Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination

Case Studies of Creative Social Change

Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781479873029
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change

One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against.

Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions.

A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.

PART I

How Do We Imagine a Better World?

Before you can change the world, you need a vision of what a better world might look like—this is the primary function of the civic imagination. Essays in this section consider different narratives through which publics identify what they are fighting for and what they are fighting against.

Science fiction writers have long thought about their works as “thought experiments,” as encouraging readers to discuss potential futures, speculating beyond what was currently known. Recently, designers have begun to consider science fiction world-building as a means to prototype alternative directions for their work. Writers and practitioners such as Brian David Johnson (2011), Julian Bleecker (2009), Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell (2011), and Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (2013) have advocated for the use of critical design, speculative design, and “design fictions”—scenarios or prototypes that allow users to imagine future technologies and the contexts within which they might be used. They argue that such “design fictions” anticipate how technological change shapes—and is shaped by—social, cultural, and political change and how desired technologies depend on implicit assumptions about the people who might use them.

Drawing on his experiences on large-scale Hollywood film productions such as Minority Report, production designer Alex McDowell (2015) envisions a methodology of critical speculative design that imagines future worlds and the peoples and systems that inhabit and sustain them. Through his World Building Lab based at the University of Southern California, multidisciplinary and geographically dispersed teams collaborate to explore the potential repercussions of developments such as climate change while making room for fantastical elements such as giant flying whales. They collectively generate social action narratives that often go beyond familiar story arcs, recognizing the multiple points of entry for imagining change. Engaging in critical speculative design helps center concerns about agency, privacy, and inclusion that might otherwise be overlooked.

Following a similar logic, science fiction has become a battleground as different groups demand a voice in how the future is represented. William Lempert (2015), for example, has documented how Native American, First Nation, and Aboriginal peoples use science fiction as a means of contesting the frontier and settler mythologies that run through so many space operas: “By assuming that Native peoples are not just relics of the past, but have as many complex cultural and political futures as Western societies, Native sci-fi has the potential to help reimagine the assumptions that inform the social and policy treatment of contemporary Indigenous peoples.” Curtis Marez (2016) similarly considers what he calls “farm worker futurism,” alternative conceptions for the economic and social arrangements sustaining agribusiness that emerged from those seeking to organize farm workers for collective action. One recent anthology, Octavia’s Brood (Brown and Imarisha 2015), created as a tribute to the legacy of Octavia Butler, assembled science fiction stories by, for, and about social movements: “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction. Organizers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another world, or many other words—so what better venue for organizers to explore their work than science fiction stories” (3). The visions that emerge in these debates are often contradictory and polyvalent. Michael Saler describes them as “contingent”; they cannot be reduced to classic utopias and dystopias. Minority writers in particular struggle to think through how their communities might fit within the genre vocabulary of speculative fiction as it has evolved since the pulp magazine era in the early twentieth century: their narratives reflect their ambivalence about whether they will be allowed a meaningful future, whether they can redefine the society in which they currently live or escape and build a new world for themselves elsewhere.

Science fiction imagery surfaced often at feminist protest marches against Trump in 2017. On the one hand, the image of Princess Leia from Star Wars was newly revitalized by the character’s digital reconstruction in Rogue One and had gained greater cultural resonance following actress Carrie Fisher’s death. Her heroic posture of holding a blaster evokes a utopian possibility for women: “A woman’s place is in the resistance.” On the other hand, a number of women adopted the restrictive dress of the Handmaids from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, recently adapted into a television series for Hulu. This dystopian narrative reminds participants of the stakes in their struggles against greater restrictions on women’s reproductive rights.

Several of the essays in this section explore the politics of speculative fiction. In chapter 1, William Proctor focuses on the alt-right backlash against Star Wars and other media properties for what some perceived as “politically correct” messages. Here the push to imagine more inclusive futures was seen as having gone too far, too fast—at least by some white men who felt displaced from and threatened by these new narratives.

In chapter 2, Lauren Levitt considers the growing popularity of dystopian young adult fiction, “mass-market narratives about revolution.” Levitt traces the growing popularity of the Hunger Games series—with its narrative about wealth inequality, government surveillance, and media manipulation—at the same moment that Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign directed attention to similar real-world problems. She explores what happens as activist groups mobilize around such narratives and how market demands smooth away their more radical potentials.

A world can be “better” without being perfect or ideal. We may never reach a consensus about what a better world looks like, and one group’s utopia may be another’s dystopia. But this is what Duncombe means when he describes utopian rhetoric as a provocation rather than a blueprint. In chapter 3, Michael Saler depicts the communities around speculative fiction as examples of what he calls “public spheres of the imagination”—places where ideas are debated, positions are questioned, and people evolve. He shares two stories about the horror and fantasy writer H. P. Lovecraft: The first is about how Lovecraft himself evolved away from a reactionary worldview through conversations with readers and writers who saw things differently. The second deals with how contemporary genre fiction writers, especially those of color, wrestle with his legacy, trying to write their way past the racism, misogyny, and xenophobia they identify in works that have proven foundational to the fantasy tradition.

Of course, speculative fictions are not the only popular genres inspiring debates about what a “better world” looks like. In chapter 4, Taylor Cole Miller and Jonathan Gray narrate the political history of the television sitcom, a genre often accused of offering a nostalgic and sanitized conception of the American family. Yet their account shows how the sitcom has been a contested space, where different ideas about gender, sexuality, race, and class are staged and debated. In the final chapter of this section, Raffi Sarkissian considers award shows as a space where we celebrate what is best in our culture or, more recently, where minority winners counter prevailing narratives within popular media. Tracing the 2016 award show cycle, he demonstrates how acceptance speeches called attention to struggles over representation, moving beyond personal success stories to consider systemic constraints on whose stories are told.

1

Rebel Yell

The Metapolitics of Equality and Diversity in Disney’s Star Wars

William Proctor

Since Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012, the Star Wars saga has been a lightning rod for political quarrels and conflicts. On the one hand, the three Star Wars films that Disney has produced so far—The Force Awakens (2015), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), and The Last Jedi (2017)—have each been critically championed for enacting positive shifts in representation, opening up the imaginary world as an ideological space for inclusion and equality through new characters played by a culturally diverse cast as well as an increase in female actors. On the other hand, a small band of rebels asked audiences to boycott Disney’s Star Wars in order to resist such shifts by attacking (what they saw as) a significant uptick in politically correct entertainment. Indeed, the reemergence of the Star Wars film franchise has been paralleled by the ascendancy of the so-called alt-right, “an amorphous, ideologically diffuse, and largely online movement,” which has grown into “an umbrella term for white supremacists, MRAs [men’s rights activists], neo-Nazis, white tribalists, and other ideological groups” (Heikkilä 2017, 2). Whether for progressive or reactionary ends, a battalion of digital commentators tapped into the Star Wars civic imagination by voluntarily enlisting as soldiers in the new culture wars being fought across the battlefields of the internet, with social media platforms functioning as “public spheres of the imagination” (Saler 2012).

This is not the first time that Star Wars has been a hotbed of political antagonism. In 2005, Revenge of the Sith was criticized by members of Patriotic Americans Boycotting Anti-American Hollywood (PABAAH) for promoting anti-Bush rhetoric, the most offensive element being a line spoken by Anakin Skywalker, at this point descending rapidly to the dark side, to Obi-Wan Kenobi: “You’re either with me or you’re my enemy.” For dissenters, this was clearly a pop at Bush’s War on Terror, when the POTUS stated unequivocally, “Either you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists.” In fact, George Lucas made no secret of the film’s political analogies and promoted the film as a commentary on the War on Terror and US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. In response, PABAAH attempted to mobilize a boycott of the film via available online channels prior to the ascendancy of Twitter and other social networking services. But if box office receipts are an indicator of a film’s success, it failed to spark anything much beyond mainstream ridicule. Writing for the Guardian, John Sutherland (2005) mocked the boycotters of the right as “hilarious,” drawing on other campaigns, such as one by the American Family Association that protested Disney’s The Lion King “on the grounds that Timon the Meerkat and Pumba the Warthog were inter-species homosexual lovers.”

On Twitter, the first hashtag campaign directed at Disney’s Star Wars allegedly occurred in December 2014 following the release of the teaser trailer for The Force Awakens. The inclusion of black actor John Boyega in Stormtrooper uniform reportedly led to the hashtags #boycottStarWarsVII and #BlackStormtrooper becoming trending topics on Twitter. As I have written about elsewhere (Proctor 2018), many news outlets claimed that the hashtags were used to promote virulent racism, and the media drew from Twitter as source material for a bevy of news reports. The hashtag #BlackStormtrooper, it was argued, had been created specifically to protest Boyega’s involvement in the film. However, the hashtag had been created in 2010 to publicize Donald Faison’s LEGO parody Black Stormtrooper. Across social media, there were fannish arguments about the genetic makeup of Imperial Stormtroopers and, in particular, the way in which Boyega’s racial identity raised significant questions regarding Star Wars canon. In Attack of the Clones (2001), Jango Fett (played by Polynesian actor Temuera Morrison) provides the genetic material for the creation of an army of clones. The main canonical issues pivoted on comments and queries relating to Jango Fett’s race, perhaps best exemplified by one commentator who tweeted, “Pretty sure the galaxy is patrolled by bad ass Polynesians” (quoted in Proctor 2018). Other commentators marshaled textual evidence from a variety of sources that demonstrated that Clonetroopers and Stormtroopers are, in fact, different kinds of soldiers: the former grown from the genetic soup of Jango Fett and the latter recruited from civilian populations.

Similarly, the hashtag #boycottStarWarsVII rapidly became a trending topic on Twitter. However, it was the welter of news media reporting that catapulted the hashtag into prominence, not the social media platform itself. The website Mashable employed social media analytics firm Fizziology to scrape the hashtag and provide quantitative data centered on racism within the thread as well as robust challenges from the twitterati. According to the data, 94 percent of comments were critical of the hashtag, with 6 percent being “racist trolls trying to get people mad” (Dickey 2015). As with #BlackStormtrooper, the discussion around the hashtag mostly attracted antiracist comments, many of which were hostile themselves, perhaps signaling that Twitter is, in the main, a left-leaning platform. What is impossible to determine is whether progressive tweets were acts of “virtue signaling” to draw attention to liberal politics as a bid for cultural capital or if the cacophony of invective directed at an imaginary and imagined community of fan racists was also the work of trolls. That said, there has certainly been an escalation of right-wing pushback within and across a variety of other digital spaces, especially those Adrienne Massanari (2015) describes as “toxic technocultures,” such as Reddit, 4Chan, and the men’s rights activist website Return of Kings (ROK).

Following the theatrical release of The Force Awakens in December 2015, ROK published opinion pieces on how the film was nothing more than “social justice propaganda” within which women are granted power that they could never obtain in the real world (Brown 2015a). Although new character Rey, played by Daisy Ridley, was largely celebrated across news media as “a game-changer,” “a feminist-punch-in-the-air moment we’ve all been waiting for” (Carvelas 2016), and “a female Jedi that kicks ass” (S. Cox 2015), ROK writer David G. Brown singled out Rey but also criticized other female characters, such as Captain Phasma, who “is given command of the First Order’s elite Stormtroopers but has the same biology as in our world where no woman has ever passed the Marine Corps’ Infantry Officer Course” (2015a).

Contextually, ROK is an online hive of scum and villainy composed of what can only be described as misogynist, reactionary, antifeminist, and antifemale content. Articles include non-ironic titles such as “Seven Ways Women Are Just like Abandoned Dogs” (Sharpe 2017), “How Toxic Femininity Turned Men into Tranny Chasers” (Jones 2017), and “Why Are So Many Women Sluts?” (Sebastian 2016). Created by misogynist Daryush Valizadeh—who goes by the pseudonym Roosh V—ROK is a container for right-wing propaganda, often marshaling falsehoods such as Brown’s astonishing claim that the boycott of The Force Awakens was triumphant, costing Disney $4 million in box office receipts only four days after its theatrical release. If true, then that would account for just 0.21 percent of $2 billion, the global box office tally, which is hardly indicative of a meaningful impact. But of course, it isn’t remotely true, and even a cursory glance at Brown’s methodology and his claim that ROK contains “balanced critical reporting” should cause scholars to twitch and squirm (Brown 2015b).

The first Disney spin-off movie, Rogue One, also attracted the ire of right-wing commenters in the months leading up to its theatrical release, with a spate of racist articles and another hashtag campaign (#dumpstarwars). In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory, Rogue One screenwriter Chris Weitz tweeted the progressive message “Star Wars against hate. Spread it” above an image of the rebellion insignia with a safety pin attached—a signifier of solidarity with immigrants, refugees, and other exploited parties that was first used in the wake of the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and adopted in the United States following the election. Others responded by calling out Weitz for dressing the franchise in political robes: “Just let Star Wars be Star Wars,” said one early commenter. In response to another follower who said, “I’m with the empire,” Weitz tweeted, “Please note that the Empire is a white supremacist (human) organization.” To this, writer Gary Whitta added that the Empire is “opposed by a multi-cultural group led by brave women.”

These comments served to inflame members of the so-called alt-right, with both sides playing a game of social media volleyball between interpretative and ideological communities, striking abusive comments back and forth across digital platforms. Recognizing that Weitz’s and Whitta’s tweets had provoked an angry backlash from Trump supporters, Disney CEO Bob Iger attempted to calm the fracas, claiming that Rogue One “is not a film that is, in any way, a political film. There are no political statements in it, at all. [Rogue One] has one of the greatest and most diverse casts of any film we have ever made and we are very proud of that, and that is not a political statement, at all” (Galuppo 2016). Iger’s insistence that Rogue One is not political “at all” had more to do with appealing to multiple audiences by attempting to paratextually neuter the movie’s politics in order to promote it as nonpartisan and ideologically agnostic, “a film that the world should enjoy.” As the Hollywood Reporter’s Tatiana Siegel (2016) argued, “What Disney and Lucasfilm might not be thrilled about is that a Trump ‘Empire’ versus [Hillary] Clinton ‘resistance’ narrative might alienate the 61-million-plus voters who backed the real estate mogul, a group too large to ignore when a company is in the tent-pole business. . . . In the Trump age, if the right-leaning media can help tip a presidential election, it’s reasonable to assume it can impact grosses.”

Moreover, right-wing voices protested Disney-Lucasfilm for allegedly ordering expensive reshoots so as to add anti-Trump messages to the film. This rumor—set in motion by right-wing troll Jack Posobiec, who tweeted that “Star wars [sic] writers rewrote and reshot Rogue One to add in Anti Trump scenes calling him a racist”—gained traction across various news media pl...