Book review

Henry Jenkins, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, and Sangita Shresthova, editors, Popular culture and the civic imagination: Case studies of creative social change. New York: New York University Press, 2020; paperback, $32 (400p), ISBN 9781479869503; hardcover, $99 (400p), ISBN 9781479847204.

[1] In June 2020, K-pop fans flooded the Dallas police department's iWatch app, uploading fancam videos instead of cell phone footage of #BlackLivesMatter protesters as the police department had hoped (Haskins 2020). Later that month, K-pop fans hijacked white supremacist hashtags like #WhiteLivesMatter by flooding them with K-pop content about groups like BTS and Stray Kids, drowning out white supremacist content (Elba 2020). On June 20, 2020, President Donald Trump held a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma; tickets were free, but had to be requested ahead of time. K-pop fans and TikTok users reserved tickets en masse. Trump's team expected more than a million attendees, but they didn't even fill the twenty-thousand-person stadium (Lorenz, Browning, and Frenkel 2020). Later in November 2020, K-pop fans in Thailand raised money for a prodemocracy movement, purchasing supplies for protesters and donating money to cover legal fees (Tanakasempipat 2020). K-pop fans aren't the only fans using popular culture to do civic engagement. Other examples abounded in 2020, including "I VOTED WITH KINDNESS" stickers (a collaboration between Harry Styles fans and the Women's March) and the endorsement of US presidential Democratic candidate Joe Biden by Supernatural (CW, 2005–20) creator Eric Kripke. These are exactly the kinds of cases Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination considers. This is a remarkably timely book and a must-read for our contemporary times.

[2] Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination explores how popular culture intersects with civic action when "cultural practices and materials are deployed toward overtly political ends" (7). The editors advance the concept of civic imagination as one way to enable scholars to examine that intersection. They define the civic imagination as "the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions" (5) and posit that the civic imagination is central to any civic action.

[3] Jenkins, Peters-Lazaro, and Shresthova productively cross disciplinary boundaries in their investigation of the intersection between civic action and popular culture. They frame their project as an investigation of the "political consequences of cultural representations and the cultural roots of political participation" (5). This is an important intervention: political science and political communication often need more cultural perspectives, and media and cultural studies could turn their attention to civic action more often. As an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field, fan studies is an ideal home for this kind of scholarship. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the editors expertly synthesize research from many fields in their positioning of the book in the introduction. Their introduction ties together a wide range of scholars, including social science scholars in political communication like Peter Dahlgren, humanities scholars in literature like Ramzi Fawaz, and education scholar-activists like Paulo Freire. These scholars are not often positioned as being in conversation with each other, but Jenkins, Peters-Lazaro, and Shresthova instead construct that conversation in innovative ways. This is one of the most impressive aspects of the book. The drawback of this interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approach is that the book's disciplinary home can be unclear at times. Does the book take a cultural studies approach to civic engagement, or does it look at a particular kind of civic engagement that deploys media and popular culture in unusual ways? Regardless of its disciplinary home, the intervention the book makes and its interdisciplinary perspective are essential to understanding our political culture.

[4] Cases that blend popular culture with civic engagement are often framed in public discourse as unusual—indeed, this is what makes cases like K-pop activism newsworthy. We imagine the boundary between popular culture and civic engagement as largely impermeable, except in unique circumstances. Yet the essays assembled here demonstrate that these cases aren't unusual at all. In fact, the book offers thirty chapters that each consider a different case study of how the civic imagination is deployed through popular culture. The most impressive aspect of the book is the sheer number and remarkable variety of cases, including brands, civic organizations, dance, theatre, acceptance speeches, poetry, and websites. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination demonstrates that cultural engagement with politics isn't the exception to the rule; it is the rule. This is the book's biggest intervention.

[5] The book is organized into six sections, each one considering a different function of the civic imagination: a better world, the process of change, civic agency, solidarity, collective identity, and place. The editors' identification of the functions of the civic imagination is convincing, but the divisions between the functions seem arbitrary. For example, imagining the process of change also requires imagining ourselves as civic agents. In practice, these functions often occur alongside one another. This is reflected in the case studies as well; readers will find that the chapters discuss not only the function identified in that particular section but also many of the other functions of the civic imagination.

[6] Part 1 examines cases in which citizens envision alternatives to the status quo. Popular culture imagines various versions of the future. Such images then function as resources, feeding back into on-the-ground action of social movements. Taylor Cole Miller and Jonathan Gray's chapter, "Family Sitcoms' Political Front," examines how the family sitcom on television has functioned as a popular cultural resource that both polices and reimagines what families look like in the United States. Miller and Gray identify tensions within the genre as shows like The Simpsons (1989–), Roseanne (1988–96, 2018), and Black-ish (2014–) push against a much longer conservative history of the genre. Ultimately, as Miller and Gray note, "the domesticom attempts to reimagine the genre and its families as key resources for a similar reimagination of American politics, of who belongs, and of its rules and norms for gender, sexuality, class, race, and power" (67).

[7] Part 2 examines the process of social change: "How do citizens get the skills and resources necessary to enact the social change they imagine?" (77). One chapter that expertly examines the processes of social change is Elisabeth Soep, Clifford Lee, Sarah Van Wart, and Tapan Parikh's "Code for What?" These authors tie together two parts of the process of social change: skills and agency. They question the ethics of the "code for all" movement emanating from Silicon Valley and some education activists. Soep, Lee, Van Wart, and Parikh argue that "code for all" produces classes where "we end up teaching code for code's sake" (91). In place of "code for all," the authors invite teachers and activists to ask instead, "code for what?" Drawing on examples from the YR Media Innovation Lab like the mobile app Know Your Queer Rights, the authors argue that when young people envision their own projects, code has the potential to drive equity.

[8] Part 3 focuses on agency and explores the question, "How do we imagine ourselves as civic agents?" (117). By focusing on how popular culture enables both formal and informal critical media pedagogy, this section is anchored in Freire's assertion that education can liberate students from oppression as they find their own agency. Donna Do-own Kim examines these questions in "Mirroring the Misogynistic Wor(l)d: Civic Imagination and Speech Mirroring Strategy in Korea's Online Feminist Movement." Kim examines how the website Megalia critiqued Korea's gender inequality and helped build its feminist movement. Its core strategy was "mirroring," defined as a "parodic, gender-swapped mimicking of misogynistic texts." (152). Terms like "kimchi-man" and "K-man-bug" were deployed to mirror gender-specific hate speech aimed at women, like "kimchi-girl" and "sushi-girl." Kim examines how mirroring fed into the civic imagination that helped build a feminist movement through a five-stage process: the corset-identifying/countering stage, the collective play stage, the collective action stage, the collaboratively achieved success stage, and the expansion stage. In tracing these stages, Kim explores the relationship between asserting agency, movement participation, and solidarity in online communities.

[9] Part 4 examines solidarity and poses the question, "How do we forge solidarity with others with different experiences than our own?" (183). This section examines how popular culture offers narratives about other citizens, imagines models of solidarity, and develops "emotional affordances" (183) key to civic action. Rebecca Wanzo's chapter is a standout in this section—indeed, in the entire volume. She argues that the relaunch of Ms. Marvel as Kamala Khan enacts a multicultural citizenship model, which replaces the assimilationist "melting pot" model so often found in both politics and comics. Superheroes, Wanzo argues, represent American ideals, and Khan's multicultural citizenship model "imagines a nation grounded in a decentered moral authority" (212) located in local communities.

[10] Part 5 considers community. The chapters in this section answer the question, "How do we imagine our social connections with a larger community?" (241). Here the editors transform Anderson's concept of "imagined communities" into "imagining communities," a term the editors say emphasizes difference, "competing narratives," and "alternative ways forward from historical divisions" (243). Sangita Shresthova explores the tensions inherent in these competing narratives. Her chapter examines two Bollywood performances, each one presenting a competing narrative and political vision. One performance was done by Anubhav, a collegiate competitive dance team at Northwestern University, which performed choreography that told the story of a young man learning to embrace his sexuality. The other performance occurred at the Republican Hindu Coalition's (RHC) Hindus United against Terror charity concert and depicted US armed forces in conflict, ultimately "valorizing the nation through the fear of terror" (250). Both performances used Bollywood dance to make drastically different arguments about public issues and competing (or contradictory) politics. These cases, Shresthova asserts, demonstrate that Bollywood dance is "an intensely contested imaginary space" (252).

[11] Part 6 examines space and place. Anchored in the work of theorists like Henri Lefebvre, this section explores the imaginative dimensions we bring to our spaces and places. For example, in chapter 29, "Tzina: Symphony of Longing: Using Volumetric VR to Archive the Nostalgic Imaginaries of the Marginal," Ioana Mischie explores how virtual reality (VR) functions to allow citizens to remember and reimagine a public square at the center of Tel Aviv. In 2016, the public square was demolished and rebuilt. The Tzina Symphony of Longing VR project, consisting of a VR experience and an interactive documentary, captured the public square's details before demolition, preserving both a version of the space itself and the people who frequented the space. By telling the stories of the people who frequented the square, the VR project focuses on the relationship between space, people, and the feelings evoked.

[12] Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination belongs on the bookshelf of anyone studying fan activism in fan studies, civic engagement in political science, and media in political communication. The concise length of the chapters makes the book well suited to undergraduate courses. The writing across the book is accessible and engaging—a testament to the vast number of writers who contributed. Ultimately, the book invites us to turn our attention to the intersection between fandom, popular culture, and civic engagement not as exceptions or outliers but as essential aspects of political culture.