people are learning to identify and frame political issues in language that speaks to themselves and their peers.
The Institute for the Future reached a similar conclusion about the value of imaginative citizenship when participants at the inaugural ReConstitutional Convention, held in 2013, penned a manifesto for what they call the “public imagination”:
Any democracy requires a thriving public imagination, in order to make visible, sharable, and understandable to all the people new ideas, new models, new potential policies. We cannot make any kind of collective decision unless the collective can understand what is at stake, and envision where it may lead.… We must strive to understand the private imaginations of others, whose reality is defined by different lived experiences, and assumptions. (“Framework: Public Imagination” 2013)
Their document describes a movement from private imagination toward its realization in forms that can be shared with a wider public. That process often depends on images already familiar to participants from other contexts—images drawn not from political rhetoric but popular fantasy. Many of the youth we interviewed feel ownership over these popular myths but struggle to make connection with symbols associated with traditional civic life.
Civic Agency and Ethical Spectacles
Andrew Slack, the young community organizer who has been a key leader of the Harry Potter Alliance, explained the price of falling back on alienating and stagnant rhetoric as a means of teaching the emerging generation about democratic values: “It affects how people feel regarding their civic agency, civic engagement, and civic education—all of these falter and contribute to a systemic empathy deficit that has a destructive effect on every aspect of the democratic process including our collective ability to get beyond political blind spots through imagining new possibilities to effectively respond to our most stubborn problems around inequality, environmental crisis, etc.” (personal correspondence, 2014).
For Slack and other fan activists, the solution comes through mobilizing popular stories as an entry point for political conversations, which brings us back to the zombies at the Occupy Wall Street encampment, the ways Jonathan McIntosh allowed Donald Duck to take down anti-immigration rhetoric, and the use of Harry Potter references to explain the stakes in human rights struggles. Chapter 3 discusses such practices in terms of fannish civics, in which they depend on a deep understanding and emotional commitment to a content world, and cultural acupuncture, in which these remixes tap into broadly shared knowledge about current popular culture trends that might be accessible to a larger audience.
As we have presented our research, some skeptics have expressed concern that “empowerment fantasies” may be displacing empathy for real-world problems; others have suggested that for these young fans—who often come from privileged backgrounds—it is easier to access human rights concerns through allusions to popular culture than through traditional mechanisms of consciousness raising and identity politics. Yet such mechanisms play vital functions even in those groups where people are directly advocating for their own rights and dignity. For instance, to explain his undocumented experiences, in a post on his blog, Erick Huerta—an immigrant rights advocate —explained how he turned to Superman, who was “from another planet … and grew up in the United States, just like me.” Superman, a character created in the 1930s by two Jewish high school students—both second-generation immigrants from Eastern Europe—has become a key vehicle by which another wave of immigrants has sought to understand their place in American society (Engle 1987; Andrae 1987). If ever there was an illegal alien, it is Kal-El from the planet Krypton, whose parents sent him from his native world in search of a new life and who slipped across the border (via spaceship) in the middle of the night, got adopted by an Anglo family, has had to hide his true identity and remain silent about how he got here, and yet has been deeply dedicated to promoting and defending American values.
Retelling Superman’s narrative in this way offers an empowering fantasy for other undocumented youth. Across her research on the DREAMer movement, Arely M. Zimmerman found several examples of the deployment of superhero imagery. One respondent described the experience of discovering other undocumented youth online as like “finding other X-Men.” Another compared their campaign, which involved youth from many different backgrounds, to the Justice League. A third suggested that posting a video on YouTube in which he proclaimed himself “proud” and “undocumented” had parallels to the experience of Spider-Man, who removed his mask on national television during Marvel’s Civil Wars storyline. A graphic created for an online recruitment campaign used the image of Wolverine to suggest what kind of hero youth volunteers might aspire to become. These images also provided a means by which the debates about immigration rights might be discussed from new perspectives, reaching many who had never considered their experiences in this way before. Subsequently, the shared use of the superhero mythology allowed Imagine Better to partner with immigrant rights groups for a campaign that accompanied the release of Man of Steel, discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.
Dreamers use Superman to explain the immigration experience.
It is not surprising that Huerta uses superhero comics as a means to explain his lived experiences of being undocumented. His Superman saga exists alongside a range of other efforts to mobilize the superhero as a kind of technology for sparking the civic imagination, including uses of Wonder Woman for feminist politics (Yockey 2012) and Captain America as a symbol for both reactionary and progressive organizations (F. Phillips 2013).
As Stephen Duncombe (2012a), one of the authors of the manifesto for the public imagination, explains:
Scratch an activist and you’re apt to find a fan. It’s no mystery why: fandom provides a space to explore fabricated worlds that operate according to different norms, laws, and structures than those we experience in our “real” lives. Fandom also necessitates relationships with others: fellow fans with whom to share interests, develop networks and institutions, and create a common culture. This ability to imagine alternatives and build community, not coincidentally, is a basic prerequisite for political activism.
Our concept of the civic imagination is closely related to the set of practices Duncombe (2007) has identified as “ethical spectacle.” Duncombe documents tactics that command public attention, often by dramatizing the stakes of a political struggle, and often in a language that is playful, even comic, rather than sober and literal-minded. These ethical spectacles work best, he tells us, when they emerge from participants’ collective imaginations, when they are flexible enough to adapt to changing situations, when they are transparent enough that spectators understand them as constructed, and when they have utopian dimensions—because they allow us to think beyond the range of current possibilities.
So far, our discussion of the civic imagination has identified examples that deploy fantastical elements from popular culture to make their political points. Such examples are often the most surprising, since they look so different from the forms of political speech we associate with earlier generations. But the civic imagination is also at play as young people share their own real-world experiences, as in, for example, Joshua Merchant’s spoken-word pieces. Consider another example. On December 11, 2012, Noor Tagouri, a 19-year-old American Muslim woman, posted a video, “My Dream: First American Hijabi Anchorwoman #LetNoorShine,” on YouTube. In it, she recalled how a photo of her sitting behind an ABC news desk took on a life of its own on Facebook and garnered 20,000 likes in one week. Noor then asked various media celebrities—including Oprah Winfrey, Lisa Ling, and Anderson Cooper—to let her shadow or intern with them to help fulfill her dream of becoming the first hijabi (scarf-wearing) news anchor on an American primetime news network: “It is the people from every corner of the globe who have liked and shared my photo and sent me thousands of letters and messages of their support, who gave me the confidence to ask … [for] this.” The video was both an expression of Noor’s dreams and an encouragement to imagine a different status for Muslims in American media.
