Global Fandom: Camilo Diaz Pino (Chile/New Zealand)

My interest in fan studies in particular first came from necessity: I was trying to understand the industrial impact of Japanese cartoon media flows in Latin America’s media production cultures. I had for a while been able to get a good read of these dynamics as they applied to the Anglo-American and European mediascapes by looking at a combination of industrial phenomena and lay media discussions, as well as through textual analyses of Western creative works influenced by Japanese and other East Asian media. When it came to the impact of similar flows of Asian media in Latin American popular cultures however, audience and fan dynamics suddenly became much more central to the discussion. Most of what I wanted to understand was happening away from the “mediated center” (to borrow Nick Couldry’s terminology - Media Rituals: A Critical Approach , London, Routledge, 2003, pp.41) represented by media industries, news coverage and the emergence of anime-influenced Western works. Anime and Japanese media were indeed having a tangible impact in Latin America’s popular spheres, but this influence was largely latent, and was only legible visible through a different perspective. 

While Latin America’s “otaku” Japanophile fan communities were active in similar ways to those embedded in the Anglo-American popular sphere, there was also a different, wider ¾ and to my mind more pervasive ¾ set of transcultural influences at play. I came to see the dominant analytical frameworks of transnational Japanese media fandom, entrenched as they have been in Anglo-American (and European) understandings, as inadequate for understanding the artform’s impact in Latin America. This was for two primary reasons. The first is concerned with the fact that Japanese media fandom in the Anglo-American sphere necessarily occurs within the wider landscape of the latter’s extraordinary insularity and solipsism. The importation of media from other languages and cultures is an exception in the Anglo-American mediascape, rather than the quotidian reality it represents in Latin America ¾ and the majority of the rest of the world for that matter. Anglo-American (and to a lesser extent, European) anime fans have historically been marked as engaging with objects seen as distinctly foreign, exotic, and often esoteric and/or even transgressive, even as they are often infantilized in their association with cartoon cultures. While Latin American Japanophile media fandoms do share some similar histories in this regard, they are also engaging with media that exists in a field in which foreign media imports are ubiquitous, even and especially now from the wider Asian mediascape, with anime currently coexisting in Latin America alongside Korean and Turkish TV dramas, Indian films, and of course K-pop, which for its part may be seen as having a longer popular history here than in the English-speaking world (For some more detailed discussion of this, see Min W, Jin DY, Han B, “Transcultural fandom of the Korean Wave in Latin America: through the lens of cultural intimacy and affinity space”, Media, Culture & Society. 2019, 41:5, 604-619).

The second factor involves the role of standardized language in Latin America’s (Spanish speaking) mediascape itself. Despite incorporating a variety of national and regional dialects, Latin America’s Spanish-speaking countries are pervaded by a standardized form of neutralized Spanish that is ultimately placeless, belonging only to the wider region’s media itself. This is the language of the vast majority of locally produced TV, radio, and film content aimed at a regional audience, as well as that of the region’s multiple capitals of media importation, redistribution, and dubbing ¾ a process itself which virtually all media undergoes when imported to Latin America through official channels. This process thus has two notable consequences, on the one hand making it so that anime feels less distinctly “foreign” to audiences (not just being spoken in Spanish, but a Spanish that feels like it could be from anywhere in Latin America given its neutrality), but also less distinct from media imported from other countries as well. After all, the same person voicing any given anime character may just as easily be heard as the voice of a Western cartoon character, or even live-action TV shows and films dubbed for Spanish audiences.

The dimensions of Asian media fandom in Latin America I was looking at then were not those of the Japanophile, “otaku”, or even necessarily people who would identify themselves as fans strictly speaking. Rather, I found myself interested primarily in the types of latent social affective relationships people have with media that occur in communal quotidian life ¾ common cultural references, familiar narratives, and shared verbal and iconographic lexicons. For me, what was interesting about anime’s fandom in Latin American popular cultures then was how anime characters, narratives and other references were so easily integrated into both popular culture and “ownership” as it were, to the extent that, for example, any given soccer team merch  sold on street corners (non-official of course) may just as well include Pikachu or Goku as Homer Simpson or Spider-Man (Fig. 1). This syncretic “flattening” of anime alongside Western media into popular control may also certainly be seen in Anglo-American popular culture as well, but Latin American audiences did it earlier, and more integrally. My mother’s family, including her parents and adult brothers, would gather together every Sunday during the original Chilean run of Heidi, Girl of the Alps (Arupusu no Shōjo Haiji) in the late 1970s. And this was not exceptional. Heidi and its anime contemporaries were often seen as appointment television, understood both by distributors and the public at large to exist on the same level as any local telenovela. 

Quotidian dynamics such as these often elide the boundaries of fandom as it is often studied ¾ particularly when discussing media such as anime, which is so often discussed as a disruptive influence, whether it be to dominant media flows (to use the term as coined by Daya Thussu – “Mapping global media flow and contra-flow”, in Daya Thussu (ed.) Media on the move: Global flow and contra-Flow, 2007, London, England: Routledge. 11–32), the “centrality” of Western culture and industries, or as a boogeyman exposing Western children to different standards of violence, sex, and/or sexuality. They can be difficult to study, because their impact is often latent, with the depth of their influence only becoming visible when they are called upon to consolidate wider cultural identities and agendas. My last two publications (“Weaponizing collective energy: Dragon Ball Z in the anti-neoliberal Chilean protest movement”, Popular Communication, 2019, 17:3, 202-218 and “K-pop is Rupturing Chilean Society”: Fighting With Globalized Objects in Localized Conflicts, Communication, Culture and Critique, 2021, tcab047) focused precisely on the latent dimension of Asian media’s integration into Latin American (specifically Chilean) popular imaginaries, and how these are evoked. Both dealt with the ways in which Asian media integrated anti-neoliberal activism in the last decade. In the first case study I looked at how a massive 2011 student-led protest demanding an end to the Chile’s educational privatization used a climactic moment from the anime series Dragon Ball Z to narrativize the collective political agenda and add an element of nostalgic play to the event (Fig. 2).

What was most notable to me about this particular performance was how it both expected and received widespread popular recognition of a very specific narrative moment in this show, which may have indeed been popular worldwide, but which was also clearly intimately understood by the wider Chilean popular sphere to the same extent that something like Star Wars would be in the US. To me this evidenced the depth of this texts’ integration into Chile’s popular imaginary, and by extension the extent to which it can now be seen to “belong” to these popular subjects. My second and most recent work on this topic focusses on the ways in which, in the face of continued and even more wide spread anti-neoliberal dissidence, the Chilean government attempted to externalize the issue and blame Chile’s social rupturing on K-pop as a foreign entity, only to face both widespread mockery and the appropriation of K-pop as a symbol of Chile’s vast, syncretic activist movement. This movement for its part has grown rapidly to embody not only anti-neoliberal reforms, but also incorporates long-overdue feminist, transgender, and indigenous rights agendas. By assuming popular ownership of K-pop music and idols alongside such figures as Pikachu, “Pareman” and “Stupid Sexy Spider-Man” (look him up, he’s great), Chile’s activists are again demonstrating not only the extent to which these objects coexist and comingle in the wider imaginary, but also the ways in which their popular significance is something that can (and should) be participatory in nature, just as much a “collective” resource as ones being debated in the political realm (Fig. 3). 

Camilo Díaz Pino is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at West Chester University. He holds a BA and MA from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research interests include peripheral media flows, activist cultures of the Global South, transperipheral cultural hybridity, emergent production cultures, kids media, and cartoon cultures. His current book project focuses on Japanese media’s history to and throughout Latin America, and how these flows have influenced Asian media’s wider cultural presence in the region’s contemporary popular culture.