adult success to the lessons learned selling newspapers. They became useful symbols of American enterprise.But most newsboys kept within their social class and grew up to become teamsters, mechanics, and work in similar trades.

Understanding the persistence of this myth required tracking its changing function in society and the ways in which nostalgia helps gloss over past injustices. I compare the stereotypical newsboy to the happy darky or noble savage—figures that obfuscate the horrors of slavery and genocide. The mythic newsboy who pulled himself up by his bootstraps similarly distorts our understanding of class exploitation—and the resistance it provoked. Many newsboys engaged in strikes and formed unions that affiliated with the Knights of Labor, American Federation of Labor, and Industrial Workers of the World, but their stories are not part of the myth. Others newsboys, such as Jack London in Oakland, California, and Norman Thomas in Marion, Ohio, become prominent socialists. I contend that news peddling influenced children in profound and enduring ways, depending on their race, ethnicity, region, gender, and generation. But the self-made man narrative is just that—a story wielded selectively to laud individual initiative and minimize the underlying structures of economic opportunity.

You compare the American newsboy to his old-world counterpart, the ballad singer. How might this comparison give us some insights into how news was circulated in the two cultures?

Yes, I mention that America’s newsboys were direct descendants of the ballad singers, mercurie girls, and flying stationers who distributed news sheets in Europe beginning in the 15thcentury. These were Gutenberg’s first children, though most were adults. They made up what historian Robert Darnton calls the “forgotten middlemen of literature.” They share several things in common with their American counterparts, including an initially low reputation as scoundrels and vagabonds who avoided real work by trafficking in rumors, lies, and half-truths, often of a seditious nature. Yet carriers and postriders who distributed newspapers and pamphlets during the American Revolution and subsequent wars raised their status as patriots who personified freedom of the press. Another key difference between European and American news peddling was the higher literacy rates in the United States due to the importance placed on Bible reading. Newspapers and newspaper reading flourished in the United States compared to England, where newspaper duties and other “taxes on knowledge” restricted readership until the mid-1850s. 

What are some of the challenges of researching this topic? What are some of the resources and techniques you deployed to address those challenges?

My research began in the pre-digital age. I started out following footnotes to the published and unpublished reports of child welfare societies and child labor committees. I consulted municipal histories, city guides, trade journals, and the memoirs and private papers of editors and publishers. Newspapers were valuable sources, too, as they often ran feature stories and crime reports about newsboys. Finding these stories was hit and miss at the beginning. Fortunately, some municipal libraries compiled handwritten indexes of local newspapers. I also relied on colleagues and strangers who would send me the odd newsboy reference they came across in the course of their research. 

My best source of visual material was Peter Eckel, a collector whose devotion to Father John Drumgoole, director of St. Vincent's Newsboys' Home in Gilded Age New York, led him to haunt the book stalls on Fourth Avenue looking for prints related to newsboys. He amassed an amazing collection that included badges, statues, and a scrapbook assembled by the superintendent of another Newsboys' Home. Peter shared his archive with me while I was writing my dissertation at Princeton. After he died I helped Firestone Library's Department of Rare Books and Special Collections acquire and catalog it.

Everything changed with the digitization of newspapers, periodicals, diaries, and images in the early 2000s, which made thousands of documents and collections word-searchable. I could now find needles in archival haystacks throughout the country. This technology led to my discovery of newsboy strikes, boycotts, murders, accidents, unions, clubs, lodging houses, and reading rooms in scores of cities where my source material was originally quite thin. The hidden history of working-class youth seemed suddenly accessible, and I fell victim to what Ludmilla Jordanova calls the "chimera of comprehensiveness."

Then there's the question of how to read these sources—how to make sense of children's lived experience, and trust the voices embedded in human-interest stories and reform tracts. Visual images also posed challenges in that they reflect generic conventions and political agendas as well as providing glimpses of real children. But that's the fun part: analyzing how a certain social practice—child news peddling—could alternately be viewed as a social evil and a public good. I found that this tension existed in every decade. For example, during the progressive era, when muckraking journalists were producing shocking exposés and disturbing photographs of ragged newsboys, images of happy, energetic newsboys circulated widely in advertisements, calendars, board games, and children’s books. These images virtually neutralized the impact of reports produced by the child labor reformers.

You frame the newsboy as both laborer and entrepreneur within what you describe as “penny capitalism.” Explain this concept and how it might shed light on today’s “gig economy.”

“Penny capitalism” is a term coined by anthropologist Sol Tax (a former Milwaukee newsboy) in the 1950s to describe small-scale trading among indigenous peoples. It was revived by British historian John Benson in the 1980s to call attention to the various entrepreneurial activities of working-class people to supplement their meager wages. They took in borders, sold victuals, opened pubs in their homes. Benson correctly notes that the industrial working-class has never lived by wages alone. The question he raised is how does this kind of economic activity affect their class identities and affinAs workers and merchants, newsboys epitomize this blend of labor and commerce. Yet in the course of my research I found that they also toiled in a variety of labor systems, in slavery, apprenticeship, and the padrone system, as wage workers, piece workers, and unpaid family labor. Editorial writers liked to call them “little merchants” and equate them with Wall Street speculators because they had to buy and sell again. This propaganda had real consequences in that it contributed to the legal fiction that newsboys were not employees but independent contractors and thus exempt from minimum wage standards, maximum hour laws, workers’ compensation coverage, and other workplace protections. In this sense, newsboys were the prototypical gig workers of their day. Newspaper publishers and circulation managers exaggerated the degree of autonomy they had on the job in order to deny them wages and benefits, especially after the passage of New Deal legislation in the 1930s. Like them, today’s gig workers—including most newspaper deliverers—are subject to a host of fines, work rules, and schedule demands that undermine their vaunted independence as independent contractors.

Biography

Vincent DiGirolamo has published essays on a wide array of subjects, including child vagrants, Wobbly strikes, Ashcan artists, and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York. His work has appeared in Labor History, Journal of Social History, Radical History Review, San Francisco Sunday Examiner-Chronicle, and several anthologies. He also co-produced Monterey’s Boat People (1984), an award-winning PBS documentary on Vietnamese refugee fishermen, and published the middle-grade novel Whispers Under the Wharf(1990). His contributions to the digital humanities for CUNY’s American Social History Project comprise essays, podcasts, and teaching modules on the Sand Creek massacre, Jacob Riis, Ellis Island, and the 1934 West Coast maritime strike. DiGirolamo has held research and writing fellowships at the Princeton University Center for Human Values, Woodrow Wilson Society of Fellows, American Antiquarian Society, Bentley Historical Library at University of Michigan, and the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Crying the News also received support from the NEH, PSC-CUNY, and the Eugene M. Lang Foundation, as well as a 2015 Leonard Hastings Schoff Trust Publications Award from the Columbia University Seminar on the City, a 2017 Furthermore Grant from the J. M. Kaplan Fund, and a 2018 Book Completion Award from the CUNY Office of Research.

Stuart Hall: Island Boy (1 of 1) by Keesha Wallace

The following paper was written by Keesha Wallace, a student in my seminar this term, exploring the roots of the Cultural Studies Tradition. Her own "island" background led her to interesting insights about Stuart Hall, a key figure running across the class, resulting in a memorable paper that I wanted to share with my readers.

Stuart Hall: Island Boy

By Keesha Wallace

“The idea that, because I moved, from colony to metropole, there were no connections between them, has always seemed inconceivable to me. But others have tended to see these worlds as much more compartmentalized. And to someone who doesn’t know the interior life and spaces of the colonial formation, and how its antinomies were forged, the connections may not appear to be evident, or as evident to them as to me. To me, their interdependence is what defines their respective specificities; in everything they reverberate through each other”—Stuart Hall (2017, 11)

Stuart Hall and his mother Jessie Hall on the boat to England, 1951

As a Jamaican, there is something slightly amusing and a little insulting in the way academics speak of Stuart Hall’s Jamaican identity.  “Born in Jamaica” is a throwaway line. Perhaps it is because they are speaking about the work and not so much the man, but I don’t think it can be separated. Hall might agree. 

“I’ve never been persuaded by the orthodox social science division between the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’. It’s always seemed to me that even the most abstract theories are, to varying degrees, informed by their subjective conditions of existence: by, that ism the inner psychic dynamics of the theorist. I’ve felt this to be true of my own life….We need to  consider how we are inserted into the social processes of history and simultaneously think about the mental means we, as subjects, employ to explain to ourselves where, in history, we find ourselves” (Hall 2017, 63).

In the first paragraph of the New Yorker article marking his death,  they noted Hall was “born in colonial Jamaica to mix raced parents who worried that his dark complexion would be an impediment to ascending the island pigmentography, he went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship to study literature when he was 19” (Hsu, Hua 2017, July 17).

It's not directly stated but there is a slightly odd implication that he was fleeing a Jamaican bias as if England had evolved beyond pigmentation in 1954 when we know it still hasn’t done so today. (Smith 2019).

And, this isn’t an isolated incident. His “brown” or mixed-race parents are often mentioned immediately followed by discussions of his not feeling accepted by “Black Jamaica.”  Another repeatedly mentioned anecdote – “as a child, his skin was darker than the rest of his family’s, prompting his sister to tease, ‘Where did you get this coolie baby from?’ It became a family joke—one he would revisit often.” (Hsu, Hua 2017, July 17). 

It is worth noting that “Black Jamaica” wasn’t and still isn’t the only Jamaica. There was definitely a space in Jamaican society for the Halls of the world. In fact, there was a space in all of the Caribbean for them, the West Indian intellectual expats he’d eventually find and develop life-long bonds with  once he got to Oxford. 

It’s also important to know that in terms of literal meaning, brown and mixed raced are often one in the same in Jamaica. Brown is generally used to signify a lighter complexion and mixed race is rarely as clearly delineated as black and white. Both are extremely common. On small islands when the moral policing of the colonizers is removed there are offspring of many shades.  I am the last of four and was often called coolie by my siblings. Coolie is a derogatory term used to describe the Indian popular that had migrated to Jamaica as indentured servants. It’s not as withering an attack as suggested. Not as alienating as presented.

There was nothing particularly radical or unusual about Stuart Hall’s ethnicity in a Jamaican setting. Malcolm Gladwell’s mother is Jamaican. Zadie Smith’s mother is Jamaican. Both authors discuss their inherited ideas on colorism at length. Shades of black and brown definitely make a difference and are mentally noted on the island but should be kept in perspective. He might not have felt a part of “Black Jamaica” but it was about much more than race. 

Wide colour variations are a common feature within families across Jamaica’s uncertain color spectrum. My grandmother on my mother’s side, the notably fair-skinned part of the family, was an expert in racial classifications, as that master of structural anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss, would have appreciated.  

It’s highly doubtful that Hall’s journey to England, as a Rhodes scholar no less, was any different from other brilliant Third World immigrants looking for opportunity in the First World. The only difference might have been his initial inability to realize that although he was born under the crown, it was never attempting to be his home. If that was his view, he was quickly disabused of such notions. 

Caribbean migrants journey to England

“What I realized the moment I got to Oxford was that someone like me could not really be part of it. I mean I could make a success there, I could even be perhaps accepted into it, but I would never feel it was my place. It’s the summit of something else. It’s distilled Englishness.”  

Hall was part of the Windrush Generation, a time of mass migration of nearly half a million people moved to Britain from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1970.[†]While other intellectuals from the colonies studied hard sciences, Hall looked to culture. I’m interested in the ways his Jamaican heritage influenced this area of study. Hall never claimed Jamaica as the place where he belonged. But I hear it in his voice and I know there is nothing more island intellectual and Jamaica College alumnus than his entire perspective.

I can imagine that when Hall first read Williams and Hoggart he must have seen similarities. Hoggart’s working-class neighborhood in Leeds, William’s Welsh border town might have been equally as foreign to Oxford tea shops as Hall’s childhood home in Kingston, Jamaica. When Hall wrote of a “ subjective rupture” in Hoggart and Williams. “The contrast between these two cultural experiences and their inevitable impact on one another is not unlike the experience of migration – from one class to another, from one town  to another, from the country to the city, or from the periphery to the center. It makes you instantly alive to the forms and patterns which have shaped you and which you have left behind, intellectually at the very least, for good.” He could have been talking about himself (Hall 2016, 57).

Yet there is no Caribbean equivalent to Shakespeare. Hall understood he was from a different space. We are an imported people, purposefully fragmented stripped of a collective consciousness of any culture high or low brow.   If the Arawak and Taino natives had scholars, they were killed before anyone thought about classifying them as such. We don’t have a past to draw on.  I believe that was one of the reasons the colonial education system was so important. It was the only way “natives” made themselves worthy of heading back to the colonizer, becoming civilized. 

In an interview between Hall and Trinidadian scholar CLR James[6] you feel the kinship of that unwritten agreement. They bond over their uniquely English educations that took place against tropical backgrounds. They laugh as they remember the shock in metropole elite inner circles when they knew the work of historical scholars better than British or French born. They laugh as if they had both over-prepared for a test, a test they soon realized they didn’t care to pass or fail.   

In contrast to Hoggart and Williams, Hall’s perspective might have been more complicated. When Mary Louise Pratt talks about  contact zones as “ Social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in context of highly asymmetrical relations of power (Pratt, Mary Louise,(1991)p34)” It is applicable to Hall’s life on many levels but it’s not immediately clear to me where England would fall in its relation to his Jamaica. 

Hall writes":“Privately it must be said, the English aroused ambivalent feelings. They were deferred to because of their power, colour, wealth and exalted social position and due to their leadership of every aspect of our lives. At the same time they constituted for us ‘natives’ a sort of running joke, a constant source of casual humour,  even ridicule, which made us feel superior. They appeared to us so foreign in their dress, manner and behavior, so uptight, so profoundly in the wrong place!” (Hall 2017, 20).

He knew that even if we weren’t publicly acknowledged England appreciated the differences of the West Indies.  Clearly the islands had something, because if we didn’t so many wouldn’t have stayed so long. 

There is an ego involved in being a colonizer. An ego Hall saw and questioned, “That was what was so baffling about the English when I first arrived: the contrast between the ordinariness – dreariness, even – of much everyday life and the certainty possessed by the English of their exalted place in the world (214).

Hall’s position as a native elite child of the commonwealth left him with so much to grapple with. At home and abroad. “Jamaica’s intricately articulated social hierarchies were characteristic of what Mary Louis Pratt calls the colonial ‘contact-zone’, in which different national, social, economic, ethnic, gendered and racially defined groups were obliged by the imperial system to inhabit the same space.”

There is something about being of two worlds that forces an examination of culture. As a product of colonial Jamaica on the brink of demands for independence, his identity was a constant negotiation. A position that made him uniquely qualified to look at everything a little differently. He took his place amongst outsiders but with a slightly different gaze. 

This post serves as a call for the repatriation of Stuart Hall. My unscientific polling of Jamaicans’ knowledge of Hall was  terribly disappointing. The island doesn’t know about his work. We all know of CLR James. We know Franz Fanon was from Martinique not France. That as problematic as he might have been in his views, VS Naipaul was a child of Trinidad and Derek Walcott a St. Lucian. The world needs to know Stuart Hall was Jamaican, and I think, if the discussions of Hall happened a little differently, they would. 

His heritage isn’t a footnote, it’s the whole thing. An instinct I had from my first discovery of Hall that was confirmed after reading his work I’ve heavily quoted “Familiar Stranger – A Life Between Two Islands.”

From the beginning of the book he gives a nod to the erasure of his Jamaican-ness, deliberate or not. 

“Jamaican graduate students studying in North America in the 1980s discovered Cultural Studies, with which I had become identified, as a product of an English university, the University of Birmingham – only to find, when I turned up to lecture, that a black Jamaican had somehow been involved with the enterprise form the beginning!” (Hall 2017, 11).

He acknowledged the erasure of his blackness a subject that he would write about later in his career but was aware of the entire time. “I remember reacting with disproportionate rage to one of my earliest reviews, an intelligent and broadly sympathetic English sociologist, who had said he didn’t understand why I kept banging on about being colored, since I was from a well-to-do middle-class family, had been educated at a good, English-type school and studied abroad at Oxford” (12).

People tire of calls for diversity, but what has been lost through interviews of brilliant minds of color by members of the establishment that never understood basic points of entry cannot be overstated. It was so amazing to see Jamaican food discussed in such detail by a man who is studied at universities. I had to pause to smile when I found out Hall’s cousin was my old headmistress from high school . It made me so happy. 

We need to see ourselves in new spaces, we need to know we belong. We need to make sure everyone in a position to cover our subjects ask the right questions. 

There is a sad but weirdly funny recent example I think of often. During an interview with Quincy Jones, a young white male reporter from GQ Magazine had a moment of disbelief when he found out Quincy’s grandmother was biracial. Quincy waited a beat to then explain that no, it wasn’t something that had been discussed. No, it hadn’t been some unspoken love across the forbidden racial lines. His grandmother had been a slave who was raped by her master with little choice but to birth the result.

——

Appendix

‘Colonization in Reverse’ By Louise Bennett written in 1966

Brief History of Miss Lou

Wat a joyful news, Miss Mattie,

I feel like me heart gwine burs’

Jamaica people colonizin

Englan in reverse.

By de hundred, by de t’ousan

From country and from town,

By de ship load, by de plane-load

Jamaica is Englan boun.

 Dem a-pour out o’Jamaica,

Everybody future plan

Is fe get a big-time job

An settle in de mother lan.

CLR James Talking to Stuart Hall

Hall, Stuart. 2017. Familiar Story: A Life between Two Islands. Duke University Press.

Hall, Stuart. 2016. Cultural Studies 1983 A Theoretical History. Duke University Press

King, Anthony D. 1997. Culture, Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pratt, Mary Louise. (1991) Arts of the Contact Zone.Modern Language Association.

Smith, F. 2019. BBC puts focus on Windrush scandal. Shropshire Star.

Yardley, W. (2014, Feb 18). Stuart hall, trailblazing British scholar of multicultural influences, is dead at 82. New York Times (1923-Current File) Retrieved from http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/1941469117?accountid=14749 

Biography

Writer. Publicist. Creative. After 10+ years in NYC, Keesha Wallace recently relocated to LA to continue her work in the entertainment industry amplifying marginalized voices and making sure Caribbean culture is getting the love it deserves. She’s currently pursuing a MA in Strategic PR at USC Annenberg School of Communication and plans to continue on to a PhD. 

Comics and Stuff: The Interviews (4 of 4)

William Proctor 

Personally—and thanks to your recommendation—I have found Emil Ferris’ My Favourite Thing is Monsters one of the most emotionally-engaging, beautifully illustrated, and profound graphic works of the twenty-first century hitherto. What first drew you to the book, and what was its impact? How did it affect you on a personal level?

I saw a page from the book -- the one which is on p.191 -- reproduced along with a short review in Entertainment Weekly and felt an urgent need to read it because of my own personal experience growing up as part of the Monster Culture of the mid-1960s. Her world is so very different from mine and yet we had a strong connection through our common fandom. I fell for it hard and wrote that chapter within a week of first reading the book, just giving myself over completely to the project of re-reading and annotating the work. I was and still am nervous about discussing a work which is only half finished and can’t wait to see the second part, which keeps getting delayed. 

On the first reading, I could not figure out how to make it work in terms of the core themes of the book.  The main character Kare does not have many material objects of her own due to her poverty, and the book seems skeptical that we should put faith in things, rather than asserting ownership over images which can be reproduced on the page or through imagination. I came to see this anti-materialism as part of its message and was particularly drawn to the ways the character is shown appropriating and transforming everyday materials -- from bic pens to macaroni, from old school papers to Barbie dolls -- in the course of claiming fanship within monster culture. I also struggled with the title which did not seem to make grammatical sense until I realized that Monsters were her “thing” (her conceptual frame) rather than multiple things that she gathers around her. 

I was also excited because the book helped to break down a binary gender distinction that seemed to be taking root in my book -- the idea that male comics artists mostly wrote about the experience of being collectors where-as the female artists were more interested in inheritance as the over-arching theme in their relationship to stuff. But Monsters, alongside Carol Tyler’s account of her teenage Beatles fandom, gave us an alternative set of images of female fans whose collecting was more aspirational and transformational than fully materialized. Once I worked through those challenges, the chapter largely wrote itself, allowing me to dip into the literature around monster movies and in particular, monster fan culture.

Ichigo Mina Kaneko

In your discussion of Emil Ferris’ Monsters, you discuss how Kare mobilizes “stuff” in a transformative way. Not only does she have a different relationship to ownership, but she creates a space of belonging for herself in a world where she doesn’t belong—where “things” often inscribe normative expectations of race, gender, able-ism, etc)—by redrawing her surroundings and thinking/feeling with monsters. 
It seems to me there is an interesting intersection here with your discussion of comics and memory via Chris Ware when he says, “A cartoon is not an image taken from life. A cartoon is taken from memory. We are trying to distill the memory of an experience, not the experience itself.” Do you think memory in comics encourages a distinctive participatory reading practice? How do comics—or “stuff” in comics—help create a shared sense of belonging that may differ or overlap from that of say, “stuff” in cinema?

Henry Jenkins

That is a really interesting question and since I used that Ware quote in one of your Quals questions, turnabout seems fair play. In some ways, the mere fact that we are reading a comic, when doing so is such a minority practice, means that we have a different relationship to the medium and what it represents than we do when we enter a movie theater, especially to see a big blockbuster. When I go to my local comic shop, I feel a sense of belonging, a solidarity with the other customers, and an especial bond to my dealer, because we all have that in common -- we are there because we read and one presumes, enjoys reading comics. Many have commented how often comic studies writers drift back to their childhood or adolescent discovery of the medium at some point in their writing. So, yes, flipping the page of a comic, even one we have never read before, can bring out a burst of memories for us. 

Ware means something a bit more abstract that that -- there’s a kind of fuzziness about the ways comics represent the world -- not as sharp and clear as a good photograph and comics somehow captures the fading of memory as we struggle to bring back to our mind what our room looked like when we were in seventh grade. Some features are very clear, others totally forgotten, and the stylization and abstraction of hand-drawn images seems to be groping towards and never fully capturing the world that is in the head of the artist. 

I characterize Monsters as an anti-materialist book, which has much to say about our relationships to things like the paintings in the art museum that we can not fully possess as our own, that talks about roles, such as that of the monster, that we never can fully occupy. Kare as a character performs what Michel De Certeau called as “the art of making do.” In this case, she makes do with the materials at hand and in many cases, she does create art from the most mundane materials, like the riot of anti-romantic monsters she draws on an old math paper.

As a reader, I certainly feel some degree of alignment with Kare’s world view -- as someone who was an obsessed monster fan during that time period, who felt cut off from the puppy love courtship games that obsessed my school in sixth and seventh grade, as someone who hated math class and often daydreamed and sketched, and as someone who hung out with other outsiders with whom we formed our own rituals and identities through our relationship with popular culture. At the same time, I did not experience the broader range of intersectional exclusions that shapes her life.

William Proctor

My Favourite Thing is Monsters is designed as if drawn in biro on scraps of note-paper, as if scribbled in a school book or an A4 writing pad. Was this an intentional design by Ferris, or was it actually created this way? Do you know if Ferris used software to give the impression that it’s more organic in its aesthetics? What effect do you think Ferris is aiming for? 

Henry Jenkins

Good question and I do not know 100 percent. My impression from the interviews I’ve read is that she did the book using the materials as depicted. Add to this the fact that she did so while struggling with disabilities which made it painful for her to work with her hands for a long period of time and that she did so, at least part of the time, while homeless and destitute, not to mention a single mother. The fact that she was able to produce such exquisite work under these circumstances is nothing short of astonishing, as is the fact that this was the first substantial comics work that she had done. So, yes, it is a staggering work by any criteria you want to throw at it. Under these circumstances, we should cut her some slack about the long wait for part two. In terms of what to make of these choices which surely made producing this work that much harder on her. I do think her artistic choices amplify the anti-materialism and transformative nature of her graphic storytelling. She has chosen to frame her story as a young girl’s sketch book, even though no girl of this age has the virtuosity to be able to conceptualize and generate this work. Focusing our attention on what can be done with household materials also calls attention to the other ways that Kare lives by what Michel De Certeau would call “the art of making do.” She takes advantage of what the world gives her and transforms it into an expression of her personality and worldview.

“Monsters” provides her with a metaphor to reflect on so many aspects of her identity (her gender, race, sexuality, economic situation, and her mother’s declining health). And I keep coming back to the moment when she turns her Barbie dolls into Dracula’s Daughter (the few Lesbian image to enter her world) and Wolfman (her own persona) as a way of transforming manditory femininity and hetrosexuality into something different. Her character survives by changing her conditions through transformative use of everyday things. And so, apart from the artist’s own desire to experiment with comics form, the book’s technical approach helps to direct our attention onto the limits in the protagonist’s life and what she does about them.  

Ichigo Mina Kaneko

Has the changing format of comics (“from disposable to durable”) changed the way you collect them? Similarly, how has the process of writing this book transformed or influenced your own relationship to collecting?

Henry Jenkins

Most of my comics are no longer in long boxes. I now display them on a row of bookcases in my study. I still buy mostly monthly floppies rather than graphic novels -- when I can. And this is an old habit I am finding hard to break -- they take up much more shelf space than bound editions and often look much messier. I tell myself that I want to keep up with the stories as they unfold but that rarely happens and I end up binge reading a year’s worth of a given title in a sitting. In some cases, I do like to read the letters and other back matter that are often cut from the graphic novel versions once they are compiled. I have written several essays now about how Robert Kirkland helped to map the rules of his zombie universe in his response to readers in The Walking Deadseries or how Kelly Sue Deconnick (Bitch Planet) and Matt Fraction (Sex Criminals) construct a informal public of their readers as they work together to change how they thrink about gender and sexuality. So, yeah, I buy the monthly issues for the letters, that’s the ticket! I also pref er to buy print comics in whatever format to digital comics. I value the materiality of comics and any number of recent comics reward us by making imaginative use of the printing process itself, whether it is Chris Ware’s Building Stories or Joe Sacco’s The Great War.

To tackle your second question, I wrote the book in part to work through my ambivalences regarding my own collecting  and accumulation tendencies. When we acquire more great stuff than we can display, the result is clutter.  At that point, pride gives way to culturally induced shame The process of writing the book opened up far more questions for me than it resolved. I try to state some of those questions in the book’s conclusion. On the most basic level, I am working through my own pack rat instincts as I reach a point where I can no longer hold onto as many things from my past as I would like.  But that closing chapter hints at something else.-- the cultural baggage which needs to be discarded if we are able to learn to respect each other within an society that is transforming as a result of increased diversity at all levels. We can not simply build monuments to the way things used to be and we certainly should not be taking souvenirs with us to recall older attitudes towards race, gender, sexuality, or nationalism. We need to move beyond the comfort of surrounding ourselves with familiar things (or people) when it comes at the cost of someone else’s dignity. On paper, this sounds obvious, but it can be harder for people to let go of things than it sounds.

Michael Saler

Throughout the book I was aware of how personally invested you were in many of the issues you explored, just as you analyzed the emotional import of these issues to the individual creators; your Epilogue made this explicit. Each chapter of the book was in some ways a mise-en-scène of your own preoccupations over a lifetime of reflecting on how mass culture is used to create and recreate personal and social worlds.  How would you relate this book to Textual Poachers, in terms of the evolution of your own thinking about these or other issues?

Henry Jenkins

You are very perceptive. This is in many ways my most personal book, even if I withheld autobiographical details for the introduction and conclusion. Each of these artists spoke to me because I recognize something of myself in their work. We are fans and collectors of many of the same things, which is part of what gives me the knowledge set to be able to address the meaningfulness of the objects they represent in their comics. 

We do not always relate to those materials in the same way -- I already flagged the differences in how Emil Ferris and I experienced monster culture, say -- but having had those experiences, I recognize what she is talking about.  You can, for example, see bits of my early work on variety performance traditions (What Made Pistachio Nuts?)  creep into my discussion of Alice in Sunderland, for example. My childhood experiences as a white southerner growing up in a segregated Atlanta during the civil rights era shaped how I responded to Bayouand especially the ways that he evoke Br’er Rabbit.. The past few years has required me to work through traces of the Lost Cause ideology that I did not know I still had. The issue of going through your parent’s stuff after they die -- as part of the process of letting go -- speaks to me on an immediate emotional level and can not help but inform what I say about C. Tyler, Roz Chast, and Joyce Farmer. 

But you asked specifically about Textual Poachers. I pointedly have not written about the fan as collector until recently. I lacked a conceptual model to discuss this aspect of fandom. It came too close to the critiques of commodity culture or fetishization that fans are often implicated in. I spent time in dealer’s rooms at cons, but I did not write about them. But with this book, I offer an implicit defense of collecting as a form of memory management, media-making, and self-fashioning. I talk about Kare, the protagonist of Monsters, in terms of her appropriative and transformative use, concepts that come straight out of fandom studies. I reflect on Seth’s self-representations in relation to the stereotypes I identified in Poacher’s opening chapter and yet I find myself more forgiving when these tropes are deployed through self-representation, rightly or wrongly, and see comics as a space where fans are at least sometimes represented in sympathetic terms. I am not a Beatles fan, let alone a pre-teen girl, and yet I recognize the anticipation, the social rituals of fandom as Carol Tyler shares his experiences in Fab4Ever; I read them in relation to Barbara Ehrenreicht et al’s analysis of Beatlemaniaas the start of a sexual revolution for women. I discuss Birmingham and subculture theory in relation to Tyler’s fights with her father over her adoption of his old military garb as part of her counter-cultural identity in A Soldier’s Heart.

I am not sure I can sum it all up, but I kept stumbling into my earlier writing as I was doing this book.  In some ways I must be feeling old, because it does have an elegiac quality, as if I were summing up my life’s work. But, have no fear -- I’m not dead yet. I am hard at work on another book, which is if anything even more personal, since it deals with the cultural experiences of the Baby Boom generation, structured around texts which meant a lot to me as a child. And in some cases, being the packrat I am, I am writing my analysis using the battered copies of Dr. Seuss that my parents gave me to read as a child -- not quite first editions, but early editions. So, behind the scenes, my collection is still going to be very much in display in this book.

Interviewers

Ichigo Mina Kaneko is a PhD candidate and Provost’s Fellow in Comparative Media and Culture at USC. She holds a BS in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU and was formerly Covers Associate at The New Yorkerand Editorial Associate at TOON Books. Her research focuses on disaster and speculative ecologies in postwar Japanese literature, comics and cinema.

William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film and Transmedia at Bournemouth University. He is the co-editor of the books Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Matthew Freeman) and the award-winning Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception (with Richard McCulloch). William is a leading expert on the history and theory of reboots, and is currently preparing his debut monograph on the topic for publication, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia for Palgrave Macmillan. He has also published widely on a broad array of subjects including Batman, James Bond, Stephen King,  Star Trek, Star Wars, and other forms of popular culture. William is also co-editor on the forthcoming edited collection Horror Franchise Cinema (with Mark McKenna) and he is associate editor of the website Confessions of an Aca-Fan.   

Michael Saler is professor of history at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches modern European intellectual and cultural history. He is the author of As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (Oxford University Press, 2001); coeditor of The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford University Press, 2009) and editor of The Fin-de-siècle World (Routledge, 2015). He is currently working on a history of modernity and the imagination.

Comics & Stuff: The Interviews (3 of 4)

Michael Saler

The relations among history, memory and nostalgia are major concerns in comics by Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, Jason Lutes and many others. Your own explorations of graphic novels tends to highlight their fluid, multidimensional and open-ended nature, but do you find that contemporary narratives continue to risk forms of reification and closure despite their metafictionality? I’m thinking about Seth, who in effect has reified himself as a person, perhaps inadvertently – can Seth ever take off his hat and tie? Has he, like the characters he represents, become a captive of his his possessions and nostalgic yearnings?

Henry Jenkins

Each of the authors you identify here raise their own questions -- several of them are folks I considered writing about in this book, but let me bracket them and focus on Seth, who I do write about. 

You are absolutely right that in some ways, Seth has turned himself -- his living persona -- into a caricature who seems to have stepped directly off the pages of his graphic novels. He talks about his persona, his lifestyle as being  one of his creative projects. He represents a kind of dandy-ish self-fashioning which serves to situate him in the mid-century world that his characters want to get back to. And this certainly makes it easy to recognize Seth’s self-representation in his graphic novels, whether he acknowledges the connection or not. He constructs himself there as a sensitive soul for whom nostalgia borders on mental illness. 

You are absolutely right that in some ways, Seth has turned himself -- his living persona -- into a caricature who seems to have stepped directly off the pages of his graphic novels. He talks about his persona, his lifestyle as being  one of his creative projects. He represents a kind of dandy-ish self-fashioning which serves to situate him in the mid-century world that his characters want to get back to. And this certainly makes it easy to recognize Seth’s self-representation in his graphic novels, whether he acknowledges the connection or not. He constructs himself there as a sensitive soul for whom nostalgia borders on mental illness. 

As I suggested in my analysis, some of these representations of fans and collectors would offend me in other contexts. Yet, there is a sense that Seth owns these stereotypes. They are representations of self and not others. They are understood from the inside and not the outside. They are sometimes self-parody and sometimes self-pity. If the character seems overwhelmed, the artist is still showing his mastery in finding a way to express these relationships through his work. I am really fascinated by the ambivalence he shows towards his own community and by the ambivalence he arouses in me as I look at these otherwise stereotypical constructions.  Is he possessed by his possessions? Almost certainly, but part of what makes the meta-text dizzying, is that he knows—and expects us to know—that he is possessed by his possessions.

William Proctor

I am a massive fan of Bryan Talbot’s work, ever since I was first introduced to his work in ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ in the British weekly science fiction comic 2000AD (which remains one of the last survivors of the UK comics collapse of the late-1980s and early-90s). Nevertheless, I was stunned when you informed me that you’d be exploring Talbot’s magnificent Alice in Sunderlandfor Comics and Stuff back in 2013 when we first met, principally because I was born-and-bred in Sunderland, and couldn’t get my head around how you would interpret the city (once the biggest industrial town in England, but now a pale shadow of its former self, thanks to the Tory/ Thatcher government of the late-70s and throughout the 80s). As you recount in Comics and Stuff, you and I visited the Talbots, and went around many of the sites represented in Alice in Sunderland. We also visited the museum, which at the time had a focus on the mining heritage that has now disappeared (again, courtesy of Thatcher and the Tories). I am very interested in your impressions of Sunderland, coming from a radically different national context yourself. Was it quite an alien, discombobulating experience?

Henry Jenkins

Well, as I’ve shared before, the first time I read this book I had a crisis of faith mid-way through when Talbot suggests that perhaps Sunderland doesn’t exist. I had been taking it on faith, never having heard of Sunderland before, and not bothered to look it up on a map, and I was drawn by Talbot’s account by the historical and literary richness of this place I had never heard of. 

Talbot’s device of the one “fake story” in the sealed envelope encourages us to question what we are reading. But his account uses Sunderland as a microcosm for all of the great movements of British history, going back to the Age of Reptiles, and finds a way to link in such a broad array of culturally significant works of art, literature, and media. 

Having had this lapse of faith, I needed to ground my reading of this book in reality, I wanted to trace some of the routes Talbot takes in the book which is, among other things, organized by his character’s movements through space. As for the town itself, it was not “alien” or “discombobulating,” but it is a very British place, representing a different kind of Englishness than what motivates Anglophile trips to Londontown or Oxford. I had already been to Birmingham, Manchester, Blackpool,and Liverpool, all of which evoke a more working class view of British life, though each is better known in America than Sunderland. Regardless, I had a blast and was much appreciated of what you and the Talbots were willing to share with me of the place.

William Proctor

You describe Talbot’s Alice in Sunderlandas “a hypertext in printed form.” What do you mean by this?

Henry Jenkins

I was trying to get at the way that the book is structured through associations and digressions, that it works on multiple levels simultaneously and that on different readings I have tended to favor one level over another. Is it about local history and geography, national culture, the nature of death and decay, the cultural status of comics, an account of how Lewis Carroll was inspired to write Alice in Wonderland or a case for a multicultural Britain, among just a few of its core themes and structures? All of the above and much more. And that’s why it might be interesting to reconfigure the content to trace through the various strands.

Talbot is insistent that he does not feel that the story would work in hypertext because there is a deep logic to the sequence in which things unfold and that giving readers total freedom to move through links across its pages would result in a less satisfying dramatic form. I can see that and I ultimately bow to his claims about his own text. But I have had so many students, who are studying how to craft interactive stories, say that they learned a ton from following how he leads readers from place to place, thematically, temporally, and geographically, all at the same time.

In the context of the book, I end up discussing it in relation to three Victorian era practices which also rely on an aesthetics of accumulation—the cabinet of curiosities, the music hall, and the collage. Each seems more appropriate, in the end, for talking about how Talbot draws on forms of storytelling appropriate to the context where the core events of this pictorial essay occurs.

Michael Saler

You discuss the “enchantments” of material culture and of collecting (highlighted by the work of Kim Deitch, Bryan Talbot and Emil Ferris) as well as their “disenchantments” (highlighted by Seth and Chester Brown) and conclude on an ambivalent note yourself: “Sooner or later, our stuff will engulf us.” You show that ambivalence is innate to collecting, just as complementaries are intrinsic to sequential art. How might the disenchanting aspects of collecting be challenged by digital culture, with the cloud as the ultimate repository of things? Might we be more willing to let go of the material object as we become accustomed to thinking of existence in virtual as well as material terms? And might there be a fundamental “manna” to tangible objects that virtual representations will never have: have collectibles become our secular reliquaries?

Henry Jenkins

One of my points of entry into the book was Will Straw’s writing about the new forms of historical consciousness that we find in digital spaces. He was arguing that people there can gather around a particular bit of cultural real estate, assemble information, contest theories, share finds, build archives and encyclopedias, and so forth. I traced this through in terms of the 1939 New York World’s Fair (another shared obsession) and its relationship to the forms of Retrofuturism which informs Dean Motter’s work. And I got the ultimate fanboy honor—Motter chose to run a version of that essay in his graphic novel, Terminal City.  I ended up not writing as much about Straw’s work in Comics and Stuff, but I think his ideas about historicity shadow the argument of the book. If we think of communities who gather around and make meaning from meaningful objets, then networked communication is a huge asset for such relationships.

That said, as a collector, I want to own things, especially media, which is probably the primary focus of my collecting.  On one side of my desk is a wall of comics—including some of the earliest comics I read—and on the other wall are DVDs. As a child, I used to lay awake at night and imagine which movies I wanted to own, assuming scarcity in a world of celluloid prints. Each selected film was precious. Now I am a completist. I have all of the surviving works of Alfred Hitchcock (and am starting on Alma’s films). I have been collecting the films of John Ford, Frank Capra, The Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin… I believe anything is better in a boxed set. I don’t want to trust the cloud or more importantly, some streaming service to provide my access—“on demand”—to such materials. They are not really “on demand” when they are on the streaming services one day and gone the next month. And the same thing happens on YouTube for different reasons -- a collector posts some rare film one day, then the next time you look for it the film’s gone because the owner got a take-down notice. I dig the idea of the “infinite jukebox” -- I really do -- but it is a long way from being a reality and until it is, I want to own these things. And getting deeper into the psychology of the collector, I want to display them. I am about at the limits of this -- until now, I have kept all of the DVDs in their boxes but I am running out of shelves and need to find a more compact way to house some of them if my collecting habits are going to continue.

So, yes, in some senses, the digital changes the context of collecting from a solitary to a more networked relationship and it gives us access to things we could never find before. In the book, I contrast the responses of Seth (who values the search as an adventure) and Kim Deitch (who starts many of his stories by buying things on e-Bey and then starting to trace their secret origins through systematic research). The two express the ambivalent response of the collector to the changes digital media is bringing to their lives. But few collectors are ready to trade access for ownership any more than I do.  And so far, we are talking about mass produced items. Add scarcity to the mix. Add uniqueness and historical significance to the mix. Add what Walter Benjamin called “aura.” Add the connection of this object to a loved one (as Joyce Farmer or Roz Chast are discussing). And we want to own the thing itself -- not just look at it on our computer screen. I want toownthe school bell that my great grandfather used to call his students together. I want to ownmy father’s copies of the Pogo books. And I do. The problem is that the more my expertise grows and my interest expands, the more things I must own and I am running out of space.

Interviewers

Ichigo Mina Kaneko is a PhD candidate and Provost’s Fellow in Comparative Media and Culture at USC. She holds a BS in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU and was formerly Covers Associate at The New Yorkerand Editorial Associate at TOON Books. Her research focuses on disaster and speculative ecologies in postwar Japanese literature, comics and cinema.

William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film and Transmedia at Bournemouth University. He is the co-editor of the books Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Matthew Freeman) and the award-winning Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception (with Richard McCulloch). William is a leading expert on the history and theory of reboots, and is currently preparing his debut monograph on the topic for publication, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia for Palgrave Macmillan. He has also published widely on a broad array of subjects including Batman, James Bond, Stephen King,  Star Trek, Star Wars, and other forms of popular culture. William is also co-editor on the forthcoming edited collection Horror Franchise Cinema (with Mark McKenna) and he is associate editor of the website Confessions of an Aca-Fan.   

Michael Saler is professor of history at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches modern European intellectual and cultural history. He is the author of As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (Oxford University Press, 2001); coeditor of The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford University Press, 2009) and editor of The Fin-de-siècle World (Routledge, 2015). He is currently working on a history of modernity and the imagination.

Comics and Stuff: The Interviews (2 of 4)

Michael Saler

You state, “I hope to contribute a new conceptual and methodological vocabulary for thinking about graphic novels.” Many of the categories you explore – material culture, collecting, nostalgia, history and memory – are the explicit focus of the “graphic novels” you analyze so insightfully. How might your approach help us to revisit the superhero comics that have been studied in more traditional ways? Given Lee and Kirby’s own penchant for self-referentiality and nostalgia, for example, how might The Fantastic Four be understood using the insights you provide inComics and Stuff?

Henry Jenkins

Let me be clear that I am not an expert on Kirby, Lee and the Fantastic Four. I am not the person to do this work. But let me point in the right direction. We might start with Kirby’s extraordinary splash pages, which are, like the work of Harvey Kurtzman or Will Elder which I discuss briefly in Comics and Stuff, are great examples of scanability in comics. Often, theyare focused on actions occuring across the full space of the page. We generally would look at this panel in terms of Kirby’s dynamism, the kinetic force of Captain America smashing through the door. What happens if we decenter our gaze and focus on the bricabrac being thrown about here? Some of it is fairly generic, other parts of it are pretty distinct and on further focus, become points of interest in its own right. Are these objects we could trace across the book? Do they accrue meaning and significance for the character or for the author? Do they help us map the world where the comics take place?  Or are they artistic flourishes? 

We might also think about the whole phenomenon of Kirby-Tech which I reference in passing in Comics and Stuff: the idea that Kirby adds lots of details to his design of certain mechanisms and technologies, which helps make them seem more concrete to the reader. Here, we see an example from The Fantastic Four. See I did get there. Yet, these technologies seem designed for the quick impression and they become less plausible (but more fascinating) if we study them closely. They operate differently say that the details I discuss in relation to Bryan Talbot’s Grandville universe, where he has carefully worked through a steampunk future occupied mostly by anthropromorphic animals. I use this page as an example in Comics and Stuff. The more we study the details here, the more the world comes to life for us, though also, the funnier his play with anthropromorphism becomes.

Finally, I find myself thinking about those moments where we see the superhero as collector. I am thinking about Superman with the bottled city of Kandor, which always fascinated me as a kid, or the various objects gathered in the Bat Cave and the Hall of Justice. Some of these things have history -- point us back to specific stories, some of them are fascinating yet are given no backstory. What’s striking is how consistently some of these details (The giant Joker card, the oversized penny, the dinosaur, in the case of the Bat Cave) surface across generations of writers and artists, suggesting that they emerge from the mythology surrounding the character but do not reflect the personal obsessions of their artists.  And that would be one way to shift the focus of meaningful objects -- towards a study of what the superheroes themselves hold onto from their adventures, why these objects and not others, and how we come to accept these objects (bizarre as some of them may be) as recurring background details.

I am not sure I got at all the parts of your question, but as I said, there are others out there who are more immersed in the analysis of Jack Kirby’s work than I am. As for Stan Lee, I used to say—every comics fans should here him talk once. 

William Proctor

On page 3, you casually throw in the term ‘auteur’, as if it is axiomatic and requires no explanation. What do you think of the problems associated with the term—thorny concept that it is—and how might it apply to comics given that the term originated in film criticism? Do you believe that graphic novelists deserve the auteur appellation while mainstream comics writers do not? What impact does this have on the cultural distinctions identified above?  

Henry Jenkins

Let’s be clear -- the auteur theory originates in film but it’s really just the French term for author and that discourse goes back a lot further in relation to books. So the most simple claim is that graphic novels, like other books, have authors, and in the case of most of the books I discuss inComics and Stuff, the writer and artist is typically the same person making some of the counter-arguments about film auteurs -- that film is a deeply collaborative medium -- less convincing here. 

Accepting the concept of the auteur is part of the Faustian Bargain -- all arts which have gained cultural respectability have had to make claims about the author or the artist as part of the price of admission. In comics, such arguments go back at least as far as “The Good Duck Artist” (i.e. Carl Barks before he was named) or perhaps Lynn Ward, as he lent his cultural reputation to graphic storytelling or Winsor MacCay and George Herrman when they were celebrated by Gilbert Seldes. In other words, like it or not, that ship has sailed many decades ago.

I also would point out the ways that the auteur critics helped to elevate many popular genres, such as the western, the musical, the melodrama, and the film noir, which had previously had some disrepute, just as contemporary comics creators are actively insisting that we pay more attention to children’s comics or horror comics or early comic strips. That was really the parallel I was trying to make here. And the auteur critics were interested in moments where the artist was at war with their material, that is, the places where the artist expressed themselves through their reworking of commercial genre conventions and within studio constraints. Again, the parallels with the struggles over, say, authorship within superhero comics produced by the two big brands seem strong. 

That said, I also draw on the mise-en-scene critics, such as V. F. Perkins, who said we should pay attention to how characters got defined through the details of their setting, an approach that seems especially well directed towards my focus on comics and stuff.

William Proctor

You observe that the term ‘graphic novel’ is ‘problematic.’ Roger Sabin has written that the term was ‘an invention of publishers’ public relations department’ that sought to ‘sell adult comics to a wider public by giving them another name: specially by associating them with novels, and disassociating them from comics’ (Sabin 1993, 165). What are your thoughts on the genre being named ‘comics’ and do you think its association with humour and ‘kid’s stuff’ is the primary reason why comics have remained in the cultural gutter for so long in the US? 

Henry Jenkins

Let’s accept that the term, graphic novel, is a marketing phrase but also part of Spigelman’s “Faustian Bargain,” allowing the curators, educators, and critics to call this something other than comics and thus allowing them to have a face turn in their relationship to the medium. (Not to be pedantic, but comics is a medium and not a genre, as Scott Mccloud has demonstrated, and that’s why I think the problematic reputation of superhero comics has to do with the genre and not comics per se.) 

Douglas Wolk says that what distinguishes comic books and graphic novels is “the binding.” But I make the case in my book that the nature of the binding matters -- comics were going to be treated as trash as long as they were published on cheap paper that was not meant to last beyond a few readings and thus disposable. The fact that graphic novels are now bound in hardcover and meant to reside on library shelves for decades represents a significant change in status. The fact that they were perceived as a children’s medium and thus something that people “outgrew” does not help, nor did it help that they were perceived as targeting the “semi-literate” rather than understood as tapping multiple literacies. As I outline in the introduction, many things needed to change before comics achieved the cultural status at least some graphic novels enjoy today.

William Proctor

It is fascinating that the differences you illustrate in commercial terms between top-selling mainstream comics (or in the vernacular, ‘floppies’) compared with graphic novels (and to a lesser extent, trade compilations). As you state, comparing single issue sales, which are distributed to comic specialty retailers, with graphic novels on the New York Times best-seller list and “a different pattern emerges.” What do you think this teaches us about the market?

Henry Jenkins

Comics sold in speciality shops and graphic novels sold in bookstores are appealing to two different audiences: there’s almost no crossover between the top selling titles in the two markets. Superhero comics still dominate the Diamond List (with limited room for other genres); the openness to other genres grows as we look at bound compilations sold through the direct market and then the tide shifts towards more realism and autobiographical, historical or journalistic stories once we get to the bookstore circuit. And it’s worth noting that in most cases, bookstore sales swamp direct market sales, just because they are reaching a larger audience. This is the paradox: ‘alternative’ comics now outsell “mainstream comics.” As comics become graphic novels, there is a tendency to shed their relationship to the pulp genres from which they originated and to move towards the kinds of literary genres that appeal to bookish people. The graphic novels which get taught in Literature classes or get nominated for book awards follow the genres and narrative tropes, get evaluated by the same criteria, as the other works that are receiving this same recognition. We can go back to what I said about Fun Home -- as good a book as it is, there are places where it seems to be pandering to the hit Literature professor who wants to add a splash of color to his Freshman survey class.

Ichigo Mina Kaneko

I’m really interested in how you discuss collecting as a material practice but also a “structure of feeling,” drawing upon the work of Raymond Williams. Many of the comics you look at feel very intimate in both their storytelling and the stories they tell, conveying relationships to things in intensely personal ways. Do you think comics as a medium allows for particular intimacies to emerge between artist and reader? Are comics inclined toward certain “structures of feelings”?

Henry Jenkins

I do not think comics as a medium are necessarily inclined towards certain ‘Structures of Feelings’. We need only look at the fairly significant shifts in the tone of superhero comics through the years to see that even within a given genre, comics are more responsive to shifting structures of feelings within the culture at large. But it is quite possible to see something shared across a certain school of comics at a particular historical juncture. 

That’s the whole point of Williams’ concept: the culture shifts in ways that are hard to describe, but which we feel, we recognize, and we respond to. A certain affect becomes part of how we remember a historical moment and link together works across artists and perhaps across media. 

For many of these collector artists, there is a certain nostalgia for the past -- a longing for older things, even as there is often a critique of the historical context that gave rise to those objects in the first place. We can see both Seth and Kim Deitch as dealing explicitly with those conflicting feelings as they relate to the popular culture of the early-to-mid-20th Century. They are drawn to the aesthetics of that period, yet they are clear they would not have liked to live during that era. The result can be a certain shame or pathos which gets expressed in some of these works. Seth depicts himself as crippled by his longing for a lost era, where-as Deitch depicts himself as drawn to conspiracy theories and occult speculations as he seeks truths about the past that can no longer be recovered.

A different kind of sadness surrounds the passing of the prior generation which impacts the works of Carol Tyler, Joyce Farmer, and Roz Chast and for Tyler in particular, there is a recognition of the toxic damage the “greatest generation” brought in their path because of their unprocessed, “bottled up” feelings from the war. And finally, these same older materials produce a kind of existential dread that runs through Jeremy Love’s Bayou, since there is no place for a black author in that world, even through acts of nostalgic imagining. He has no longing for that era, even as he reproduces it beautifully in his work. So, it is hard to put this structure of feelings into words, except that it has to do with working through our feelings for the past, a sense of belatedness perhaps, often masks a sense of distaste for the current moment and an aftertaste of disenchantment.

Interviewers

Ichigo Mina Kaneko is a PhD candidate and Provost’s Fellow in Comparative Media and Culture at USC. She holds a BS in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU and was formerly Covers Associate at The New Yorkerand Editorial Associate at TOON Books. Her research focuses on disaster and speculative ecologies in postwar Japanese literature, comics and cinema.

William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film and Transmedia at Bournemouth University. He is the co-editor of the books Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Matthew Freeman) and the award-winning Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception (with Richard McCulloch). William is a leading expert on the history and theory of reboots, and is currently preparing his debut monograph on the topic for publication, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia for Palgrave Macmillan. He has also published widely on a broad array of subjects including Batman, James Bond, Stephen King,  Star Trek, Star Wars, and other forms of popular culture. William is also co-editor on the forthcoming edited collection Horror Franchise Cinema (with Mark McKenna) and he is associate editor of the website Confessions of an Aca-Fan.   

Michael Saler is professor of history at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches modern European intellectual and cultural history. He is the author of As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (Oxford University Press, 2001); coeditor of The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford University Press, 2009) and editor of The Fin-de-siècle World(Routledge, 2015). He is currently working on a history of modernity and the imagination

Comics & Stuff: The Interviews (1 of 4)

My newest book, Comics and Stuff, was released last month by New York University Press. Creating this work—my such solo authored book since Convergence Culture—was a labor of love, done over many years, on time borrowed from other, often more pressing projects. As I release the book, I wanted to shift the microphone here—first, to William Proctor, the blog's Associate Editor, and also to two colleagues and thinking partners, Ichigo Mina Kaneko and Michael Saler—who were among the book's first readers. Over the next week, they grill me hard about various aspects of comics and stuff. Coming soon: An announcement of the schedule for a Zoom Book Club coming up in Zoom, where you will have a chance to ask me questions in real time and where a range of other comic scholars who influenced this book, one way or another, will come, hang out, and share their thoughts about comics and other stuff.

Henry Jenkins

William Proctor

What first attracted you to the concept of 'stuff'? Why do you think the comics medium is especially insightful as a lens with which to analyze our 'stuff'? 

Henry Jenkins

This project was started in a bass-ackward fashion. I was invited to propose a digital book concept to the Annenberg Innovation Lab, and I saw an opportunity to explore what comic studies might look like in an interactive book context. I wanted to respond to several challenges in comics studies: first, the problem of reproducing comics for analysis in a book whose format was often smaller than the original publication venue and where it was often too expensive to reproduce color images. This desire led me to focus my initial thinking around questions of mise-en-scene, which is under-emphasized in current comic studies in favor of sequentiality and breakdown. 

I started to make an initial list of graphic novels that spoke to me, that had been neglected by other scholars, and that lent themselves into this mode of analysis. As the project continued, I would abandon some artists from that initial list and pick up others, but the core of that list shaped the final book. (If any one is curious, I ended up publishing an essay on Spigelman’s In the Shadow of No Towersas a stand-alone essay and still have hopes to publish other essays -- one on Dylan Horrack’s Hicksvilleand Sam Zabell and the Magic Pen  and one of Ben Katchor with a focus on The Cardboard Valise. Maybe someday. Anyone editing an anthology where they might fit?). 

My vision was to release a series of stand-alone essays about different comics artists, one per month, which would be assembled into a single work when they were completed, much as a series of monthly floppy comics might come together to form a graphic novel or in the case of C. Tyler’s A Soldier’s Heart, a series of graphic novels might be gathered into an omnibus. By this point, I was jokingly calling the project, Comics and Stuff. I had my title before I really knew what the book was going to be about. In the end, it proved too difficult to achieve a digital book with the properties I imagined but I clung to the impulse to generate a book around this corpus of materials. 

In a playful mood, I did a search one day on Amazon for books about “stuff” and found Daniel Miller’s Stuff, which utterly fascinated me, and it was in reading that book that the core concept started to take shape for me. I am a pack rat bordering on hoarder so the problem of stuff has personal significance to me. I had written an essay some years back about Dean Motter (Mister X, Terminal City), nostalgia, retrofuturism and the collector mentality in comics. 

Otherwise, I had never written about collecting despite writing much about fandom through the years and this project offered me a chance to dig into collecting more deeply. And the more I read Miller and outward from him to others (such as Bill Brown) the idea of looking at literary texts in relation to material culture started to grow on me. I was struck by the fact that such scholarship was becoming more common in literature and art history but had not really crossed over, at that time, to the study of popular culture. So,  all of this led me deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole, looking at still life painting and other genres that throughout media history had encouraged a focus on material practices and everyday life.

The final key element came when I was in residence at Microsoft Research New England and the team there asked me about comics as stuff. And that was when I recalled that I had already written about comics as stuff for Sherry Turkle’s book, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. In the end, it seems like my route to Comics and Stuff, no longer a gag title, was over-determined, but it seemed fairly random at the beginnings of this process.

In the end, the book put forward four main propositions: 

●     Stuff is used to refer to material objects and the emotional investments we make in them, which translates them into our possessions.

●     Comics are stuff, once disposable, now more highly valued, and the struggles over their enduring value inform the artist’s perception of themselves as collectors and inheritors.

●     Comics depict stuff through their mise-en-scene and such details reflect the artists’ world views in important ways.

●     Comics narrate our relations with stuff and the central narratives deal with collecting and inheritance, though the book also explores the recurring theme of material objects (especially toys) being brought to life.

William Proctor

 In the opening to the book, you address the ‘Faustian deal’ articulated by Maus creator Art Spiegelman regarding the legitimacy of comics in recent years. Where do you think the medium stands now in reference to comics-as-art? How does this attitude compare with, say, France, where comics (or bande dessinèes) have been viewed as ‘Le Neuvième D’art (the ninth art) since at least the 1960s? It may be surprising to some that France are the second-highest producer of comics in their different forms, with Japan in pole position, and the US in third place. In addition to the examples you give, Sabrina by Nick Drnaso became the first graphic novel to be nominated for the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, and March: Book Three by Andrew Aydin and John Lewis about the Civil Rights Movement won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2016. We can see how cultural distinctions within the medium continue to persist, as well as outside it. The history of comics “as trash” seems to remain for certain comics, while others have been elevated to the status of art. Do cultural distinctions exist for superhero comics, for instance? What maintains these distinctions and do you think they’re helpful? 

Henry Jenkins

For me, personally, I think the battle to establish graphic novels as a legitimate art form has largely been won in the Anglo-American context. It may not be as well established an art form here as in France. Some would describe it as a middle brow form of expression here, but the kind of signifiers you describe above have helped to shift its status. 

 Superheros may be an exception, but they are not the only one: right now, the exceptions are defined by genre and thus not dependent on individual artists and their output. The same bias is attached to Superhero films, even if we’ve now seen Black Panther and Joker get best picture nominations. Again, it has to do with the genre elements which seem alien to a segment of the critical and curatorial community.  

But, this takes us back to what makes legitimation a “Faustian bargain.” Respectability comes at the potential price of losing some of the pop vitality of the form,  respectability comes with the loss of some of the disreputable and transgressive elements, which is part of what led us to love comics in the first place. Spigelman’s Mausseems to deftly play them against each other -- the funny animals attracting readers who would not be invested in a holicaust narrative and vice-versa. On the other side, I struggle with the literary pretensions of something like Alison Bechdel’s Fun House (at the risk of making a controversial hot-take) where-as the Broadway version was less invested in embracing cultural hierarchies. I’d like Fun House more (I do like it) if Bechdel was less determined to impress me with her good taste. Remember Charlie the Tuna: We want tuna that tastes good, not tuna with good taste. 

So far, the Superhero comic’s primary bid for cultural respectability has come through self-criticism so that Watchman has the best claim to having succeeded at the “Faustian Bargain” Spiegelman describes. The recent television series took the superhero genre elements towards historical reconstructionism (the Tulsa bombings) and political satire, allowing it to receive a high degree of critcal praise. The Oklahoma Department of Education has now added the Tulsa bombings to the state history standards off the back of its evocation in Watchman. And Watchman was just nominated for a Peabody Award which recognizes “stories that matter.” It is not the first superhero series to be so recognized—Jessica Jones previously was acknowledged by the Peabody Awards, again a superhero story that matters because of that Faustian deal between social import and pop culture vitality.

Ichigo Mina Kaneko

As you describe in your book, comics are embedded in practices of collecting in part because they themselves were historically ephemeral objects not meant to last. With comics becoming a more durable medium that has begun to form something of its own “archive,” how do you envision comics’ relation to “stuff” shifting? How might the formation of something like a “comics archive” or “comics canon” influence the way these collecting impulses appear in comics moving forward?  

Henry Jenkins

I personally am reluctant to see things solidify into a comics canon though there is a very good chance that something like that may be happening. I would be happier with a more expansive notion of a comics archive. The sense of rediscovering interesting and forgotten comics is part of what really excites me about the current moment. It’s great that we are seeing so many older comics put back into print again in hardcover editions that are meant to last, showing respect for outstanding works from previous generations of creators. I love having access to such beautiful editions of Gasoline Alley, Pogo, Barnaby, Little Nemo in Slumberland, Krazy Kat, Basil Wolverton, Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder,  and so much more. But a canon is about what gets excluded as much as it is about what gets included.  I like inhabiting a world where different comics artists are pimping for their predecessors, trying to get us to pay attention to something they think matters, rather inhabiting a world where -- like contemporary literature departments -- a handful of authors and their works dominate the discussions. 

The fact that so many of the artists are collectors of older paper materials contributes to the focus on stuff in their books. So many of the things they draw exist in the real world -- the artists are showing their possessions (and their obsessions) to the world! There’s a thin line in many cases between collecting comics and collecting movie stills or old records or old toys (as Kim Deitch suggests) or mid-century modern bric-a-brac (as Seth shows us). I love that Carol Tyler still has her pre-teen diary of going to a Beatles concert which she can draw on for her latest graphic novel or that Mimi Pond geeked out on our podcast about napkin holders, silverware, and coffee-makers she recalls from her years working as a waitress in an coffee house.

I corresponded recently with Joyce Farmer about the Klu Klux Klan figurine she depicts near the end of Special Exits. She shared, “I gave the 9" plaster statuette of the Ku Klux Klan figure to my son with a careful explanation of how I got it and that it probably belonged in a museum of African-American history. He found it too strange to display in his home and it ended up on a shelf in his garage. After some sort of verbal altercation with his wife about either the statue or me (or both) his wife smashed it on the garage floor, thus ending up in the garbage.” I learned this too late to include it in the book but somehow I was tickled to know what happened to this particular object that appeared in one highly memorable panel.

I have digressed away from your core question here. Insofar as canons create a shared language, a set of meaningful references, things which artists can assume most people know, it may allow artists to shorthand certain ideas and push into new territories. Insofar as canons set limits on what we read, a canon may deter experimentation and exploration of older materials. I am not that worried though, because comic artists are an eccentric and cantankerous lot; they tend to march to their own drummer and they tend to love to debate the merits of old comics. They do not have the herd mentality of the average literature professor.

William Proctor

What encouraged you to exclude more mainstream comics from your analysis? Are there any examples of material culture—‘stuff’—in superhero comics, for instance? 

Henry Jenkins

Almost certainly, though there will be differences in how it functions there.  I borrow from art history a distinction between Megalographic  (“the depiction of those things in the world that are great -- the legends of the gods, the battles of the heroes, the crises of history) and  Rhopographic works (“the depiction of those things which lack importance, the unassuming material base of life.”) 

Curiously, for art historians, the Meglaographic was historically the domain of great art, while the still life (a classic example of the Rhopographic) tended to be dismissed as humble or domesticated art. In comics, the superhero comic has many elements of the Megalographic  (the epic battles, the god-like characters) but has contributed to the medium’s disreputability where-as the turn towards more realistic depiction of everyday life has been part of what has given it artistic status. And in depicting everyday reality, these graphic novels ground themselves in details from our material culture. 

I am interested in the ways Paul Chadwick’s Concrete uses such details in a superhero context. These two illustrations show the contrast it establishes between an interest in the interior spaces associated with its characters and a fascination with the natural world, both rendered with great attention to details. My copies of the books are at the office right now and thus out of reach so I am limited to what I can find scanned on the web. In the early chapters,  rather than mask his identity, Concrete (and his government handlers)  decide to saturate the media with his story, resulting in compassion fatigue and disinterests. Here, many frames show pop culture artifacts in the background that reflect this media strategy, and there’s something to be explored about the celebrity of the superhero through these commodities. 

In later stories, we see many details of the natural world, including animals in their burrows, details the characters do not notice but which also exist without regard to Concrete’s actions. This is part of a systematic interest in environmentalism throughout Chadwick’s work, culminating in a series of issues centered around more radical forms of environmental justice activism such as spiking trees. These details often serve to decenter the superhero from his own narrative,contributing to the anti-heroic perspective this comic takes towards the superhero narrative. We might see the artwork as drawing more or less equally on the still life and landscape traditions. I am passionate about Chadwick’s work within the superhero genre and beyond and hope to write about it someday, though even this is from an alternative rather than mainstream superhero title. 

I would love to see other examples of how the model of analysis Comics and Stuff offers might work in relation to superhero titles. The challenge there is that for most contemporary artists working for the big two the pressure to crank out pages results in a lack of time to fill in the kinds of environmental details that intrigue the alternative writers I discuss. And the collaborative nature of their output -- that is, the separation of artists and authors means there is often less space for anyone’s personal worldview as a collector, say, to enter the picture. I love superhero comics. I hope readers can point to some good examples there worth exploring more fully. Or perhaps stuff there plays different roles I just have not considered yet. I will certainly offer a No Prize to anyone who shows me the gaps here.

Interviewers

Ichigo Mina Kaneko is a PhD candidate and Provost’s Fellow in Comparative Media and Culture at USC. She holds a BS in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU and was formerly Covers Associate at The New Yorkerand Editorial Associate at TOON Books. Her research focuses on disaster and speculative ecologies in postwar Japanese literature, comics and cinema.

William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Comics, Film and Transmedia at Bournemouth University. He is the co-editor of the books Transmedia Earth: Global Convergence Cultures (with Matthew Freeman) and the award-winning Disney's Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion, and Reception (with Richard McCulloch). William is a leading expert on the history and theory of reboots, and is currently preparing his debut monograph on the topic for publication, Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia for Palgrave Macmillan. He has also published widely on a broad array of subjects including Batman, James Bond, Stephen King,  Star Trek, Star Wars, and other forms of popular culture. William is also co-editor on the forthcoming edited collection Horror Franchise Cinema (with Mark McKenna) and he is associate editor of the website Confessions of an Aca-Fan.   

Return and Renewal: Star Trek: Picard (3 of 3) Djoymi Baker & Roberta Pearson

Pearson

All of this discussion about the characters and their backstories raises the issue of how well the producers addressed that dilemma of attracting a new audience with new characters. What is the difference between fans like us who know the storyworld and the characters, and a new viewer who has to work harder to understand the rules of the storyworld and for whom the characters will not have that very strong emotional resonance that they have for us?

Baker

It’s an interesting point, whether viewers can connect with the Picard if they’re not already familiar with those characters, whether it’s Seven, or Riker and Troi, or even Picard himself. Brad Newsome gave a review as a non-Star Trek viewer, saying the pilot episode hooked him in regardless.

If you go to Rotten Tomatoes and you just glance over the stats for reviews of the season, the first episode gets 100% but by the finale it goes down to 59%. I’m wondering with a new viewer such as Newsome, who initially felt they had an entry point into this narrative world they had not been familiar with, whether they continued to feel part of the journey.

You’ve written about this with Messenger Davies, that there are often many scenes across the Star Trek franchise where you need that backstory to fully understand what’s going on at least in terms of the way characters are interacting with one another.

Pearson

I think you do. Characters, I argue in the Star Trek book, are constructed through a narrative function, a constellation of traits, a setting and their relationships with other characters that inform who they are and how they act. That’s why I think it’s so hard to reinvent a character like Picard, if you take away his narrative function of command, take him out of his normal setting of the starship and take away all his old crew. His essential character traits and behaviours still remain – he continues to be a man of great moral integrity and high principles, he still drinks Earl Grey tea (although now the decaf version) and he still quotes Shakespeare, although not until the final episode. But the absent Enterprise and the absent crew inevitably make him a different character to the one whom we got to know through seven seasons of TNG. In the second episode, when Picard has determined to return to space in search of Bruce Maddox he tells his Romulan caretakers that he has deliberately not called on his old crew to accompany them because he knows that they would agree and that helping him would cause trouble for them. However, as mentioned above, the narrative arc of the first episode is to re-establishes his narrative function as a commander – that’s why it’s so thrilling in the final episode to see him pilot a starship for the first time in twenty years. And it gives him a new crew to replace the old. So, it could be argued that the show presents a character who is not Picard, or not Picard as we have known him, at the beginning and by the end restores the character to the one that we do know. But we should remember to discuss the fact that some fans think that the synth Picard is not really Picard.

Speaking of characters, we do have to mention all those returning characters who show up presumably to please the fans, but then get killed. You’ve got Maddox (John Ales), who is killed by Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill), Seven’s adopted son Icheb (Casey King), and Hugh (Jonathan Del Arco). It’s like a slaughter of the backstory characters.

Baker

It’s not just that Seven’s adopted son Icheb dies. Christian Blauvelt, writing for IndieWire, argues that the drilling of Icheb’s eye socket is “probably the most brutal moment ever in any incarnations of ‘Star Trek’”, and suggests it underscores Seven’s transformation into gritty, traumatised vigilante. It’s such a visceral, confronting scene.

More broadly, Variety argues Picard “is different from its predecessor in nearly every respect – texture, tone, format, production value, even the likelihood of characters dropping an f-bomb”. People’s responses to that shift in tone have been pretty varied. Fan Tina C. writes, “The violent, dark, dystopian, vulgar hellscape they’ve supplanted is not Star Trek”.

This is part of a bigger shift, though. As Andrew Lynch and Alexa Scarlata point out in a forthcoming chapter in Science Fiction Television and the Politics of Space, adult science fiction on subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services is shifting the genre into grittier terrain than their broadcast equivalents, including the Star Trek franchise. Bryan Fuller, creator of Star Trek: Discovery, acknowledges there’s a tricky balance to be achieved between the more adult content possible on CBS All Access and the desire to maintain Star Trek’s “younger viewers”.

If we look at parental advisory sites such as Common Sense Media, the parental backlash to both Discovery and Picard suggests many feel that balance has not been achieved: “Now I can't even watch it with my kids… Wish they would had kept it family friendly”. These are adults who want to bring children into the world of Star Trek by watching it with them together as a family. It’s worth noting that for the most part these are parents who enjoy Picard themselves, but lament the shift of the franchise from family to older teen/adult viewing. For others, a Star Trek that is not family friendly is “not Star Trek” at all.

In my Star Trek book, I’ve written about how TOS was initially misconstrued (and summarily dismissed) as a children’s program when it first aired, primarily because serious science fiction television was associated with drama anthologies, while the cheap space operas of the 1950s had been pitched at children. It was only in its final season that reviewers were engaging with Star Trek as serious intergenerational fare that dealt with contemporary social issues in science fiction guise. TNG more deliberately targeted the family audience by making the Enterprise a family spaceship, to the notable discomfort of Picard, and through the inclusion of young Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton).

While Picard’s showrunner Michael Chabon has defended the dark turn of Picard by saying Star Trek always reflects the time in which it is made, it is worth remembering the significant cultural unrest in the 1960s when TOS aired. As such, Stephen Kelly argues that “the idea that the grittiness of shows such as Picard makes it mature and relevant, while the ethos of yesteryear Star Trek is now naive or too old-fashioned to survive, feels misjudged. The hope, optimism and sincerity of the original 60s series was in itself a radical act”.

All the same, by the end of season one, Picard brings a peaceful resolution by affirming the values that the Federation appears to have abandoned, and Riker seems to bring Starfleet to its senses in backing Picard.

Chabon suggests “the space we found for Picard is not ‘dark Federation’” – which makes me think of Blake’s 7 (1978-1981) – “It’s one of people who live and work at or beyond the margins of the Federation who travel beyond its boundaries”. But is it also beyond the boundaries of family fare? Certainly, I was disappointed in this regard.

Pearson

When the Science Museum in London had a Star Trek exhibition back in 1995, Máire Messenger Davies and I distributed a questionnaire to visitors asking why they were visiting. There were grandparents bringing their grandchildren in order to introduce them to the franchise. So, this comes back to what audiences CBS is targeting, is it the old audience or the new audience? That could be seen as a failure in both Picard and Discovery, because what you want to do is precisely to cultivate an intergenerational loyalty – think of Disney, or Star Wars – they want it to be passed down the generations, and yet if you put in either too much sexual or violent content, that’s hard to do.

Baker

If you want a franchise to survive over decades and generations, you have to repopulate that fan base.

Pearson

However, what CBS is intending to do as a franchising strategy is having a range of programs for different demographics, with an animated series aimed at a younger audience. Increasingly with transmedia products within a franchise, they’re trying to target different audiences with different content. This seems to be what CBS is now going to do with Star Trek and wanting to proliferate the number of series they’re producing.

Baker

The kickback some of the fans who are parents or grandparents is that they don’t necessarily want their kids watching a separate Star Trek, and I feel that way too. I want new Star Trek we can watch together and then chew the fat together afterwards as well.

Pearson

That speaks to what is television, in that television became increasingly fragmented with the proliferation of cable and then the streaming services which clearly target multiple niche audiences. Netflix does have family versions of horror and science fiction to watch together, so it’s trying to address that audience.

Baker

Yes, one of my current research projects, with Jessica Balanzategui and Diana Sandars, looks at the darker science fiction, fantasy, and horror content on Netflix that’s nonetheless pitched at a family audience under the genre tag “Family Watch Together TV”. It’s still a really controversial strategy because trying to get that balance right between something that’s edgy enough for adults to enjoy but not so creepy that your youngest child can’t sleep at night is really tricky. For example, the Lost in Space (2018-) remake and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (2019 -) both come under that umbrella on Netflix and are rated TV-PG in the United States. Of course, when those shows come up on a parent’s feed, it will often be sitting next to a creepier show at a higher classification, so you may well click there next into even darker content.

Pearson

When I think of family science fiction viewing here in the UK, I think of the reinvented Doctor Who (1963-1989, 2005-), which was designed precisely for that intergenerational audience. It was broadcast in the early evening when children would be able to watch with the family. I remember there were complaints about content that wasn’t suitable for children in Doctor Who because it was very much marketed by the BBC as family viewing.

Going back to the pandemic, which inevitably we must these days, I was reading in The Guardian how the viewing of terrestrial, broadcast television has really increased during the COVID-19 crisis, because people want to watch TV together, they want comforting television. There’s a show over here called The Repair Shop (2017-) about repairing old items which is now apparently a big hit because everybody’s watching it together.

Baker

It comes back to the old-fashioned water-cooler TV, so you can watch things together and discuss them at the same time, in the same week. As much as we’ve said that Picard is very much informed by the new Netflix-era streaming era, it was still released on that week-by-week drip feed, to try to reinstate that water-cooler moment, so you felt that if you wanted to be in that conversation, you had to be watching it at the same time.

Pearson

That’s very interesting in terms of the strategy – whether you drop all the episodes at once or you space them out as in the broadcast era. I find myself getting frustrated because I know they’ve got all the episodes, so why aren’t they giving them to me? Why do I have to wait?

Baker

We’ve become newly enculturated to watching episodes back-to-back in one or more “epic viewing” sessions, as I call it in The Age of Netflix. Our expectations have changed.

Pearson

On the other hand, what are the pleasures of television? The pleasure of the weekly drop is that you have more time to contemplate, you do have time to get caught up in that ongoing conversation. After both Discovery and Picard, I would read all the recaps, I would look to see what the fans were saying, and I found that very helpful because the storytelling is so intense that I think you need the collective intelligence to help you figure out what the hell is going on and what you might feel about it.

Baker

I find that very interesting, because it’s an amplification of what was around even in the 1950s with early television, when they did some studies that said prediction and anticipation were key pleasures of TV watching, particularly with serialised stories. It’s talking to other people before the next episode drops which is part of the fun. So even though we're in a new era, doing the weekly drop is re-instigating something that’s been there since the very beginning of TV, that pleasure/pain of anticipation, making you wait.

Pearson

Yet I also want to know what’s going to happen, so I want to binge. With Better Call Saul (2015-), I decided I would wait until all the episodes dropped before watching.

Baker

Everyone’s got so used to that way of viewing, that it’s too frustrating to watch it bit by bit.

Pearson

But after binging Better Call Saul I don’t know if I will have the energy to then read recaps and reviews the way that I would if I had watched week by week. So, it’s a question of which pleasure you prioritise. Do you want the time to reflect and read and talk to other people, or do you want it all at once?

Baker

Then that has flow on effects, because if you’re waiting, there are certain places online you can’t go.

Pearson

Exactly, this came up with my Facebook feeds around Picard. I hadn’t watched the final episode of Picard, because it dropped just as we went into lockdown. I had a friend coming over every week and we were cooking dinner and watching the weekly episode of Picard together, and then occasionally we FaceTimed with her sister in Israel to discuss it afterwards. We were very much treating it as appointment television.

When the final episode dropped in lockdown, I really didn’t want to watch it without my friend coming over. It became symbolic of all the things we were losing in our lives. Then another friend said I might not want to watch it if I was feeling delicate. I was feeling very delicate at that point! So, I waited for a long time. That meant I would just have to very quickly scroll past everything in my Facebook feed that related to the finale, because I hadn’t seen it yet. But you can’t avoid reading the headlines!

Negotiating television is much harder than it used to be in terms of viewing practices and preferences because of choices about binging or watching individual episodes as well as decisions about which streaming services you want to subscribe to. CBS All Access used both Discovery and Picard to drive subscriptions in the United States, successfully it seems. Internationally the shows appeared on Netflix and Amazon. I signed up for both platforms because I had to watch new Trek shows.

Baker

Some of my friends who are also Star Trek fans thought they had too many subscriptions already and were waiting for all the episodes of Picard to drop, so they could watch the entire season in a free trial period.

Pearson

Will the next step be bundled streaming packages?

Baker

At this stage that seems inevitable, unless some of the providers fold before then. When there are TV shows that everyone’s talking about and you’re supposed to be watching them, but they’re all on different providers, it’s just unsustainable.

Pearson

Even if their price point is low, if you have several subscriptions it's going to add up over the course of a year. It points to the importance of the flagship program that attracts new subscribers to streaming services.

Baker

I probably did what Amazon wanted me to, which is that I signed up specifically for Picard, and then I found The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel (2017-) and The Man in the High Castle (2015-2019). The industry logic is that you have these flagship shows, and then ideally, it’s the rest of the catalogue that keeps you there.

Pearson

I think that’s true, but they have to have enough in the catalogue to keep you in there. Mrs. Maisel, The Man in the High Castle, also Transparent (2014-2019), these were the shows that were getting the buzz, and I felt out of the conversation around those shows so like you started to watch or plan to watch them.

Here in the UK, Discovery is on Netflix, but Picard is on Amazon. Why might CBS’s international division make that call? There’s so much to research around this from both an industry and an audience perspective.

And now content will start to dry up with the impact of COVID-19 on the industry. I presume production on Picard season two has now been delayed. Will the streamers be able to turn out enough new flagship shows to drive subscriptions and then maintain those viewers?

Baker

There will come a point when no new content is coming through, and those streaming services with the stronger catalogue will be in a better position to survive.

Thinking about Picard season two, we really need to discuss that finale. Picard is now both an XB like Seven and a synth like Soji (Isa Briones), but without her additional longevity and non-human capabilities because apparently – as fan Legate Damar argues – “anybody who knows Picard knows that Picard wouldn’t want any of that”.

Pearson

What’s the average life span of a human in the twenty-fourth century? Having gone through all that, wouldn’t he want a younger body and more time? I’d be perfectly happy to adjust to a new body!

Baker

I had to go and look it up. In the TNG pilot, Doctor McCoy (DeForest Kelley) is 137, which would potentially give the 94-year-old Picard another 43 years without his neural condition. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean McCoy’s longevity is the ‘average’, and he’s pretty frail.

Pearson

And Picard asks, “Ten years? Twenty years?” So, he does want at least some more time.

A related question is if they could download Picard, why couldn’t they download Data (Brent Spiner)?

Picard wakes in his synthetic body

Baker

I had to watch it again to see if I could figure that out, and even then, I had to go online and see whether anyone had a reasonable explanation. According to Chabon, the idea is that this Data is an incomplete “simulated reconstruction”.

Pearson

There’s also a practical problem, in that 71-year-old Brent Spiner said ages ago that he couldn’t keep playing Data because he’s ageing, and an android isn’t supposed to age. In Picard, you see the real Spiner in the character of Dr Altan Inigo Soong and then you compare him with Data, and you can see the make-up and post-production work and lighting to make those scenes work.

Baker

As well as the publicity photos, where you can see him in make-up but before the CGI.

Brent Spiner and Patrick Stewart relax between takes

Pearson

I found the idea that one positronic neuron from Data could be used to make Soji and Dahj quite implausible. That being said, I bought Data as the same character as he had been in TNG. The speech patterns were the same, the facial expressions were the same. To see Picard and Data together even in the dream sequences was very emotionally resonant.

If we’re thinking about the primary arc of the season being Picard’s redemption and resurrection, it’s not only that he feels he has to redeem himself with regard to the Romulans, it’s also because of his guilt over Data’s sacrificing himself for Picard in Nemesis. Picard is able to come to terms with his guilt by having a chance to say goodbye to Data. Data then becomes an important element of Picard’s narrative arc.

Baker

I thought the dream sequences were beautiful, partly because we see Picard’s regret over Data’s sacrifice.

Pearson

I loved the dream sequences, especially the first one in which the two play poker, since that harks back to TNG. Although have to say that fans thought that Data’s holding five queens in his hand would become an important plot point and it didn’t.

Deceased Picard and Data

Baker

I feel sorry for Data, though, in that it’s unclear whether he’s been experiencing the real passage of time, on his own, in a grey room. It seems like a sad place for him to have been after making that sacrifice. No wonder he wants it to end.

Pearson

The scene where they terminate him is very touching, and it does give Picard a chance to quote Shakespeare again.

Baker

This brings us to whether the synth Picard who farewells Data is still really Picard. As fan SilenceKit puts it, this raging philosophical “debate is the point”. By not resolving the existential issues around Picard II, the finale leaves an open space for everyone to talk about it between the seasons before they are (hopefully) unpacked when the series returns.

If he’s quoting Shakespeare and making speeches, that seems pretty Picard!

Pearson

Absolutely! That comes back to my theory of character. I'd be inclined to argue it is Picard. He’s got all his memories, he’s quoting Shakespeare, he looks and sounds like Picard. He’s doing all the things Picard should do.

The interesting thing in the second season will be if he has glitches, if there are things he doesn’t remember, or if he behaves uncharacteristically.

Baker

Although I wonder if that will make season two a little too like Dr Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) over on Discovery (albeit in a different context and without ‘killing your gays’ along the way)? We have two cases of a character coming to terms with being in a new body.

Pearson

At the beginning of the season, Picard gets the news about the abnormality from Dr Moritz Benayoun (David Paymer), who served with him on the Stargazer, which was a nice touch. But we knew that Picard wasn’t going to die because by the time the first season dropped, the second season had been greenlit. As soon as it becomes clear that the season is centred around synths, that’s the obvious solution. The downloading into the synth body comes as no surprise. There’s also preparation for this in his discussions with Dahj in which he reassures her that she is indeed as real as he is. So, Picard himself will probably believe that he is the real Picard.

Baker

It poses a potential Altered Carbon (2018-) scenario. They've strategically made the new Picard mortal, but if knowledge of this technology goes public, anyone without those moral qualms will want to download themselves and live forever.

Pearson

My assumption is that there’s only one synth prototype. Picard says to Soong that he’s sorry to have taken the synth body that Soong had intended for himself. But if there was a successful prototype, they could roll it out.

Baker

I felt there was an inference that Maddox may have been needed, but it wasn’t clear.

There are some practical plot holes in the finale but also some incomplete philosophical issues that are raised. I hope that they don’t drop the ball on all of those in season two, that they actually do something with them.

Pearson

Beyond those first two episodes, which introduce the Picard character, I was as confused as anybody else as to the overall plot.

Wherever it goes, Star Trek always needs to reinvent itself for each new period of TV. It gets reinvented not just in industrial terms but also in ideological terms because it has to reflect the time in which it’s being produced.

If people say Picard isn’t Star Trek, what do they want? Do they want every new series simply to replicate TOS? Does it have to be Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the universe? As I point out in our book, writers like Ron Moore were contesting Roddenberry’s view of the Star Trek universe in terms of the lack of conflict among characters because they found it too constraining. You can’t preserve Trek in amber.

Baker

It brings us back to nostalgia. There’s a pleasure in returning to our favourites, but deep down we all know that it has to move to on, for cultural reasons, for industry reasons. People won’t watch it in if it’s an exact replica. They might think they will, but TV has simply changed too much over the years.

Pearson

A franchise can’t survive on just the core fan base. It has to pull in other viewers.

Djoymi Baker is Lecturer in Cinema Studies at RMIT University, Australia. With a background in the television industry, she writes on topics such as streaming, genre studies, fandom, and myth in popular culture. Djoymi is the author of To Boldly Go: Marketing the Myth of Star Trek (2018) and the co-author of The Encyclopedia of Epic Films (2014). Her current research examines children’s television and intergenerational spectatorship.

Roberta Pearson is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is the co-author of Star Trek and American Television (2014), editor of Reading Lost: Perspectives on a hit television show (2009) and the co-editor of several titles including Storytelling in the Media Convergence Age: Exploring Screen Narratives (2015), A Critical Dictionary of Film and Television Theory (2014) and Cult Television (2004).