Resources

“… The Dark Fantastic considers the work of mainstream authors, television writers, and other storytelling creatives through the networked communities – such as fandoms -- where such work is discussed, and the attendant implications for the larger culture.”– Ebony Elizabeth Thomas Teaching courses at the intersection of religion and popular culture is an integral component of my teaching practice. However, when I began teaching, first as a graduate student tutorial leader and then as a faculty member in the 1990s, incorporation of popular cultural texts often bore the strain of having to justify their relevance or appropriateness for academic scrutiny. For many of us who were fans and/or critics of movies, novels, comics, and fashion, our forays into critical popular culture studies were often viewed as side interests. There was the “other” curriculum of unassigned popular cultural texts accessed through independent bookstores, literary and film festivals, and frequently through borrowing from each other. Surely, they could not constitute “serious” academic inquiry. In fact, we often began our academic inquiries about the popular as fans of an author or a particular work or genre. We did the work anyway, often while we pursued other projects deemed, at the time, more worthy of scholarly attention. Fortunately, the influential work of scholars in cultural studies such as Stuart Hall, Jamaican-born sociologist and former director of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies in the UK, [helped bring] methods and approaches for examining the impact of cultural representation to the forefront.As digital texts have grown and proliferated in format and significance, I see these early examinations of popular cultural texts as critical interventions emerging from what Ebony Elizabeth Thomas refers to as “the dark fantastic,” in her book of the same name. For Thomas, “the dark fantastic” is not synonymous with “the Black Fantastic” or “Afrofuturism.” Rather, “the dark fantastic” emerges from the reactions and critical commentary of fandoms to narratives produced by mainstream authors, filmmakers, and television writers. It is a perspective which takes seriously audience reactions and the collective discussions which form because of them as a basis of critique. In retrospect, I think that the dark fantastic is what some of us were engaging in through our participation in ad hoc discussion groups about movies, novels, and particular authors as students.The oeuvre of science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler is a particular example. I was introduced to Butler’s work in the early 1990s by another student who recommended the novel Wild Seed. Neither of us had had any of Butler’s writing assigned in our courses, yet we met and discussed her novel. We saw the connections in Butler’s writing with themes about identity, displacement, and community relevant especially for considering African diasporic experiences. Since then, I have taught Butler’s work, such as the novel Parable of the Sower, in religious studies courses for nearly thirty years. Moving the commentary which began in fan discourse into scholarship and creative expressions has enriched my academic and creative path.In teaching contexts, embracing this approach has meant including opportunities for students to use their responses to storyworlds and narratives which are widely accessed, often through multiple platforms and genres, as the basis of scholarly critique. Does this mean that individual students are viewed as “fans” and classrooms as fandoms? In answer to this question, not necessarily, but it does open the space to include such discourse as a source of critique.It does not replace more traditional academic forms of scholarship, such as library-based research, for instance, but it acknowledges and leaves space for critical interventions which emerge from the shared communications of viewing and reading popular cultural texts outside of the digital or in-person religious studies classroom.Here are a couple of examples from my teaching and learning experience in which students are encouraged through assignments and class discussion to reflect on and share their reactions to popular cultural texts as an initial step in their critical analysis:(a) Music Playlist: Students are invited to contribute to a curated music playlist related to the course subject matter. In this short assignment, students select a song which they associate with themes and concepts in the course and write a short (typically 300-word) review outlining the connections which they associate between the song and the course subject matter, including readings, lectures, and documentaries.(b) Film Screening: A film screening is organized as an integral component of the course, to which other members of the department or larger university community are invited. An introduction is provided by the instructor. A facilitated discussion follows. On some occasions, a filmmaker has participated in a facilitated question-and-answer session with the audience.Recommended Reading:Hall, Stuart, Sean Nixon, and Jessica Evans (eds.). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, 3rd edition. Sage Publications, 2024.Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games. New York University Press, 2019.

When utilizing embodied pedagogy, I am constantly aware that my own experience and positionality is limiting. I am a white woman from the southern part of the United States who is currently living in Denver. I have traveled some and have lived in several cities around the United States, but I have never lived abroad. I teach seminar-style classes where dialogue is prioritized and my students speak often. When creating my syllabi, I assign readings that represent a diversity of scholars, and which are mostly academic in focus. But even though I prioritize these things, it is impossible to represent all voices and perspectives in one course. I want to bring in stories and experiences of people from around the world, though, and I want these voices to enter the classroom, to be part of our dialogue. One way that I attempt to do this is to assign novels. Through these readings, fictionalized bodies enter the space of the classroom and allow us to broaden our view of various topics. Last quarter, I taught an introductory level course called World Christianities. One of the course objectives was to outline how Christianity grew from a small group of Jesus followers in a specific region of the world into a global religion with devotees around the world. A second objective was to acknowledge how this transition happened through violence, missionary work, colonialization, enslavement, and various forms of manipulation. To cover a topic like this in a 10-week quarter felt overwhelming at first, and I began to think of authors that I could include who could speak to the distinctiveness of Christianity in a part of the world that is distinct from my own teaching context. The novel I chose was A Grain of Wheat by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The story is set in Kenya in the 1950s and 60s, during the Mau Mau rebellion and the fight for Kenya’s independence from Britain. The main character, Mugo, spends time in a detention camp run by British colonizers, and he struggles inwardly with his interactions with colonizers, even though his village views him as a hero. Through this fictionalized story that is based on historical events, Ngũgĩ reveals the complexity of his own experiences living in a colonized place like Kenya. As Ngũgĩ discusses in this piece, choosing to write in English, the language of the colonizer, is itself a political decision. Ten years after writing A Grain of Wheat, Ngũgĩ decided to only write in Gikuyu, his mother tongue and the language of his community. I encouraged students to read this novel throughout the course, and we discussed it together during two of the final classes. During one session, we focused solely on the experiences of the characters in this novel. We used the narrative to imagine their experiences and also the ways that Christianity impacted their lives. On the one hand, many characters in A Grain of Wheat were impacted negatively by the impact of Christianity, especially as it was entangled with colonialization. On the other hand, some characters embraced aspects of Christianity and were empowered by certain biblical stories. For example, Kihika (who becomes a martyr after his death) carried a Bible with him and underlined passages of importance to him. After his death, the Bible is passed along to his family and friends who reread the passages he underlined. The text becomes a source of hope to the community. I assign novels in other classes as well. In a course I teach called Women, Gender, and the Bible, I give a list of possible novels that the students can chose from in order to follow their interests. For this class, I include novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale, Parable of the Sower, and The Color Purple. When we discuss the novels, I put the students into discussion groups according to which novel they chose. I then dedicate a class session for the groups to introduce their novel to the rest of the class. The goal of their presentation is to “convince” the other students to read this novel. At the end of the class we have a vote as to which presentation was the most convincing. Similarly, when I taught a course on Jesus in Text and Traditions, I assigned The Book of Longings to provide an imaginative view of the ways in which women could have been involved in Jesus’s life and ministry. Assignments like these have been beneficial additions to my syllabi, and they illustrate my pedagogical goal of creating classroom spaces that include a variety of perspectives as a way of encouraging dialogue. Fictional characters are embodied characters. The experiences they bring into the classroom enhance the content of the class in a number of ways. Returning to the example of Grain of Wheat, the students in World Christianities brought this novel up in their final presentations/projects and also in the course evaluations. They appreciated the inclusion of a story from another part of the world. This one novel provided them with multiple viewpoints of how Christianity impacts a community. In the space of the classroom, these fictionalized bodies came to life and spoke to us about their experiences. In a way, characters like Mugo and the novelist Ngũgĩ joined our classroom and dialogued with us, sharing their experiences and listening to ours.