Black Hero Research Articles

Who Benefits from Your Ignorance? Visualizing Black (Super)Heroism and Refuting Respectability Politics in Victor LaValle’s Destroyer

ABSTRACT: In Victor LaValle’s 2018 collected comic book Destroyer , the limits of respectability politics and the goals of representation for Black characters are both tested. Destroyer focuses on the death and rebirth of a young Black boy named Akai, who is murdered by police while walking home; his mother, a descendant of Victor Frankenstein and a researcher working on nanotechnology and reanimated life, brings him back in a “super” powered form. In the graphic narrative’s depiction of Black heroism and struggle, its radical politics and its visual work deny the peacemaking impulse of respectability politics that have been linked to the representation of Black characters in comics and other sequential art. This essay traces how Destroyer rejects respectability politics, explores the often-disregarded righteous rage of Black women, and conveys its protest of the premature death Black people are vulnerable to on a regular basis through a highly referential and often intertextual graphic narrative. LaValle’s comic ultimately embraces the rage, heroism, and humanity of its Black characters in its speculative approach to the issues of life and death that it is in conversation with throughout its panels and pages.

Multimodal Discourse Analysis on Representation of Black Hero in Malcolm Spellman the Falcon and the Winter Soldier Series (2021)

Multimodal discourse analysis is an interdisciplinary approach that studies how different modes of communication work together to create meaning in social interactions. The author analyzes verbal and visual elements in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier in this study. This research used the descriptive qualitative method. The aim of this study is to determine the verbal and visual elements that represent black people and to find out the relationship between verbal and visual elements in this movie. To achieve these objectives, the researcher applied the theoretical framework from Halliday & Matthiessen (2014) on the language of metafunctions, Kress & van Leeuwen (2006) on visual grammar analysis, and the analysis of inter-mode relations from Leeuwen (2005) to obtain a detailed description of the relationship between verbal and visual elements. The results of the study show that in verbal language, the ideational metafunction is dominated by the material process. Interpersonal metafunction is dominated by statement speech acts which show that the text is mostly in the form of a declarative mood. The textual metafunction contains topical unmarked and multiple themes in this movie. In the visual image, ideational metafunction is realized mostly through the reactional process. Interactive metafunction is realized through the offer gaze and the medium shot. The medium size dominates the compositional metafunction. Visual and verbal elements have elaboration and extension relations. Through the elaboration of visual grammar analysis, some visuals are used to make the verbal elements more specific, and others are used to add information not included in the verbal elements. The verbal and visual modes clarify each other's meanings and display connected and not contradictory concepts so the audience can easily understand.

Black Heroes Matter: Toward a Critical Race Theory Framework for Comics Education

Black Heroes Matter: Toward a Critical Race Theory Framework for Comics Education

“Crusaders on a Quest for Democracy”: Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson’s Black Civic Pedagogy

This article examines Hunton and Johnson’s Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, which recounts their WWI YMCA service in France supporting Black troops. TCW exemplifies a long tradition of Black civic pedagogy, drawing on prophetic and empirical strategies to teach audiences that Black experience and racial justice are foundational to American democracy. Deploying the Black jeremiad, it exposes racial inequities and envisions a racially just future; deploying testifying, it combines narrative, reportage, and documentary evidence to empirically support its findings of white racism, Black heroism, and French egalitarianism. These strategies suggest possibilities and limitations for future practice.

“You know how the game goes, Baby”: Exploring Intersections of Power in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song

Existing academic discourse surrounding pioneering Blaxploitation film, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971), regularly frames the titular character as the forerunner of an eventual collection of aggressive, hypersexual, and macho Black heroes. These texts accordingly examine Sweetback’s characterization with limited nuance, and therefore overlook the film’s more complex contentual and formal engagement with masculinity and power. Via close analysis of the film and marketing materials, I propose that Sweetback’s macho behavior can be re-contextualized via attention to his repeated displays of passivity, which jointly signal the film’s engagement with notions of “ideal” Black masculinity, generational oppression, and trauma.

Blackness after 9/11: topographies of race and counter-terror at the 9/11 memorial museum

ABSTRACT More than a decade after the murder of Trayvon Martin and the creation of the Black Lives Matter protest movement, extrajudicial killings have become all too commonplace in the post-9/11 landscape, mirroring two decades of racialised surveillance against Arab and Muslim populations in the name of counter-terrorism. This paper maps Blackness’ proximity to the U.S. nation-state amidst the emergence of 9/11 memory and the post-9/11 counter-terrorism imaginary. Paramount to the longest war in US history (2001–2021), for example, Black patriotism is a powerful product and purveyor of the military industrial complex’s Global War on Terror. Yet while Black heroism and sacrifice are deeply encoded within the post-9/11 imaginary at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum at the World Trade Center, the Global War on Terrorism has ushered in the re-racialisation of both Brown and Black communities, as well as the fantasy of a “post-racial” nation now firmly in ruin in the age of Trumpism and the alt-right. Analysing key artefacts and narrative scripts within the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, I argue that 9/11 memory and the Global War on Terrorism work in tandem to reproduce new/old geographies of “terror” and “threat”, investigating how Blackness has always been central to the racialised logics of counter-terrorism and state surveillance.

The Function of Symbolism in Ernest J. Gaines’s ‘A Lesson Before Dying

Although Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying writes with meticulous realism, he uses significant symbols as to enhance its theme. The present paper examines the importance and the indication of such symbols especially those represented by Jefferson and Paul, and how they help convey the message of the work, which is considered by many Gaines’s masterpiece. From a dehumanized, “hog” to a “Christ-figure”, Gaines was able to deconstruct the myth of the white supremacy and reconstruct the black hero. He also uses other symbols that are important as to the development of its protagonist-narrator, Grant Wiggins.

Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism: Black speculative writings in search of meaning and criteria

This paper interrogates the concepts of Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, describes and interprets the indices that differentiates both concepts. The paper is informed by the belief that all black speculative writings are Afrofuturistic, and views this classification as inappropriate because Dery’s Afrofuturism is clearly an African-American signification that provides no space for the African imaginary. Okorafor’s Africanfuturism is hinged on the fact that, there are narrative convergence and departure for both concepts. Using meta-criticism, textual examples are drawn from both concepts, for purpose of critical elucidation and clarification. Meta criticism is systematic, logical, and views the text as an ongoing process, where the critic’s opinion becomes a means to the realization of meaning. This article contends that there is the need for a different set of criteria for evaluation and categorization of both concepts, and proposes five-point criteria—experience, authorship, language, black heroism and technology for their evaluation.

STEREOTYPES OF THE IMAGE OF THE “COLOR” POPULATION IN AMERICAN MOVIES OF THE XX – FIRST QUARTER OF THE XXI CENTURY

The article considers the peculiarities of the stereotypical image of the “color” population in the US film industry of the XX – first quarter of the XXI century as one of the manifestations of racism; the reasons for the transfer of “ethnic stereotypes” in cinema have been identified. The brightest ethnic stereotypes in film and television are presented in the form of so-called “tropes”. The heroes of films of Asian descent were endowed with excessive militancy and the ability to master martial arts (tropes “All Asians know martial arts”, “All Chinese people know kung-fu”); Asian women were portrayed as defenseless as opposed to a strong white man (“Mighty Whitey and Mellow Yellow” trope); to describe the black hero took the trails “Humble Servant” (“Mammy”), “African-American criminal” (“Blaxploitation”), “White Savior”, “Magic Negro”, “Black Best Friend”. Latin American heroes are physically perfect, sexual and romantic (tropes “Latin Lover”, “Spicy Latina”). In 2010–2020, the “color” population in Hollywood movies is portrayed from a new angle. The main “non-white” heroes show absolute equality with whites, and sometimes dominance over them. This is a social film about problems of general scale and their perception in society, in particular homosexuality (“Moonlight”); a movie with a black superhero (“Black Panther”); a thriller about the confrontation of a black guy with a group of white killers (“Get Out”). Films of this genre are focused on the “color” spectator. The catalysts for changes in Hollywood policy were the #OscarsSoWhite (2016) and Black Lives Matter (2020) movements. As a result, there was a review of the composition of film production teams with an approximation to the proportion typical of the national population of the United States – 40 % (2020, the share of “color” actors in films was 39. %, directors – 25.4 %, writers – 25.9 %); implementation of new requirements for the Oscar (“Best Film” nomination, from 2024) with quotas on gender and racial composition of the production team, etc.

Would they save me, too? Victim race recall when the hero is Black vs. White and its influence on expectations of reciprocity

ABSTRACT Bounded Generalized Reciprocity (BGR) hypothesizes that expectations of reciprocity provide the foundation for ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation. These expectations can be influenced by interaction with outgroup members, including vicarious interaction through media. This analysis examines how non-Black participants view helping behavior by Black individuals, and how their interpretations of helping scenarios influence intergroup attitudes. Participants (n= 211) were randomly assigned to view a news clip in which a Black or White hero saves someone White, or whose race was not portrayed. When viewing a clip with an ambiguous victim, participants were significantly more likely to report that the victim was not White when the hero was Black – indicating an expectation of helping behavior between Whites and Blacks. However, when a Black hero saved an unambiguously White victim, participants were more accurate in their recall. Victim race recall and hero race interacted to predict future reciprocity expectations, such that Black heroes saving a victim recalled as White (regardless of accuracy) resulted in increased positive reciprocity expectations. Positive reciprocity then predicted motivation to avoid prejudice and prejudiced attitudes. These results have implications for how media depictions of helping behaviors may impact intergroup beliefs and attitudes.

Queering El valiente negro en Flandes

Abstract: Andrés de Claramonte's El valiente negro en Flandes (ca. 1620) reframes the representation of Blackness in Spain, presenting the possibility for Black people to reproduce themselves in freedom. This essay, through a reading of Frantz Fanon, addresses how, in Juan de Mérida's journey to overcome the social inferiority of his Blackness, he faces the threat of sodomy. Sodomy conjures the Black protagonist's fears about white supremacy. The two different endings the textual transmission of the play offers, one in which the Black hero marries his former enslaver, and another in which the marriage scene is excised, signal the anxiety in Spain about the increased presence of a free Black population in the midst of a society that enslaved kidnapped Africans and their descendants, the scenes of sodomy performance functioning as a form of symbolic containment.

The Heroic Slave

Frederick Douglass based this story on the real-life heroism of Madison Washington, who led the largest successful slave revolt in U.S. history in 1841. His story is told through the eyes and words of two white men. First, Mr. Listwell from Ohio sees Madison enslaved in Virginia, then a fugitive in Ohio, and finally a recaptured returnee bound from Richmond to the slave markets of New Orleans. Lastly, Tom Grant, the mate on the slave transport Creole, describes the ship’s takeover by its human cargo and its passage to the British Bahamas, where 128 men and women stepped out of bondage and into freedom. Douglass contributed the story in 1853 to a book of collected pieces by anti-slavery writers and reformers. It is his only known work of “fiction,” and it is interesting especially for its prismatic point of view: a black writer’s account of white men describing a black hero. What makes a person heroic? And what possibilities for heroism even exist under slavery—for whites or blacks? Could they act together to lift the the great national curse? The work is brief, dramatic, and compelling, showing the gift for expression that made Douglass such a powerful figure on the anti-slavery platform.

The legacy of Angélique in late 20th-century Black Canadian drama

ABSTRACT This article examines the complex issue of Black heroism through the legacy of the figure of the enslaved Portuguese woman Angélique, who set Montreal on fire in 1734. It looks into how late-20th-century artists have engaged in recuperating this figure through the analysis of two specific iterations, the plays of Lorena Gale (Angélique, 1999) and George Elliott Clarke (Beatrice Chancy, 1999). The article contributes to critical readings to date in arguing that these texts represent the enslaved subject as agent and not as victim, in line with recent changes in Black historiography, and that they constitute cultural interventions that aim to bring into focus the still largely unaddressed history of Black enslavement in Canada. Further, it adds a consideration of the plays’ currency nowadays insofar as their plot and characterization stress continuities between past and present struggles against pervasive forms of anti-Black violence.

Literature Counts: The Feelings of Overwhelmed

Literature Counts: The Feelings of <i>Overwhelmed</i>

Identity Lost and Regained: A Postcolonial Analysis of Don Shirley’s Dilemma in Green Book

Images of black men in movies have been depicted negatively as brutal rioters or silly clowns at large for centuries, consolidating the stereotype that black man is inferior and subordinate compared with the white. Green Book, an Oscar-winning movie in 2019, subverts the traditional images of black men and white men, successfully portraying a well-educated black intellectual and a vulgar white driver. The present study aims to decode its success in characterizing positive images of black men, and reveal the psychological activity and identity dilemma of the hero, Don Shirley. Based on Fanon’s psychoanalysis and Bhabha’s hybridity theory, this paper probes into the following questions: Firstly, what kind of psychological trauma did the black hero suffer due to his black identity? Secondly, what leads to the hybrid identity of Don Shirley? The result shows that the black hero experienced the psychological trauma of inferiority complex and delusion of becoming white. He first mistook himself as a white man, then he lost his identity and finally regained a hybrid identity. Hybrid identity is attributed to cultural assimilation and otherness, which is a common phenomenon under the backdrop of colonialism. By an in-depth analysis of Don Shirley’s identity dilemma, this paper hopes to shed light on racial discrimination from the perspective of post-colonialism.

For Better or For Worse: Western Mainstream Media and the ‘Renarrativization’ of Black Heroes

For Better or For Worse: Western Mainstream Media and the ‘Renarrativization’ of Black Heroes

Red Myth, Black Hero: Frederick Douglass, the Communist Party, and the Aesthetics of History, 1935–1945

Red Myth, Black Hero: Frederick Douglass, the Communist Party, and the Aesthetics of History, 1935–1945

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett

Reviewed by: Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal by Kate Dossett Craig Peariso Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal. By Kate Dossett. John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xx, 338. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5442-3; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5441-6.) Much has been written about the Federal Theater Project (FTP), a part of the United States government's Works Progress Administration that from 1935 to 1939 paid out-of-work writers, actors, directors, and crews to stage theatrical productions. The segregated "Negro Units" within the FTP, however, have received less attention. In Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal, Kate Dossett offers a rich archival history of a number of Negro Unit productions, setting aside the question of white leadership within the Negro Units and highlighting the political complexity of Black-authored works produced by the FTP. As political opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal increased, its programs actually gained acceptance among many African American writers and activists for their potential to ensure at least a minimum standard of living for all Americans. For that reason, among others, the Negro Units were embraced by a number of playwrights as an opportunity to give form to a variety of political content. Through close study of manuscripts from local productions of Black-authored (or coauthored) plays, Dossett weaves an engaging narrative of the ways authors and performers (though her emphasis is clearly on the authors) used the theater to envision "radical paths to the future" (p. 39). [End Page 358] Dossett's study opens with a chapter on the 1934 play Stevedore, a play about the lives of working-class Blacks produced by members of New York's Theatre Union, a group of white leftist playwrights and directors. Though the play would seem to fall outside her specific focus on federally funded and Black-authored works, it is nevertheless important to her history, as it not only served as an important model for many in the FTP looking to produce socially and politically relevant work, but also "became important to a community of black theatre critics, audiences, and performers who were willing, skilled, and increasingly able to adapt white dramas in order to develop a politically useful black theatre" (p. 41). Having established Stevedore as a type of precedent, she goes on in the next chapter to discuss Black-authored works such as Stars and Bars (1937–1938) and Liberty Deferred (1937–1938), which adapted the Living Newspaper form as a means of "subjecting white spectators to the black gaze" (p. 121). With these first two studies in place, Dossett proceeds to devote the second half of the book to the various representations of Black heroism found in Negro Unit plays. She first offers a comparison of the characters of John Henry in Natural Man (1937) and Bigger Thomas in the stage adaptation of Native Son (1941) and then, in a different register, a consideration of Theodore Ward's Big White Fog (1937–1938). Looking to move beyond the now clichéd narrative that portrays Big White Fog as a "'pro-communist'" drama—noting that its labor politics are actually relatively anodyne—she chooses instead to focus on the play's gender politics, offering it almost as a partial counterpoint to the overwrought masculinity of Natural Man and Native Son (p. 165). Finally, she turns to Haiti (1938) and Go Down Moses (1938), two productions offering what she seems to see as a more hopeful model of Black male heroism by rooting it, respectively, in the Haitian Revolution and the American Civil War and Underground Railroad. As a whole, Dossett's study makes an excellent contribution to our understanding of the history of African American theater, and American theater more generally. At a time when, as she notes, calls to improve and acknowledge the importance of Archives for Black Lives have become common on multiple social media platforms, Dossett returns to some of those archives to remind readers of their richness and intricacy. Craig Peariso Boise State University Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture by Grégory Pierrot, and: The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love by Bryan Wagner

Reviewed by: The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture by Grégory Pierrot, and: The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love by Bryan Wagner Tynes Cowan Grégory Pierrot. The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2019. 274 pp. $32.95. Bryan Wagner. The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced at Congo Square, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2019. 272 pp. $39.95. When the runaway slave named Squire (known in legend as "Bras-Coupé") was killed in 1837 after years of marronage in the swamps surrounding New Orleans, the city authorities ordered that his body be dismembered and displayed in the Place d'Armes as a warning to the Black population. There his body remained for days, giving those enslaved and free people of color time to witness the scene—whether led there by curiosity or coercion. Not unlike the insurrectionaries of 1811 whose heads were placed on pikes for all in New Orleans to see, Squire's body provided an official response to the threat of African American autonomy. Perhaps with the Nat Turner insurrection fresh in mind, the authorities found ample reason to make an example of Squire. For white authorities, the public display was intended as an explicit threat to any who might consider running away, living in the swamps, or plundering plantations. The display was also intended to transform the legendary Bras-Coupé back into the runaway Squire: to conclude his story and control the narrative. The threat of a Black hero, free in the wilderness, to inspire and potentially to lead an insurrection would have been more dangerous to white authorities than the potential depredations he might commit against property. The narrative power of Bras-Coupé and other Black avengers is the subject of these two books: The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture by Grégory Pierrot and The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé by Bryan Wagner. Pierrot frames his study with recent cinematic representations of the Black avenger trope. His Introduction claims Django, Jamie Foxx's character in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), as a direct descendant of other Black avengers in the Atlantic tradition: "the extraordinary black leader who would lead his fellow enslaved to deliver righteous retribution on their white oppressors" (9). He concludes his book musing about Ryan Coogler's Black Panther (2018), with Prince T'Challa's cousin, Erik "Killmonger" Stevens, inheriting the role of Black avenger. Between these contemporary references, Pierrot examines several characters, from the Renaissance to the Progressive Era, who exemplify the trope. Reaching back to ancient Rome for founding myths, Pierrot argues that Black avenger narratives have been used historically not only to critique slavery but to reinforce the borders of national identity. Beginning with the prototypical rebel slave (Spartacus) and the catalyzing agent for political action (Lucretia), the various examples in the book are understood as reenactments or inversions of these "original patterns," whether the fictional creations of Martin Delany and Sutton Griggs, or the real Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture. The royal slave of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688), for example, embodies the exceptional qualities of the Black avenger—the status and pedigree necessary to enact revenge—with which Behn's audience would find sympathy. Oroonoko's own failure dooms his fellow enslaved who are incapable of enacting vengeance themselves, and threats posed by the Black avenger are safely (though brutally) exorcised by the narrative. In the end, the Black avenger trope has [End Page 255] "contributed to deny, stifle, and obfuscate the portrayal of Black collective agency and its very reality" (14). As such, the Black avenger is a sacrificial figure, dying on the altar—and for the benefit—of white identity. Bras-Coupé, the subject of Bryan Wagner's book, is a particular incarnation of the Black avenger not mentioned by Pierrot. Bras-Coupé's legend extends far beyond the basic facts of Squire's outlawry, as reflected in Wagner's subtitle: "The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law...

“Any Leadership Would Have to Be the Type of Frederick Douglass”

The inspiration for twentieth-century activist-artist Jacob Lawrence’s multipart narrative series Frederick Douglass (1938–1939), a thirty-two-panel work he painted while he was living in Harlem, emerged from his exposure to the stories of “strong, daring and heroic black heroes and heroines.” Whereas it had been an act of philosophical and political liberation for Frederick Douglass to focus on the “multitudinous” possibilities of textual experimentation and visual reimagining when it came to his own face and body, let alone his life story and his intellectual and moral power as an orator and author, for social justice artists such as Jacob Lawrence who were building new languages of liberation from Douglass’s activism and authorship, it was imperative that he become a point of origin, a Founding Father in a Black revolutionary tradition, and a steadying compass point for acts of radicalism, reform, and resistance in the African Atlantic world.