ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the importance of studying race and transcultural fandom, these areas of fan studies remain underdeveloped. Bertha Chin serves on the board of the Fan Studies Network and the editorial board of the Journal of Fandom Studies; she has written widely about social media, crowdfunding, and science fiction fandom. The issue of invisibility needs to be solved within fan, media, and cultural studies at large. There's a sense that anything beyond UK/US/Europe is always considered "fringe," and therefore applicable to fan practices in the Western context, even though discussions of race, ethnicity, and whitewashing are becoming more of a concern for fans now. In a similar vein, the K-Pop case makes it clear that we live in a multi-polar media world today and that a global phenomenon can completely by-pass the Anglophone media capitals and set up circuits of fandom that scholars based in the Anglophone academy do not understand very well at this point.
