Fandom for Us, by Us The Pleasures and Practices of Black Audiences

Fandom For Us, By Us will undoubtedly be seen as an essential building block of fan studies. Martin's reception studies do the important work of helping us understand how African Americans use media as a tool in everyday life and make pleasure a political necessity. (Rebecca Wanzo, author of The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging) Fandom for Us, By Us is such a welcome addition to audience research, fandom studies, and, of course the field of film and media studies in general. Alfred L. Martin's accessible and hilariously engaging writing in addition to the specific case studies that assist in explaining his concept of the four C's of Black fandom make this text a valued contribution for training up students to become more critically literate consumers and creators and for insisting that scholarship engage harder with Black audiences not traditionally imagined as part of fandom. (Kristen Warner, author of The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting) Martin notes the joy many Black fans get from feeling like they can see themselves in the media ... readers will enjoy the interviewees' excitement and may want to experience all four examples themselves. (Library Journal)