Unstable Masks; Or, The Whiteness of the Superhero (a preview)
A guest post in the form of a preview of the forthcoming anthology, Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics.
“Am I Black Enough For You?” The Respectability of CW’s Black Lightning
The CW’s Black Lighting represents the split between Black respectability and radical politics in a singular figure.
Jack-in-the-Box: Race & Legacy Superheroes
Exploring the intersection of legacy and race in superhero comics through Kurt Busiek’s Astro City
Striking Back: Black Lightning and Reading Race (part two)
When Black Lightning rejects the Justice League he is rejecting white supremacy.
Striking Back: Black Lightning and Reading Race (part one)
The clumsy way superhero comic books of the post-Civil Rights 1970s explicitly address race can provide a site for imagining productive racial consciousness for black characters, while also highlighting the limits of that kind of resistant reading.
The Captain Black America Needs
Leveraging Marvel’s underwhelming Civil War II to think about Black lives in the Marvel Universe.
Marvel Five-in-One: Prominent, Notorious and Invisible Black Lives of the Marvel Universe
Exploring the limits of diversity in a white supremacist framework through a five-in-one look at 1978’s Marvel Two-in-One.
Bumbling: DC Super Hero Girls and the White Racial Imagination
This Girl Power(!) needs to be a little more intersectional in its thinking.
The Captain White America Needs
Because you can’t trust even the best-intentioned white Captain America to know what’s up.
Imperfect Storm (Part Three): “Return of the Goddess”
Storm’s return to the site of her X-origin and the awkward undoing of her “goddess” identity.
Imperfect Storm (Part Two): Exploring “Lifedeath II”
Part Two of Exploring Storm as a postcolonial figure.
Imperfect Storm (Part One): Exploring “Lifedeath”
Exploring the relationship between seriality, identity and the colonial imagination through X-Men’s Storm.
Should We Marvel at a Black Captain America?
Sam Wilson’s characterization as the rugged individual and then his ascension to the role of Captain America are political messages that must be addressed beyond the tendency of media to oversimplify the political ramifications of things, or streamline complex histories
Humanity Not Included: DC’s Cyborg and the Mechanization of the Black Body
Could Cyborg be the comic book superhero representation of white supremacy’s effect on the black body? To have a black person transformed from a metaphorical machine to an actual one?
The Man Who Lived Twice! (If You Can Call That Living): Marvel’s Brother Voodoo
The fourth in a series of posts about black superheroes. Marvel Comics’ Brother Voodoo—a character to feel really conflicted about.
Images for “Black Communities of the 30th Century: Racial Assimilation and Ahistoricity in Superhero Comics” in the June 2014 Issue of Apex Magazine
Images for an essay published in the June 2014 issue of Apex
Black Lightning Always Strikes Twice! – Double-Consciousness as a Super-Power.
Jefferson Pierce’s “blackness” is explored in relation to his superheroic identity, but doesn’t get anywhere.
“Invisible (Watch)Men: The Impossibility of the Black Superhero”
Miles Morales or Trayvon Martin are more likely to be victim of a “heroic” vigilante than to be one.
Black Goliath: “Some Black Super Dude”
Black Goliath is a title that never got a chance to really develop and it suffers from the problems of a lot of early attempts to bring ethnic characters into the limelight.
