Alfred L. Martin, Jr., "Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences" (NYU Press, 2025)

Apr 24, 2025

Alfred L. Martin, Jr., an associate professor and chair of the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Miami, explores the vibrant world of Black fandoms in his new work. He discusses the 'four C’s'—class, clout, canon, and comfort—revealing how these elements shape Black audiences' media experiences. The conversation dives into the interplay of joy and pain in cultural consumption, the complexity of representation, and the significance of nostalgia through beloved shows like 'The Golden Girls.' Martin advocates for centering Black narratives in fandom studies.

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ADVICE

Go Where Black Fans Are

To study Black fandom effectively, researchers must go beyond traditional sampling and find fans where they gather.
Engaging fans directly yields critical insights that cannot be gained through spectatorship alone.

ADVICE

Use Conversational Trust in Interviews

Use conversational style and cultural fluency to build trust in interviews with Black fans.
Employ authentic speech and inflection to bridge gaps between researcher and participants.

INSIGHT

Joy and Pain Dialectic in Black Fandom

Black fandom is a balance of joy in celebration and pain in cultural marginalization.
Fans experience pride but also navigate systemic exclusion and politics of respectability.

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Boldly going where few fandom scholars have gone before, Fandom for Us, by Us: The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences (NYU Press, 2025) breaks from our focus on white fandom to center Black fandoms. Alfred L. Martin, Jr., engages these fandoms through what he calls the “four C’s”: class, clout, canon, and comfort.

Class is a key component of how Black fandom is contingent on distinctions between white, nationally recognized cultural productions and multicultural and/or regional cultural productions, as demonstrated by Misty Copeland’s ascension in American Ballet Theatre. Clout refers to Black fans’ realization of their own consumer spending power as an agent for industrial change, reducing the precarity of Blackness within historically white cultural apparatuses and facilitating the production of Black blockbusters like 2018’s Black Panther. Canon entails a communal fannish practice of sharing media objects, like the 1978 film The Wiz, which lead them to take on meanings outside of their original context. Comfort describes the nostalgic and sentimental affects associated with beloved fan objects such as the television show, Golden Girls, connected to notions of Black joy and signaling moments wherein Black people can just be themselves.

Through 75 in-depth interviews with Black fans, Fandom for Us, by Us argues not only for the importance of studying Black fandoms, but also demonstrates their complexities by both coupling and decoupling Black reception practices from the politics of representation. Martin highlights the nuanced ways Black fans interact with media representations, suggesting class, clout, canon, and comfort are universal to the study of all fandoms. Yet, for all the ways these fandoms are similar and reciprocal, Black fandoms are also their own set of practices, demanding their own study.

Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.

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