Keeping It Unreal

Abstract

Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics explores how fantasy—especially superhero comics, which are usually derided as naïve and childish—is a catalyst for engaging the black radical imagination. Such engagements prompt “fantasy-acts” against antiblackness, a transgressive way of “reading” beyond the comic-book page to envision and to experience alternate, and potentially more just, realities. Fantasies about superhero characters are not just or even primarily forms of escape, Scott argues, but are active reshapings of readers and their worlds. Keeping It Unreal offers a rich meditation on the relationship between fantasy and reality and between the imagination and being, as it weaves Scott’s personal recollections of his encounters with superhero comics with interpretive readings of figures like the Black Panther, Luke Cage, Nubia, and Blade and theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Saidiya Hartman, and Gore Vidal. Keeping It Unreal represents an in-depth theoretical consideration of the intersections of superhero comics, blackness, and queerness, and draws on a variety of fields of inquiry, including African American and African diaspora studies, media studies, comics studies, queer theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and black feminism.