Amélie Hurkens: The Woke Franchise: Representing and Co-opting Resistance in Young Adult, Superhero, and Speculative Fiction

Abstract

In the last decade, U.S. popular literary culture has been under increasing pressure to include more racially and other marginalized groups. This study shows how this has led writers, publishing companies, literary prizes, and a host of other dominant corporate and cultural actors to align themselves with social justice through the representation of marginalized identities. I argue that this forms part of a broader media trend, in which media industries are rebranding themselves as progressive by engaging with identity politics. I contend that this phenomenon, which I call the ‘woke franchise,’ is an economic and sociocultural strategy and system that converts the struggles for recognition and empowerment by oppressed groups into economic, symbolic, and sociopolitical value. The study therefore draws a parallel between the woke franchise and the commercial strategies of neoliberal ‘woke’ capitalism. In pursuing this argument, I zero in on how popular literary culture is investing in writers of color to ally itself to the cause of racial minorities. The first chapter explores how Young Adult publishers have built a diverse-books market around bestselling novels written by BIPOC women. The second chapter investigates how Marvel Comics has been diversifying its superhero franchises by assigning them to well-known writers of color. The third chapter turns to speculative fiction, illustrating how the field has been using awards to signal its commitment to racial justice.

While failing to contribute to the structural empowerment of racially marginalized groups, these instances of minority representation, I argue, nevertheless open up avenues for writers to engage themselves politically in the system that I describe as the woke franchise. In close readings of Angie Thomas’s Young Adult coming-of-age novel The Hate U Give (2017), Gabby Rivera’s America comic series (2017–2018), and N.K. Jemisin’s award-winning Broken Earth science fantasy trilogy (2015–2017), I analyze how these works and their writers articulate ways to resist entrenched systems of oppression and inequality. The works, I therefore maintain, should be understood as complex, though not always successful attempts at negotiating the tensions between struggles for social justice, and endeavors by their corporate and cultural stakeholders to extract value from those struggles.