Keeping It Unreal
eBook - ePub

Keeping It Unreal

Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Keeping It Unreal

Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics

About this book

Winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ+ Studies!

Explores Black representation in fantasy genres and comic books

Characters like Black Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Miles Morales, and Black Lightning are part of a growing cohort of black superheroes on TV and in film. Though comic books are often derided as naïve and childish, these larger-than-life superheroes demonstrate how this genre can serve as the catalyst for engaging the Black radical imagination.

Keeping It Unreal: Comics and Black Queer Fantasy is an exploration of how fantasies of Black power and triumph fashion theoretical, political, and aesthetic challenges to—and respite from—white supremacy and anti-Blackness. It examines representations of Blackness in fantasy-infused genres: superhero comic books, erotic comics, fantasy and science-fiction genre literature, as well as contemporary literary "realist" fiction centering fantastic conceits.

Darieck Scott offers a rich meditation on the relationship between fantasy and reality, and between the imagination and being, as he weaves his personal recollections of his encounters with superhero comics with interpretive readings of figures like the Black Panther and Blade, as well as 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.

Reading new life into Afrofuturist traditions and fantasy genres, Darieck Scott seeks to rescue the role of fantasy and the fantastic to challenge, revoke, and expand our assumptions about what is normal, real, and markedly human.

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Yes, you can access Keeping It Unreal by Darieck Scott in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Introduction: Fantastic Bullets
  7. 1. I Am Nubia: Superhero Comics and the Paradigm of the Fantasy-Act
  8. 2. Can the Black Superhero Be? Blackness vs. the Superhero
  9. 3. Erotic Fantasy-Acts: The Art of Desire
  10. Conclusion: On Becoming Fantastical
  11. Acknowledgments
  12. Notes
  13. Index
  14. About the Author