Brogdon, Blackness and the BSI: Archiving race in Sherlock Holmes fandom

Philip R. Brogdon is an avid Sherlock Holmes aficionado and the first Black American ever inducted into the exclusive – and predominantly White – Sherlock Holmes society, the Baker Street Irregulars. His small monograph, Sherlock in Black (1995), brings a wealth of archival information and insight into the Black history of Sherlock Holmes fandom, ranging from famous fans of colour to Black fan creators and a history of both professional and amateur fan art, film and music. This article argues that Brogdon’s Sherlock in Black archive provides an important counter-history to White establishment fan narratives popularized by the Baker Street Irregulars and raises important questions about the roles race and identity play in collecting, fandom and identity. How does Brogdon define Black Sherlockian fandom? What did it mean to him, and to other fans, to see this long history of Black Sherlockians in American film and media? What kinds of activities and creations are included? Brogdon’s Black Sherlock Holmes archive illuminates how fans of colour construct their own fan identities and how they see themselves in relation to large, often primarily White, cultural constructs.

Fannish boy: Examining blues fandom through British music periodicals

Before online forums and social media groups allowed spaces for blues fans to share their love of the music, newsletters and periodicals created by blues societies and fans provided outlets for blues aficionados to connect with other fans, discographers, musicians and scholars through performance and album reviews, pilgrimage storytelling, descriptions of recent discoveries of rare sound recordings and much more. The University of Mississippi Blues Archive holds a large collection of blues periodicals, covering over 1000 unique titles, from over 25 countries, with a bulk date of 1963 to the present. Historically of interest to researchers of blues performance history, the collection also contains a wealth of insight to blues fandom and communities of music appreciation worldwide. This article explores pathways for examining blues fandom studies through the newsletter collection and highlights unique issues and perspectives found in the collection.

‘Does anybody have that fic…?’: The fannish reclamation of the circulating library

Associated with frivolous reading and moral repugnance, eighteenth-century circulating libraries provided women and members of the working class easy access to novels. Almost three centuries later, fans who create and own private, file-based collections of fanfiction have reclaimed the circulating library structure. Now used to preserve the very kinds of content Victorian detractors were so against by the communities they feared would be corrupted, transformative fans (mostly women and queer folx) share copies of works from their personal collections to interested readers. These serve the dual function of archiving fic for pleasure on the part of the collector, as well as storing a stable format of the work – one that is less likely to be made obsolete. Because fans do not expect these files to be returned, a private fic collection is therefore not a library at all, but an archive, one that is dependent on individual taste but connected to the community through a network of endless copying, gifting and regifting. Therefore, studying these fic collections not only gives us insight into fannish reading habits over time but also points to strategies of archiving and cultural preservation in the face of technological debt.

From the hobbit-hole: The Lord of the Rings fanzines of the 1960s and archival limitations

This article explores the ways in which fan archives, particularly physical archives of pre-internet fan artefacts, offer a limited perspective of fan participation based on conditions of access to fan community and production means. Using 1960s fan magazines dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy that emerged in the early days of US-based fandom, this research demonstrates that analysis of the content of these fanzines is most significant to fan studies when it considers factors of publication such as who had access to printing materials, funding and the social conditions of the 1960s that would have privileged specific fan voices over others. I argue that archives that fail to take factors such as these into account help to perpetuate notions of acceptable fandom as practised by White fans. The fandom presented in the pages of The Lord of the Rings fanzines, as presented by their political statements or lack of, shows how fandom interests change when fandoms move from heavily concentrated spaces, fanzines, to broader and more accessible spaces such as the internet.

(Don’t) just screenshot it: Ethics of archiving fan misbehaviours

Despite the field of fandom studies’ interest in fan archives and fan behaviours, little work currently discusses how a fan archivist may approach the curation of a fan behaviour-focused archive. While such an archive may be fraught with ethical dilemmas of documenting others without consent, the archival efforts remark on broader cultural ramifications outside of individual works for a more encompassing view of the fandom itself. This article explores the ethics and understandings of such archives, in which fans have, without institutional training or sponsorship, curated archives dedicated to the misbehaviours and harassment of other fans. I conclude with what academics can learn from their ethical approaches.

Institutional collection profiles

Performing research in fan studies, or any other discipline, is difficult if not impossible without access to documentary collections of primary historical documents, including manuscript material, fannish creations such as fanzines, fanvids and filksongs, correspondence, and ephemera. There are a number of institutions across the world that hold these sorts of collections, and here we provide information about a selected few of those open to scholarly research.

‘I want to delete this tweet so much, but…’: Jameela Jamil as a celebrity feminist educator

The ideas of outspoken feminist celebrities are met with scepticism. This scepticism is rooted in the idea that, while celebrities have a platform for expression, they are not academics and their role in education should therefore be limited. This article explores the role of Jameela Jamil, a British, queer actor, and analyses her use of Instagram and Twitter as platforms for education and social change. I argue that she uses social media to teach and learn from her followers regarding body acceptance, racial and sexual inclusivity and queer representation. This work also explores the realities of clapbacks, cancel culture, mistake-making, shame culture and affective solidarity via her use of language, such as through the vulnerable phrase ‘I want to delete this tweet so much, but…’. In positioning Jamil as more than simply a celebrity feminist, and beyond what is considered a normative public intellectual, I assert that she embodies the role of a celebrity feminist educator. This role is unique as it creates space for Jamil’s online feminist activism, her accessible use of language and her desire to teach and learn from her followers to be made meaningful within the context of feminist education and celebrity studies.

Police officer or social media star? Live PD and microcelebrity

This article examines the rhetorical strategies of microcelebrity in the reality TV show Live PD. Live PD is an important text for understanding how police work with the entertainment industry to create selective strategies of self-presentation in the wake of the media challenges posed by the Black Lives Matter movement. It shows how police draw on new media and social media to shape public discourse about police and promote alternative images of police officers. It also shows how police mobilize the techniques of reality TV, fan engagement and social media to respond to emergent crises of police credibility. This article argues that Live PD’s rhetorics of microcelebrity use intimate visual access and fan engagement to create new modes of cultural attachment to police power while also substituting affective sensations of intimacy for substantive demands of police accountability.