By Any Media Necessary. Henry Jenkins
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.
Photo from Noor Tagouri’s campaign to become a hijab-wearing anchor on commercial television.
Writing about a 1957 news photograph showing white citizens jeering at black students as they attempted to enter a once segregated school, Danielle Allen (2006) tells us:
The photo forced a choice on its U.S. viewers, and its power to engage the imagination lay in this. The picture simultaneously recorded a nightmarish version of a town meeting and, by presenting to a broad public the visible structure of segregation, elicited throughout the citizenry an epiphantic awareness of the inner workings of public life and made those mechanics the subject of debate. (5)
Noor’s video does similar work, enabling us to envision, discuss, debate, and struggle to achieve other possibilities. Allen argues, “As democracy develops an explanation of how its citizenry is a coherent body, ‘the people,’ and makes this body imaginable, it also invents customs and practices of citizenly interaction that accord with that explanation” (17). In short, changing how the American public imagines democracy may be a key first step toward altering how Americans perceive and treat each other, essential if undocumented or American Muslim youth are going to be embraced within “we the people.” The photograph of Noor in her hijab sitting in a network anchor’s chair called attention to the absence of American Muslims within the mainstream media, while also promoting the young woman’s aspiration to someday enter the media on a more equal basis. The photograph Allen discusses became part of the shared political culture through its circulation via mass media; other young activists have similarly used social networking platforms to heighten the visibility of their own creative works.
Imagining Communities
Benedict Anderson (1983) used the term “imagined community” to describe one of the core mechanisms shaping strong nationalist movements in the 19th and 20th centuries; people across the British empire read the Times of London, and through this shared experience and through the ways that the newspaper articulated a common agenda, they were able to connect diverse everyday experiences to a larger project of empire building. Today, the term “imagining communities” might be more productive. Young people are not simply accepting an agenda constructed by mass media for their consumption, rather they are actively co-constructing the contents of the civic imagination through networked communications. They are building a group identity that might fuel their campaigns and, within those campaigns, they are developing ways of expressing their shared visions for what a better society might look like. Such exchanges may occur at all levels—from the hyperlocal to the transnational, from friendship circles to social movements and formal organizations—yet imagining is an activity, something produced and not simply consumed.
In Anderson’s classic formulation, these communities were imagined because they consisted of massive numbers of people who would never meet each other face to face but somehow felt connected to each other; the same would be true for today’s imagining communities, except that in the context of a many-to-many networked communications system, the potential for direct contact between participants is different from what could have been achieved among the readers of the Times. Ethan Zuckerman (2013c) has noted the many ways that contemporary participants in the online world fail to realize its more cosmopolitan potentials, and fail to reach out to people from different backgrounds than their own, yet there is still a greater opportunity for such interactions than could be facilitated through print culture.
We are speaking here of the civic imagination