Black Superheroes Research Articles

Deciphering the Ontology of Racial Cultural Politics in Black Super Heroes Comic Narratives

The origin of the superheroes genre in popular graphic narratives medium provides a new hindsight to the genre of children’s literature. However, with the introduction of black racial politics in the superheroes genre there arose a cultural shift to the conception of superheroes with the advent of DC and Marvel comic book universes black superheroes gained a popular place in the new comic books medium which provided spaces for creativity critique as a celebration in resulting in new ways of understanding the world and their place within it. Besides it reflects how black superheroes struggle to maintain their own racial and cultural identity against the white(imperialist) capitalist policy of assimilation and marginalization

Potential and Power in Black Superhero Film Comedies

Potential and Power in Black Superhero Film Comedies

Unintended Consequences: Spawn as “Superman Black”

ABSTRACT: While arguably the most popular and successful Black superhero in comic books, Spawn, the former CIA assassin Al Simmons turned agent of Hell, rarely exhibits his racial identity. The creator of Spawn and one of the founding members of Image Comics, Todd McFarlane, remarked that he wanted to make Spawn a super-hero “who happened to be black,” thus trying to transcend racial identity through the superhero genre. This attempt at transcendence, however, results in the suppression of Spawn’s racial identity, and ultimately an affi rmation of the superhero genre’s logic as a logic of whiteness. With the help of Frantz Fanon and numerous comic studies scholars, I will look at Spawn’s actual body, his super suit, and the rare moments of Black identity allowed him by McFarlane as a site of Spawn entering into the “bodily schema” of the superhero. After this analysis, I will use James Lamb’s idea of “Superman Black” to frame McFarlane’s wish to suppress and minimize Spawn’s Black identity and reveal how that suppression and erasure becomes integral to Spawn standing on his own as “Superman Black.”

Give the Black Girl the Remote: De-colonising and Depatriarchalising Knowledge and Art in Black Panther and Colour Me Melanin

This article explores two texts set in Africa to determine to what extent they exhibit decolonial and anti-patriarchal impulses. They are Ryan Coogler's 2018 film, Black Panther, and the adult colouring book, Colour Me Melanin (Kekana 2019), which features 27 portraits of African women paired with 27 poems inspiring pride in women's African heritage. Black Panther features a Black superhero: the hypermasculine T'Challa, although its technological genius is not T'Challa (the eponymous Black Panther), but his sister Shuri, disparaged by traditionalists in Wakanda as 'a child'. Despite her irreverent and iconoclastic approach to tradition, sixteen-year-old Shuri is 'the smartest person in the world, smarter than Tony Stark [Iron Man]' (Malik 2023). Despite these promising features, the film's portrayal of Shuri - a Black girl nerd who is manifestly her brother's equal in the arts of war and technology - stops short of a complete depatriarchalisation of the norm that reserves superhero status for men. Further, Black Panther contains a number of concerning representations that reinforce, rather than disrupting, the colonial view of Africa. Colour Me Melanin may be called speculative fiction in that it points to a future that is yet to come as it shifts the locus of women's beauty away from whiteness and places it firmly in the domain of Black African women's embodiment. All the same, some aspects of this multimodal text signal its affinity for colonial taxonomies and ways of thinking about ethnicity.

“Becoming Fantastical” in Black Superhero Comics

“Becoming Fantastical” in Black Superhero Comics

Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics by Darieck Scott (review)

Reviewed by: Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics by Darieck Scott D’Arcee Charington Neal (bio) Scott, Darieck. Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics. New York University Press, 2022. 280 pp, $89.00, $29.00. In his introduction to Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics, Darieck Scott considers how rhetorical Blackness in various forms (whether visual, ideological, or fantastical) operates through the lens of the comic book. Asking the critical question of why the collective imagination seems unable to accurately capture the nuance of what it is to be Black, Scott “examine[s] representations of blackness in fantasy-infused genres . . . to theorize how fantasies of black power and triumph fashion theoretical, political, and aesthetic challenges to—and respite from—white supremacy and antiblackness” (2). Through Frantz Fanon’s articulation of fantasy as an abject impossibility for Black people throughout the book, Scott utilizes Fanon’s Afro-pessimistic observations as a thread throughout the text. Later, he argues against the influential linguistic psychoanalyses of Fredric Wertham, Jean LaPlanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis in order to construct a societal understanding of what comic books do both to and for their audiences. In Keeping It Unreal, the audience-specific focus takes up much of the space in the book as the central weapon that is stylistically wielded against Black imaginative power. As a result, Scott expertly weaves through a dizzying number of critics, artists, fanatical reports, essays, and Congressional testimony to showcase both the immense power and the masculine fragility of the readers who were consuming 100 million issues per month during the so-called Golden Age. Though that number has dropped significantly, the issues that came with it have not. Wertham’s argument is entertainingly remixed through the idea of what Scott calls “fantasy-acts,” refocusing fantasy’s supposed passivity toward the very real, accountable weight it carries through speculative actions and/or power (30). Scott points out that many of these acts are responsible for the censorship and rabid calls of homosexuality that loom throughout superhero comics’ criticisms. He is also adamant [End Page 93] in pointing out that although they are rarely considered for their subjective additions to literary canons, superhero comics exist as untapped libraries of creative ideals, further arguing that these considerations exist in comics at the intersection of masculine identity, feminine sensuality, and ableist assumptions of whole (and largely white) bodies. For Scott, paradigmatic constructions of fantasy or “phantasy . . . [as] the creative activity of imagination, rather than the reduction to whimsy and triviality that often occurs with the English word ‘fantasy,’” exist not as the sole property of whiteness but, instead, as the unexamined-yet-hugely-influential moments of Black characterization that are under the surface (72). This mantra is the singular track that Scott stays tethered to throughout the book as he examines the way that Black super-heroes—both male and female—have carved out a landscape assumed to be entirely white and straight, and why this is completely wrong. In the first chapter, he makes use of Wonder Woman’s Black sister Nubia and positions his own life story as a queer Black child through Dick Giordano’s 1973 cover of Wonder Woman #206. On it, as Nubia, in a tight leopard print outfit, battles Diana Prince, Scott recontextualizes Wertham’s incendiary argument about homosexuality to highlight how even negative patriarchal views leave no space for women (68). Bringing up various discussions of lesbianism, he points out that these are swept aside in favor of an overt sexuality that is essentially cloaked in two-dimensional fantasies of 1970s Black power. Curiously, Scott makes reference to the fact that DC Comics perhaps recognized the unsubtle racism suggested through Nubia’s initial artwork, citing the fact that her subsequent appearances are redesigned as either fully clothed and/or armored. Regardless, the core issue of identification that Nubia represents remains a staple for Scott, bolstered by Freudian comparisons to a suggestive Oedipal complex. This is represented in Jonathan Dollimore’s update to Wertham’s hetero-to- homosexual lens, which goes from “I desire you” to “I desire (to be like) you” (71, emphasis original). In the character of...

Sister Night, Hooded Justice, and Racial Reckoning in Watchmen

ABSTRACT: The television series Watchmen (HBO, 2019) is a reflection on the trauma of racism and the means by which Black people have survived and subverted that trauma. I read the protagonist Angela Abar/Sister Night and her grandfather Will Reeves/Hooded Justice as revisionist Black superheroes who facilitate the remembrance of Black histories. As police officers and costumed crimefighters, these characters balance the identities of Blackness and the law and complicate symbols such as the police badge. I argue that Will’s critical function is that of chronotope, a symbolic embodiment of time and space, and Angela’s most important role is to learn from and transcend her grandfather’s legacy. As such, this article offers an Afrofuturist and feminist interpretation of this acclaimed series.

Review: The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, by Rebecca Wanzo

Review: <i>The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging</i>, by Rebecca Wanzo

Representation of Anti-racism and Reconstruction of Black Identity in Black Panther

The black superhero film is an important research object for anti-racism development. Under the White supremacy framework, Black people and culture have been devalued and neglected for a long time. The all-Black lead Marvel film Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler in 2018, employs a well-defined system to present the appeals on anti-racist and reconstruct the filmic Black identity. This study explicitly analyses the approach through which the images of Black people and Black culture are represented, and it attempts to understand how this film reconstructs Black people’s sense of self-identity. This study focuses on the physical appearance of Black superheroes and material culture, the spatial narrative of Black Panther’s fictional spatial world Wakanda, and the Black spirit depicted in the film. Cultural identity, cinematic representation theory, and social identity theory are used to interpret how Black Panther reconstructs Black identity and represents Black culture. This study discovers that Black superheroes are portrayed as powerful, justice, and wise as White people, and Wakanda provides a utopia for a non-racist world. Meanwhile, Black culture is depicted elegantly and proudly to reconstruct Black people’s recognition of cultural and social identity.

Governmentality and comic propaganda: Mighty Man, the black superhero of apartheid

Recent years have seen growing academic interest in the proliferation of a distinct genre of African superheroes. There is, however, a much longer – and at times, problematic – history of superheroes in and from Africa, a history often heavily infused with colonial and imperial ideology. Using the 1970s South African Mighty Man comic book series, this article highlights how popular culture and media can be used as covert and mundane tool of governmentality. Mighty Man can be understood as a technique of power deployed in service of the apartheid regime's philosophy of separate development, illustrating the use of popular culture as a technology of (colonial) governmentality. The landscapes, narratives and additional content of Mighty Man were used in efforts to instil and frame a conduct of conduct amongst Black subjects – both in accepting separate development and the apartheid government, and in framing the everyday practices and dispositions that would allow for governing at a distance by the white minority regime. Mighty Man provides a powerful example of state-commissioned, covert comic propaganda which was indelibly framed by government policy and an ambition to create and impose a set of values and ideals around the dispositions, behaviour and actions of Black subjects. Ultimately, Mighty Man embodied a segregationist fantasy in which the absence of non-Black characters both denied the possibility of inter-racial contact and normalised social and spatial segregation – as well as class-based aspirations – while simultaneously promoting the conduct of conduct amongst subjects that would maintain these divisions. Through the construction of moral township landscapes, the Mighty Man series not only sought to regulate the conduct of the colonised subject through the condemning of ‘immoral’ behaviours but also attempted to offer illusory hopes of aspiration and freedom.

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.

Aspiration and the Violence of Gentrification in Marvel’s Luke Cage

This article analyzes the cultural politics of gentrification as they are deployed in the Netflix series Marvel’s Luke Cage. Based on the comic book character, Luke Cage, who was created in response to the popularity of the 1970s blaxploitation films, and the Black Power movement, the television series portrays a Black superhero who defends contemporary Harlem and its people from crime and exploitation. Critically recognized and widely watched during its first airing from 2016 to 2018, Luke Cage was a breakthrough television series that not only centered a Black superhero but directed itself to Black experience and public dialogue during the time of Black Life Matters. The Harlem portrayed in Luke Cage is both a specific community, and a virtual invocation of Black community aspiration, and the structural violence of gentrification. The violent emotions and displacement of gentrification that are presented in the series represent a form of intramural dialogue between the Black creatives working on the show and the broader Black public that is engaging with the long-time debates around the meaning and future of Harlem.

Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh

Haitian Revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture has been the focus of many plays, novels, children’s books, illustrated histories, and biographies since the nineteenth century. Yet, Louverture’s story has seemed elusive to scholars until just recently. In this biography, Hazareesingh works “to return as far as possible to the primary sources, to try to see the world through [Louverture’s] eyes, and to recapture the boldness of his thinking and the individuality of his voice” (10). Through research in libraries and archives in France, Britain, and the United States, Hazareesingh shows how Louverture “embodied the many facets of Saint-Domingue’s revolution” (2). He challenges assumptions that European ideas brought about the Haitian Revolution, instead focusing on the local origins and “intellectual potency” of the Black revolutionaries (12).Hazareesingh divides this sizeable tome into four parts, each with three chapters. The first part explores Louverture’s emergence as a revolutionary. He disputes the overstated differences between enslaved people born in the colony and those born in Africa. He explains how these distinctions were “another essential tool of white power” (25). Hazareesingh refers to the period from 1791 to 1794 as Louverture’s apprenticeship, serving under other Black revolutionaries and the Spanish. He stresses that Louverture’s choice to join the French was not a rallying to Jacobin republicanism, and he attributes Louverture’s military successes to his focus on fraternity among his troops, his presence on the battlefield, his paternal leadership, and his insistence upon humanity toward civilians and prisoners of war.Parts II and III explore Louverture’s time in power, when he acted in accordance with a “multi-layered concept” of fraternity that “included whites, people of colour, republicans from France and all the men and women across the Atlantic who were engaged in the just war against slavery” (103–104). He had to convince the formerly enslaved, particularly those born in Africa, and maroons to join the republican cause. He also faced challenges to his leadership and vision from representatives sent from France, namely Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Gabriel d’Hédouville, both of whom he outmaneuvered. Louverture worked to establish economic relationships with the United States and British in Jamaica to ensure the success of the colony, and he secured control over Spanish Santo Domingo on the eastern part of the island. Furthermore, he worked with a small group of men to draft a constitution from Saint-Domingue in 1801.In Part IV, Hazareesingh describes the last years of Louverture’s leadership as “an authoritarian spiral” (278). Indeed, his agrarian policies provoked the formerly enslaved in Saint-Domingue with their “echoes of slavery” (277), and his political and military actions prompted Napoleon Bonaparte in France to send an expeditionary force to the colony. Even though Louverture anticipated an attack and prepared the island, the French tricked and arrested him. Hazareesingh suggests that Jean-Jacques Dessalines may have been complicit in Louverture’s capture to secure power for himself. Imprisoned in Fort Joux in France, Louverture wrote and dictated his defense. Following his death, he became a hero to revolutionaries of all stripes, from enslaved people who revolted elsewhere in the Caribbean and the United States to Fidel Castro in the 1950s. Hazareesingh describes Louverture as “the first black superhero of the modern age” (329).Hazareesingh refers to Louverture as “Toussaint” throughout the manuscript while using the last names of all the other figures, including Bonaparte and Dessalines. Although exclusive use of the first name reflects a personal story, it also denies Louverture the respect afforded to other figures in the book. A formerly enslaved man deserves to be identified by his chosen name of Louverture. Production elements in this book make it more appealing to a popular audience than to a scholarly one. The book has a helpful chronology and glossary but no bibliography. Moreover, its endnotes, which run together in paragraph form, are difficult to navigate. On the other hand, a popular audience may struggle with untranslated French and Kreyol (Hatian Creole) within the text. Nonetheless, this biography makes a solid contribution to our understanding of Haiti’s most well-known revolutionary.

Corporate Colonization of Blackness – The Representation of Blackness in the National Basketball Association from 1984 to 2005

In light of current social justice dynamics, this article examines marketing strategies employed by the NBA (and associated companies) to sell predominantly Black athletes to a chiefly White audience. Through historical contextualization and critical analysis, the NBA’s development from a non-profitable and scorned circus to a multi-faceted and multi-billion-dollar global attraction is explored. From the earliest league structures until the 1980s, a dichotomy between Black and White players (and the values/stigma they embodied) dominated the sport of Basketball. This however changed with the rise of Michael Jordan to fame. Jordan became the first basketball player who transcended these racial lines in terms of associated values and/or stigmas. Simultaneously, His Airness’ rise to global fame let the NBA’s popularity soared into astronomical spheres. A shiny Black Superhero was born, yet his public image is predominantly inspired by corporate considerations – a case of corporate colonization of Black bodies. Black players’ transgressions and the NBA’s reactions to those – as happened in the Malice in the Palace (2005) incident – highlight the conflicting lines along which the NBA constructs and presents its players with a clear tendency towards corporate colonization, a concept which will be outlined in the paper. Through critical historical reading of past corporate efforts, this article re- and deconstructs the strategic illustration of Black athletes.

Imaginary Nation of Wakanda in Black Panther: The Neo-colonized African Continent

Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther as a high-profile black superhero film has been lauded especially by African descendants for its features such as diversity of actors and expression of Afrofuturism. As a Hollywood film that is produced under the grand project of Marvel Cinematic Universe, Black Panther is celebrated for representing African (American) characters without distorting them. Thus, in this stance, the film is located within the historical context of African American film production that has long attempted to represent just and empowering images of the Black race. On the other hand, few scholars criticize Black Panther for its way of using African continent which does not differ from popular and everlasting culture prop. Starting from this point, this paper explores in particular the power dynamics surrounding Africa as the Third World via Wakanda as an imaginary space which generates the multi-layered perspectives for approaching the representation of Africa. Although this imaginary nation is supposed to be a leading image of liberating Africa through a cinematic imagination, it only comes to reiterate the existing position which dismisses and devalues African continent since it fails to embrace the continent. In further focusing the relationship among the African, the African American, and Wakanda, this paper also delves into what lies behind the idealistic surface of Black Panther. The detailed examination of the tension between T’Challa, the African, and Killmonger, the African American, will allow this paper to critically engage with Pan-Africanism the film stands for, and concludes that the film, although unintentionally, reinforces U.S. nationalism.

Black skin as costume in Black Panther

As a costume, textile and surface adornment practitioner my research focuses on how skin contributes to the reading of a costume. Black Panther’s (2018) Oscar winning costume by Ruth E. Carter conformation to whilst also breaking traditional superhero costuming tropes feeds directly into my research on reading black skin as heroic. The visual disruption to the limited and negative narratives usually embedded within black skin are subtly challenged by Carter’s use of both black primordial and superhero skin-like costumes to signify the heroic. The costuming of a black superhero and nemesis frame the black body in action away from the negative stereotypes of Bogle’s hypersexual buck. The reading of black skin as heroic underpins the practice’s explorations away from the binary of black and white skin to the many shades of brown the moniker of black represents. It is the repetition of skin as metaphor where both superhero costumed skin and primordial skin demonstrate the multiplicity between superhero, his alter-ego and Bogle’s stereotypes that form the basis of this article. Black skin as costume explores how skin colour, according to Dyer has been used to other the black body and rank it below that of the white body within postcolonial readings. Traditionally systemic racism in action films has seamlessly placed the white body and skin as inherently heroic whilst reading the equivalent black body and skin negatively. My practice explores equity of black and brown skin as strong, precious and powerful so that any costumes, textiles or surface decoration I create would read the same when placed on a black body as they would on a white body.

No Crips Allowed: Magical Negroes, Black Superheroes, And the Hyper-Abled Black Male Body In Steven Spielberg's Amistad and Ryan Coogler's Black Panther

No Crips Allowed:Magical Negroes, Black Superheroes, And the Hyper-Abled Black Male Body In Steven Spielberg's Amistad and Ryan Coogler's Black Panther Charles I. Nero (bio) Initially, it might seem odd to discuss shared racial tropes in Amistad and Black Panther. Not only were the movies created over two decades apart, the films belong to entirely different cinematic genres. Steven Spielberg's Amistad (1997) is a historical period drama that is based on the true story of an armed insurrection aboard a 19th century slave ship. Ryan Coogler's Black Panther (2018) is a fantasy film that focuses on a futuristic advanced mythical kingdom in Africa that produces superheroes. Nevertheless, these films are connected by their subject matter and a recurring strategy. At their cores, both films emphasize Black resistance to the white supremacy that trans-Atlantic slavery and European imperialism necessitated. Both films deploy as strategy the hyper-abled Black male body as a tool for resisting white supremacy and colonialism. I call attention to the hyper-abled Black male body in these two films specifically to focus on the Black disability that trans-Atlantic slavery produced. I am writing along the lines of Nirmala Erevelles brilliant reading of Hortense Spillers's now-classic essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," in which producing and maintaining slavery required the impairment of Black bodies. The racialization of slavery meant that Blackness was always impaired, or, as Erevelles concludes, it was "at the historical moment when one class of human beings was transformed into cargo to be transported to the New World that Black bodies become disabled and disabled bodies become black."1 On the one hand, Amistad reflects upon the trans-Atlantic slave experience, while Black Panther showcases a Black nation that was spared this terrible ordeal; yet, both create magical worlds in which Black people are hyper-abled. Subsequently, in this essay, I examine the limits of the hyper-abled Black body as a tool of resistance; I also raise the question of whether such a dependence upon a specific gendered type--hyper-abled masculinity--reproduces a logic of white supremacy that equates Blackness with physicality, yet simultaneously denies Black intellect, therefore refuting political agency, or the rights of citizenship. [End Page 52] Amistad Prior the film's debut in 1997, Steven Spielberg and the film's producer, African American dancer and actress Debbie Allen, held blockbuster aspirations for Amistad. Both believed that Amistad could build upon the success of Schindler's List, Spielberg's historical period blockbuster from 1993. The commercial and critical success of Schindler's List had cemented Spielberg's status as a "serious filmmaker," though Spielberg was long credited with developing films that defined Hollywood filmmaking during the 1970s-1990s: namely, Jaws (1975), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Poltergeist (1982), the franchises that stemmed from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Jurassic Park (1993). Despite the success of these previous films, Amistad was not the powerhouse that Spielberg and Allen had imagined. Instead, Amistad barely recouped its investment and it failed among critics, arguably because the film confused audiences. A possible source of this confusion was because of the decision to transform a genuine story of resistance into an "interracial buddy film," a subgenre that became popular during the Civil Rights Movement and subsequently expanded to include Hollywood cop film franchises, such as Lethal Weapon (beginning in 1987), Beverly Hills Cop (beginning in 1984),48 Hours (beginning in 1982), Independence Day (1996) and Men In Black (beginning in 1997). These films celebrate the developing bonds between Black and white men who overcome their racial differences and learn to work together to solve a crime, prevent corruption, or even save the planet from alien invasion. At stake in these movies are the interracial relationships between the crime-fighting duos; certainly, the buffed bodies of the captured Africans suggested this possibility. The fitness of the Beninese actor Djimon Hounsou, who played Cinque, the leader of the insurrection, was especially notable. Previously known as a fashion model, Hounsou's first cinematic appearance was as "eye candy" in the pop star Janet Jackson's video "Love...

Thinking about Watchmen: with Jonathan W. Gray, Rebecca A. Wanzo, and Kristen J. Warner

Michael Boyce Gillespie leads a roundtable with scholars Jonathan W. Gray, Rebecca A. Wanzo, and Kristen Warner to discuss issues of medium, genre, fandom, and African American history in the highly regarded HBO series Watchmen. Characterizing the HBO series as a disobedient adaptation that modifies, extends, and redirects the world making of its source material—the famed twelve-issue comic-book series of the same name, written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons (1986–87)—Gillespie et al. explore the ways in which Watchmen remediates American history, starting with the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 that serves as the historical and ideological trigger that sets the series in motion. In a wide-ranging conversation that encompasses subjects including fan fiction, adaptation, cultural mythology, and black superheroes, the authors argue for Watchmen's significance as some of the most consequential television of the century so far.

Fifty Shades of Blackness: Recovering an Aesthetics of the Afrifuge

Black lives and histories are to the fore at the moment: from #BlackLivesMatter in the United States to the movement to decolonize syllabi and pedagogy in South African universities. The filmBlack Pantheris watched within a visual and political terrain in which the black body is presented no longer only within histories of previous abjection—slavery and apartheid—but in visions of future reconstitution. This article will put together the changing representation of T’Challa from 1966 to the present in Marvel Comics and the film and argue that blackness has meant different things at different times to the creators as much as within the historical circumstance within which the black superhero has been seen and understood. Central to this has been the dilemma of bringing together the histories of “Africa” and the tenements of the United States—Wakanda and Oakland, California, in the film, and Harlem, New York, in the comic books.

Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West by Karla Slocum

Reviewed by: Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West by Karla Slocum Kathryn A. Mariner Karla Slocum. Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 192 pp. Karla Slocum. Black Towns, Black Futures: The Enduring Allure of a Black Place in the American West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. 192 pp. Karla Slocum begins her Black Towns, Black Futures autobiographically, with the death of her grandfather, Mozell C. Hill. Kinship and ancestry become potent methods and modes of analysis, as the book grows out of her grandfather's own sociological research on Black towns. Based on multi-sited ethnography in Oklahoma between 2004 and 2012, Black Towns, Black Futures is an impressive effort to theorize what Slocum calls the "appeal" of Black towns in the United States, not historically, but in contemporary social life. What attracts residents and non-residents alike to these small rural places (typically inhabited by 100–1,000 residents), especially during a period of increasing urbanization, not just in the United States, but globally? Via Hill's research, Slocum's own personal ties to Black towns reverberate throughout the text at a deeper level than common discussions of positionality or social location; she notes, "my family ties and newfound family stories play a role in how I think about the towns," describing herself as a "curious seeker for whom memory and personal history play a part in the motivation both to connect with Black towns and to understand what Black towns are" (xi). Slocum's exploration of "this intersection of subjective experience and empirical research" (xi) is a welcome addition to other recent calls to think more deeply about why we as anthropologists pursue the research that we do, and the ethical implications of our decisions in the field (McTighe and Raschig 2019)—in other words, what is appealing [End Page 801] about ethnography and why we are drawn to our subjects. This is the first of several ways Slocum helps us to understand the appeal and attraction of Black towns—by theorizing her own experience of being drawn to them. By chance, I found myself sitting down to read this book in December of 2019, the week after watching the season finale of HBO's Watchmen, a show which begins and situates much of its historical context in the 1921 Greenwood Massacre in Tulsa (albeit in an alternate sci-fi-inflected America, complete with reparations, Black superheroes, and even a Black god). Slocum's grandfather, Mozell C. Hill, was 58 in 1969, so he would have been a young child at the time of the massacre, just like Will Reeves (himself the grandfather of the show's Black protagonist Angela Abar), whom we meet in the first episode of the series trying, with his family, to escape the massacre's unspeakable violence. The appeal of a Black place was understandable then, and it continues to resonate today, against the backdrop of what Slocum calls "the realities of a postracial society not yet achieved" (88). This appeal was even more evident in the summer of 2020, when in the midst of a global pandemic and rising racial unrest in response to police brutality, Donald Trump planned to hold a campaign rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth. After widespread outcry, the rally was rescheduled to June 20. I will not say that Slocum's book is timely, because anti-Black violence has been part of the fabric of the United States since its founding. But Black Towns, Black Futures is necessary now, for the glimpse it provides into the vision and attraction of Black spaces and Black places, at a time when safety and survival seem increasingly precarious. In the introduction, Slocum introduces the notion of seeking protection from racism in place, rather than policy or anything else. "The people in the place matter," she argues, "but the place…is the essential piece of the story" (1). What is it, she wonders, that makes a particular place appealing? In the case of Black towns, she argues that appeal is tied to the...