Network

This website is a spin-off of a conference entitled »Fans in the theatre? About unbeloved fannish spectators and theatre's self-image 1860-1920«, which took place from 23 to 25 October 2024 in Schloss Wahn near Cologne (the conference programme is available here: https://www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/nordisch/fanmail/conference_wahn2024.html). At this conference, it became clear that there was a need for greater networking between researchers and projects dealing with the historical phenomenon of fandom. Picking up on an idea by Daniel Cavicchi, which he had already put forward in 2014 in his essay »Fandom Before ›Fan‹. Shaping the history of enthusiastic audiences« (in: Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 6 (2014): 70), the transnational Fan History Initiative was launched.

Problems

Fandom Studies is now well established – at least internationally – but historical fan cultures unfortunately play a negligible role in Fandom Studies. Fandom Studies has a predilection for fan cultures from the 1960s onwards (and especially digital fan cultures). Significantly, of the 175 articles published in the Journal of Fandom Studies between 2012 and 2024, only one deals with historical fandom.

The historical amnesia of much of Fandom Studies tends to overlook the historical conditionality and thus mutability of fandom, its manifestations and practices: The close, interdependent connection to very specific, historical structures and discourses is lost.

The concentration of large parts of Fandom Studies on the (roughly speaking) fan cultures of the present is often accompanied by the rarely explicitly reflected premise that the true location of fan objects is in popular culture. This premise reflects the fact that fan studies as an (inter-)discipline emerged in the 1990s as an extension of Cultural Studies, which in turn – originating in post-war British class society – had written the ennoblement of popular cultural forms of expression on its banner. However, when this leads to the restriction that fan objects are reserved for popular culture and ›high culture‹ fan objects are tacitly excluded, it ironically reproduces the hierarchical differentiation between popular culture and ›high culture‹ that underlies the pathologisation and defamation of fans as ›cultural dupes‹ that persisted into the 1990s. Sociologically-inspired fan research typically refrains from restricting or focusing on popular culture and simply assumes a broadly defined fan object. This can be drawn from popular culture, but also from areas that are defined within a culture as distinct from popular culture in order to serve purposes such as the aesthetic ›education‹ of the individual or the like. 

Historical Fandom

The Fan History Initiative is based on the theses that manifestations of fandom go back a long way in history, that fandom is not limited to the reception of (late modern) popular culture, and that fandom is historically and terminologically variable due to its intermedial, interdiscursive, and interpractical connections (especially with discourses on gender, sexuality, age, education, and the ›masses‹). Even if the terminology used in historical sources to characterise forms of fannish behaviour is certainly relevant, the use of the term ›fan‹, first coined in 1883 in the context of sport, is not decisive for characterising an action or practice as ›fandom‹: there were numerous forms of fannish behaviour long before 1883, as well as clear fan relationships, e.g. in the 20th century, which had not (yet) been assigned the term ›fan relationship‹. The term ›fan‹, which originated and was coined in English, was often only adopted in other languages after the Second World War, but of course the phenomenon and the discourses that constitute it existed long before the loan of the word: The admirers of Mary Pickford, for example, who were already called ›fans‹ in the USA in the 1910s, were no different from their European sisters and brothers, even if these ›fans‹ were still referred to as ›admiratrice‹, ›Bewunderer‹ or the like, using more traditional terminology.

Given that fan relationships can occur in very different cultural fields such as sport, literature, music or cinema, it is difficult to make an overarching historical periodisation. However, an attempt based on media history could look like this:

The layering of the periods shall indicate that they are by no means replacing each other, but rather that new practices and forms of fandom are being added while the old ones are continued directly or remain in a slightly modified form. For example, fan practices from the 19th century, such as collecting devotional objects like locks of hair, are certainly continued in later times. Collecting autographs also goes back a long way, but while in times of physical co-presence with the star it was customary to wait for him or her at the stage entrance and ask for an autograph in his or her autograph booklet, the medialization of the fan relationship in the age of tertiary media fandom led to autographs now being collected on portrait postcards. On the one hand, this was a simple necessity, as a fan of a film star in Osijek, Croatia, for example, never had the chance to ask an international film star like the Dane Olaf Fønss face to face for an autograph, and on the other hand, autographs on individual postcards had the advantage that any loss in the now necessary postal service was easier to bear than the loss of a painstakingly completed autograph book.

Agenda

The transnational Fan History Initiative aims

• to facilitate and encourage research into the long history of fandom in all its forms (stage, sport, literature, etc.). This includes in particular its changing as well as constant practices, its history of terminology, its embedding in social and political structures, and its links with contemporary cultural and psychological discourses. Last but not least, the particular methodological challenges of studying historical (as opposed to more or less ›contemporary‹) fan cultures will be examined in more detail;


• to broaden the scope of research, which has so far been mainly Anglo-American and/or English-language, with a corresponding focus on the USA or England, to include other cultural areas in Europe, but also beyond, in order to gain a better insight into the respective (national or ethno-)cultural premises of fan practices. What does it say about a fan culture, for example, if it falls back on terms familiar from stage and music life, such as admirer, devotee, etc., and thus places the fannish behaviour of film fans in a continuity with performative practices of the 19th century, instead of using the concept of the fan coined in sport, with its implicitly competitive component?


• to bring together and create synergies among the various researchers from different disciplines and countries around the world who study historical fan cultures, but who are often quite isolated in their respective disciplinary contexts. A mailing list and a website will be set up and maintained as a forum for the exchange of information. In the short term, this website will provide references to research literature, resources and scholars, as well as announcements of upcoming publicatons, events and conferences; in the long term, it may even provide short papers, blogs, etc. 

Invitation

Everyone is invited to participate in the initiative by sharing contact details, bibliographical information, references to conferences etc. as well as research results. Please write us an email: fan-history@uni-koeln.de