Darieck Scott

blackness, power, and sexuality in the African American literary imagination

Extravagant abjection

Ramzi Fawaz

This special issue explores the intersection of queer theory and comics studies. The contributors provide new theories of how comics represent and reconceptualize queer sexuality, desire, intimacy, and eroticism, while also investigating how the comic strip, as a hand-drawn form, queers literary production and demands innovative methods of analysis from the fields of literary, visual, and cultural studies. Contributors examine the relationships among reader, creator, and community across a range of comics production, including mainstream superhero comics, independent LGBTQ comics, and avant-garde and experimental feminist narratives. They also address queer forms of identification elicited by the classic X-Men character Rogue, the lesbian grassroots publishing networks that helped shape Alison Bechdel's oeuvre, and the production of black queer fantasy in the Black Panther comic book series, among other topics. Contributors andré carrington, Anthony Michael D'Agostino, Ramzi Fawaz, Margaret Galvan, Yetta Howard, Joshua Abraham Kopin, Kate McCullough, Darieck Scott, Jessica Q. Stark, Shelley Streeby, Rebecca Wanzo

Queer about Comics

Introduction: Fantastic Bullets -- I Am Nubia: Superhero Comics and the Paradigm of the Fantasy-Act -- Can the Black Superhero Be? -- Erotic Fantasy-Acts: The Art of Desire -- Conclusion: On Becoming Fantastical.

Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics

Keeping It Unreal

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.

When a boyhood friend is brutally raped and murdered, a dreamy, unemployed New York actor is forced to confront his homosexuality, his guilt about keeping a white lover, and his uneasy relations with other African-American men. Reprint.

Traitor to the Race

"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, the author argues, but are active reshapings of readers and their worlds. This book 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"--

Celebrating sex between black men, this collection of gay erotica recalls first time affairs and swinging times in the Mine Shaft, a famous New York club, as well as other sexual scenarios, by Canaan Parker, Samuel R. Delany, Thomas Glave, James Earl Hardy, and Belasco, among others. Original.

Darieck Scott

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