Mixed-Race Superheroes 9781978814639

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Mixed-Race Superheroes

Mixed-Race Superheroes

EDITED BY SIKA A. DAGBOVIE-MULLINS AND ERIC L. BERLATSKY

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dagbovie-Mullins, Sika A., editor. | Berlatsky, Eric L., 1972–editor. Title: Mixed-race superheroes / edited by Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric L. Berlatsky Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020031133 | ISBN 9781978814592 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978814608 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978814615 (epub) | ISBN 9781978814622 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978814639 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Comic books, strips, etc.—History and criticism. | Racially mixed people in literature. | Superheroes in literature. | Racially mixed people—Race identity— United States. | Passing (Identity) in literature. Classification: LCC PN6714 .M59 2021 | DDC 741.5 / 9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031133 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2021 by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Individual chapters copyright © 2021 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.rutgersuniversitypress.org Manufactured in the United States of America

 For Asilah—SDM For Katie and Julia—EB

Contents

Introduction

1

SIK A A . DAGBOV IE-MUL L INS A ND ERIC L . BERL AT SK Y

Part I  Superheroes in Black and White 1

Guess Who’s Coming Home? Mixed Metaphors of Home in Spider-Man’s Comic and Cinematic Homecomings

27

SIK A A . DAGBOV IE-MUL L INS

2

The Ride of Valkyrie against White Supremacy: Tessa Thompson’s Casting in Thor: Ragnarok 46 JA SMINE MITCHEL L

3

“Which World Would You Rather Live In?” The Anti-utopian Superheroes of Gary Jackson’s Poetry

64

CHRIS G AVA L ER

4

Flash of Two Races: Incest, Miscegenation, and the Mixed-Race Superhero in The Flash Comics and Television Show

81

ERIC L . BERL AT SK Y

vii

viii  •  Contents

Part II  Metaphors of / and Mixedness 5

“Let Yourself Just Be Whoever You Are!” Decolonial Hybridity and the Queer Cosmic Future in Steven Universe 105 C ORRINE E . C OL L INS

6

The Hulk and Venom: Warring Blood Superheroes

120

GREGORY T. C AR T ER

7

Monsters, Mutants, and Mongrels: The Mixed-Race Hero in Monstress 138 CHRIS KOENIG -WOODYARD

8

Examining Otherness and the Marginal Man in DC’s Superman through Mixed-Race Studies

158

K WA SU DAV ID T EMBO

Part III  Multiethnic Mixedness (or Mixed-Race Intersections) 9

Talented Tensions and Revisions: The Narrative Double Consciousness of Miles Morales

179

JORGE J. S A N TOS JR .

10

“They’re Two People in One Body”: Nested Sovereignties and Mixed-Race Mutations in FX’s Legion 199 NICHOL A S E . MIL L ER

11

Into the Spider-Verse and the Commodified (Re)imagining of Afro-Rican Visibility

220

IS A BEL MOL IN A- GUZM Á N

12

Truth, Justice, and the (Ancient) Egyptian Way: DC’s Doctor Fate and the Arab Spring

243

A DRIENNE RE SH A

Acknowledgments 261 Notes on Contributors 263 Index 267

Mixed-Race Superheroes

Introduction SIK A A. DAGBOVIE-MULLINS AND ERIC L. BERL ATSK Y

In a 2017 Wired article published a month before DC’s Wonder Woman U.S. premiere, comedian and TV host W. Kamau Bell wrote, I have two Black / mixed-race daughters. My oldest daughter is 5. At that age many kids are covered in superhero gear. But not her. I asked her who her favorite superhero was. I had no idea if she even had one. After thinking for a considerable, considerable time, she finally declared, “Word Girl!” Word Girl is a PBS show starring a brown-skinned fifth grader who fights crime and teaches kids to read. (Because apparently even POC superheroes have to work multiple jobs.) That means if Hollywood wants my daughter’s ticket money when she is my age, then it needs to do better to highlight and create heroes that look like her and her friends.

Although Bell’s commentary is primarily intended to critique the dearth of nonwhite (and not necessarily mixed-race) superhero characters, we find his daughter’s response interesting, as Word Girl embodies a kind of racial mixedness or racial indeterminacy (prompting questions like “What race / nationality is word girl?” on Yahoo! Answers, “Is Word Girl black or 1

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Hispanic?” on Quora, and “As far as ‘race’ I guess she’s a Lexiconian?” on Fandom). Word Girl is an alien from the planet Lexicon who is found and adopted by a human couple (mirroring the Kryptonian origin story of Superman, the “first” superhero). While many fans read Word Girl as “brown” and Latinx (the show debuted on Maya and Miguel), her adoption by Tim and Sally Botsford (conspicuously Anglo names) further complicates how one might think about her racialization. Still, Bell’s daughter’s citing of Word Girl as her favorite superhero (and not, for example, The Powerpuff Girls, rebooted in 2016) speaks to the broader call for all kinds of racially diverse heroes, including those who may blur racial boundaries. Consider Anglo-Indonesian and British writer Will Harris’s embracing of Barack Obama in Mixed-Race Superman: Keanu, Obama, and Multiracial Experience: “I was a shy eighteen-year-old confused about my identity [in 2007] and Obama spoke to my desire for a ‘certain presumptuousness, a certain audacity.’ . . . ​A fter a decade of waiting for a ‘new era’ to arrive, I wanted a superman: a comic book narrative of self-discovery that would compensate for my own self-ignorance. Now here was a politician who not only looked different, but talked beautifully—and knowingly—of his mixed-race upbringing. Here was a story that was long and painful but seemed to bend implacably toward justice” (16). Harris was not the only one to view Obama as a superhero. There are numerous indirect representations of him as such, including Calvin Ellis / Kal-El as both Superman and Black president of the United States in Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis, vol. 1, no. 7 (Morrison et al.), and Action Comics, vol. 2, no. 9 (Morrison and Ha), as well as images of Obama as (or posing with) Superman in popular media. Ralina  L. Joseph’s review of Obama’s recognized extraordinary abilities also invokes his position as a man of steel: “Even when blatant racism . . . ​is thrown in Obama’s direction, he does not appear to flinch. He is gifted with racism Teflon. Obama’s perceived superhero quality is linked to the representation of his mixed-race” (165). In response to Bell’s critique, 2018 answered energetically with the blockbuster Black Panther, which features a predominantly Black cast and Black director. However, 2018 is also notable for three films that presented mixed-race characters (two of which also featured mixed-race actors or actresses): Ant-Man and the Wasp, Aquaman, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.1 All three films went into production during the Obama administration and in some way reflect the aspirational postracial politics

Introduction • 3

of the time. However, as political scientist Michael Tesler explains, “the 2008 election night hopes of racial unity had given way four years later to growing fears of racial polarization in American politics” (5). Racial divisions deepened during Obama’s second term, stoking the racial fears, anxieties, and violence that have characterized President Donald Trump’s rhetoric, policies, and administration. Thus the U.S. premiere of these films (in June and December 2018) coincided with recognition of postracialism as a myth, undeniable in light of the increasingly public expressions of white supremacist rhetoric. In short, the time span during which the development, production, and eventual debut of these films took place speaks to our nation’s contradictory impulses when it comes to issues related to race and racial divisions. Subtle and more obvious stereotypes about racial mixedness, the postracial promise of race mixing, and what Joseph calls the “exceptional multiracial” appear in these films, suggesting that problematic ideas associated with racial mixedness continue to be recycled in the twenty-first century (4).

The Specter of Mixed Race In Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, the villain is a Black and white mixedrace young woman who was orphaned as a child and is struggling to survive as an adult. Ava Starr / Ghost (played by mixed-race actress Hannah JohnKamen) is weary, desperate, and enraged about her corporeal condition, which causes her to literally fade in and out of existence, summoning up the tragic mulatto archetype frequently discussed in this anthology.2 Her bodily impermanence literalizes Obama’s description of “the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds” in his autobiography Dreams from My Father (xv; emphasis added). Ava’s moniker, Ghost, is fitting on several fronts, as it relates to racial mixedness and the haunting specter of miscegenation in America. In a flashback we learn that Ava’s father, Elihas, was white and her mother, Catherine, was Black, a coupling whose history invokes violence, coercion, and abuse. As Renee Romano reminds us, “Under slavery and later under the system of segregation, Black women had little recourse against the sexual advances of white men, and many Black women were raped, victimized, and sexually abused by white men” (235). While Ava’s parents were presumably in a loving

4  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric L. Berlatsky

(and, of course, contemporary) marriage before they died, Ava’s phantomlike predicament becomes the ghostly embodiment of this aspect of America’s dark past.3 As an adult, Ava is lonely, isolated, and constantly in physical and emotional pain. Her story superficially resembles early nineteenth-­ century mulatto fiction: “The typical plot summary of such writings involves the story of an educated light-skinned heroine whose white benefactor and paramour (sometimes also the young woman’s father) dies, leaving her to the auction block. . . . ​The protagonist, sheltered from the outside world, is driven to desperation by her predicament and perhaps to an early death” (Raimon 7). Although Ava does not die, her parents are killed when her father’s quantum research lab blows up, leaving her a young orphan. She survives the explosion apparently because of the “molecular disequilibrium” she experiences during the blast. Dr. Bill Foster4 (played by Laurence Fishburne), then a member of S.H.I.E.L.D., is called in to help with this “quantum anomaly,” a term that parallels how mixed-race people were viewed as racial aberrations.5 Even Sonny Burch, the black-market technology dealer, calls her a “freak.” Ava explains, “Every cell in my body is torn apart and stitched back together over and over every day.” While this condition allows Ava to live, it also means she lacks solidity—her body goes right through objects and she flickers in and out of being a solid mass. Bill Foster becomes Ava’s surrogate father (and thus she has both a white father and a Black father, emphasizing her twoness) and builds her a chamber to “slow her decay.” Ava sleeps in this mostly glass chamber, which allows her to be seen from all sides, displaying her body and underscoring her racial alienation. Her mysterious sleeping chamber and fittingly colored gray Ghost suit, coupled with the gothic elements of the house, contribute to the motif of racial ambiguity, a “constant trope” in gothic literature (Edwards xxiii). When Scott Lang / Ant-Man, Hope Pym / the Wasp, and Hope’s father, Dr.  Hank Pym (the original Ant-Man), pull up to Bill’s house at night and look at the dark mansion in the woods that sits behind closed gates, spooky extradiegetic sounds contribute to the eeriness. They hear a howling wolf, prompting Scott’s comedic comment, “This seems right.” As James Edwards writes in Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic, “The gothic landscape and its identificatory markers . . . ​ are presented with the gothic currency that typically goes hand in hand with the motif of racial confusion” (xxxiii). When Ava / Ghost appears to confront them, she seems physically disheveled. Her slightly messy hair is in loose pigtails, exactly how she wore it as a little girl the day her parents died.

Introduction • 5

Her confusion is symbolically signaled via her subtle infantilization and implied racial in-betweenness. Further, when she talks to Scott, she understandably acts slightly manic while recounting her parents’ death and how she was subsequently used by S.H.I.E.L.D. as a “stealth operative” who was forced to steal, spy, and kill. Her criminality underscores the numerous transgressions and taboos, racial and otherwise, she embodies. While the mulatto archetype struggles in between Black and white, Ava is additionally caught between presence and absence: “The ghost appears as something at odds with limits, this thing that is both living and dead, that is neither living nor dead, that is past and is not past to come, that looks like a dead father, or husband, or daughter, and therefore the question of definition appears with it” (Coughlan 5). Ava / Ghost’s sputtering, like a computerized or digital picture constantly breaking up and freezing, technologizes the tragic mulatto—she is temporarily frozen in real time and susceptible to disappearing but then reappears (though slow-moving and delayed). Her containment suit helps her control her “phasing,” but it is as if she is always a file in the process of being downloaded. In this twentyfirst-century update, the tragic mulatto’s identity confusion is symbolically akin to a delayed download buffering. In computer speak, “If a network is fast enough to keep up with playback, buffering is not necessary. However, this is not the case over the Internet where packets can traverse numerous routers from source to destination, and delays can be introduced at any juncture” (“Buffering”). This technical explanation of network packets recalls the “scientific lore” spread about mixed-race people and their “electrical signals” in the early nineteenth century: “Neurologists decided that electrical signals that control the body run in one direction in white people and in the opposite direction in Black people. Mulattoes, obviously, were bound to be a highly confused people. Their signals were hopelessly mixed, and the slightest mixture—even one drop—was enough to upset the system and jangle the nerves. Small wonder, then, that mulattoes were sometimes imagined by whites to be a shallow, flighty, and fluttering people” (Williamson 95–96). Although Ava is more determined than confused, her behavior becomes more and more disturbing and volatile as the film continues. She threatens to do something harmful to Scott’s daughter in order to get into Hank’s lab and then later fights with Bill, throwing him to the floor in an attempt to extract quantum energy for herself. Bill has already told her she only has a few weeks to live, causing her to literally flutter in and out of existence more frequently in the latter part of the film.

6  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric L. Berlatsky

When Janet Van Dyne (Hope’s mother and the original Wasp) and Hank successfully exit the quantum realm where Janet has been trapped, their vessel inadvertently hits Ava / Ghost. This allows for a tearful motherdaughter embrace, after which Ghost reemerges. Janet immediately walks toward her, confirming Ava / Ghost’s suffering: “Your pain. I can feel it.” Ava / Ghost, appearing vulnerable, defenseless, and childlike, responds, “It hurts. It always hurts.” Janet then places her hands on the sides of Ava’s head, both a maternal and healing gesture, relieving her pain and causing Ava / Ghost to cry. Occurring after Janet’s reunion with Hope, this moment reads like a second mother-daughter exchange. Ava / Ghost now has a second set of surrogate interracial parents: Bill and Janet. At the end of the film, she is no longer tragic. In the final scene she escapes down an alley with Bill, repeatedly telling him to go. He refuses to leave, promising, “We can make it. I’m not leaving you,” and they embrace. Ava’s future seems hopeful, as she is no longer in pain, she is not alone, and she is no longer dependent on the chamber to live. Referencing nineteenth-century American literature, Eve Raimon asserts, “A liminal figure like the mulatta . . . ​is well situated to reveal writers’—and therefore the culture’s—conflicted visions of national and racial exclusion and belonging” (12). We propose that Ava / Ghost’s liminality serves a similar purpose. That she is at first alienated and entrapped and later free symbolizes the contradictory ways in which multiracial people are and have been viewed. Ava / Ghost’s condition reflects a familiar narrative about mixed-race people and nonbelonging. Fittingly, it is only when she is no longer “phasing” and thus no longer occupying the same in-between space that her future appears promising.

The Transcendent Half-Breed On the other end of the spectrum of mixed-race stereotypes is the exceptional, superhuman multiracial figure embodied by Aquaman (played by mixed-race actor Jason Momoa) in DC’s Aquaman.6 Arthur Curry is son of Atlanna, queen of Atlantis (played by Nicole Kidman), and Thomas Curry (played by New Zealand actor Temuera Derek Morrison). In the beginning of the movie, Thomas rescues Atlanna when she is brought to land by a storm. They fall in love, but when Arthur is a toddler, Atlanna is forced to return to Atlantis by order of the king. Atlanna and Thomas’s love is literally and symbolically transgressive in at least three ways: Arthur

Introduction • 7

is human, Arthur is Indigenous, and Atlanna has been betrothed to the king. In a voiceover, Arthur explains, “Their worlds were never meant to meet, and I was the product of a love that never should have been,” thus affirming both his parents’ interspecies and interracial star-crossed lovers’ story. Contributing to his parents’ unlikely union is the setting of their meeting—Maine, 1985. Maine has historically been an overwhelmingly white state. Just five years after Thomas and Atlanna would have met, the white population of Maine constituted 98.4  percent of the population (1990 Census 11). Notably, Atlanna’s whiteness is emphasized with her platinum-blond hair and gleaming white outfits, in particular the white iridescent wetsuit she wears when Thomas finds her unconscious on the beach and presumably the same outfit ornamented by animal bone armor when Arthur reunites with her in the Hidden Sea. (In Adventure Comics, vol. 1, no. 260, the first comic-book account of Aquaman’s origin, Atlanna also has blond hair, but Kidman’s tresses are more platinum [Bernstein and Fradon].) In the last scene, she also emerges wearing a white iridescent dress with beads and sequins. To contrast with Atlanna’s whiteness, Thomas and Arthur are clearly racialized as Maori. Jason Momoa explains how he adopted a Maori identity when playing Arthur to pay homage to Temuera Morrison, the actor who plays his father. During the fight scene on the submarine when he saves Russian sailors, his battle cry is “Ona Takai.” He expounds, “Here’s the thing with Maoris, I love Temuera Morrison, he was one of my idols. He was my father in the movie. I wanted him to play my dad, so I thought it would be good to just use Maori for it instead of Hawaiian. There’s no such thing as Hawaiian, it’s ‘Nā Kānaka Maoli’ with an L. That’s what Hawaiian means. That’s where the Maoris came from. So, I thought it was all right to go ‘Ono Takai,’ which means ‘You deserve this,’ and I think it’s kind of neat to add a little more flavor in there, you know what I mean” (Barrow). His battle cry symbolically affirms his self-acceptance despite his liminality. Arthur’s ethnic identity is also emphasized via his tattoos and other subtleties in the film. He “wears a pounamu and greets his dad with a hongi, while the Kiwi actor makes reference to ta moko tattooing, all of which Temuera credits to Jason embracing the Maori culture he encountered during filming on the Gold Coast” (van der Zwan).7 All of this is to say that Arthur’s status as King Orm’s “half-breed brother” is emphasized through his racial ancestry, not just his status as a “fish boy” (as one human calls him during a bar scene).

8  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric L. Berlatsky

The film’s various storylines center on familial tensions, legacies, and duty. These are further intensified by the film’s main story, which features an interracial union.8 Broadly speaking, the film highlights the significance of familial obligations, from the humans’ duty to take care of Mother Earth, to Atlanna’s obligation to her parents and her betrothed, to Princess Mera’s treason against King Orm and her father’s alliance with his kingdom. Aside from Aquaman’s story, the tensions associated with race, citizenship, and family legacy are introduced early via Black Manta’s storyline and patrilineal line. When sea pirate David (Black Manta) and his father, Jesse, overtake a submarine at the beginning of the film, Jesse passes down his father’s knife to his son and reminds him about the importance of filial duty: “This was your grandfather’s. He was one of the navy’s first frogmen during World War II. He was so stealthy in the war, his unit nicknamed him Manta. But after the war, his country forgot about him so he went back to the sea, scavenging and surviving with his wit and this knife. He gave it to me when I was your age and now it’s yours, son.” Most obviously, this moment highlights a strong father-son bond that mirrors Thomas’s close relationship with Arthur. When David and Jesse fight Aquaman and Aquaman lets Jesse die, Manta becomes obsessed with killing Aquaman in revenge, representing yet another character who is working to avenge, counteract, or make amends for the actions or death of a parent.9 However, the story of Manta’s grandfather also intimates the ways that race, allegiance, and betrayal merge and frame Aquaman’s story. Manta’s grandfather was betrayed by a nation that continued to subject him to racial prejudice and oppression following the war. He and many “African American servicemen embodied the inherent tensions of fighting for a country that denied democracy to its own citizens and the dilemma of remaining loyal to both nation and race” (Williams 6). There are other instances of betrayal and abandonment: Queen Atlanna betrays her people (literally ocean-dwellers but also her “race”) and marries a surface-dweller, countering Atlantean tradition and racial expectations. The product of her union, Arthur / Aquaman, symbolizes this betrayal. Jennifer Lisa Vest writes, “The possibility of Mixed existence creates ‘discomfort,’ a ‘crisis of racial meaning,’ or else elicits a fear of annihilation, political betrayal, or capitulation with colonialist and racist projects” (96). Both possibilities are reflected in Orm’s reaction to Aquaman when he captures him. On the one hand, he calls him his “halfbreed brother.” On the other hand, he admonishes, “You’ve come all this way to take sides against your own people.”

Introduction • 9

Aquaman is positioned as the marginalized racial Other while he ironically symbolizes colonialist power in that “the exploitation of human beings and the natural environment are linked” (Pellow 50). When Aquaman is brought before Orm in chains, the massive all-white chambers (including Orm’s throne) underscore the Atlanteans’ whiteness. However, Orm reveals that his hatred of Aquaman is both personally and ecologically rooted: he notes that humans have “polluted our waters, and poisoned our children, and now the skies burn and our oceans boil.” Here Aquaman’s status as a surface-dweller links him to global ecological injustices perpetrated by those in power. Yet, as David Naguib Pellow affirms, “natural resources are used and abused to support racial hegemony and domination and have been at the core of this process for a half-millennium” (50). Orm is obsessed with becoming Ocean Master and being acknowledged as such by the seven ocean kingdoms, and thus he also represents colonialist impulses. Here again Aquaman’s contradictory position as both symbolic human colonizer and half-breed colonized contributes to his liminal positioning. During the ring-of-fire battle scene, Aquaman is simply named “Half Breed” on the stadium screen, where his and his brother’s photos appear beside a list of pros and cons. Aquaman has no pros, and two out of three of his cons point to his mixedness (“surface dweller,” “half breed,” “drunk”). His “half-breed” status also becomes the monster Karathen’s main insult when he attempts to retrieve the trident in order to defeat his brother: “You dare come here with your tainted mongrel blood to claim Atlantis’s greatest treasure?” It is at this point that Aquaman reluctantly steps into the role of mixed-race savior. Earlier, Mera counsels him by stressing that his mixedness is an advantage: “You think you’re unworthy to lead because you’re of two different worlds, but that’s exactly why you are worthy. You are the bridge between land and sea.” Her encouragement recalls expectations and hopes for mixed-race individuals to solve our nation’s past sins and present ills. Consider Moises Velasquez-Manoff’s argument in a 2017 New York Times opinion piece: “President Trump has . . . ​reach[ed] backward—vowing to wall off America and invoking a whiter, more homogenous country. This approach is likely to fail for the simple reason that much of the strength and creativity of America, and modernity generally, stems from diversity. And the answers to a host of problems we face may lie in more mixing, not less.” Aquaman’s response to Karathen, though, downplays his status as mixed-race savior: “You’re right, I am a half-breed mongrel. But I did not come here because I thought I was

10  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric L. Berlatsky

worthy.” He then calls himself a “nobody,” though he has been told by his father, “Your mother always knew you were special. She believed you’d be the one to unite our two worlds.” Lyn Dickens argues that in the scene with Karathen, “Arthur claims his identity as a ‘half-breed mongrel,’ reappropriating historic racial slurs against mixed race people.” She notes that he maintains “both his ambivalence towards Atlantis and his ability to accept this ambivalence without letting it rule him, while making his decision to take on the kingship in order to defend his family and his emotional connections across national and racial borders.” Although Dickens asserts that Aquaman is ambivalent in the end (after his brother is arrested and he is officially named king, he asks Mera, “So what do I do now?”), this ambivalence is short-lived and he quickly becomes enthusiastic about his new role. He notes that being king will be “fun,” and the final scene features him emerging out of the water and declaring, “I am Aquaman.” The previous scene importantly shows a reunion between his mother and father with Arthur / Aquaman narrating, “Their love saved the world.” Thus the film seems to reinscribe Sharon Chang’s assessment of multiracials who are “often . . . ​publicized as post-racial symbols of integration and the idyllic end of inequity” (166).

Race and Superhero Narratives The prominence of mixed-race superheroes (and their ambivalent meaning) in the Hollywood films of 2018 (including Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse, discussed at length by Isabel Molina-Guzmán in this volume) is a significant change from the overwhelmingly monoracial (and overwhelmingly white) superheroes of comics, film, and television of the past eight decades. At the same time, the thematics of racial mixing, both its promise and its threat, have been at the core of superhero stories since their inception, and thus a close examination of these thematics sheds significant light both on the discourse around mixedness in (particularly) American culture and on the idea of superheroes themselves. While racial mixedness is now sometimes viewed as a superpower in  itself, the origins of superhero stories are substantively rooted in the opposed rhetoric and practice of racial purity and white supremacy. Two of the myriad strands that contributor Chris Gavaler identifies in On the Origin of Superheroes as contributing to the debut of Superman in Action

Introduction • 11

Comics, vol. 1, no. 1, in 1938 (which is frequently cited, if somewhat inaccurately, as the “first superhero comic”) are inextricably linked to white supremacy and specifically racial purity. As Gavaler demonstrates in On the Origin of Superheroes and in a series of journal articles, the idea of the “übermensch,” via Friedrich Nietzsche and others, is at least partially rooted in the discourse of eugenics, and the idea of eugenics plays an important role in the history of superhero comics. Gavaler likewise shows that the idea of superheroes partially arises from the masked vigilante “justice” of the Ku Klux Klan, especially as depicted in Thomas F. Dixon Jr.’s 1905 novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the American South and its film adaptation, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915). Eugenics, or selective breeding, often in an effort to weed out the putatively racially impure, seems to have the capacity to produce superheroes in multiple ways, and from the concept’s very inception. As Gavaler points out, the first telling of Superman’s origin does not identify Earth’s yellow sun as that which gives Superman his powers. Rather, all Kryptonians had attained what Earthlings would call superpowers through “evolution.” As described in 1938’s Action Comics, vol. 1, no. 1, “Kent had come from a distant planet whose inhabitants’ physical structure was millions of years advanced of our own. Upon reaching maturity, the people of his race became gifted with titanic strength” (Siegel and Shuster 8; emphasis added). The equivalent newspaper strip likewise names Krypton as a “planet so far advanced in evolution that it bears a civilization of supermen” (qtd. in Gavaler, Origin 160). That is, in its earliest iterations, the “space” between Earth and Krypton functions as a substitute for the “time” it would take for human beings to evolve into more perfect and perfectly powerful beings. Though this evolution is not overtly racialized, Superman’s “race” is invoked, and “evolution” was a term often used “interchangeably with eugenics” (Gavaler, Origin 197) in the early part of the twentieth century. With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that all of the supermen of Krypton are depicted as white, as if all racial impurities had been purged through eons of selective breeding. This portion of the origin, long ignored in favor of the “yellow sun” theory, returns in the 2013 Zack Snyder film Man of Steel (briefly discussed in Kwasu David Tembo’s chapter), wherein Kryptonians “reproduce scientifically” and “evolution always wins” (qtd. in Gavaler, Origin 161). Superman’s racialized purity (despite his being an alien to Earth and an immigrant to America who was created by two Jewish boys during the

12  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric L. Berlatsky

height of Anglo-European anti-Semitism) is preceded by the likes of protosuperheroes Tarzan and Doc Savage, who despite being raised by (racialized) apes or being a “man of bronze,” respectively, are also emphasized to be of pure or aristocratic blood, and these attributes, indicated by their whiteness, prove their superiority.10 The link of (white) racial purity to superheroism via the Ku Klux Klan is also undeniable and one that is inextricable from the concept’s prehistory. Again, as Gavaler discusses, in Dixon’s Clansman, Klan members are depicted as “good guy” vigilantes in costumes who don their (superheroic) garb in order to prevent or avenge that most heinous of crimes, the sullying of white women’s purity by Black male rapists. In addition, in some ways, the link of The Clansman’s “heroes” to superheroism is stronger even than the oft-cited Scarlet Pimpernel’s protagonist of the same year, as Dixon’s “homicidal Klansmen are the first twentieth-century dual-identity costumed heroes in American lit” (Gavaler, Origin 179).11 While the Pimpernel has a secret lair and a secret identity, he does not have a costume or a mask and thus, unlike the Klansmen, “lacks one of superheroes’ defining characteristics” (179). Likewise, the Klan itself is portrayed in the novel as an “institution of Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy and Patriotism” (Gavaler, Origin 320) in much the same way that Superman, in most iterations, is configured as a defender of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way,” coined first in the 1950s television show (Lundegaard). The Klan in the novel vows to “protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal: to relieve the injured and the oppressed.” Of course, “weak” and “innocent” are terms applied here only to white people (and particularly to white women), while negative signifiers accrue only to Black people. Nevertheless, it is disturbing that Superman’s early catchphrase as “Champion of the Oppressed” should parrot so closely the “mission statement” of the Klan (Siegel and Shuster 8; Gavaler, Origin 180). In The Clansman goodness itself is linked not only to white supremacy but also to white racial purity, as embodied by Abraham Lincoln, who, far from being portrayed as the Great Emancipator, “cannot . . . ​abide the threat of assimilation, which he equates with the horrors of miscegenation and the production of the mulatto race” (Kirkpatrick). The novel’s simultaneous critique of Reconstruction and racial mixing then sets the stage for the introduction of the costumed vigilante or superhero who must act outside the law in order to bring justice, a common superhero archetype,

Introduction • 13

exemplified by Batman in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Rorschach in Watchmen, and Marvel’s the Punisher, among others. Gavaler notes that the Klan, in this context, might be seen as the South’s “most famous team of masked avengers,” who, “like the original X-Men[,] wore identical costumes, and were led by a man who called himself ‘Cyclops’ ” (Origin 118). The link between superheroes, racial purity, and the Klan only becomes more evident in Griffith’s famous film version of The Clansman, Birth of a Nation, in which the origin story eerily prefigures Batman’s, and the Klan costume features a “fluttering cape and a Klan emblem,” both of which became “standard motifs of the superhero costume.” Griffith invented the Klan emblem, but it was adopted by a resurgent KKK in the aftermath of the film (Gavaler, Origin 189). As if to ratify Gavaler’s research on the topic, and the foregoing discussion, legendary graphic novelist Alan Moore notes, in a 2017 interview, that “save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these [comic] books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race. In fact, I think a good argument could be made for D.  W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks” (Sassaki and Moore).12 As Moore’s critique implies, perhaps the strongest evidence for the argument that white supremacism and white racial purity are important to the history of the superhero, and the concept itself, is the lack of super­ heroes of color in the genre’s early days. As Ramzi Fawaz notes, early superhero comics “associated justice with white figures of authority (and criminality with ethnic minorities . . .)” (174), and though (as chronicled by such critics as Jeffrey Brown in Black Superheroes, Adilifu Nama, and Fawaz himself), starting in the 1960s, superheroes of color became increasingly common (if never the norm), racial mixing in superhero stories, if anything, lagged behind the broader American culture, despite that culture’s often violently reactionary opposition to the idea. The landmark Loving v. Virginia case of 1967 effectively legalized interracial marriage across the United States, striking down a number of state laws forbidding the practice. The generally acknowledged first interracial kiss in mainstream superhero comics occurred ten years later, in 1977, in Marvel TeamUp, vol. 1, no. 64 (Claremont, Byrne, et. al.), wherein the white martial arts hero Iron Fist kisses African American cyborg Misty Knight. It would take over two more decades for a mainstream comic company to depict an

14  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric L. Berlatsky

interracial marriage in the superhero community, in Alan Moore’s own Tom Strong, vol. 1, no. 1 (Moore et al.), and even in that case the protagonist is pointedly called a “science hero,” not a superhero, and is not part of the highest-profile superhero multiverses, Marvel’s or DC’s. Given that, it is arguably not until the Luke Cage–Jessica Jones marriage of 2006, in New Avengers Annual, vol. 1, no. 1, that a high-profile mixed-race superhero marriage takes place (and not until 2012 that a same-sex mixed-race marriage is depicted) (Bendis, Copiel, et al.; Liu and Perkins). Likewise, though there are occasional minor mixed-race heroes, villains, and supporting characters in mainstream superhero comics in the latter part of the twentieth century, it is not until Miles Morales becomes the Spider-Man of the Ultimate Universe in 2011 that a mixed-race superhero had sufficient fame and popularity to penetrate the broader public consciousness. Despite all of this, it does not take long for Nazis, eugenicists, and the Ku Klux Klan to be defined as villains, rather than heroes, in superhero stories. In 1940, the cover of Captain America, vol. 1, no. 1, famously shows Cap punching Hitler in the face (Simon and Kirby). After the war, in 1946, a sixteen-episode radio serial pitted Superman against the Klan in Clan of the Fiery Cross. The series is frequently credited with damaging the Klan in the real world, though Gavaler notes that by 1946, the (second) Klan was already in decline in terms of membership, influence, and public prominence (“Ku Klux Klan” 200). To list all of the superhero comics, radio serials, television shows, and films in which racism, eugenics, or white supremacy, in some form or other, is the putative “villain” would take up the remainder of the book, but it is perhaps sufficient to note that superheroes frequently defined organizations devoted to white “purity” as villains13 despite being almost completely white themselves. Likewise, despite it being possible to define superheroes by whiteness,14 they can and have also been defined as “mixed,” if in a more metaphorical context than a strictly racial one. Again, it is Gavaler who expresses this most baldly when he says, “All superheroes are amalgams” (Origin 237). While he notes that they often combine traditional genres (“space cowboy”), he also notes that “a superhero is the merged offspring of two alien-to-each-other worlds, bridging an inconceivable gap between Us and not-Us. The character type is a half-human hybrid, an antimiscegenation crossbreed” (237). This is literally the case with characters like DC’s Aquaman and his Marvel counterpart, Namor, the Sub-mariner, who both have one human parent and one from Atlantis. In some configurations, Wonder

Introduction • 15

Woman is half Amazon and half deity, as is Marvel’s Hercules. Even beyond this, however, nearly all superheroes not only have “dual identities” but are, at the very least, metaphorically mixed. Superman is “biologically” Kryptonian, but, as Kwasu David Tembo discusses in this volume, he is culturally half human and half “alien” (likewise with the multitude of other aliens roaming Earth in superhero stories). The X-Men are humans who have undergone genetic mutation, or mutants, but their loyalties are split between separatist mutants like Magneto who want to discard their humanity altogether and the “regular” humans who hate and fear them. They are thus neither fully human or mutant, but are both and neither. There are, likewise, many superheroes who are half human, half machine, or more simply, cyborgs. As LeiLani Nishime discusses, cyborgs are often metaphors for racial mixedness, and thus it is perhaps not surprising that quite a few (though not all) superheroic cyborgs (DC’s Cyborg, Marvel’s Misty Knight and Deathlok) are people of color, nor that they are frequently as angst-filled as “tragic mulattas / os” about their status as a mix of organic and machine parts. A similar dynamic occurs in the Black antihero Blade, who is half human, half vampire. Even the “fully human” vigilante Batman has a twoness emphasized by his superhero moniker, implying a “half-man, half-animal” nature that is literalized in his foe, Kirk Langstrom, the Man-Bat, who drinks a serum and becomes an anthropomorphic giant flying, well, Man-Bat. If this applies to Batman, it also applies to Animal Man, Hawkman and Hawkwoman, and, of course, Spider-Man, whose blood is irradiated by the animal “other,” making him both more and less than fully human. As Gavaler writes, “They’re all mongrel über-children of fantastically incompatible parents” (Origin 239); or in Clare Pitkethly’s words, “The superhero straddles the boundary of an opposition and is simultaneously on one side and the other, incorporating both opposing sides” (25); or, as José Alaniz offers, superhero “stories [are] fundamentally predicated on split consciousness and proliferating selves— reflective of American paradoxes regarding freedom, racial / ethnic passing, assimilation, and dual citizenship” (13). Of course, not in all cases does the mixedness of the superhero self-­ consciously comment on race, but it is the case that the thoroughgoing mixedness of the superhero concept lends itself to the deployment of common tropes of racial mixing, as noted earlier in our readings of Ant Man and the Wasp and Aquaman, which engage both the core of the mixed superhero concept and actual racial mixedness. While the Ghost is a tragic

16  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric L. Berlatsky

mulatta, Jessica Drew draws metaphorically from that archetype in the original run of Marvel’s Spider-Woman. Drew’s first origin story describes her literally as a hyperevolved spider (despite her appearing as completely human) before this origin is amended to depict her as a mix of evolved human and spider DNA (used by her father, with the help of “High Evolutionary” technology, to save her from a deadly illness).15 Not surprisingly, Jessica is described as lonely and isolated, belonging to neither the human nor the animal kingdom. In Spider-Woman, vol. 1, no.  3 (1978), Jessica thinks, as she glides around Los Angeles, “As long as I wear this costume, I’m reminded how different I am from all the others—that I’m not only human, but I’ve got the blood of a spider coursing through my veins.” The following issue finds her contemplating her loneliness and isolation while perched on the Hollywood sign: “All my life, I’ve lived apart from mankind—trapped in a world with only genetically altered animals as my companions. And now that I live alongside humans . . . ​I still find myself—alone. Am I always destined to be different? Is that my fate . . . ​or my curse?” (Wolfman et al.). Here, her “mixed blood” is emphasized alongside, and as the cause of, her unbelonging. Likewise, she is irresistibly sexually attractive to some and inexplicably repulsive to others, partaking of common invidious tropes of the tragic mulatta, despite being racially white. Her hybridity thus can be read racially, though one is not specifically invited to do so. Reading the metaphorical mixedness of superheroes through a racial lens is often possible, though even more so when actual characters of mixed descent are important to the stories told. An interesting example is in the storyline in which Iron Fist and Misty Knight kiss. Here, Iron Fist / Danny Rand, who was given his superpower after undergoing martial arts training in the “forbidden [Himalayan] city” of K’lun, is called a “half-breed” by his competitor / villain the Steel Serpent because of Fist’s white / Western background. Fist’s paramour in the story (and beyond), Misty Knight, is African American but is also, as discussed earlier, metaphorically mixed because she is a cyborg. When Fist and Misty kiss at the close of the story, their metaphorical mixedness, both promise and threat, is literalized, and the comic, through this depiction, overtly invites a closer examination and critique of the Steel Serpent’s rhetoric of racial purity.16 Such overlaying of the metaphorical and the literal is relatively infrequent in superhero comics until we enter the twenty-first century, perhaps explaining why so many of our contributed chapters focus on this latter era. That is, while the plotlines

Introduction • 17

devoted to Ghost and Aquaman are nothing if not common to superhero stories of the past eighty years or more, it previously would have been rare for such stories to literally employ mixed-race actors or characters to tell those stories. In so doing, these films, like many of the texts discussed throughout this book, directly engage the long-standing stereotypes, both positive and negative, around racial mixedness, and thus reveal the ways in which superheroics and racial mixing are surprisingly inextricable and important to one another’s histories. Covering comics, film, television, and poetry, Mixed-Race Superheroes is divided into three parts: “Superheroes in Black and White,” “Metaphors of / and Mixedness,” and “Multiethnic Mixedness (or Mixed-Race Intersections).” The essays in these sections cover representations of racial mixedness and related issues (hybridity, belonging and nonbelonging, racial authenticity and “purity,” dual identities, passing, racial alienation, postracialism) in a diverse collection of superhero texts. Given the foregoing discussion, the majority of our contributors discuss the representation of literal racial mixing or mixedness, though these representations often also engage the far more common metaphorical approach to racial mixedness discussed earlier. Our second four-chapter part is specifically devoted to the ways in which superhero narratives treat the idea of racial mixing metaphorically, while the first and third parts address more specific categories of racial mixing. While the official title of this book is Mixed-Race Superheroes, our original intent was to insert a slash between the two terms (Mixed-Race / Superheroes) to indicate that the book will consider the intersections of superhero narratives (and superhero studies) with racial mixedness (and mixed-race studies), though this does not necessarily mean, in all cases, that the contributions will be about literally “mixed-race superheroes” themselves. Our first part, “Superheroes in Black and White,” is devoted particularly to depictions of characters (whether superheroes or characters within superhero narratives) of Black and white mixed racial heritage. Because Critical Mixed-Race Studies engaged first with this type of mixing and because of the long-standing historically vexed nature of such coupling, many of the instances of racial mixing in superhero stories (both literal and metaphorical) have been primarily engaged with matters of Black and white. For this reason, we chose to explore those matters first. The section begins with an essay by Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins that looks at both Amazing Spider-Man no. 252 (“Homecoming”) and the recent Spider-Man: Homecoming film to

18  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric L. Berlatsky

examine the importance of tropes and definitions of “home” and “homelessness” to representations of racial mixedness. The comic presents SpiderMan’s new black-and-white alien symbiote costume for the first time, alongside an interracial slice-of-life encounter, as if to invite the reading of the costume’s relationship to racial mixedness, while the film presents its viewers with a surprisingly multiracial cast, rejecting some of the stereotypical depictions in the comics and inviting a more complex engagement with racial mixedness than that presented in the comic. In the next chapter, Jasmine Mitchell’s reading of Thor: Ragnarok’s Valkyrie as a mixedrace queer heroine who challenges white supremacist, colonialist, and patriarchal ideologies examines the ways in which nontraditional casting can highlight the often unrealized antihegemonic potential of mainstream superhero films. Then, Chris Gavaler’s reading of poet Gary Jackson’s book Missing You, Metropolis elucidates the way in which the poems transform allusions to and metaphors of racial mixing in the comics Jackson read as a young boy into a literal discussion of the politics of racial mixing for the past, present, and future. Finally, Eric Berlatsky’s chapter on the recent Flash comics and CW television show reads the covert incest plot in the show as a repressed encoding of and recirculation of historical fears of racial mixing through an examination of parallels between the “postracial” show and two canonical William Faulkner novels. The next part, specifically devoted to metaphors of racial mixing in superhero narratives, begins with Corrine Collins’s chapter on the Steven Universe animated series. Collins examines how the explicitly (if somewhat metaphorically) queer, nonbinary, and mixed-race characters of the show not only challenge patriarchal and white supremacist hegemony but also put into question the ways in which utopian narratives of racial mixing are themselves heteronormative, emphasizing heterosexual reproduction at the expense of other kinds of mixing (the kinds explicitly celebrated in the show). Gregory Carter’s chapter on the Hulk and Venom provides an account of long-standing discourses of “warring blood” in depictions of mixed-race people and how those discourses are reflected in both the comics and recent films devoted to these superpowered antiheroes. Chris Koenig-Woodyard’s reading of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s comic Monstress provides an account of Liu’s self-professed efforts to reject white supremacism, colonialism, patriarchy, and kyriarchy by redefining heroism in the context of feminism and multiraciality, particularly by recuperating the categories of the “mongrel” and the “monstrous.” Finally, Kwasu David

Introduction • 19

Tembo looks at the ways in which Superman has, at times, been portrayed within the stereotype of the “mixed-race” marginal man and how such a depiction, despite situating Superman within a multiracial context, actually contributes to the logic of white supremacy. The final part, “Multiethnic Mixedness (or Mixed-Race Intersections),” looks at additional types of racial mixing, including two chapters devoted to Afro-Latinx (or Afro-Rican) breakthrough mixed-race superhero Miles Morales (the Ultimate Spider-Man). The first chapter of the section, by Jorge Santos Jr., examines the entire run of Miles Morales comics, since his debut in 2011, in the context of W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of the “talented tenth” and its relationship to racially rooted superheroism. In her chapter, Isabel Molina-Guzmán focuses both on the postracial narrative of Miles’s film debut, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and its reception by and appeal to multiracial (particularly Black, Latinx, and mixed-race) viewers. Nicholas E. Miller’s chapter on the FX television show Legion looks at the way in which the show engages with, critiques, and at times reproduces the history of European settler colonialism in the Americas through the depiction of Kerry and Cary Loudermilk, two characters, one white and one Indigenous, who share one body. Finally, Adrienne Resha’s essay on Paul Levitz and Sonny Liew’s Doctor Fate comic examines the ways in which the comic stereotypically insists that its mixed-race hero, Khalid Nassour, must choose between his Arab / Muslim and white / Christian heritage, ultimately refusing him some portion of both American citizenship and the Doctor Fate mantle because of his mixed status. In all of the contributions, the ambivalent status of racial mixedness comes to the fore. Racial mixedness has long been associated with weakness, abnormality, impurity, transgression, shame, and various pathologies while also ironically connoting genetic superiority, exceptional beauty or physicality, and special potentiality. As discussed earlier, this latter romanticization of mixed race is linked to the idea of the mixed-race individual as a kind of savior figure, or, indeed, superhero, who has unique abilities to free us from racial tensions and divisions. As Sharon H. Chang writes in Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World, “Painting mixedness as a super power able to undo racial strife turns out to be a shallow form of multiculturalism that avoids the real, continued, and deep oppressions people of color face all over the world” (190). This book and its constituent chapters illustrate how mixed-race superhero narratives both perpetuate harmful myths about mixedness and, at times, critique

20  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric L. Berlatsky

such myths. In the latter case, we hope that these narratives, and our examination of them, are a step toward a more honest engagement with discourses of mixedness, an engagement with the potential to transform these narratives, superhero and otherwise.

Notes 1 In addition, Deadpool 2 featured mixed-race actress Zazie Beetz as Domino, and

Venom also thematizes racial mixing, as discussed by Gregory Carter in this volume.

2 It is perhaps important here to realize that the original of the character, an Iron

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Man villain from the Marvel comics, is neither mixed race nor female. All of the elements of the tragic mulatta archetype are thus added for the film. Interestingly, there is at least one direct reference to the mid-nineteenth century in the film. When Ant-Man and Wasp miniaturize and fly into Dr. Foster’s home looking for Pym’s research lab, Ant-Man jokes about naming his ant Ulysses S. Ant, in reference to Ulysses S. Grant, commander of Union armies during the Civil War. In the Marvel comics, Bill Foster becomes the second Giant-Man, replacing Henry Pym, who was also the first Ant-Man (played by Michael Douglas in the Ant-Man films). Foster also goes by the names Black Goliath and, simply, Goliath. For example, American writer Lewis C. Copeland remarked that white society viewed “the person of mixed parentage . . . ​[as] a ‘moral anomaly’ in the racial imagination” (Furedi 38). Jason Momoa’s father is Hawaiian. His mother “is of German, Irish and Native American descent.” Director James Wan stated, “I really wanted to lean into the sort of biracial nature of Aquaman. . . . ​He is a superhero character who actually is biracial in that he’s half Atlantian, half surface dweller. It’s great for someone like Jason Momoa, with his background, he could really kind of understand that growing up and really sort of play it up” (Barrow). “Momoa’s passion for the Māori culture extended off screen. He led the haka at the film’s world premiere in Los Angeles. The performance went viral and received mixed reviews. One camp supported Momoa’s love for a Polynesian culture that wasn’t his own, but others believed Momoa should have acknowledged his Hawaiian heritage first before embracing Māori” (Awarau). Dickens, for example writes, “Arthur Curry’s Polynesian and Caucasian heritage is presented as part of who he is without tokenism. It is clear in Arthur’s tattoos, jewellery and physical behaviour that Polynesian culture plays a large role in his life, however this is not a site of clumsy stereotype or curiosity” (Dickens). As Maria P. P. Root maintains, “Often the prospect of an interracial marriage takes on mythical proportions and the partnership is seen as an act of blatant disloyalty, even as an act of war. Filial piety is assumed; sons and daughters are indebted to their parents and must repay them for their sacrifices. Marrying the right partner is a filial obligation. The children of these families are caught in a horrible bind: sacrifice their own needs and desires or alienate their parents, perhaps permanently.” Black Manta’s origin and reasons for hating Aquaman are different in the comics. The character was introduced as a villain in 1967 in Aquaman, vol. 1, no. 35

Introduction • 21

10

11 12 13

14 15

16

(Haney and Cardy), but does not get an origin until 1992. In that story, Black Manta is kidnapped as a child and forced to work on a ship. At one point, he signals to a passing Aquaman, who does not see and fails to rescue him, explaining Manta’s antipathy to the hero (McLaughlin et al.). A 2003 story revises this origin, but like the 1992 version, this story does not emphasize patrilineality or the bonds between father and son (Veitch, Guichet, et al.). These elements are specific to the film. See Dyer (157) for a discussion of the ways in which Tarzan’s whiteness allows him to internalize native African skills and traditions and then surpass and rule over the Africans he encounters. For a comparison of Tarzan, in this mode, to the superhero Wolverine, who does the same to Japanese culture, see Sobel (esp. 234). See Brown (“Dark”) for a similar discussion of how Batman’s recent iterations cannibalize a variety of cultures to create transformative whiteness and Chireau for a discussion of the trope of the “white Indian superhero” performing the same kind of white internalization and transcendence of Indigenous cultures. See Gavaler (“Ku Klux Klan”) for a more heavily sourced and detailed accounting of this same material. The same claim is made three years later by cultural critic Noah Berlatsky. For up-to-the-minute examples (as of this writing), we can cite HBO’s 2019 Watchmen (a sequel to the 1986–1987 comic) (Lindelof), and Gene Luen Yang and Gurihuru’s 2019–2020 comic Superman Smashes the Klan based on the radio serial discussed earlier. The former configures the Ku Klux Klan (a.k.a. “Cyclops”) as villains, along with their present-day successors in the Seventh Kavalry (and several of the “heroes” are Black). The latter follows a more familiar formula. See, for instance, Guynes and Lund. More recently, Drew’s origin was revised again, including genetic manipulation by Hydra (of which her father was a member), Marvel’s most frequently used neo-Nazi / white supremacist organization (Bendis, Reed, et al.). See Matthew Pustz’s essay on Iron Fist and other 1970s Marvel martial arts heroes (Shang Chi, Richard Dragon) for more on the contradictory common presence of mixed-race heroes and characters in such comics and the privileging of both monoraciality and the “white savior” archetype in Iron Fist in particular. For instance, Colleen Wing, Fist and Misty’s mutual best friend, is a mixed white and Japanese woman whose soul is proudly described by her grandfather as “all Japanese” (Pustz 214). Yvonne Chireau identifies a similar dynamic in “white Indian” superhero comics (see esp. 208).

Works Cited Alaniz, José. Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond. University Press of Mississippi, 2015. Ant-Man and the Wasp. Directed by Peyton Reed, performances by Hannah JohnKamen, Laurence Fishburne, Michelle Pfeiffer, Michael Douglas, Paul Rudd, and Evangeline Lilly, Marvel Studios, 2018. Aquaman. Directed by James Wan, performances by Jason Momoa, Temuera Morrison, Nicole Kidman, and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Warner Bros. Pictures, DC Films, Safran Company, 2018.

22  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric L. Berlatsky

Awarau, Aroha. “Is Aquaman the Polynesian Black Panther?” Stuff, 3 Jan. 2019, www​ .stuff.co.nz/entertainment/film/109677464/is-aquaman-the-polynesian-black​ -panther. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019. Barrow, Jerry L. “How Jason Momoa and James Wan Incorporated Polynesian Culture into Aquaman.” BET, 20 Dec. 2018, www.bet.com/celebrities/exclusives​ /aquaman-jason-momoa-entourage.html. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019. Bell, W. Kamau. “Wonder Woman Is Awesome—but We Still Need a Black Superhero.” Wired, 3 May 2017, www.wired.com/2017/05/we-need-black-superheros/. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019. Bendis, Brian Michael, and Brian Reed, writers, Joshua Luna, layouts, and Jonathan Luna, pencils and inks. Spider-Woman: Origin. Marvel Comics, 2007. Bendis, Brian Michael, writer, Olivier Copiel, penciller, Drew Geraci, Drew Hennessy, John Livesay, et al., inkers. New Avengers Annual, vol. 1, no. 1, 2006. Berlatsky, Noah. “Empowerment for Some, or Tentacle Sex for All.” Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics, edited by Sean Guynes and Martin Lund, Ohio State University Press, 2020, pp. 258–263. Bernstein, Robert, writer, and Ramona Fradon, artist. Adventure Comics, vol. 1, no. 260, May 1959, second story. Birth of a Nation. Directed by D. W. Griffith, David W. Griffith Corp., 1915. Brown, Jeffrey. Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans. University Press of Mississippi, 2000. ———. “The Dark Knight: Whiteness, Appropriation, Colonization, and Batman in the New 52 Era.” Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics, edited by Sean Guynes and Martin Lund, Ohio State University Press, 2020, pp. 242–257. “Buffering.” PC Mag, www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/39024/buffering. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019. Chang, Sharon H. Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World. Routledge, 2015. Chireau, Yvonne. “White or Indian? Whiteness and Becoming the White Indian Comics Superhero.” Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics, edited by Sean Guynes and Martin Lund, Ohio State University Press, 2020, pp. 193–211. Claremont, Chris, writer, John Byrne, penciller, and Dave Hunt, inker. Marvel Team-Up, vol. 1, nos. 63–64, Nov.–Dec. 1977. Coughlan, Davie. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Deadpool 2. Directed by David Leitch, performance by Zazie Beetz, Marvel Entertainment, Kinberg Genre, Maximum Effort, Donners’ Company, TSG Entertainment, 2018. Dickens, Lyn. “Aquaman Is the Mixed Race Movie We Didn’t Know We Needed.” Medium, 23 Jan. 2019, medium.com/@lyn.dickens/aquaman-is-the-mixed-race​ -movie-we-didnt-know-we-needed-57841939feb6. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019. Dixon, Thomas F., Jr. The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the American South. Illustrated by Arthur I. Keller, Doubleday, Page, 1905. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture. Routledge, 1997. Edwards, James D. Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic. University of Iowa Press, 2013.

Introduction • 23

Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York University Press, 2016. Furedi, Frank. “How Sociology Imagined ‘Mixed Race.’ ” Rethinking “Mixed Race,” edited by David Parker and Miri Song, Pluto, 2001, pp. 23–41. Gavaler, Chris. “The Ku Klux Klan and the Birth of the Superhero.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, vol. 4, no. 2, 2013, pp. 191–208. ———. On the Origin of Superheroes. University of Iowa Press, 2015. Guynes, Sean, and Martin Lund, editors. Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics. Ohio State University Press, 2020. Haney, Bob, writer, and Nick Cardy, artist. Aquaman, vol. 1, no. 35, Aug. 1967. Harris, Will. Mixed-Race Superman: Keanu, Obama, and Multiracial Experience. Melville House, 2019. Joseph, Ralina L. Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial. Duke University Press, 2013. Kirkpatrick, Mary Alice. “The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan: Summary.” Documenting the American South, docsouth.unc.edu/southlit​/dixonclan​ /summary.html. Accessed 19 Nov. 2019. Lindelof, Damon, creator. Watchmen. White Rabbit, Paramount Television, DC Entertainment, Warner Bros. Television, 2019. Liu, Marjorie, writer, and Mike Perkins, artist. Astonishing X-Men, vol. 3, no. 51, 2012. Lundegaard, Erik. “Truth, Justice and (fill in the blank)- Editorial & CommentaryInternational Herald Tribune.” New York Times, June 30, 2006, www.nytimes. com/2006/06/30/opinion/30iht-ederik.2093103.html?_r=0. Accessed October 1, 2020. McLaughlin, Shaun, writer, Ken Hooper, penciller, and Bob Dvorak, inker. Aquaman, vol. 4, no. 6, May 1992. Moore, Alan, writer, Chris Sprouse, penciller, and Al Gordon, inker. Tom Strong, vol. 1, no. 1, June 1999. Morrison, Grant, writer, and Gene Ha, artist. Action Comics, vol. 2, no. 9, July 2012. Morrison, Grant, writer, Doug Mahnke, artist, Tom Nguyen, Drew Geraci, et al., inkers. Final Crisis, vol. 1, no. 7, Mar. 2009. Nama, Adilifu. Super Black: America Pop Culture and Black Superheroes. University of Texas Press, 2011. 1990 Census of Population: General Population Characteristics: Maine. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1990, www2.census.gov/library/publications​ /decennial/1990/cp-1/cp-1-21.pdf. Accessed 19 May 2020. Nishime, LeiLani. “The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future.” Cinema Journal, vol. 44, no. 2, 2005, pp. 34–49. Obama, Barack. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Three Rivers Press, 1995. Pellow, David Naguib. Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice. MIT Press, 2007. Pitkethly, Clare. “Straddling a Boundary: The Superhero and the Incorporation of Difference.” What Is a Superhero?, edited by Robin S. Rosenberg and Peter Coogan, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 25–29. Pustz, Matthew. “ ‘A True Son of K’un-Lun’: The Awkward Racial Politics of White Martial Arts Superheroes in the 1970s.” Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics, edited by Sean Guynes and Martin Lund, Ohio State University Press, 2020, pp. 174–190.

24  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric L. Berlatsky

Romano, Renee C. Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America. Harvard University Press, 2003. Root, Maria P. P. “The Color of Love.” American Prospect, 26 Mar. 2002, prospect.org​ /features/color-love/. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019. Raimon, Eve. The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and Nationalism in NineteenthCentury Antislavery Fiction. Rutgers University Press, 2004. Sassaki, Raphael, and Alan Moore. “Moore on Jerusalem, Eternalism, Anarchy and Herbie.” Alan Moore World, edited by smoky man, 18 Nov. 2019, alanmooreworld. blogspot.com/2019/11/moore-on-jerusalem-eternalism-anarchy.html. Accessed 18 Nov. 2019. Siegel, Jerry, writer, and Joe Shuster, artist. “Superman: Champion of the Oppressed.” Superman: The Golden Age, vol. 1, DC Comics, 2016, pp. 8–20. Simon, Joe, writer, and Jack Kirby, artist. Captain America Comics, vol. 1, no. 1, Mar. 1941. Sobel, Eric. “The Whitest There Is at What I Do: Japanese Identity and the Unmarked Hero in Wolverine.” Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics, edited by Sean Guynes and Martin Lund, Ohio State University Press, 2020, pp. 226–241. Tesler, Michael. Post-Racial or Most-Racial?: Race and Politics in the Obama Era. University of Chicago Press, 2016. van der Zwan, Sebastian. “Why Jason Momoa Fought for Temuera Morrison to Be Cast in Aquaman.” Now to Love, 29 Dec. 2018, www.nowtolove.co.nz/celebrity​/movies​ /jason-momoa-temuera-morrison-aquaman-40125. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019. Veitch, Rick, writer, Yvel Guichet, penciller, and Mark Propst, inker. Aquaman, vol. 6, no. 8, Sept. 2003. Velasquez-Manoff, Moises. “What Biracial People Know.” New York Times, 4 Mar. 2017. Venom. Directed by Ruben Fleischer, performance by Tom Hardy, Columbia Pictures, Marvel Entertainment, Tencent Pictures, Arad Productions, Matt Tolmach Productions, Pascal Pictures, 2018. Vest, Jennifer Lisa. “Being and Not Being, Knowing and Not Knowing.” Philosophy and the Mixed Race Experience, edited by Tina Fernandes Botts, Lexington Books, 2016, pp. 93–116. “What Race/Nationality Is Word Girl?” Yahoo! Answers, 2012, answers.yahoo.com​ /question/index?qid=20130221210347AAlZVL0. Accessed 19 Nov. 2019. Williams, Chad Louis. Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era. University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Williamson, Joel. New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States. Louisiana State University Press, 1995. Wolfman, Marv, writer, Carmine Infantino, penciller, and Tony DeZuniga, inker. Spider-Woman, vol. 1, nos. 3–4, June–July 1978. Yang, Gene Luen, writer, and Gurihuru, artist. Superman Smashes the Klan, vol. 1, nos. 1–3, Dec. 2019–Feb. 2020.

1

Guess Who’s Coming Home? Mixed Metaphors of Home in Spider-Man’s Comic and Cinematic Homecomings SIK A A. DAGBOVIE-MULLINS

The landmark issue Amazing Spider-Man, vol. 1, no. 252, entitled “Homecoming,” dated May  1984, features Peter Parker donning his symbiote black suit for the first time in his own flagship magazine, after returning to Earth from another galaxy. The alien symbiote (later named Venom) symbolically stands in for stereotypical Blackness (Parker remarks that his “new costume . . . ​looks a lot more menacing than [his] old one!”) and thus also initiates Peter’s symbolic racial mixedness (Stern et al. 17).1 Allusions to Black and white racial mixing continue at the end of this issue when Spider-Man encounters an interracial couple in the midst of a fight; a Black male teenager is threatening to hit his white girlfriend as they argue about date plans. The film Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) superficially takes 27

28  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins

up and often reverses this issue’s representations of Blackness, race passing, and race mixing in order to challenge racial expectations and stereotypes via its diverse cast and plot twists.2 Peter Parker’s friend Ned is Asian (played by Hawaiian Filipino American actor Jacob Batalon), a nod to Ganke Lee, Miles Morales’s best friend in the comics.3 Peter’s crush, Liz, is mixed race (played by mixed-race actress Laura Harrier), and his bully, Flash Thompson, blond and blue-eyed in the comics, is brown (played by Tony Revolori, a Guatemalan American). Interracial crossings frame the story, from the men of various ethnicities interested in Peter’s Aunt May (the Latino bodega owner and an Asian waiter at a Thai restaurant) to the Black male high school television anchor interested in his white female coanchor, to Peter’s love interest, Liz Toomes (not blondhaired Liz Allan from the comics), who is mixed race (her mother is Black and her father, Vulture, is white).4 In addition, mixed-race actress Zendaya plays MJ / Michelle Jones, a clear nod to Mary Jane Watson, Peter Parker’s best-known (white) love interest in the comics. Both Homecomings also draw on several mixed-race tropes, including nonbelonging, alienation, and passing.5 Spider-Man: Homecoming’s climax (and my title) recalls the classic 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? when Joanna’s mother (played by Katharine Hepburn) is shocked when introduced to her daughter’s Black fiancé (played by Sidney Poitier). In Homecoming, Peter’s surprise comes from his apprehension of Liz’s father’s secret identity as Vulture, a villain illegally selling and using alien technology for arms. The audience’s surprise that Liz has a white father parallels the astonishment of Hepburn in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Thus “coming home” in my title most literally refers to Peter’s visit to Liz’s house to pick her up for the home­coming dance in the film and the shock that ensues. It also calls to mind SpiderMan’s return to New York as a Black Other in issue 252 and the reactions his new appearance garners. Five years after that issue, the last page of Amazing Spider-Man, vol. 1, no.  316 (Michelinie and McFarlane), ends with the words “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” followed by laughter, hinting at the next issue, when Eddie Brock unexpectantly shows up at Aunt May’s home despite Peter feeling assured that Brock / Venom does not know where he lives. Here, Venom’s physical blackness also functions as a marker of race. More generally, however, my title speaks to the concept of home as a potentially liberating space, particularly as it relates to race and racial prejudice. Here I am borrowing Toni Morrison’s idea of home:

Guess Who’s Coming Home? • 29

“I prefer to think of a-world-in-which-race-does-not-matter as . . . ​home. ‘Home’ seems a suitable term, because, first, it lets me make a radical distinction between the metaphor of house and the metaphor of home and helps me clarify my thoughts on racial construction. Second, the term domesticates the racial project, moves the job of unmattering race away from pathetic yearning and futile desire; away from an impossible future of irretrievable and probably nonexistent Eden to a manageable, doable, modern human activity” (3–4). In Morrison’s imaginary, “home” is a productive and nonhegemonic (yet not romanticized) metaphoric place that is “racespecific and yet nonracist” (5). Morrison’s vision is not an idealized, postracial fantasy that erases race, nor a colorblind imagining of race. Rather, she envisions a world that is not directed or confined by racism and inequality. In issue 252, conceptions of home unsurprisingly fail to manifest as “nonracist.” Rather, the issue regurgitates familiar narratives of Blackness and racial mixedness wherein nonwhites are figured as visitors at best and dangerous foreigners or Others at worst. Yet the film offers competing ideas of the racial home that recall issue 252 and gesture to Morrison’s concept while complicating commonplace definitions of what it means to be or feel at home for mixed-race individuals. Literal allusions and references to home abound in the film and the comic issue. My chapter focuses on these references to home as both physical places and psychic spaces because they underscore each story’s recycling of stereotypical narratives associated with racial mixedness and belonging.6 Michelle Mahtani contends, “The public imaginary of the mixed race individual is often marked by a relentless negativity. The popular discourse is made up of a series of myths that explicitly declare the mixed race individual to be ‘out of place’ or to have ‘no place to call home,’ which fractionalizes the mixed race person’s experience. Although the ‘out of place’ metaphor is a tired one it still fuels the dichotomous and divisive situation in critical mixed race theory” (167). Indeed, the comic “Homecoming” reifies “home” (a metaphor for both nation and belonging) as a white, male, heteronormative place and experience; those who fall into the neither / nor divide are detached or displaced from home. Homecoming, the film, at times goes beyond this construct, particularly with Zendaya’s character MJ (who signifies mixedness primarily via the actress who plays her but also via the intertextual allusion to the original, white Mary Jane), who is both ubiquitous and nowhere.7 MJ has no place to call home, and yet she is not completely without a place. Scholar Sara Ahmed invites her readers to

30  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins

interrogate the assumed associations with home and fixity. She proposes we rethink the ways home is imagined, particularly in the context of the postcolonial experience: “Home . . . ​becomes associated with stasis, boundaries, identity, and fixity. Home is implicitly constructed as a purified space of belonging in which the subject is too comfortable to question the limits or borders of her or his experience, indeed, where the subject is so at ease that she or he does not think. . . . ​To be at home is the absence of desire, and the absence of an engagement with others through which desire engenders movement across boundaries” (339). MJ’s brief appearances imply that home is not a fixed category. Her movements across social borders ironically establish her “home.” Further, her lines in the film force others to question their place. Altogether, her characterization both subscribes to and complicates expectations of mixed-race belonging.

“When Does a Location Become a Home?” When does a location become a home? What is the difference between “feeling at home” and staking claim to a place as one’s own? —Avtar Brah

In Amazing Spider-Man no. 252, allusions to home (Earth, Peter Parker’s Chelsea apartment, and New York) are abundant. When Spider-Man returns to Earth from another galaxy in his black alien symbiote suit,8 he exclaims, “We really are back home!” and celebrates by jumping up in the air, then cheekily kissing a white policeman on the lips with a loud “smek!” and introducing himself as Spider-Man (Stern et  al. 6). This moment queers Spider-Man—in his new suit he is racially ambiguous, committing a sexually and racially transgressive act. Another white police officer, reaching for his gun, tells him, “We’ve all seen Spider-Man before—and you don’t look a thing like him!” repeating a common encounter Black men have with police who view them as threatening and foreign. Interestingly, all of the white men Spider-Man encounters while in his black suit see him as unrecognizable or unknowable. True, his suit’s color is drastically different, but other than that, his new suit is almost identical to his old one. After he drops off Dr. Connors at his apartment, Connors’s son

Guess Who’s Coming Home? • 31

muses that he “didn’t even recognize him [Spider-Man]!” He remains shocked even as he puts it together: “What happened? Did he get a new tailor?” (9). Later, after Spider-Man scares away a robber, the would-be victim is so frightened by Spider-Man’s appearance, he calls for the police to save him, prompting Spider-Man to think, “I don’t believe it! That guy was more terrified of me than of the mugger!” (17). Such reactions speak to Ramzi Fawaz’s suggestion that the suit (in later issues) is “racialized through the stereotype of the hypermasculine black man sexually terrorizing white women” (226). Though Spider-Man is not sexually threatening here, in the last scene he encounters a Black male teenager who threatens his white girlfriend with physical (though not sexual) violence: “If you don’t close your mouth—I will!” (Stern et al. 18). This teenager is also the only male who does not respond to (black) Spider-Man with fear, surprise, or disbelief, underscoring the symbolic racial tension or disconnect between Spider-Man and white men during his earlier interactions.9 In this sense, Spider-Man’s planetary homecoming can be read as a metaphor for his racial homecoming to United States as a nonwhite person who is now viewed as suspicious, aberrant, and villainous. Scott Bukatman argues that Spider-Man is already a kind of intruder when compared to other city-dwelling superheroes: “SpiderMan indeed lacks a place. Superman and Batman are guardians of the urban space but Spider-Man is a trespasser. He is not master of Metropolis . . . ​he is not a part of the city’s power elite” (184). In this issue, Spider-Man’s complex relationship to his city, including homesickness and feelings of dislocation, speaks to African Americans’ precarious status in America, which exposes, in Salamishah Tillet’s words, “the paradox of post–civil rights African Americans’ experience as simultaneous citizens and ‘noncitizens’ who experience the feelings of disillusionment and melancholia of non-belonging and a yearning for civic membership” (3). While the alien suit temporarily racializes Spider-Man as Black, it also symbolically (mis)places Peter as mixed race.10 Interestingly, in both the comic and the film, readers are introduced to literal or symbolic racial mixedness when characters are at home or in a home. Initially, SpiderMan’s reference to his home highlights his identity (and subsequent racial) split: “Is this really the bathroom skylight which opens to the home of that celebrated, world-famous, galaxy-hopping freelance photographer . . . ​ Peter Parker?!” (Stern et  al. 10). When Spider-Man enters his home, his black symbiote suit instantly responds to his thoughts and desires and transforms into a black shirt and pants. One panel shows the black suit

32  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins

quickly disappearing from Peter’s face, revealing only his hands and the top of his face. This uncanny moment prompts Peter to exclaim, “Weird! It treats my every thought as a command!” However, what is also “weird” is that Peter’s body is both black and white; his literal homecoming (back to New York, back to his apartment) has led up to a temporary corporeal homecoming (his return to being white Peter Parker) wherein his houseas-body is at once familiar and strange, comforting and alien. He even superficially notes a disconnect with his body after his return, commenting that he needs to address “problems . . . ​of a far more personal nature”: “My face hasn’t seen a razor in days!” (10). In short, while Peter is at his home, he is not completely at home, recalling Elisabeth Bronfen’s discussion of cinema and home: “Any imaginary notion of home, referring to a familiar haven of safety, could then be understood, from the start, to be inscribed by something foreign, and the articulation of this fundamental dislocation at the heart of the home is at stake in any experience of the uncanny. Because it compels the subject to recognize that he or she never was and never will fully be master of his or her own house, the uncanny emerges as the privileged trope for psychic dislocation” (23). Such a description is fitting when it comes to Spider-Man / Parker’s sense of home as he is symbolically racially dislocated (upon his return to Earth and in his own body) and is out of place in his apartment, where he cannot sleep or relax. His dilemma recalls how “mixed race people have been . . . ​pathologized as having no place to call home, envisioned as torn and confused about their racial identity” (Mahtani 4). Indeed, Peter “has too many things swirling around in [his] mind” and suffers from insomnia that prompts him to leave his apartment. Once he leaves, he finally feels at home in his body: “I feel too good being back in the saddle to worry about that [his new costume’s frightening look] now!” (Stern et al. 17). Earlier, when Peter is unable to sleep, his symbiote suit takes the shape of a stealthy creature and instinctively comes to him: “His incredible costume flows to the floor, from the chair across which it is draped. Snakelike, it slithers across the room” (16). It begins at his feet and makes its way up to his head; two panels show the top half of his body as human and his bottom half as the alien suit (fig. 1.1). Again, we see Peter as literally black and white and as half human and half alien; to quote Eva Saks, he becomes “a single entity created by two disparate bodies, which, when joined, become a ‘miscegenatious body’ ” (77). In her seminal essay “The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future,” LeiLani Nishime argues that this body is

Guess Who’s Coming Home? • 33

FIG. 1.1  ​The symbiote envelopes Peter. From “Homecoming,” Amazing Spider-Man, vol. 1, no. 252, May 1984, Marvel Comics, art by Ron Frenz and Brett Breeding.

monstrous: “Western culture’s long history of equating human with white European suggests that the admixture of human with Other in the cyborg [or, in this case, alien] finds its closest racial parallel in the mixed race body” (34). When the suit responds to Peter’s restlessness and begins to cover his lower body, he appears horrified, yelling, “Whoa-oh!” He comments that the “costume may be fast and efficient! But I’ll be a loooong time before - - - - I’m ready for service like this,” which literally speaks to the suit’s awareness of and response to Peter’s thoughts but perhaps also symbolizes the racial implications of donning the suit (Stern et al. 16). Put another way, what else might take such a long time for Peter to accept? I am not suggesting he is consciously referencing his racialization; rather, I point to this moment to underscore the specter of race and anxieties about mixedness in this issue. It seems fitting that Spider-Man encounters Justin and Weezie, an interracial couple, following his encounter with his own monstrous, in-between body. After all, in media and popular cultural “representations the dominant theme was that interracial unions are represented outside the norm or deviant” (Childs 178). However, Saks reminds us that in the American imagination, the “mulatto monster” is “double deviant, the other of the other” (77). We can thus read the ending of the issue as a meeting between the product of interracial unions and the unions themselves. In this encounter, Spider-Man breaks up a fight between Justin and Weezie (fig. 1.2). When he tells them they have “so much going for [them],” Justin registers serious

FIG. 1.2  ​Justin and Weezie. From “Homecoming,” Amazing Spider-Man, vol. 1, no. 252, May 1984, Marvel Comics, art by Ron Frenz and Brett Breeding.

Guess Who’s Coming Home? • 35

doubt: “Me and Weezie live here—and it stinks!” (Stern et al. 19). SpiderMan then takes it as his mission to extol the value of their New York neighborhood to the couple, as if they are newcomers unaware of the city. Here Spider-Man embodies Bukatman’s description of the urban superhero: “Superheroes exist to inhabit the city, to patrol, map, dissect, and traverse it. They are surprisingly proper guides to these cities of change: invulnerable yet resilient and metamorphic, they hold their shape” (195). Indeed, SpiderMan takes the couple to the top of a skyscraper “to get a real bird’s-eye-view of this city . . . ​your city!” and proceeds to acknowledge the city’s imperfections while impressing upon them its beauty and potential. Justin and Weezie’s relationship with home (in essence disowning and dissing the city Spider-Man asserts is theirs), in conjunction with their outsider status (as an interracial couple), signals their metaphoric homelessness. Ahmed is instructive here: “If we were to expand our definition of home to think of the nation as a home, then we could recognize that there are always encounters with others already recognized as strangers within, rather than just between, nation spaces. To argue otherwise, would be to imagine the nation as a purified space, and to deny the difference within that space: it would be to assume that you would only encounter strangers at the border” (340). Spider-Man’s lecture to the couple about home (“This city is like any living creature! It has the potential for incredible good . . . ​or horrible evil!”) addresses Ahmed’s contrasting definitions. In other words, Justin and Weezie’s interracial relationship means they are both “strangers within” and “strangers at the border,” or mere visitors on a “web-swinging” tour (Stern et al. 19). As he also thinks of himself as Peter Parker, Spider-Man can be confident in claiming the city and articulates the value of home; the couple symbolically dismiss such possibilities. Still, although Spider-Man philosophizes that “you’ll always carry it [your city or neighborhood] with you—wherever you go,” the reality is that Spider-Man’s homecoming has been marked by rejection, misunderstandings, and discomfort. He may carry his home with him, but his home does not always extend acceptance. In micha cárdenas’s essay on Battlestar Galactica (which features a mixed-species and mixed-race character), she writes, “The story parallels the ways that white Americans are figured as human, while people of color, children of color, and mixed-race children continue to be figured in nationalist immigration narratives as monstrous” (25–26). Such a description speaks to “Homecoming,” where Spider-Man’s blackness

36  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins

marks him as unnatural, frightening, and bizarre. After Spider-Man brings the couple back down to the ground, Weezie notes his Otherness: “You’re a nice guy . . . ​but awful weird.” Spider-Man replies, “Weirder than some . . . ​ but not as weird as others!” (Stern et al. 21). In the previous panel, Justin has already begun to run off while Weezie speaks to Spider-Man. The next panel in which they appear shows Weezie about to run off while Justin continues to run ahead, already out of conversation range. Earlier, when SpiderMan lectures them atop the skyscraper, one of the panel boxes shows scenes of the city down below: an older Black man and white woman stand side by side but not together. The Black man looks forward while the white woman looks off to the side, seemingly waiting for someone. This positioning foreshadows Justin and Weezie’s future separation. In other words, this panel, coupled with Justin’s flight on foot, intimates the end of this relationship, a union that has been historically deemed by society as unnatural. This seeming breakup symbolically attests to the “unfitness” of their union, which also speaks to the unfitness of the mixed-race body that Peter (in the symbiote suit) represents. Ironically, when Spider-Man is most appreciative of his home or neighborhood (“I don’t know if that did more good for them—or me! But I feel even better than I did before”), he is also singled out for his Otherness or weirdness, a symbolic testament to the tension between feeling at home and being dislocated.11 The cover of the issue is particularly interesting given its overt and subtle messages about race. Issue 252 shows Spider-Man in his black alien suit, swinging two teenagers across a cityscape. The girl, who has red hair and a headband, is Weezie (she wears an almost identical outfit, only in different colors). The boy (who wears a blue hoodie and jeans) seems to be the white replacement for Justin (who wears a yellow hoodie and khakis). One could speculate that the reason for this curious cover change is marketing. Those purchasing the comic in 1984 (overwhelmingly white teenage boys and perhaps their parents) might have negative reactions to the cover exposure of an interracial coupling. Joshua Paddison writes, “Formerly sold on newsstands alongside magazines and paperback books, comics after 1980 were sold primarily in specialty stores that were often unwelcoming to children, women, and people of color” (258). Thus the strange illustration of Justin as white on the cover and Black in the issue underscores the same anxieties, fears, and rejection of racial mixedness that are evident in the story.

Guess Who’s Coming Home? • 37

“Perpetually Homeless” It’s as if by being mixed race you are a perpetual immigrant. . . . ​You don’t really have a homeland, so you’re sort of perpetually homeless. —Danzy Senna (Khakpour)

In the film Spider-Man: Homecoming, we are made aware of Black-white racial mixedness in the Toomes home—viewers learn of Liz’s racial mixedness when Peter picks her up for the homecoming dance and her father, Adrian Toomes, a.k.a. Vulture, answers the door. This is a dramatic moment in the film, as viewers are previously unaware that Liz’s father is Vulture. However, it is also a crucial race moment, as viewers realize that Liz is mixed race and that Vulture is married to a Black woman.12 As Bustle writer Olivia Truffaut-Wong asserts, “The addition of biracial characters to the MCU also forces viewers to examine how they interpret race onscreen. . . . ​Spider-Man: Homecoming’s major twist . . . ​gets its shock value from the fact that audiences are so unused to seeing biracial characters onscreen, that most of them won’t even suspect that Toomes, played by Michael Keaton, is in any way related to Liz. Thanks to years of Hollywood consumption, viewers are trained to see onscreen diversity in its simplest form: black characters are black, white characters are white, there is no in between.” Indeed, actress Laura Harrier (who plays Liz) remarks, “Growing up, there were no families on TV that looked like mine” (Weatherford). The racial reveal in the film is interesting, as race is presented as just a sidenote, fitting into the film’s broader portrait of multiculturalism, where diversity is ubiquitous.13 In one sense, the Toomes household could be a superficial cinematic example of Morrison’s racial home, which is “not a windowless prison” but “an open house, grounded, yet generous in its supply of windows and doors” (4). Fittingly, the first look we get of the Toomes household is when Peter and his friend Ned attend Liz’s house party and the camera pans the Toomeses’ modern mansion, whose walls are ceiling-to-floor windows. Morrison notes that her racial project is not “the race-free world that has been posited as ideal”; instead, she is interested in a “race-specific yet nonracist home” (5). While not much about the Toomeses’ family dynamic is known, their home symbolizes a kind of postracial model where race does not matter. Liz’s party is a reflection of the

38  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins

school, where a number of people of different races and ethnicities intermingle. And from what we see, the Toomeses are a happy family who just happen to be interracial. Toomes loves his wife and daughter and they, in part, are the reason for his quest for money and power.14 Class clearly trumps race when it comes to social hierarchies in the film. For Toomes, the divide between wealthy and working class is what separates people. When Spider-Man leaves the dance and follows him to his villain workplace, Toomes emphasizes their shared working-class roots as he prepares his Vulture suit to attack: “Those people up there—the rich and the powerful, they do whatever they want. Guys like us, like you and me, they don’t care about us. We build their roads, and we fight all their wars and everything, but they don’t care about us. We have to pick up after them. We have to eat their table scraps. That’s how it is.” Thus, while class is occasionally alluded to (the film’s opening is the other clear example), much of the film treats race as more of a cinematic accessory. To return to metaphors of home, in critic Jason Johnson’s words, “As the characters get closer to Peter, the diversity becomes less impressive and more like window dressing.” The two mixed-race women in the film switch places when it comes to feeling at home or being home. Zendaya’s role in the film was unanticipated and unusual on various levels. First, the stereotypical nerd is typically white (or Asian) but rarely Black or brown, and thus Zendaya as the off-beat geek is one of the film’s many racial inversions.15 In short, Black nerds do not belong in our popular cultural conceptions of unhipness and superintelligence; they are “largely exceptions to the normative presentation of the straight white male nerd” (Flowers 169). Second, before the film’s release, many fans assumed Zendaya’s character was going to be Peter’s love interest, and thus one could argue that her character temporarily passed as the comics’ (white) MJ with regard to racial expectations and rumors before the film’s cast was made known.16 The point is that Zendaya’s role as MJ recalls recurring motifs in representations of racial mixedness, such as surprise racial revelations, racial passing, and not belonging. Throughout the film, MJ is socially homeless; we are first introduced to her in the school cafeteria when Peter and Ned are obsessively staring at Liz while she decorates for the homecoming dance. MJ calls them “losers” for staring, and when Ned asks, “Then why do you sit with us?” she responds, “ ’Cause I don’t have any friends,” underscoring her social isolation (fig. 1.3). MJ’s other brief appearances highlight her lack of place. At Liz’s party, MJ tells Ned and Peter, “I can’t believe you guys are at this lame party,” to

Guess Who’s Coming Home? • 39

FIG. 1.3  ​Zendaya as an isolated MJ in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Columbia Pictures /

Marvel Studios, 2017.

which they reply, “You’re here too.” MJ’s reply, “Am I?” is a comic moment that confirms her strange quirkiness but also symbolically speaks to her lack of place.17 She is everywhere (she appears in almost every schoolrelated scene) yet has no specific home, group of friends, or clique (besides the decathlon team, where she exists on the margins until the end). Her choice to sit in detention because she likes “to sketch people in crisis” is an example of this. The gym teacher asks her, “Why are you here?” a question that literally or metaphorically follows her wherever she goes (always solo) whether it is in the cafeteria, at Liz’s party, at homecoming, or during the academic decathlon trip to Washington, DC. MJ’s chronic displacement exemplifies what has been described as a cultural homelessness associated with mixed-race or multiethnic people: “the sense of not belonging and not being accepted as members by any existing group” (Buchanan and Acevedo 129). Indeed, MJ is clearly viewed as strange—she is both a part of her school community, which functions as a largely welcoming social space (where jocks, cool kids, and nerds seemingly coexist without stark divisions), and outside it. At one point, MJ notes out loud Peter’s absence from school events: “He already quit marching band and robotics lab.” When everyone stares at her questioningly, she is aware that she seems odd: “I’m not obsessed with him. I’m just very observant.” At the same time, however, MJ’s placelessness (up until the end) is not tragic. She does not bemoan the fact that she has no friends, and her social wandering is mostly represented as a choice. At the homecoming dance,

40  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins

she gives Peter the middle finger and generally appears not to care what others think of her actions or behavior.18 Her sketch of “people in crisis” during detention is not a self-portrait; she is not the tragic mulatta doomed to a racialized identity crisis. Instead, she presents Coach Wilson with a portrait of himself—one of many examples that suggest she is an astute reader of other people. Moreover, MJ does “question the limits or borders of her . . . ​experience” (Ahmed 339). When Ned points out her presence at Liz’s party despite her declaration that it is “lame,” her retort, “Am I?” reveals an ontological inquiry that both dismisses boundaries of time and space and represents her refusal to fit in (or answer for) a particular place. In a later scene, MJ again isolates herself when she refuses to participate in the decathlon team’s activities while in Washington, DC. She is independent and critical-minded. We get a sense of this when she expresses a desire to get to DC early because she is “hoping to get in some light protesting in front of one of the embassies before dinner.” The only direct reference to racial politics also happens on this trip. When the decathlon adviser greets her outside the Washington Monument, she notes that she will not be visiting because she does not “really want to celebrate something built by slaves.” When the teacher expresses uncertainty about this claim, a Black security guard affirms its likely probability. Finally, at the end of the film, MJ officially ends her apparent self-isolation. When the adviser names her captain of the academic decathlon team, she tells everyone, “My friends call me MJ,” to which Ned says, “I thought you didn’t have any friends.” MJ replies, “I didn’t,” solidifying her place within a community. The way MJ’s characterization alternates between subtly recalling mulatta tropes and countering them provides an interesting backdrop for Liz’s initially clear place and belonging, which is only disrupted at the end of the film. As she is the only clearly identified mixed-race character, her place and “home” in the school is secure and set. While she is beautiful, her looks are not fetishized or viewed as exotic. She is smart (captain of the decathlon team), mature (she suggests she has a crush on Spider-Man “for the person he is on the inside”), social (apparently on the homecoming planning committee), and popular (her house party is packed). However, at the end of the film, she is shown distraught and crying as she says goodbye to her friends following her father’s arrest. She tells Peter, “I guess we’re moving to Oregon. Mom says it’s nice there . . . ​so that’s cool. Anyways, Dad doesn’t want us here during the trial.” Liz’s positioning has drastically changed, as she is temporarily without a home. Once firmly established in the social fabric of Midtown High School,

Guess Who’s Coming Home? • 41

she and her mother will be moving to the other side of the country, ostensibly as far away from multiracial, multicultural, and multiethnic New York as possible. In essence, she and MJ have exchanged places. MJ takes over as decathlon captain (and viewers wonder whether she will take over as Peter’s new love interest in the next film, Spider-Man: Far from Home) and Liz symbolically takes MJ’s place as the nomadic outsider, particular when one considers Alana Semuels’s declaration: “Oregon has never been particularly welcoming to minorities.” Even if they move to Portland, Oregon’s largest city, they will be moving to “the whitest big city in America.” Semuels explains in a 2016 Atlantic article, “Many African Americans in Portland say they’re not surprised when they hear about racial incidents in this city and state. That’s because racism has been entrenched in Oregon, maybe more than any state in the north, for nearly two centuries. . . . ​In more recent times, the city repeatedly undertook ‘urban renewal’ projects . . . ​that decimated the small Black community that existed here.” The point is that the end of the film disrupts Liz’s earlier comfortable status as someone with an ordered life who belongs. In conjunction with MJ’s characterization, Liz’s fate suggests the precariousness of home for mixed-race individuals. Still, it is important to note that the film does not end with a distressed Liz. In her last scene, Liz labels Peter as confused, effectively pushing away any implications that she is the lost one: “Whatever’s going on with you, I hope you figure it out.” Liz may be temporarily displaced, but it is Parker’s dual identity that makes him appear mentally disoriented (a stereotypical mulatta trope) rather than the other way around. Spider-Man: Homecoming certainly counters issue 252’s troubling racial politics, but it also remains ambivalent about metaphors of home for mixed-race individuals.

Notes 1 In later issues, Spider-Man continues to struggle with the alien suit (figuring out

what it is, trying to get rid of it, etc.). The suit attempts to occupy a number of host bodies before combining with Eddie Brock and appearing as Spider-Man’s new archenemy, Venom, in The Amazing Spider-Man, vol. 1, no. 300, in 1988 (Michelinie and McFarlane). 2 In another intertext cited by the director of the film as an influence, a four-issue Mary Jane:Homecoming comic book miniseries takes place before and after a homecoming dance (Vulture and Spider-Man also appear in two scenes where they are fighting). In contrast to Spider-Man: Homecoming, Mary Jane: Home­ coming (2005) is notable for its lack of diversity. There are a handful of Black or

42  •  Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins

3 4

5

6

7

8

9

10 11

12

brown students at the dance or playing football, but the issues are overwhelmingly white (McKeever and Miyazawa). The use of the name Ned is also a reference to longtime white Spider-Man supporting character Ned Leeds. Spider-Man: Homecoming was notably celebrated for its multiethnic cast. However, some fans and journalists noted that it was not as diverse as it could have been. In 2010, Donald Glover started a Twitter campaign to audition for the role of Peter Parker in Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield was cast). While he did not get the role, he was later asked to play Aaron Davis (the Prowler) in Homecoming (Davis / the Prowler is Mile Morales’s uncle in the Ultimate SpiderMan comics. The original Prowler, Hobie Brown, was one of Spider-Man’s earliest African American villains, introduced in 1969). Casting a Black Peter Parker (not just a Black Spider-Man) would certainly have been a more radical move, particularly considering Stan Lee’s statement about keeping Peter Parker white: “We originally made him white. I don’t see any reason to change that” (qtd. in Miller). The two main passers are, ironically, white men in love with Black women: Peter Parker as Spider-Man and Adrian Toomes as Vulture. The film utilizes race reversals in order to unsettle racial presumptions and familiar narratives of race. At various points, characters pass in the viewer’s eyes (such as Vulture as Liz’s father). These instances of symbolic passing relate to racial mixedness or race mixing. Alison Blunt writes, “Ideas about home and identity are a recurrent theme in works on, and by, people of mixed descent. Alongside a wide literature of ‘interracial’ partnering, parenting, fostering and adoption, there is a growing literature on home and identity that extends beyond domestic life and family relationships to explore a wider sense of place and belonging” (52). In the film, Zendaya’s character is known as Michelle until one of the last scenes, when she tells her decathlon adviser, “My friends call me MJ.” In this chapter, I will hereafter refer to her as simply MJ. In the Homecoming sequel, Spider-Man: Far from Home, Parker / Spider-Man wears a black suit given to him by Nick Fury during his school trip to Europe and receives the name Night Monkey (people do not know he is Spider-Man), recalling the racist trope of Black people as primates. The other Black male character in the issue is Joe “Robbie” Robinson, the Daily Bugle’s editor in chief. The issue opens with J. Jonah Jameson, the newspaper’s white publisher, and Robbie discussing all of the superheroes who have gone missing. Jonah expresses frustration at how “Spider-Man’s mixed up in all this!” prefiguring Spider-Man’s symbolic racial mixedness. Likewise, Jameson’s long-standing hatred of and discomfort with Spider-Man prefigures the responses of the white men Spider-Man encounters throughout this issue. LeiLani Nishime writes, “The deployment of the alien Other as a stand in for racial and ethnic difference is not new to science fiction” (“Aliens” 453). It is worth noting that the term “weird” is also used in an earlier panel when Peter, wearing the suit in the form of regular clothing, decides to develop film of photos he took while in another galaxy: “Wow! I knew these pictures were weird when I took them—but I had no idea how weird! Beautiful . . . ​and yet so very terrifying!” (Stern et al. 14). I would contend that this is particularly true for African American viewers. Unsurprisingly, “survey and ratings data since the 1970s suggest that African

Guess Who’s Coming Home? • 43

13

14

15 16

17 18

Americans prefer and enjoy watching TV shows that have Black cast members and that explore Black themes more than they do other types of programming” (Squires 235). In a movie review for The Root, Jason Johnson writes, “On the positive side, the depiction of Queens, N.Y., in general and Peter’s high school are great. Peter comfortably speaks Spanish, and the hallways of his high school look like the United Nations. Most of Spider-Man’s secondary villains, like the Shocker and the soon-to-be Scorpion, are played by well-known or at least recognizable actors of color. Moreover, even bit parts like the school principal and gym teacher are people of color, which helps flesh out the feeling that you are actually in a living, breathing, modern-day New York City.” When he drops his daughter off at the dance, he tells Peter, “Nothing is more important than family. You saved my daughter’s life. And I could never forget something like that. So I’m gonna give you one chance. Are you ready? You walk through those doors, you forget any of this happened and don’t you ever, ever interfere with my business again. Because if you do, I’ll kill you and everybody you love. I’ll kill you dead. That’s what I’ll do to protect my family, Pete. Do you understand?” Mary Bucholtz writes that “nerd” “is a cultural category that is both ideologically gendered (male) and racialized (white)” (85). Zak Wojnar writes, “In the months leading up to the film’s release, Sony made the curious decision to attempt to conceal Michelle’s true identity. They didn’t just withhold information in a traditional, ‘just watch the movie and find out’ sort of way, but they actively denied it, and even Zendaya herself ‘officially’ stated that she was not playing Mary Jane.” This characterization also contrasts with the original “red-headed, slang-slinging bombshell named Mary Jane Watson,” who became “the bad girl” (Saunders 82). Her relationship with Peter changes in the next film, Spider-Man: Far from Home. Peter’s plans to tell MJ how he feels about her during a school trip to Europe get continually thwarted when he has to fight as Spider-Man. At the end of the film, MJ correctly guesses that Peter is Spider-Man and they become a couple.

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “Home and Away: Narratives of Migration and Estrangement.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 1999, pp. 329–347. Blunt, Alison. “Home, Community, and Nationality: Anglo-Indian Women in India before and after Independence.” Colonial and Post-Colonial Geographies of India, edited by Saraswati Raju, M. Satish Kumar, and Stuart Corbridge, Sage, 2006, pp. 49–61. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. Routledge, 1996, p. 193. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. Columbia University Press, 2004. Buchanan, NiCole T., and Cathy A. Acevedo. “When Face and Soul Collide: Therapeutic Concerns with Racially Ambiguous and Nonvisible Minority Women.” Biracial Women in Therapy: Between the Rock of Gender and the Hard

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Place of Race, edited by Angela R. Gillem and Cathy A. Thompson, Haworth, 2004, pp. 119–132. Bucholtz, Mary. “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, vol. 11, no. 1, 2001, pp. 84–100. Bukatman, Scott. “Song of the Urban Superhero.” The Superhero Reader, edited by Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Ken Worcester. University Press of Mississippi, 2013, pp. 170–198. cárdenas, micha. “Monstrous Children of Pregnant Androids: Latinx Futures after Orlando.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 24, no. 1, Jan. 2018, pp. 26–31. Childs, Erica Chito. Fade to Black and White: Interracial Images in Popular Culture. Rowman and Littlefield, 2009. Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York University Press, 2016. Flowers, Jonathan Charles. “How Is It Okay to Be a Black Nerd?” Age of the Geek: Depictions of Nerds and Geeks in Popular Media, edited by Kathryn E. Lan, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 169–192. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Directed by Stanley Kramer, performances by Katharine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier, Columbia Pictures, 1967. Johnson, Jason. “Spider-Man: Homecoming: Diversity Push Makes No Spidey-Sense.” Root, 7 July 2017, www.theroot.com/1796745838. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Khakpour, Porochista. “Race and Other Flammable Topics: A Conversation between Danzy Senna and Porochista Khakpour.” Poets and Writers, vol. 38, no. 2, 2010, pp. 36+. Mahtani, Minelle. Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality. University of British Columbia Press, 2014. McKeever, Sean, writer, and Takeshi Miyazawa, artist. Mary Jane. Vol. 2, Homecoming. Marvel Comics, 2005. Michelinie, David, writer, and Todd McFarlane, artist. Amazing Spider-Man, vol. 1, no. 300, May 1988. ———. Amazing Spider-Man, vol. 1, no. 316, June 1989. Miller, Michael. “Peter Parker, a.k.a. Spider-Man, Should Be Straight and White, Says Co-creator Stan Lee.” Washington Post, 25 June 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news​ /morning-mix/wp/2015/06/25/peter-parker-aka-spider-man-should-be-straight-andwhite-says-co-creator-stan-lee/?utm_term= .9caf625eb9cc. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Morrison, Toni. “Home.” The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, edited by Wahneema Lubiano, Pantheon Books, 1997, pp. 3–12. Nishime, LeiLani. “Aliens: Narrating U.S. Global Identity through Transnational Adoption and Interracial Marriage in Battlestar Galactica.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 28, no. 5, 2011, pp. 450–465. ———. “The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future.” Cinema Journal, vol. 44, no. 2, Winter 2005, pp. 34–49. Paddison, Joshua. “Comic Books.” Postwar America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History, edited by James Ciment, Routledge, 2006, pp. 255–259. Saks, Eva. “Representing Miscegenation Law.” Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law, edited by Werner Sollors, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 61–81.

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Saunders, Ben. Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes. Continuum, 2011. Semeuls, Alana. “The Racist History of Portland, the Whitest City in America.” Atlantic, 22 July 2016, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/racist-history-port​ land/492035/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Spider-Man: Far from Home. Directed by Jon Watts, performances by Tom Holland and Zendaya. Columbia Pictures, Marvel Studios, Pascale Pictures, 2019. Spider-Man: Homecoming. Directed by Jon Watts, performances by Zendaya, Laura Harrier, Jacob Batalan, Tom Holland, Tony Revolori, Donald Glover, Marisa Tomei, and Michael Keaton, Columbia Pictures, Marvel Studios, Pascal Pictures, 2017. Squires, Catherine R. African Americans and the Media. Polity, 2009. Stern, Roger, and Tom DeFalco, writers, Ron Frenz, penciller, and Brett Breeding, inker. Amazing Spider-Man, vol. 1, no. 252, May 1984. Tillet, Salamishah. Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination. Duke University Press, 2012. Truffuat-Wong, Olivia. “Spider-Man: Homecoming: Having a Biracial Love Interest for Peter Is Monumental.” Bustle, 7 July 2017, www.bustle.com/p/spider-manhomecoming-having-a-biracial-love-interest-for-peter-is-monumental-68279. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Weatherford, Ashley. “Laughing and Crying with Laura Harrier, the New Star of Spider-Man: She’s Your Average Stunningly Beautiful Nerd.” Cut, July 2017, www​ .thecut.com/2017/07/laura-harrier-of-spider-man-homecoming-interviewed.html​. Accessed 18 Oct. 2019. Wojnar, Zak. “Why Was Zendaya’s Spider-Man: Homecoming Character Kept Secret?” Screen Rant, 14 July 2017, screenrant.com/spider-man-homecoming-zendaya-mary​ -jane-reveal/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019.

2

The Ride of Valkyrie against White Supremacy Tessa Thompson’s Casting in Thor: Ragnarok JASMINE MITCHELL

Boundary-breaking Tessa Thompson, a bisexual mixed Afro-Latinx actress, defies audience expectations and breaks a normalization of whiteness in the fantasy superhero universe. Through Thompson’s star persona and construction of the Valkyrie character in Thor: Ragnarok (2017), the film transcends binaries of race, gender, and sexuality. Arriving with neither a rousing soundtrack, nor special sound effects, nor blazes of fire, Valkyrie first appears to her audience by striding confidently from her ship on the planet Sakaar. Thor, the blond-haired, blue-eyed, muscular, square-jawed hero, watches this armored warrior advance toward him after he has been deposited on the planet against his will by his sister Hela via a portal. Only two steps in, Valkyrie stumbles and falls down drunk. As a hard-drinking, sarcastic,

46

The Ride of Valkyrie against White Supremacy • 47

bisexual herculean, Valkyrie is not the blond, Nordic, hypersexualized warrior depicted in the comics (particularly in Thor and The Defenders). The character Valkyrie is bisexual in the comics, but the film goes further. Her queerness in the film unravels discrete normative categories of sexuality, gender, and race and unmasks systems of domination. Our awareness of previous comic series’ representations of Valkyrie as the epitome of whiteness amplifies the tensions surrounding Thompson’s mixed-race body on-screen. When the announcement came that a role previously associated with the imagery of a blond-haired white woman would now be played by Thompson, social media networks exploded in simultaneous celebration and disdain. Thompson’s casting signaled the exigency and backlash toward women of African descent in mainstream superhero films. White male dominance— as cultural producers and as cultural representations—operates as a strategy of white patriarchy to assert belonging. The notion of authenticity as staying true to a comic book text relates to this sense of belonging that reifies hegemonic white masculinity through the subordination and hypersexualization of female characters. While Valkyrie has same-sex relationships in the comics, she has often been fetishized under a male gaze or morphed into the misandrous villain, Enchantress, who is bent on destroying men (Madrid 150–151). Reflecting backlash against queer feminist movements, the comic book Valkyrie exhibited fears of patriarchal decline. Thompson’s racialization is juxtaposed to normative white representations, and this portrayal alludes to broader social and demographic trends. Superhero media texts convey belonging in the way in which women and people of color are represented through exclusion or subordination. Upholding and stabilizing a character’s original race and gender as written in the comic book series then retains white characters as the norm. As superhero films and comics perpetuate this racial hierarchy and normalize white dominance, critical film and comic book audiences must negotiate these prevailing paradigms in the construction of identity. The multiracial population is one of the fastest-growing groups, and researchers predict there will be a nonwhite majority in the United States by 2050 (Jones and Bullock). This chapter argues that Thompson’s performance as Valkyrie allows for the illusion of hegemonic white masculinity and white redemption while pivoting toward a reformulation of interracial solidarity and coalitions. If one reads the film against a color-blind narrative, Valkyrie’s mixed Blackness ignites contemporary anxieties stemming from colonial

48  •  Jasmine Mitchell

and imperial attachments. Rather than Thor being situated as the star, Valkyrie, a mixed Black queer woman, becomes the site of potentiality of imagined futures.

Thompson’s Performance: Challenging Past Superhero Tropes Rather than thinking that Thompson’s casting has no bearing on the film, I argue that her performance allows us to engage slavery, colonialism, and imperialism with current sociopolitical concerns. Thor: Ragnarok’s plot revolves around Thor’s quest to protect the Asgardian planet against the destructive threat of the goddess of death, Hela. Trapped on the planet of Sakaar, Thor must convince Valkyrie, an Asgardian, to help him escape and combat Hela in order to save Asgard. The viewer’s first encounter with Valkyrie does not present her as a conventional superheroine who loyally and unflinchingly supports a benevolent white patriarchy. Soon after arriving on her spaceship, she saves Thor from a group of scavengers and then physically incapacitates him. She eventually sells Thor to the Grandmaster of Sakaar, a despot who forces slaves to compete and die in staged gladiator matches. One could argue that the film decontextualizes slavery and places a mixed Black woman as the slave trader as an allegory to absolve white guilt over involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. However, I argue the film grapples with contemporary legacies of colonization and presents a collective responsibility toward the past by dismantling structures of oppression while acknowledging the inheritance of past brutalities. While media representations of mixed Black women have often harked back to tragic mulatta myths to garner white sympathy or portray women as  lascivious mulattas who seduce white men and threaten white purity, Valkyrie is neither a sexual spectacle nor a suffering victim dependent on white saviors. Though mixed people of African and European descent acted as an intermediate buffer class between whites and enslaved Blacks, this intermediate mulatto category in many Latin American and Caribbean slaveholding nations functioned to give some relative privilege over Blacks and constrained unification among people of African descent. These mulatto groups functioned to buffer racial conflict and uphold whiteness as the supreme hierarchical category (Daniel). Thompson’s mixed Blackness thus brings back the specter of colonial and postcolonial racial hierarchies

The Ride of Valkyrie against White Supremacy • 49

instead of supporting the postracial triumphal claim that mixed Black subjects are proof of the absence of racism. Here she acts as a reflective mirror of judgment and atonement on a shifting terrain of Blackness and whiteness. The narrative elicits sympathy for the white male protagonist when he becomes enslaved and thereby functions as a form of dissonance and disrupts gender and racial hierarchies. This works in two directions. On one level, it elicits sympathy for the enslaved; on another level, eliciting sympathy for a white male protagonist is hardly hegemonic. Yet in this same narrative, the cultural trope of the mulatto serves as a potential site of radical imagined futures. However, through the use of humor, the enslaved white male muscular hero becomes a satirical amplification of fears of reverse racism and the threat that white men will become victims to overreaching feminism and antiracism. Hence, the inclusion of women of color rallies both concerns and fears that white men will lose control of their “rightful” global empires. The historical characterization of people of African descent as thankful and indebted to white saviors is inverted in this scene—at first, Thor appears grateful for his rescue and then quickly realizes his captivity. He demands that, as the son of Odin, he needs to return to Asgard. Looking down upon Thor, Valkyrie smirks and sarcastically states, “Many apologies, Majesty.” With the similarity between the words “Majesty” and “Master,” this slippage plays on the transatlantic slave trade and colonial empires with a performance of the affective relationships and social practices. Valkyrie’s expression of disgust upends Thor’s sense of entitlement and privilege. Enacting a discourse on the nature of power with the language of colonialism and empire, Valkyrie rethinks the history of order and legend with her rebellion. Until this point in the film, neither Thor nor the viewers knows Valkyrie’s identity. When she arrives on the planet Sakaar to sell Thor to the Grandmaster in exchange for alcohol, she is referred to as Scrapper 142, one of the Grandmaster’s scavengers in search of gladiators and runaways. Her name also speaks to gendered notions of toughness, aggression, and roughness that have often repeated themselves in superhero narratives as traditional acceptable roles for men prizefighting in the face of obstacles. Given the discourses of racial hierarchies and imperial colonial context undergirding the film, Valkyrie’s identification as a scrapper signifies her as a survivor of colonial violence and the extinction of her clan. For the Grandmaster, renaming Valkyrie as Scrapper 142 becomes an act of

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appropriation. Historically, enslavers renamed enslaved Africans to diminish each individual to an object of labor and to suppress the enslaved person’s cultural identity and community ties. The double position of Valkyrie—who participates in the exploitation of slaves and yet experiences exclusion herself—is also read through Thompson’s mixed body. Incorporating mixedness as a figure of ambivalence, Thompson and the white Australian actor Chris Hemsworth destabilize Black-white binaries that have often structured representations of slavery to displace responsibility from the system of colonization itself. As the 2017 global tourism ambassador of Australia, Hemsworth is the face of Australian white heteronormative masculinity. With the United States and Australia among settler colonial societies with linked identities ­centered on “white men’s countries” (Lake and Reynolds), Hemsworth’s national identity rearticulates the global legacies of colonial state power. While U.S. historical memory situates slavery as a transgression now surmounted, the link to Australia echoes and indexes these narratives with its histories of coerced labor, capture, dispossession, and marginalization. Yet this same capacity potentially disrupts systems of oppression and injustice. In a 2016 Instagram post, Hemsworth apologized for appropriating the clothing of First Nations people and stood with director Taika Waititi to express solidarity with Indigenous protests at Standing Rock.1 Like Waititi, Hemsworth has advocated for changing the date of Australia Day to expunge the celebration of Indigenous genocide. Through Hemsworth’s public persona, Thor holds further capacity to disrupt or uphold systems of oppression and injustice. The racialization of Thompson and Hemsworth illuminates the significance of racial politics of empire that code whiteness as authority to govern and Blackness as servitude. The juxtaposition of Valkyrie’s body to Thor’s white body undermines fixed ideologies of racial difference and expresses continuing anxieties over racial mixing. When Valkyrie brings Thor to the Grandmaster, the Grandmaster inches closer to inspect Thor’s body as a specimen and as a commodity and hence dehumanizes him. Harking back to fears of white slavery, Thor’s enslavement in these scenes allows white people to make a claim of victimization. Yet his very whiteness reaffirms his privilege rather than announcing his victimization. Thor’s captivity runs counter to his motives to save the kingdom of Asgard from his sister Hela. Hela, the goddess of death, has taken over the kingdom, enslaves Asgardians, executes anyone who does not obey, and plans to take over further realms. The kingdom of Asgard had been ruled by the god

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Odin, and as Odin’s son, Thor would inherit the king’s throne. Valkyrie is suspicious about Thor’s true aims and believes that he merely wants the throne for himself. Thor initially wants Asgard to maintain its image of goodness and righteousness, ideals that are at the forefront of Western nations embroiled in the slave trade, colonization, and imperialism. Valkyrie reveals that Hela had served as Odin’s executioner and had helped him violently conquer nine realms. Yet as her ambitions grew beyond Odin’s control, she massacred Asgardians and tried to seize the throne until Odin banished her. When Hela attempted to escape, Odin sent the Valkyries to fight against her. Thor pleads, “Just listen. The Valkyrie are legend, elite warriors of Asgard. You are sworn to defend the throne.” Valkyrie retorts, “I’m not getting dragged into another one of Odin’s family squabbles. That’s what’s wrong with Asgard. The throne, the secrets, the whole golden sham.” Hela’s return to Asgard resurrects the colonialism and imperialism undergirding Asgard. Valkyrie questions the Asgardian master narrative and the perpetuation of the social forgetting of colonial violent domination. As a warrior figure in the film and in the public imagination, Valkyrie refuses to become an expression of empire. Negating her role as a soldier and as a legacy of Odin’s rule, Valkyrie instead chooses exile. As part of the Asgardian diaspora, Valkyrie links histories of violence, displacement, and trauma. Thompson’s mixed Black body summons up experiences and memories of past and present generations of people of African descent. Suffering loss and grappling with her diasporic identity in exile result in the avoidance of Asgard. Eventually, Valkyrie agrees to help Thor once the trauma within her memory is unlocked. While fighting with Thor’s treacherous brother Loki, he touches her and unlocks her memory. She is forced to deal with the horror that she had escaped. In a pivotal scene, she witnesses the massacre of the Valkyries at the hands of Hela. Anguished by the act of sacrifice one of the warriors committed to save her, Valkyrie is the lone survivor. Importantly, however, the scenes of a woman leaving Valkyrie’s bedroom were cut from the final edit of the film, despite Thompson’s advocacy for their inclusion as a means of emphasizing the bisexuality of the character. In an interview, Thompson recalled, “There’s a great shot of me falling back from one of my sisters who’s just been slain. . . . ​In my mind, that was my lover” (Nicholson). With his commitment to multicultural, racially integrated casting, Waititi reclaims the superhero genre, which has historically excluded nonwhite and queer subjects. However, the suppression of scenes that foreground Valkyrie’s

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queerness, along with that of other queer characters, safeguards the perceived core audience’s adherence to white heteronormative values (West). In response to questions about Valkyrie’s bisexuality, Waititi commented, “Perhaps there’s something there that was her girlfriend. Who knows. We tried to make sure it wasn’t super specific or that we were trying to say, ‘She’s a lesbian! She’s bi! We really gotta get everyone on board with this!’ ” (Ellwood). The film employs representational practices that subtly disturb heteronormativity and allude to a more radical queer fantasy but ultimately contain the threat of interracial queer intimacies. The act of witnessing her lover die again makes it possible for Valkyrie, betrayed by history, defeated, and emotionally dead, to mourn and offers a counternarrative to the exclusions of dominant Asgardian histories. Valkyrie makes a farce of Odin’s and Hela’s imperial ventures by disarticulating the reasons for war in the first place. Her rebuttals to Thor and her flashback illuminate the ongoing warfare that has sustained Asgard: the theft of land and labor, the assault on bodies, and the continued subjection of colonized populations after incorporation into “civilization.”

The Valkyrie’s Sexuality and Mixedness on Screen In recuperating these lost memories and histories, Valkyrie also recovers queer affects and generates queer ways of knowing. Following queer of color and queer diasporic scholars, I use “queer” not as a signifier for samesex sexuality but more as an ontological conceptualization counter to dominant historical, social, and cultural formations (Ferguson; Muñoz; Tinsley). This reading practice recognizes the queerness of both Blackness and mixed race. Instead of affiliating herself with whiteness and heterosexuality as markers of civilization, Valkyrie becomes the heroine who saves Asgard. Transgressing taboos concerning interracial and same-sex pairing, Valkyrie’s body, coupled with the memory of her lover, offers new possibilities of resistance. In technical terms, the slow-motion filming utilizes a new camera technology, Dreamlight, that renders the scene so that it appears as a moving painting. The sequence of a white body coming into contact with Valkyrie’s brown body figures into a kind of sexualized racial and gender expression. Creating the intimacy of flesh on flesh in an embrace of death, Valkyrie taps into the power of memory within herself

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and enacts a language of survival and a refusal to carry out duties and orders anchored in dominant white patriarchal models. Additionally, in terms of this film’s portrayal of same-sex desire across racial lines in the fantasy realm, Thor: Ragnarok destabilizes white sexual norms and catalyzes an eroticized racialized imagination. While Thompson remains vocal about the fact that she sees Valkyrie as bisexual, the decision to avoid drawing overt attention to Valkyrie’s sexuality in the final cut of the film involves a denial of difference. The anxieties surrounding racial mixing and same-sex desire challenge white heteronormative assumptions. Valkyrie embodies a queer negation of fixed sexuality or race. As the last survivor of the Valkyries, Thompson’s character is renamed the Valkyrie. As both a symbol of near extinction and a representation of the Other, the Valkyrie becomes a character stand-in for the multiplicities and immeasurable embodiments of women of African descent. The utility of the mixed Black female warrior becomes a paradoxical expression of contradictory goals of nationalism and revolutionary Black freedom struggles. After recalling the initial traumatic memory, Valkyrie activates and extracts her own anguished memories and realities. In the current political era of willful forgetting and extensive historical amnesia, in which Western political and economic dominance, democracy, global capitalism, and racial inequalities rest on colonial formations, Valkyrie’s symbolism ignites political uses of recollection. With the momentum provided by the Black Lives Matter movement, a heightened sense of the continuities between colonialism and slavery, on the one hand, and contemporary forms of dispossession, violence, and incarceration, on the other, also emerges within popular culture. In a climactic scene in the film, Valkyrie arms the slaves and oppressed of Sakaar in the hopes of starting a slave revolt. The Grandmaster’s messengers convey that a revolution has begun and that the slaves have armed themselves. The Grandmaster dismissively responds, “I don’t like that word! Ooh the s word.” His messenger responds, “Sorry, the prisoners with jobs.” When the Grandmaster eschews the word “slave” in favor of “prisoners with jobs,” slavery is invoked here not as a universalizing conflation; on the contrary, the iterations of slavery have not necessarily ceased to exist. For example, contemporary audiences can conceive of the linkages between racialized prison labor, human trafficking, and enslavement while considering how the benefits and protections of citizenship and freedom are also

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contingent on the unfreedom of other groups. This representation of slavery signals new racial norms in an era defined by the supposed end of legal racism. Whiteness predicates the legibility of heroes and victims such that goodness and civility are inscribed onto white bodies alone. Through the symbolism of Valkyrie, the film engages with color-blind universal ideologies yet operates as a means to interrogate consequences of historical forgetting of race-based slavery and colonization for contemporary understandings of justice. As a heroine, Valkyrie demolishes these institutional powers in the form of the Grandmaster’s forces. Relying on the visibility of Thompson’s Black body, the spectacle of Valkyrie’s rage and fury potentially disrupts the coherence of white supremacy and patriarchy. Yet the prevalence of white men and nonhuman revolutionaries obfuscates the representational power of Black women at the helm of revolution with a less visible and less uncomfortable vision of revolt. The Grandmaster’s fear of the revolt of the oppressed concerns not only men of color but also women subjugated under patriarchal conditions. Furthermore, with Odin’s death and Hela’s ambitions to conquer Asgard, Valkyrie realizes that it is her land, her nation, her people that are in captivity. With Odin no longer living, if Valkyrie can defeat Hela, a new revolutionary possibility becomes feasible. With the film’s depiction of dislocations, slave trade, abduction, and exile, Valkyrie’s desire to return to Asgard becomes a way of reclaiming historical narratives. Adorned in Valkyrie battle attire with a cape and sword, she reenters Asgard to transform it anew. Inspired by Indigenous movements in New Zealand and Australia, Waititi notes that her spaceship has the colors of the Tino Rangatiratanga flag; Aboriginal flag colors mark the other spaceships and backdrop for her triumphant walk back onto Asgardian soil (Bizzaca). With Tino Rangatiratanga as a vision and practice of Maori self-determination, Thompson’s mixed body forms transnational linkages and identification with Blackness (fig. 2.1).

Marketing and Audience Responses for Superheroes of Color In a cultural moment in which Hollywood studios backed multimilliondollar production budgets on superhero films starring Black male super­ heroes in Black Panther (2018) and a white female superhero in Wonder Woman (2017), the marketability and demand for nonwhite male superheroes and

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FIG. 2.1  ​Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie with the colors of the Tino Rangatiratanga flag in Thor: Ragnarok. Marvel Studios, 2017.

white female superheroes have soared. Yet despite their small numbers, white female superheroes have continued to overshadow female superheroes of color, though both groups are far outnumbered by white men cast as the central characters. In the comic book sphere, Marvel has also reimagined the superhero genre with recastings and reimaginings of their characters. These character shifts change who gets to become a superhero. Jane Foster, a white female character who was previously a romantic interest of the white male superhero Thor, became the embodiment of him. The company released a statement identifying this incarnation as an authentic Marvel character: “The new Thor continues Marvel’s proud tradition of strong female characters like Captain Marvel, Storm, Black Widow and more. And this new Thor isn’t a temporary female substitute—she’s now the one and only Thor, and she is worthy!” (qtd. in Watercutter). Other such character shifts include Riri Williams as a Black female adolescent breaking from the white male hero Tony Stark as Iron Man, Ms. Marvel as a Pakistani Muslim female teenager who takes on the role originally held by (white) Carol Danvers, and Miles Morales as an Afro-Latinx Spider-Man in the Peter Parker role. These shifts welcome broader movements toward the inclusion and optics of diversity in relation to the overrepresentation of white men throughout the media industries, yet such changes often become curtailed or realigned with previous iterations, such as the reversion to the original Thor (Berlatsky).

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Such changes have also faced opposition from some fan sectors and from within the comic industry itself. As cultural texts dominated by white male characters, both mainstream comic books and film adaptations have historically excluded or marginalized women and nonwhite characters or reinforced ideologies that delimit women as sexual objects and Black characters as inherently threatening (Cocca). In April 2017, the Marvel vice president of sales myopically explained the decline of comic book revenue as a result of including more diverse characters (McMillan). This conjecture—that diversity is a novelty and that the target audience remains white men who solely desire more white male superheroes—was proved hollow, however, with the unprecedented box office success of the film Black Panther. While the number of filmgoers is much larger than the number of loyal comic book readers, comic book readership is becoming increasingly nonwhite and female. Additionally, the increased popularity of comic book adaptation films also correlates with younger nonwhite audiences (Weldon). Based loosely on Norse mythology, the Marvel Thor franchise also taps into imaginings of Vikings as tall, blond, blue-eyed, and strong, while also underscoring ideologies of racial purity through whiteness. Cinematically, blondness acts as a racial signifier of unambiguous whiteness (Dyer 43). The fantasy world of Thor then invites questions about the ontology of race. Understanding the associations, performances, and symbolisms of the Valkyries—originally a term for deities who are markers of tradition, militancy, and myth—functions as a means of orienting the role of Thompson as this composite character. Valkyrie, the female warrior of Norse legend and myth, along with the rise of religious Odinism, became elevated to an icon of white nationalism (Darby; Samuel) precisely as Thompson’s star persona—grounded in her mixed Black body—brought us back to the centrality of Blackness. As symbolic figures such as Valkyrie become intertwined with the elevation of Nordic heritage as emblems of white racial purity, Thompson’s mixed Black body presents the embodiment of longstanding fears of the degradation of whiteness through miscegenation. Simultaneously, her mixed Blackness questions racial belonging and the normalization of racial segregation and innocent whiteness within and outside superhero genres. The premise of superheroes as saviors is also founded on a benevolent and uncontested whiteness. Waititi taps into the role of the Valkyrie within the social imaginary and turns her into part of a fantasy that can incite social change. As an aesthetic and political ideal, the Valkyrie has transitioned into a symbol of decolonial spaces.

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Thompson’s casting as Valkyrie highlights the ideological clashes between the preservation and the disruption of whiteness as a universalizing norm. Thompson’s arrival resides in a cultural moment in racial hybridity where multiraciality has market value and oscillates between a reification of and a threat to hegemonic whiteness. The juxtaposition of Valkyrie’s multiraciality to the notion of Valkyrie as unequivocally white highlights rather than erases Thompson’s Blackness. Marvel’s success in cinematic adaptations has often relied on reproducing the status quo of narratives and characters, on the easy and conforming identification of traditional versions of comic book characters. Some audiences have praised these reboots as a step toward inclusion and social change, but by and large, fan bases desiring the preservation of original iterations have often complained that diverse casting destroys the authenticity of the original version. For one notable example, during the first installment of this film franchise, producers cast Black British actor Idris Elba as Heimdall, a Norse god, and white supremacists called for a boycott of Thor and set up a website to disseminate their beliefs (Child). Meanwhile, Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano played Hogun, a Marvel creation visualized as white in the comics. With Thompson joining the cast in the third film of the trilogy, the image of Asgardians and super­ heroes became less white dominated. Many comic fans, however, zealously demanded that the film not stray from the depiction of the comic character of Valkyrie as blond and white. Similarly, white fans enacted strategies of white dominance and exclusion against Jessica Alba, who was cast as Nordic-inspired Sue Storm in Fantastic Four (2005), but her dyed blond hair and her ethnic ambiguity of partial Latina descent deactivated these concerns (Beltrán 250–251). While Thompson is also of Latinx descent, she is notably Afro-Latinx and speaks to the obscuring of Blackness within media depictions of Latinidad as well as to hierarchies of mixedness that incessantly devalue Blackness. Furthermore, Thompson has marked her mixed Blackness with her appearance in race-conscious films. Appearing as mixed Black college student Sam White in Dear White People (2014) and as Bianca, a musician and love interest opposite Michael B. Jordan, in Creed (2015), Thompson has performed in Black-directed films that explicitly thematize race. She has also boldly addressed race in her personal and professional life. Furthermore, Thompson’s mixed Blackness and Latinx identity go against the trend of multiraciality and Latinization that leans more toward whiteness than

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Blackness. Yet at the same time, Thompson acknowledges the ways in which colorism works within the media industry. She has consistently used her social media platform to open up dialogues on racial inequities within the media industries and the power of representation. She noted on her Twitter page, “Colorism in Hollywood is real. Privilege and merit can co-exist. One can work in a system and be wary of its trappings” (@TessaThompson_x).

Social Media Responses to Racial Representations Fans have also utilized social media outlets such as Twitter and Instagram to contest problematic racial representations in superhero films. Activists have taken to social media to protest the whitewashing of Asian and Asian American characters from film (Lopez). The continuous exclusion of nonwhite heroes exemplifies the controversies surrounding the casting of white actress Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One, written as an Asian man in the comics, in the Marvel film Doctor Strange (2016), as well as white actor Finn Jones as Danny Rand, a martial arts expert written as a white savior type in the comics who could have been reclaimed as Asian American in the Netflix / Marvel series Iron Fist (2017–2018). As LeiLani Nishime argues, white actors have been granted racial flexibility and transcendence on-screen. At its core, the protest over Thor maintains white privilege. In response to Thompson’s casting, angry fans protested the “blackwashing” of the film on Thompson’s and Marvel’s Instagram and Twitter pages (@marvelstudios). Other social media users rejected these claims by pointing out the normalization of whiteness within institutions. The film’s director, Waititi, responded to this fan resistance: “The fact that we even have to keep having this conversation is ridiculous, because we keep forgetting. Unless it’s the topic of the film, it just shouldn’t even be—what do we even care? I think the story is king, and you want the best person for the job. And Tessa tested against—we cast a very broad net, and Tess was the best person” (Nordine). Although Waititi does not acknowledge Thompson’s race, his film work has explicitly centered race, ethnicity, and indigeneity and has challenged racial norms in representation and production (Farnsworth). Instead of presuming that color-blind casting is racial progress, Brandi Wilkins Catanese questions the insignificance of race in casting and maintains that color blindness disavows the material consequences of race and the normalized maintenance of innocent whiteness. Countering casting as

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racial transcendence, Catanese calls for racially transgressive casting that can be part of social change. Predating Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok shifts the normalization of whiteness through who tells and directs stories, and dislocates assumptions of racialized embodiment. In response to racist Twitter accusations about the cinematic portrayal of Valkyrie, other fans speculated that the character Valkyrie would likely not care about appearance. Thompson later tweeted, “She’s bi. And yes, she cares very little about what men think of her. What a joy to play!” Thompson also noted, “yes! Val is Bi in the comics & I was faithful to that in her depiction. But her sexuality isn’t explicitly addressed in Thor: Ragnarok” (@TessaThompson_x). Thompson offers up a queer understanding of Valkyrie in a genre that has often sexualized characters for a heterosexual cisgender male audience. Calls for increased inclusion in media operate in tension with notions of postfeminism and postraciality. These frictions manifest in casting choices that extend to relationships between narratives, audiences, and notions of authenticity. Thor: Ragnarok’s spectacular box office success, along with acclamation in film reviews, preceded the immense profits and audience attendance for Marvel’s Black Panther (2018). The presence of women of African descent in superhero films indicates the demand for diversity in cinema. With its massive $122.7 million opening weekend, during which it was number one, Thor: Ragnarok profited far more than Thor (2011) and Thor: Dark World (2013). Eventually Thor: Ragnarok brought in worldwide sales of $846.9 million. The social media backlash, then, did not dampen sales at all (Gibbs). Meanwhile, Marvel demonstrated that it is not wedded to the traditional canonical iterations of its characters. The new Exiles comic book series—released in April  2019—features a Valkyrie based on Thompson’s likeness. Thompson’s imagery clearly offers possibilities for a queer mixed Black radical imagination that subverts hierarchal categories.

Conclusion In the film, Valkyrie’s facility as hero defending her people depends on her readiness to stand within the imperfect histories of Asgard. In contrast to willful ignorance and forgetting, knowledge allows for righteousness. At the end of the film, as they carry out the prophecies of Ragnarok that dictate how Asgard will be destroyed by a fire demon, Thor and Valkyrie unleash this fire god, who destroys the land and subsequently Thor’s sister Hela.

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Meanwhile, Valkyrie has saved the masses of Asgardians by loading them onto a spaceship. Watching the planet burning in flames, Heimdall, played by Idris Elba, notes, “Asgard is not a place. It is a people.” The redemption of the Asgardians depends on the anchored resonance of knowledge, as well as their exile and dispossession. Resurrecting the prophecy of Ragnarok invites futures yet to be determined. A potential utopia can be created only through the literal destruction of Asgard because that world had been based on colonization and imperialism. In the film’s final scene, Asgardians and formerly enslaved nonhuman revolutionaries contemplate their next journey together. As Thor decides to lead this assemblage to Earth, the group becomes not future colonizers as in the Asgardian past but diasporic refugees. By relating this group to contemporary struggles and questions of national inclusion, the film opens itself up to a world with its own possibilities. As the specter of the haunted past and coupled with Thompson’s casting as a mixed woman of African descent, Valkyrie exists as a symbol of survival. Her symbolic position as the lone survivor of the Valkyrie warrior community draws on and resists the tragic mulatta trope of isolation, maladjustment, and existence without a people of her own. Yet instead of carrying the burden of the pain of exclusion, Valkyrie refuses to disappear. Her reclamation of her legacy and reemergence demonstrates that the colonial narratives represented by Asgard have always been a fiction. As a mixed Black superhero, Valkyrie upends hierarchies and decenters whiteness— she connects multiple pathways of diaspora through Thompson’s body and her help in the creation of a new people in which Asgardians intermingle with the formerly enslaved. Thor: Ragnarok offers a speculative, feminist, antiracist imaginary with queer temporalities and spaces that link to discourses of political power at the contemporary formative moment in a battle of white nationalism, Black resistance, and demographic anxieties about racial mixture and the erosion of whiteness.

Note 1 Dressed in stereotypical Native American costuming, Chris Hemsworth attended

a Lone Ranger–themed party on New Year’s Eve 2015; subsequently, Instagram photo postings of the costuming circulated on social media. Hemsworth apologized eleven months after the party incident and highlighted his own ignorance and thoughtlessness as a way to help spread awareness of issues facing Indigenous communities (@chrishem).

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Works Cited Beltrán, Mary C. “Mixed Race in Latinowood: Latino Stardom and Ethnic Ambiguity in the Era of Dark Angels.” Mixed Race Hollywood, edited by Mary C. Beltrán and Camilla Fojas, New York University Press, 2008, pp. 248–268. Berlatsky, Eric. “ ‘ We Are Who We Choose to Be’: Sadistic Choices, Forking Paths, and the Rejection of Social and Narrative Progress in Superhero Comics and Films.” Hooded Utilitarian, 29 Apr. 2015, www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2015/04​ /we-are-who-we-choose-to-be-sadistic-choices-forking-paths-and-the-rejection​ -of-social-and-narrative-progress-in-superhero-comics-and-films/. Accessed 10 May 2019. Bizzaca, Caris. “Taika Waititi: Paying It Forward on Thor: Ragnarok.” Screen Australia, 17 Oct. 2017, www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/screen-news/2017/10-17​ -taika-waititi-thor-ragnarok. Accessed 10 May 2019. Black Panther. Directed by Ryan Coogler, performances by Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, and Lupita Nyong’o, Marvel Studios, 2018. Catanese, Brandi Wilkins. The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance. University of Michigan Press, 2011. Child, Ben. “White Supremacists Urge Thor Boycott over Casting of Black Actor as Norse God.” Guardian, 17 Dec. 2010, www.theguardian.com/film/2010/dec/17/white​ -supremacists-boycott-thor. Accessed 10 May 2019. @chrishem (Chris Hemsworth). “Standing with those who are fighting to protect their sacred land and water.” Instagram, 27 Oct. 2016, www.instagram.com/p/BMFrg​Vf​ AmdP/?hl=en. Cocca, Carolyn. Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Creed. Directed by Ryan Coogler, performances by Tessa Thompson and Michael B. Jordan, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer Pictures, Warner Brothers Pictures, New Line Cinema, Chartoff-Winkler Productions, 2015. Daniel, G. Reginald. Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006. Darby, Seward. “The Rise of the Valkyries.” Harper’s, Sept. 2017, harpers.org/archive​ /2017/09/the-rise-of-the-valkyries/. Accessed 10 May 2019. Dear White People. Directed by Justin Simien, performance by Tessa Thompson, Code Red Films, Duly Noted, Home Grown Pictures, 2014. Doctor Strange. Directed by Scott Derrickson, performance by Tilda Swinton, Marvel Studios, 2016. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. Macmillan, 1986. Ellwood, Gregory. “Taika Waititi Has Your Answer on Whether Thor: Ragnarok’s Valkyrie Is Bisexual.” Playlist, 26 Oct. 2017, theplaylist.net/taika-waititi-thor-ragn​ arok-podcast-20171026/. Accessed 10 May 2019. Fantastic Four. Directed by Tim Story, performance by Jessica Alba, Constantin Film, Marvel Enterprises, 1492 Pictures, 2005. Farnsworth, Miles. “Ethnicity in the Films of Taika Waititi.” Medium, 26 Apr. 2018, medium.com/cinenation-show/ethnicity-in-the-films-of-taika-waititi-2c2e7aee7191. Accessed 10 May 2019. Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

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Gibbs, Adrienne. “Racist Backlash Didn’t Impact Huge Box Office Weekend for Thor Ragnarok.” Forbes, 5 Nov. 2017, www.forbes.com/sites/adriennegibbs​ /2017/11/05/racist-backlash-didnt-impact-huge-box-office-weekend-for-thor-ragn​ orak/#1c12e4f2ffde. Accessed 10 May 2019. Iron Fist. Marvel Television, ABC Studios, Devilina Productions, 2017–2018. Jones, Nicholas, and Jungmiwha Bullock. “Two or More Races Population: 2010.” 2010 Census Briefs, U.S. Census Bureau, 2012, www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010​ br-13.pdf. Accessed 10 May 2019. Lake, Marilyn, and Henry Reynolds. Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Lopez, Lori Kido. “Fan Activists and the Politics of Race in The Last Airbender.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 15, no. 5, 2012, pp. 431–445. Madrid, Mike. The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines. Exterminating Angel, 2009. @marvelstudios (Marvel Studios). “Tessa Thompson is Valkyrie. Get your tickets to #ThorRagnarok now [link in bio].” Instagram, 21 Oct. 2017, www.instagram. com/p/Bahc3VsH2JA/?hl=en. McMillan, Graeme. “2017: The Year Everything Went Wrong for Marvel Comics.” Hollywood Reporter, 29 Dec. 2017, www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/2017​ -year-almost- everything-went-wrong-marvel-comics-1070616. Accessed 10 May 2019. Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Nicholson, Amy. “How Tessa Thompson Went from Indie Actor to Thor: Ragnarok Badass.” Rolling Stone, 31 Oct. 2017, www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features​ /how-tessa-thompson-went-from-indie-actor-to-thor-ragnarok-badass-116635/. Accessed 10 May 2019. Nishime, LeiLani. “Whitewashing Yellow Futures in Ex Machina, Cloud Atlas, and Advantageous: Gender, Labor, and Technology in Sci-Fi Film.” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 2017, pp. 29–49. Nordine, Michael. “Thor: Ragnarok: Why Tessa Thompson Was Cast as a Character Who Is ‘Blonde & White’ in Comics: Director Taika Waititi Explains Why Thompson Was the Best Actress for the Role.” Indie Wire, 17 July 2016, www.indie​ wire.com/2016/07/thor-ragnarok-tessa-thompson-valkyrie-taika-waititi-1201​706​ 841/. Accessed 10 May 2019. Samuel, Sigal. “What to Do When Racists Try to Hijack Your Religion.” Atlantic, 2 Nov. 2017, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/11/asatru-heathenry​ -racism/543864/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. @TessaThompson_x (Tessa Thompson). “Colorism in Hollywood is real. Privilege and merit can co-exist. One can work in a system and be wary of its trappings.” Twitter, 22 July 2016, 1:39 a.m., https://twitter.com/tessathompson_x/status/75636 2946020638721?lang=en. ———. “She’s bi. And yes, she cares very little about what men think of her. What a joy to play!” Twitter, 21 Oct. 2017, 4:12 p.m., twitter.com/tessathompson_x/status​ /921876958673113088?lang=en. ———. “yes! Val is Bi in the comics & I was faithful to that in her depiction. But her sexuality isn’t explicitly addressed in Thor: Ragnarok.” Twitter, 23 Oct. 2017, 2:55 p.m., twitter.com/tessathompson_x/status/922582256232800256?lang=en.

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Thor: Ragnarok. Directed by Taika Waititi, performances by Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth, Marvel Studios, 2017. Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 14, nos. 2–3, 2008, pp. 191–215. Watercutter, Angela. “The New Thor Is a Big Deal, but Not Because She’s a Woman.” Wired, 15 July 2014, www.wired.com/2014/07/new-female-thor/. Accessed 20 Oct. 2019. Weldon, Glenn. “Beyond the Pale (Male): Marvel, Diversity and a Changing Comics Readership.” National Public Radio, 8 Apr. 2017, www.npr. org/2017/04/08/523044892/beyond-the-pale-male-marvel-diversity-and-a-changing​ -comics-readership. Accessed 8 Apr. 2018. West, Amy. “Valkyrie, Korg and Other Queer Marvel Characters That Have Been Straight-Washed on Screen.” Pink News, 26 Apr. 2018, www.pinknews. co.uk/2018/04/26/valkyrie-korg-queer-marvel-characters-straight-washed-avengers/. Accessed 10 May 2019.

3

“Which World Would You Rather Live In?” The Anti-utopian Superheroes of Gary Jackson’s Poetry CHRIS G AVALER

African American poet Gary Jackson opens his 2009 collection Missing You, Metropolis with an epigraph from Hollis Mason’s fictional superhero memoir Under the Hood, which is included in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novel Watchmen: All those brilliant and resourceful sleuths and heroes offered a glimpse of a perfect world where morality worked the way it was meant to. Nobody in Doc Savage’s world killed themselves except thwarted kamikaze assassins or enemy spies with cyanide capsules. Which world would you rather live in, if you had the choice?

Though the implied answer appears obvious, the forty-three poems that follow complicate the dichotomies of typical superhero utopias. For Jackson, 64

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whose semiautobiographical central speaker grew up racially isolated in a small, midwestern city while trying to escape into the seemingly simpler world of comics, superheroes are not a two-dimensional type but hybrid individuals navigating the impossible division between the mundane and the fantastical, where physical extraordinariness intensifies rather than alleviates psychological complexities. While neither fully human nor superhuman, Jackson’s renditions of familiar Marvel and DC characters bridge the divides that not only define the inherently hybrid character type but also represent African American experience in a racially divided culture. These superheroes are both racial metaphors and coherent fictional characters explored in their own terms and in parallel to Jackson’s own lived experience. When writing about the real world, Jackson evokes a longing for that perfect world of Moore’s epigraph—yet when imagining the internal lives of superheroes, he expresses the same longing to cross over to a better place. In Jackson’s hybrid multiverse, neither world ultimately proves an escape. The collection vacillates between its two worlds, chronicling Jackson’s life and the eventual suicide of a best friend in counterpoint to the similarly imperfect lives of masked vigilantes and mutants, with each reality further commenting on the other. While the threats and desires of racial mixing infuse both, Jackson mixes worlds to produce an anti-utopian vision that neither accepts nor entirely breaks the dichotomies that his poetry straddles. When discussing “the experience of mixed race identity,” Jackson explained to an interviewer that his Korean grandmother was “one of many women who decided she had a better chance of starting a new life in America with an American  G.I. She just made the unfortunate choice of marrying a Black man and moving in with him and his family in the Heartland of the USA in the early ’60s. Ha! And here I am, the product of this” (Hoppenthaler). Jackson grew up in Topeka, Kansas, a city best known for the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which legally ended racial segregation in public schools. When interviewed in 2017, Jackson was living in Charleston, North Carolina, where he reported feeling “simultaneously more visible and invisible . . . ​when [he] compare[d] it to anywhere else [he’d] ever lived.” He continued, “There are more spaces here where I’m much more comfortable than I’ve felt in a long time, and many more spaces where I’m hyperaware of my presence, and I feel (know) everyone else is as well. But . . . ​it takes me a long time to process experience. . . . ​I was living in Korea before Missing You, Metropolis was even published, and you can see that I’m still wrestling with those experiences on the page” (Hoppenthaler).

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As with arguably any superhero text, Missing You, Metropolis wrestles directly and indirectly with the tensions of mixing. Since its inception, the figure of the superhero has coded racial crossing through metaphoric and literal hybridity. The genre combines multiple forebears, including detective fiction, science fiction, fantasy, westerns, adventure, and crime, into an amalgam defined by an amalgam hero type. Viewed within its own genre, that mixed character is also definingly part human and part Other. A superhero, writes Clare Pitkethly, “straddles the boundary or an opposition and is simultaneously on one side and the other, incorporating both opposing sides,” with “the dynamic tension that results from this split [making] him or her a superhuman” (25, 28). Richard Slotkin describes one of the superhero’s genre forebears, the frontiersman of the western, in like terms: a border must be crossed by a hero “whose character is so mixed that he . . . ​can operate effectively on both sides of the line” (351). In that colonial context, the border is both the physical division between U.S. territory and tribal lands and the metaphorical divide between white and “dark” races and their implied cultural values. While this makes the western hero figuratively mixed, his narrative goal is the opposite: “By destroying the dark elements and colonizing the border, they purge darkness from themselves and the world” (Slotkin 352). That boundary then codes not only a dichotomy but a hierarchy, embodied internally by the hero who enacts it externally on the community he protects from the racial mixing he paradoxically represents. A species of frontiersman, the superhero operates not at the colonial border but rather in the metropole—sometimes literally Metropolis. Here the threat of the racial Other is refigured as the degenerate, the swarming immigrants and animal-like criminals infesting a nation. Late Victorian gothic novelists imagined a tragic form of mixing, with the failed heroes of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) destroyed by the Other that they are mixed with but cannot tame. Early twentieth-century eugenicists conceived of the pseudoscientific superman in an attempt to defend white aristocracy, and the later fascist breeding programs were designed to evolve a genetically purified human race (Gavaler, “Well-Born”). The depiction of well-known pulp magazine proto-superheroes like Doc Savage and the Shadow expresses similar cultural goals, with tales of superhuman heroes able to direct their otherly traits—the Shadow’s orientalist hypnotism, Doc Savage’s bronze skin and Aztec wealth—for the good of a white-dominant

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society. The comic book superhero inherited that mixed dynamic. “His costume,” writes Richard Reynolds, “marks him out as a proponent of . . . ​ exoticism,” but he “is both the exotic and the agent of order which brings the exotic to book” (83). Marc Singer also identifies “exotic outsiders [who] work to preserve” the status quo as “the generic ideology of the superhero” (110). The traditional superhero is a Mr.  Hyde directed by an internal Dr. Jekyll to preserve a society of fellow Jekylls. While superheroes have evolved considerably since—most noticeably in the leap from comics to film as their primary medium of mass consumption— the defining divide described by Pitkethly and, more importantly, the explicitly hierarchical mixing and bridging described by Singer, Reynolds, and Slotkin were still norms of the superhero comics that Jackson read during his adolescence. Though African American writers and artists had by then entered the comics industry and were making strides in transforming the character type, Jackson focuses on the mainstream center of the genre and thus content marketed to and shaped by a predominantly white, adolescent, heterosexual, male audience that nonetheless still resonated in him. Jackson explained in an interview that, “as a 10-year-old, [he] would read these X-men comics . . . ​and immediately connected the dots between being a mutant, and being different and being black” (Phillips). While superhero comics are often understood as a subgenre of children’s literature, a subgenre that Jackson associates with his own childhood, he also complicates that assumption by combining the seeming innocence of the genre with pornography and other expressions of sexuality. Though comics were initially targeted at twelve-year-old white boys, by the early 1990s the average comics reader was a twenty-year-old white male and, by the end of the century, a twenty-five-year-old (Gaslin). Jackson does not provide his birth year or many other overt time markers, but the poem “Xorn” includes an epigraph from New X-Men no. 127 (Morrison et al.), and the collection’s title poem includes an epigraph from Batman no. 608 (Loeb et al.), both published in 2002, two years before Jackson graduated college. “A Poem for Jesse Custer” features the protagonist from the 1995–2000 DC imprint Vertigo Preacher—suggested for mature readers—a series indicating that Jackson’s nostalgia for comics is not always restricted to his childhood as traditionally defined. References in “Saturday Mornings with Andrea True” to watching porn in junior high reinforce the same impression, even though the adult speaker sees “our childhood / in those old tapes” (22). The same poem references the children’s television cartoon

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series Darkwing Duck, and “Stuart,” the second poem of the collection, describes Jackson and his best friend first bonding over a 1991 issue of Amazing Spider-Man. Also, in “Fade,” the speaker dreams of Stuart knocking on the door of his “childhood home” and coming out “as if I were ten again” (75). Jackson’s backwards gaze therefore covers at least a decade-wide expanse, providing a view of an adolescence that incorporates both stereotypical childhood innocence and overt sexuality. That mixture, itself a dichotomybreaking form of hybridity, intensifies the racial tensions inherent in the mixed character type of the superhero, especially in regard to the fear of the paradoxically utopian achievement of miscegenation it encodes. Because Jackson’s speaker is male, he suggests the gendered trope of the tragic mulatto, which Ralina Joseph identifies as specifically female, where a mixedrace woman’s “excessive sexual appetites necessitate her use and abuse by white men” (5), a fate that parallels Jackson’s depiction of Stuart. Though Jackson does not mention Aaron McGruder’s comic strip The Boondocks, which entered national newspaper syndication in 1999, his speaker resembles McGruder’s mixed-race character Jazmine, who, as Michele Elam notes, is prepubescent and so “in the supposedly prelapsarian pre-social realm, the site of superior social critique,” while also “sexually and racially coming of age” and so “pointedly not prior to the social realm but . . . ​poised at the index to it” (73–74). Though Jackson’s speaker is not part of a comic, the superhero characters he explores are, like Jazmine as described by Elam, “frozen in this place beyond time, even as they are paradoxically, always in time and history” (73), a paradox Jackson explores too. As Jackson’s view of childhood is complex, his range of superhero content is focused neither exclusively on his own adolescent reading nor fully on the larger genre. Jackson’s notes list two other 1990s titles and several comics from the early 1960s through the 1980s, most published either before he was born or before he was capable of reading. His superhero references are to long-established and widely popular characters, including DC’s Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, and Marvel’s Spider-Man, X-Men, and Avengers. Two of the first African American superheroes of the 1970s, Luke Cage and Storm, appear, but not later characters introduced by African American creators. Dwayne McDuffie and M.  D. Bright’s Icon, for instance, is not mentioned, nor do any of the other DC / Milestone heroes of the mid-1990s enter Jackson’s adolescent awareness. Other newly introduced Black characters of the period—Bishop in 1991, Spawn in 1992, Steel

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in 1993, Xero in 1997, and Nick Fury in 2001—are also absent, as are older Black characters reprised in new titles, including Green Lantern, Black Lightning, Blade, and even Black Panther. Jackson’s retrospective eye then constructs the reading experience of an average comics buyer of the 1990s. If the teenage Jackson himself was attuned to Black characters or Black creators of that period, his collection does not reflect it. While Jackson does not present himself or any of his adolescent friends as mixed race, racial mixing is a driving concern of the collection and a thinly masked subtext of the superhero genre he consumes. In “Stuart,” Jackson’s speaker recalls how he and his best friend “both enjoyed the curves / of comic-book women” (7), leaving implicit that these fantastical women were overwhelmingly white and drawn in the hypersexualized style of 1990s mainstream comics art. Carolyn Cocca describes those “Bad Girl” norms, which featured “anatomically impossible proportions” and “anatomically impossible poses,” with an abundance of exposed skin (11). Wonder Woman’s costume, as drawn by Mike Deodato, for example, was thong-cut. The sexualization has predictable results in Jackson’s circle. In “A Conversation about Superheroes,” three of Jackson’s adolescent friends choose white female superheroes as fantasy sex partners—though one, Mystique, is a blue-skinned mutant shape-shifter who often assumes a white appearance. The character is also coded and then overtly identified as lesbian, adding another level of mixing, since the topic of the “conversation” is heterosexual desire but as a form of homosocial bonding. Regardless, only Jackson’s speaker selects Storm, because of, as the others correctly accuse, “her skin alone” (12). Stuart and the speaker’s other Black friends instead imagine themselves crossing the racial line, a sexual fantasy produced but likely not intended by the comics companies marketing white female superheroes to a predominantly white male audience. Racial mixing, at least imaginatively, then might be understood as an inevitable consequence of African Americans’ consuming entertainment neither designed for nor prohibited to them. Yet Jackson also presents mixing as a natural consequence of childhood innocence. In the preceding poem, “Pretend,” the speaker recalls a prepubescent game of make-believe marriage with a neighbor who is presumably white, since their imaginary daughter is “the most beautiful / light-skinned baby in Topeka” (10). The daughter’s name, Jessica, may also anachronistically reference the white superhero Jessica Jones introduced in 2001 and written into a romantic relationship with Luke Cage, whom she later marries and with whom

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raises a daughter. In the final stanza, Jackson’s speaker concludes that soon “we’ll decide we’re too old / to play these games,” suggesting a maturity that might include a heightened awareness of a racial divide (10). Jackson makes the dangers of that divide explicit in “How to Get Lynched on the Job.” There an older Stuart sexually harasses a white co-worker, and the speaker worries because “none of us are far / from ending like Emmett” (59). Dangerous attraction to sexual racial crossing by Black male characters pervades the collection. Jackson’s college-age speaker in “Listening to Plath in Poetics” experiences, though does not express openly, his own desire for a white classmate with “porcelain” skin (29). In “Kansas Winter Blues,” the speaker and his friends chat online with presumably white “girls / from Dublin and Melbourne,” identifying themselves with racially ambiguous “user names YHVH and Wolverine” (18). Only the next poem, “Natalie Pays the Neighbor Boy a Visit,” depicts an interracial sexual encounter, between the virgin Jackson and a more sexually experienced neighbor. Even here, race is fraught since Natalie, the speaker of the poem, explains, “I had been with black guys before / but lied for your pride” (19), echoing both the make-believe of his childhood romance and the disguises of his online flirtations. While the speaker of “A Conversation about Super­ heroes” selects Storm for “her skin alone,” race infuses all of his sexual encounters, both real and imagined. Jackson simultaneously approaches real-world racial mixing through the fantastical content of poems set in superhero worlds, refiguring race as a human and superhuman dichotomy rarely bridged successfully. “Nightcrawler Buys a Woman a Drink” makes the racial metaphor overt when the tailed and blue-furred member of the X-Men attempts to seduce a presumably nonmutant human, concluding in the final lines, “Show me a woman not afraid / of a mutant man. Let me mix into your bloodline” (28), an overt reference to the fear of miscegenation that motivated eugenics and shaped the superhero character type. The poem reflects the Nightcrawler of Jackson’s youth, whom writer Chris Claremont depicted as no longer disguising his mutant appearance after X-Men no. 96 (1975) (Claremont et al.). In an interview, Jackson added that the setting of the poem, the fictional bar Harry’s Hideaway, “was the one place the X-men could hang out ‘in the normal world’ and be treated just like everyone else” (Phillips). That desire for the normal also infuses “Superman’s Funeral,” where Jackson writes from the perspective of a human male longing for Wonder Woman: “I couldn’t help it— / I reached out and glossed her bare /

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shoulder as she walked by” (43). Instead of sex, the speaker imagines their mundane married life and his role as spouse giving emotional support over glasses of wine—a vision no less threatening in the eugenics subtext. Jackson maintains the racial dichotomy by contrasting the speaker’s human status with the superiority of Wonder Woman’s fantastical yet still-literal whiteness (albeit a whiteness that masks an ambiguous racial identity, since her Amazon mother formed her from goddess-animated clay). Jackson extends the motif of interracial marriage in two more poems. As established in the single-issue comic Superman: The Wedding Album (1996), the speaker of “The Dilemma of Lois Lane” has married her superhero lover, experiencing the combination of his fantastically human qualities daily: “you blow forest / fires out with those same breaths / I take into me when we kiss” (38). Here, however, Jackson’s Lois wishes that her husband were the actually human Clark Kent, not a performed disguise. When Clark pretends to cut himself, “I find myself hoping / that the tiniest drop of blood / will bloom on your finger” (38). As established in The Amazing Spider-Man Annual no. 21 (1987), Mary Jane Watson-Parker has also married her superhero lover (Michelinie et al.), but Jackson’s “When Loving a Man Becomes Too Hard” expresses the dual failures of desiring both the human and the superhuman. Though she “sometimes makes Peter / wear the costume when they fuck, // because she likes to pretend / Spider-Man is her other love,” she also resents the costume as he dresses and “kisses her // with the part of him / that still belongs to her, / before covering even that” (34–35). Desiring both the super and mundane aspects of her husband, she is abandoned by both and only “holds / his absence” (35). In all four cases of human-superhuman relationships, Jackson figures the mixing as alluring but troubled, and even when successful, the divide of difference continues to separate lovers. Jackson also imagines the offspring of such fantastical couplings, literal hybrids in the fictional world, who represent mixed-race individuals in the actual world. The plural speaker of “Autumn in Chestnut Falls” suggests a choral voice of white suburbia objecting to nonwhites living in their neighbor—though it is the offending child’s “tentacles,” not his skin color, that draws their thinly veiled racist ire. Jackson further codes the metaphor through the speaker’s grudging admiration of the child’s subtly racialized athletic prowess: “he could hold onto / a ball like nobody’s business” (55). Metaphorically mixed-race children are also threats to their own families and themselves, an extension of the tragic mulatto trope applied to racially

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mixed characters since at least the early nineteenth century. After the husband speaker of “Home from Work, I Face My Newborn Mutant Son” finds his wife “bled-out” after giving birth to an infant made of razor-sharp glass, he realizes “he cannot last” and shatters the child on the floor in part for fear of one day finding him “hanging like an ornament, / a glass boy from a tree,” or “cracked open, splintered in the street” (56). The circumstances allude to the villain Reverend Stryker of the X-Men graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills, whose mutant son’s birth kills Stryker’s wife, leading Stryker to both murder his son and persecute mutantkind (Claremont and Anderson). However, the poem’s hanging imagery is also evocative of the case of Emmett Till, referenced two poems later, as well as the motif of the Ku Klux Klan underlying the collection. In “A Poem for Jesse Custer,” Jackson imagines the nearly omnipotent Preacher character making evildoers “think twice / before burning crosses” (33). “Magneto Eyes Strange Fruit” further links the racial metaphor and vigilante threat by placing the fictional slur “Mutie” on signs hung from the “brown bodies” of two murdered children (60), an image taken from Chris Claremont and Brent Anderson’s God Loves, Man Kills—a 1982 X-Men graphic novel that also depicts a mutant girl asking a Black woman, “Suppose he’d called me a Nigger-lover, Stevie?! Would you be so damn tolerant then?!!” The poem title references Abel Meeropol’s antilynching protest song “Strange Fruit,” which Billie Holiday recorded in 1939, a year after Superman debuted in Action Comics no. 1. Jackson’s focus on lynching is also striking in the superhero context because from 1915 to 1944, the Klan popularized the tropes of costumed, emblem-wearing, dual-identity vigilantes that directly influenced the creation of the superhero character type (Gavaler, “Ku Klux Klan”). While most of Jackson’s poems are set either in our own “real” world or in a separate superhero universe, he complicates that boundary by sometimes mixing them at a metafictional level. “Storm on Display” features “Marvel’s first black mutant with features / as white as the hands of her creator,” as an apparently white, auctioneer-like speaker addresses a white, comics-buying audience, describing Storm’s “almond skin” as “no different from ours save a darker ink” (54). Though she was originally presented as an African mutant and later revealed to have had an African American father, Jackson renders her as mixed race as if her cocreator, artist Dave Cockrum, were her biological father. The narrative situation, however, is ambiguous, because the auctioneer warns listeners not to “step too close,

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for she / is a skilled thief,” implying that the fictional character is able to rob actual people. The opportunity to “take her / home” appears twofold, since she can be purchased as a comic book and as an enslaved body. The preceding poem, “Luke Cage Tells It like It Is,” deepens that fictional and real-world ambiguity through the speaker’s metafictional self-awareness of himself as a comic book character who knows he’s “not as black as you dream” (52). “I play the part,” Jackson’s Cage explains, warning readers that “behind every jive turkey uttered, / there is not a black mouth, but a white one” (52–53). Like the torn marriages and tortured mutants of other poems, Jackson’s Luke Cage and Storm, ostensibly the only Black superheroes in the collection, are failed results of racial mixing. Since these and other poems feature Jackson’s rendering of characters created by white authors, the poems themselves embody a further kind of mixing. Jackson’s superheroes are not their canonical source materials but his reinterpretations of them, creating a kind of figurative offspring that mixes traits of both parents. So while the adolescent Jackson may have selected Storm as his fantasy sex partner because of her black skin, Jackson the poet recognizes her as a projection of white authors’ imaginations, using her in a cast of superhumans to create not simply hybrid characters but a mixed world that bridges Pitkethly’s boundary. Jackson described in an interview how he intends his poems to combine these two worlds in a “conflated space,” one unified by a loss that “permeates every nook and cranny in the real and imagined world . . . ​ whether it’s a comic book or Kansas” (Gross). Jackson’s approach is not unique. Bryan D. Dietrich, in his introduction to Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books, identifies a mode of superheroic myth in which poems about superheroes take “their grandeur from stripping grandeur away, from demythologizing the myth” and “making the super mundane” (xviii, xvii). Jackson’s “Confessions from a Mutant Disco-Queen” is a prime example: the speaker, familiar to Marvel fans as the superhero Dazzler, introduced in 1980, “ran with the X-Men” but then “became a paralegal” and still gets “the occasional gig for a wedding or bar mitzvah” (66). The mundane details remove the character’s superheroic grandeur in a way typical of how the character type is most often treated in literary fiction, where the symbol of absolutist victory is demythologized through reversals of its most defining genre expectations. They become ineffectual and ultimately failed heroes in worlds of moral chaos. Instead of defeating supercriminals, Dazzler, in the foregoing example, is now only a

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lawyer’s clerical assistant who uses her mutant powers to moonlight as a second-rate entertainer. That antisuperhero approach originates partly in superhero comics of the 1980s, most influentially in Alan Moore’s Miracleman and Watchmen, and has become formulaic in consistency, as demonstrated by novelists and short story authors including Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Rick Moody, Michael Chabon, Deborah Eisenberg, Jonathan Lethem, Umberto Eco, Junot Díaz, Perry Moore, Anthony McCarten, Austin Grossman, and Ladee Hubbard (Gavaler, “The Anti-Superhero”). Jackson’s opening poem, “The Secret Art of Reading a Comic,” an extended allusion to Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” echoes the anti­ superheroes common in literary fiction. Riffing on Auden’s observation that “About suffering, they were never wrong, / The Old Masters,” Jackson’s speaker notes that, despite the fact that “old comics were never wrong” and right was “always defended / by the hero,” “that world bleeds / into our own,” and even a superhero is sometimes “helpless” (5–6). Yet while Jackson participates in the super-made-mundane, he also unsettles it by juxtaposing poems set in superhero worlds to autobiographical poems, creating an overarching hybridity not available to authors whose fictions are set exclusively in a fictional world. Jackson’s collection includes two kinds of poems of roughly equal number, arranged often with explicit pairings of the fantastical and the actual. “Nightcrawler Buys a Woman a Drink” and “Listening to Plath in Poetics,” both discussed earlier, appear side by side, figuratively placing Pitkethly’s boundary in the gutter of the page fold physically dividing them. The divide repeats on the next two-page spread, with Jackson’s speaker reflecting nostalgically on a photo of himself with adolescent friends in “Winter Photo,” offset by “How the Unstoppable Juggernaut Makes a Living after Retirement,” whose title character “falters / with the grief that carries nostalgia” when the face of a young arm-wrestling challenger sends him into recollections of his once-infamous career. Jackson continues the technique, pairing “When Loving a Man Becomes Too Hard” with the real-world love poem “A Beautiful Lie.” Whereas “The Dilemma of Lois Lane” concludes with a drop of imagined blood on Clark’s fingertip, “Bleed” begins with Stuart showing off a sketch he drew in blood with his own “pricked finger” (39). Most strikingly, Jackson pairs the real-world “How to Get Lynched on the Job” and its reference to Till with “Magneto Eyes Strange Fruit,” effectively erasing the differences between his two seemingly dissimilar worlds. Finally, as the collection builds to its conclusion, “Emergency”

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features the suicidal Stuart as speaker for the first time, before segueing to the metafictionally aware speaker of “Elegy for Gwen Stacy,” a homicide victim who laments that she “can’t stop dying” (73). Even when not physically paired, the fictional and the actual resonate within each other. In “The Family Solid,” Stuart joins a gang and shows the speaker “an S branded in his brown arm” (16), evoking the S of Superman’s chest. Similarly, the title “Watchmen” evokes the Watchmen of the epigraph, though the poem itself chronicles Jackson and his friends being stopped by actual watchmen in a department store (51). In both cases, Jackson avoids an overt reference to comics, allowing the evoked superhero content to influence the scenes indirectly. Stuart’s S links gang membership to superhumans, a powerful elite who, whether superhero or supervillain, are never victims—are never like the speaker’s father, who, as “The Family Solid” recounts, was apparently murdered by Bloods in his home when the speaker was an infant. No real-world Superman can fly down to rescue him, a fact literally branded on Stuart’s arm. When Jackson’s speaker states in “Watchmen,” “It’s a simple thrill to peer behind the veil— / observe how the other color lives,” he is describing the white customers watching as security checks the Black characters’ bags for shoplifted merchandise. While the poem’s title references Moore’s Watchmen and so Roman poet Juvenal’s questioning of authority (“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” or “Who will watch the watchmen?”), the “veil” alludes to W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, specifically to the moment that African Americans first become aware of their position in the racial divide: “Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil” (Du Bois). In the context of the collection, the veil is also between the worlds of humans and superhumans, with Jackson providing a thrilling look behind the comic book surface of superhero characters to peer into their inner lives. While the white onlookers are content with surface appearances, ones “that makes them comfortable / in their fear,” Jackson renders superhero psychology with a much higher level of complexity, a contrast that both critiques the white onlookers and suggests Jackson’s own unfulfilled wish. He imagines fictional people with more realism than that contained in the fictions whites project onto him. That realism comes at a cost. The inhabitants of Jackson’s superhero poems, like the adolescent Jackson, long to change worlds. When, in “The Golden Avenger,” “Young boys listen to his adventures,” “It’s fiction, / an

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escape, something we only / dream of” (25). Similarly, in “Upon Seeing Spider-Man on My Way to Work,” the speaker longs to be superhuman: “I’d trade my job, my BA, / hell even my wife, anything to climb walls, spin webs, touch rooftops with toes” (26). Yet those closest to superheroes, Jackson’s Lois and Mary Jane, discussed earlier, instead value the human side of their superhuman lovers. Jackson’s supervillains also value the human. In “Origin of Memory,” the Joker relives nostalgic but mundane fragments of his previous life, including an image of his “wife’s smile / that showed too much gum,” while having to accept that he is now permanently “incomplete” (42). Similarly in “Gothamites,” Batman is appreciated specifically because he is not superhuman, but “one of us,” a human willing to “show those other costumes / how a man defends his home” (27). Jackson, however, undermines even this dichotomy. In the collection’s title poem, “Missing You, Metropolis,” the speaker longs to be rescued by a superhuman—“What I wouldn’t give for Superman’s / ungloved hand to help me up”—but is resigned instead to the too-humanness of the necessarily more brutal Batman (47). Ultimately, in the final poem, “Reading Comic Books in the Rain,” Jackson’s speaker wishes to have “stayed in that four-color world / a little longer,” one “a page removed from our own” (81), partially returning the superhuman to its idealized pedestal. Though still unnamed, the young speaker’s companion, “the girl who has mashed her cheek / into my wet shoulder” in order to read a comic book together, recalls the girl of the earlier “Pretend,” the mother of Jackson’s would-be “most beautiful / light-skinned baby in Topeka” (10). If so, the collection concludes on a veiled image of racial mingling—even as it separates and restores nostalgic grandeur to the demythologized superhuman world. Even so, that grandeur is no longer absolute. Superhero worlds are typically utopian, in the standard sense defined by Darko Suvin in which a “quasi-human community” is “organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author’s community” (30). Although Watchmen is no utopia itself, Jackson’s use of Moore in his epigraph evokes the utopia of early 1930s pulp magazine superheroes Doc Savage and The Shadow that extended into the world of superhero comics, one that John Cawalti would argue uses formulas that “embody moral fantasies of a world more exciting, more fulfilling, or more benevolent than the one we inhabit” (38). To the degree that Jackson demythologizes those moral fantasies, his superhero poetry might be considered dystopian in the sense summarized by John Huntington, where “the positive (‘more perfect principle’) has been replaced

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by a negative,” creating a reversed utopia that is necessarily defined by the same dichotomy (142). However, Huntington uses the term “anti-utopian” to describe a novel by H. G. Wells that is “neither realistic nor utopian” and “opposed to the consistencies of utopia-dystopia” (141). “Anti-utopia” also describes Missing You, Metropolis. The form, Huntington writes, “discovers problems, raises questions, and doubts. . . . ​[It] is a mode of relentless inquisition, of restless skeptical exploration. . . . ​The anti-utopia questions utopian solutions even as it proposes them. It enjoys the construction of imaginary community, but it does not succumb to the satisfactions of solutions. . . . ​At the core of the anti-utopian is . . . ​an awareness of conflict” and of “powerful and disturbing ambivalences” (142–143). Jackson’s mixed-worlds approach embodies the same aesthetic to achieve like results. He rejects the false simplicity of the doubly fictional world of his Watchmen epigraph, but he does not replace it with an alternate answer, one that, even if comparatively complex, would still attempt to impose order on what he instead presents as inherently chaotic, a boundary that cannot even be straddled. Which world would you rather live in? Jackson chooses neither—and both. The divide Jackson explores is significantly older than the superhero genre it helps to define. Greg Carter notes that mixing was at times considered definingly American and positive, with French immigrant Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur equating his new nation “with newness, progress, and mixture” in 1782 (21), abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison viewing interracial marriage as divinely “designed to unite people of different tribes and nations, and to break down those petty distinctions . . . ​which lead to oppression, war and division among mankind” (qtd. in Carter 47), and Wendell Phillips foreseeing a utopic future produced by “amalgamation” (49). Other abolitionists, however, opposed racial mixing, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, who Carter notes “believed in hybrid degeneracy, the notion that mixture creates weaker offspring” (60). Such pseudoscientific beliefs grew into the international eugenics movement that defined early twentieth-century U.S. and European politics before culminating in Nazi Germany, during and after which mixing again sometimes took on a positive and specifically American connotation, with Rockefeller Institute researcher Alexi Carrel telling the New York Times in 1935 that in contrast to “the Hitler program of race purification,” “it may be that crossing civilizations as we do in American produces the best minds” (“Everybody”). Michele Elam investigates similar connotations of mixed-race characters

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by Du Bois, whose 1920 short story “Jesus Christ in Waco, Texas” features a “mulatto” Christ, and by Langston Hughes, whose 1935 play Mulatto features mixed-race children who, because their white fathers are unknown, are “mysteries” implying “immaculate conceptions” (18). Elam also notes William Byrd’s 1841 opinion that more racial mixing between European colonists and Native Americans would have prevented “much bloodshed” with natives being “blanched in two” generations (qtd. in Elam 37). Such views, however, are only an undercurrent to historically dominant rhetoric of miscegenation, literally codified by the 1930 Motion Picture Production Code, which forbade, along with profanity, nudity, sex perversion, children’s sex organs, and ridicule of the clergy, the depiction of “sex relationships between the white and black races.” Superhero hybridity emerged from this social context, making the character utopic not for its coded mixing but for the implied subjugation of nonwhite, “exotic” traits by a dominant, white consciousness—rendering superheroes paradoxical mixture-fighting mixtures. The character type evolved from the tragic, gothic mixing imagined by late nineteenth-century fantasy authors into the hybrid agents of the status quo found in the moral fantasies of 1930s pulp fiction and comics. Expanding the frontier of the colonial imagination to contemporary urban settings, their mixed natures defined the racial divide that they policed, setting them apart from white-dominated societies in order to better serve them. The characters’ part Otherness, however, also established hybridity as the hero type’s defining quality, posing an internal threat to their white supremacist utopias. Jackson exploits that tension with his own anti-utopian vision that unmasks the racial complexities not only of the superhero genre but of the United States as a whole. For Jackson, no superhero, no matter how demythologized or seemingly psychologically complex, can solve the tensions of the racially mixed culture that consumes the genre’s internally incoherent mixture of moral, racial, and heroic fantasies. And yet, by exploring those incoherent depths, the superhero, in Jackson’s hands, provides an effective lens for better studying those tensions.

Works Cited Auden, W. H. “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Another Time, Random House, 1940, p. 34. Carter, Greg. The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing. New York University Press, 2013.

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Cawalti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. University of Chicago Press, 1976. Claremont, Chris, writer, and Brent Anderson, artist. X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills. Marvel, 1982. Claremont, Chris, and Bill Mantlo, writers, Dave Cockrum, penciller, and Sam Grainger, inker. X-Men, vol. 1, no. 96, Dec. 1975. Cocca, Carolyn. Superwomen: Gender, Power, and Representation. Bloomsbury, 2016. Dietrich, Bryan D. Introduction. Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books, edited by Bryan D. Dietrich and Marta Ferguson, Minor Arcana, 2014, pp. xvi–xxi. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Project Gutenberg, 2008, www.guten​ berg.org/ebooks/408. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Elam, Michele. The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium. Stanford University Press, 2011. “Everybody Has Telepathic Power, Dr. Carrel Says after Research.” New York Times, 18 Sept. 1935, Section Social News Books, p. 25. Gaslin, Glenn. “The Disappearing Comic Book.” Los Angeles Times, 17 July 2001, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jul-17-cl-23089-story.html. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Gavaler, Chris. “The Anti-Superhero in Literary Fiction.” Image [&] Narrative, vol. 17, no. 3, 2016, pp. 1–45. ———. “The Ku Klux Klan and the Birth of the Superhero.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, vol. 4, no. 2, 2013, pp. 191–208. ———. “The Well-Born Superhero.” Journal of American Culture, vol. 37, no. 2, 2014, pp. 182–197. Gross, Rebecca. “Art Talk with Poet Gary Jackson.” National Endowment for the Arts, 9 May 2011, www.arts.gov/art-works/2011/art-talk-poet-gary-jackson. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Holiday, Billie. “Strange Fruit.” Commodore Records, 1939. Hoppenthaler, John. “Gary Jackson Interview with John Hoppenthaler.” Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, July 2017, www.connotationpress.com/hoppen​ thaler-s​-congeries/2017/july-2017/3044-gary-jackson-poetry. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Huntington, John. The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction. Columbia University Press, 1982. Jackson, Gary. Missing You, Metropolis. Graywolf, 2010. Joseph, Ralina L. Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial. Duke University Press, 2013. Loeb, Jeph, writer, Jim Lee, penciller, and Scott Williams, inker. Batman, vol. 1, no. 608, Dec. 2002. Michelinie, David, and Jim Shooter, writers, Paul Ryan, penciller, and Vince Colletta, inker. The Amazing Spider-Man Annual, vol. 1, no. 21, Sept. 1987. Moore, Alan, writer, and Dave Gibbons, artist. Watchmen. DC Comics, 1986–1987. Moore, Alan, writer, Garry Leach, Alan Davis, Chuck Beckum (a.k.a. Chuck Austen), and John Totleben, artists, Rick Veitch, penciller, Rick Bryant and John Ridgway, inkers. Miracleman, vol. 1, nos. 1–7, 9–16, Aug. 1985–Dec. 1989. Morrison, Grant, writer, John Paul Leon, penciller, and Bill Sienkiewicz, inker. New X-Men, vol. 1, no. 127, Aug. 2002.

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Phillips, Emilia. “Maybe the Poem Doesn’t Give a Shit: An Interview with Gary Jackson.” 32poems, n.d., 32poems.com/prose/prose-feature-maybe-poem-doesnt-give​ -shit-interview-gary-jackson-emilia-phillips/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Pitkethly, Clare. “Straddling a Boundary: The Superhero and the Incorporation of Difference.” What Is a Superhero?, edited by Robin S. Rosenberg and Peter Coogan, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 25–30. Reynolds, Richard. Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Singer, Marc. “ ‘Black Skins’ and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secrets of Race.” African American Review, vol. 36, no. 1, 2002, pp. 107–119. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Other Tales of Terror. Edited by Robert Mighall, Penguin Classics, 2003. Suvin, Darko. “Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia: Some Historical Semantics, Some Genealogy, a Proposal, and a Plea (1973).” Defined by a Hollow: Essays on Utopia, Science Fiction and Political, Peter Lang, 2010, pp. 17–48. Wells, H. G. The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). Edited by Patrick Parrinder, Penguin Classics, 2005.

4

Flash of Two Races Incest, Miscegenation, and the Mixed-Race Superhero in The Flash Comics and Television Show ERIC L. BERL ATSK Y

The appearance of Barry Allen as the fastest man alive, The Flash, in Showcase no. 4 (1956) is often cited as the beginning of the Silver Age of superhero comics (Kanigher et al.). The Barry Allen Flash was, like most Silver Age heroes debuting after the institution of the Comics Code, a representative of bourgeois conformity, authority, and cisgender male whiteness.1 Like many heroes of the time, he was affiliated with the law in his civilian identity as a police scientist. He was also blond and blue-eyed, sported a conservative crewcut, and lived in the fictional midwestern Central City, where Iris West served in the traditional role of both reporter and romantic interest. Unlike many heroes, he had loving and supportive parents who were alive and well, securing him in a stereotypical fifties nuclear family. 81

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Likewise, his earliest adventures avoided racial politics, content, or conflict, as the stories rarely included anyone who was not white. When Barry Allen “died” saving the multiverse in Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985 (Wolfman et al.), the superhero comics community could mark the “end of the end” of the Silver Age and of childhood, a process begun twelve years earlier with the death of Gwen Stacy, another blond, blue-eyed symbol of whiteness, purity, and innocence in Amazing Spider-Man no. 121 (Conway et al.).2 Given this context, it is surprising that one of DC’s most successful television shows of the 2010s, CW’s The Flash, is embroiled in racial politics, subtext, and symbolism, whether intentional or not. The show, when read along with the comics of the New 52 and Rebirth eras, represents a continued (if frustrated) effort to enter a postracial world wherein heroism and morality are uncoupled from the idea of whiteness through depoliticized multiethnic representation or casting. At the same time, the recent multimedia representations of The Flash also offer an unconscious fundamentally opposed ideology, which forwards the kind of nativism resurgent in the Trump era. In the comics, this dichotomy is explored through the representation of two versions of Wally West / Kid Flash, a biracial / Black Wally (now most often referred to as Wallace) and the “original,” white Wally. On the show, it is articulated through the simultaneously interracial and incestuous relationship of Barry Allen and Iris West(-Allen). The obscured ambivalence in regard to racial matters is not surprising given both representations’ straddling of the Obama and Trump eras. While the biracial Wallace and the CW show both debuted in a time of utopian, if naïve, hope for a postracial society fueled by Barack Obama’s election and presidency, they continue to have a presence in an America that elected Donald Trump through the mobilization of the alt-right and its naked appeals to white nationalism. As The Flash confirms, though postracialism and nativism initially appear to be opposites, they are, in many ways, two sides of the same coin. Earlier, I used the word “unconscious” to refer to The Flash’s engagement with racial conflict and racial politics. To amplify my use of that word, I will explore the possibility that postracial attitudes in themselves involve a  “repression” of racial history and conflict that inevitably recur just as Sigmund Freud argues that repressed desires and trauma always return to “haunt” (in uncanny fashion) the psychoanalytic subject. For Lisa Lowe, the postracial approach “aestheticizes ethnic differences as if they could be separated from history” (9), while Chandra Talpade Mohanty argues that “multicultural” approaches suggest that racial difference should be seen as

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“benign variation (diversity) . . . ​rather than as conflict, struggle, or the threat of disruption, bypass[ing] power as well as history” (193). Though neither invokes psychoanalysis directly in these passages, both link postracialism with the separation from or bypassing of (repression of) the past. The psychoanalytic context is apt given DC’s efforts to narrativize historical amnesia through convoluted science-fictional premises. For example, the New 52 soft reboot of 2011 is triggered by the “Flashpoint” time travel story, wherein Barry goes back in time and saves his mother from being murdered by Reverse Flash (Johns, Kubert, et  al.). The results are predictably suboptimal, and Barry must time-travel again and reverse the changes he made. Undoing Flashpoint did not revert the DC Universe back to its “original” form, however, but rather allowed DC editorial to keep whatever continuity they wished and make changes under the cover of Barry’s meddling. That is to say, DC arranged for its history, wherein, from the 1930s through at least the 1970s, virtually all of its superheroes were white, to be forgotten or to have never existed. By sheer force of numbers, the “original DC universe,” as Ramzi Fawaz argues, “associated justice with white figures of authority (and criminality with ethnic minorities . . .)” (174). In that universe, the emergence of a Black superhero had sociopolitical significance, while in a world wherein that history had never occurred, it need not. Among other effects, then, the rebooting of the DC Universe serves as a repression of an uncomfortable racist and racial past, reflective of U.S. history itself.

Baseball and Biraciality For the two decades following the death of comics Barry Allen, he was replaced as The Flash by Iris’s nephew, Wally West, formerly the sidekick Kid Flash (debuting in 1959), in the DC Universe (Broome et al.). After an aborted effort to introduce yet another new Flash and the subsequent reappearance of Wally, Wally disappeared altogether with the introduction of the New 52 and it became official “canon” that Barry was, and always had been, The Flash. While the New 52 was largely a backward-looking “reconstructive” initiative designed to recapture the youth and freshness of familiar (typically white) heroes, it also allowed DC to update and diversify some heroes, jettisoning “canonical” histories. These contradictions are already present in The Flash: Rebirth, which nostalgically reintroduces Barry while

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adding “edgier,” more contemporary elements to his origin (Johns and Van Sciver). In this iteration (retained for television), Barry’s mother, Nora, is killed by a time-traveling Reverse Flash and his father, Henry, is framed for the deed, imprisoned while Barry is raised by a policeman friend of the family. That is, from a psychoanalytic point of view, one might say that trauma is introduced into Barry’s origin where it previously did not exist. While these changes become relevant to my argument, more significant is the reintroduction of Wally West (henceforth Wallace) as Kid Flash in 2014. While longtime Wally fans had been disaffected by his 2011 disappearance, his return was also greeted with less than universal enthusiasm because Wallace was now not only a teenager once more but also biracial (phenotypically Black). Precipitated by the casting of African American Candice Patton as Iris for the television show, DC mandated a biracial Kid Flash in the comics (though Iris remained white in print). As in his white 1959 iteration, Wallace is presented, in the New 52’s Flash Annual no.  3 (2014), as the son of Iris’s brother, Rudy, though Rudy had “[run] off when Wally was a baby,” while his African American mother had “disappeared when the crime syndicate attacked.” Iris then takes Wally into her home to “keep him out of foster care” and prevails upon her friend (not yet lover) Barry to serve as a male role model, since Wallace “grew up with no father figure.” Iris is especially worried about Wallace because The Flash has just apprehended him for tagging a wall with graffiti. Iris asks Barry to “show [Wallace] a better path,” rather than the one offered by his criminal uncle Daniel (actually his biological father), the Reverse Flash (Venditti et al.). As a mixed-race figure, Wallace is inevitably a symbol of hybridity. However, his hybridity is not only racial. It is also generational, a contradictory attempt to mix nostalgia for the (almost completely white) Silver Age with contemporary efforts to diversify comics and attract “different” (i.e., nonwhite) fans. In bringing back Wally, DC hoped to capitalize on demand from traditional fans. By making him a young hero of color, DC hoped to attract young multiracial fans seeking heroes who looked more like themselves. Marvel’s introduction of a mixed-race Spider-Man, Miles Morales, in 2011 provided a model. However, fan responses to Wallace were negative on multiple fronts. As has frequently been the case when familiar characters undergo “race-bending,” fans of the original Wally complained about the change in a variety of online outlets (Fu; Cunningham). Racist and borderline racist objections to Wally’s transformation

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FIG. 4.1  ​Barry teaches Wally about baseball. From The Flash, vol. 4, no. 32, September 2014, art by Brett Booth and Norm Rapmund.

were accompanied by more legitimate concerns that Wallace’s portrayal was itself racially insensitive. Wallace, unlike his white iteration, is depicted as a child of a “broken home” who performs petty vandalism stereotypically associated with “urban” youth. Likewise, his (white) biological father is an incarcerated supercriminal. Thus negative stereotypes of African Americans, including of delinquent Black youths, absent fathers, incarcerated men, and criminality, are deployed within Wallace’s first few appearances. Likewise, elements of his story familiar from white Wally’s history take on new meanings. While Barry becomes a father figure to young Wally in the Silver Age, his fulfillment of the same role for Wallace signals a condescending white paternalism and perpetuates the stereotype of the absence of Black male role models. Nowhere is this dynamic depicted more problematically than when, in New 52 Flash no. 32, Barry takes Wallace to his first professional baseball game (fig.  4.1). While there, Wallace complains that they could not get basketball tickets and is cold and distant. Barry explains the slower, simpler pleasures of baseball before Central City wins on a dramatic home run (Venditti et al.). In this scene, the comics’ creators, three white men, portray a Black youth—a demographic stereotypically associated with basketball— being taught by a policeman, as part of his guidance away from crime and bad role models, the value of the more stereotypically white game of baseball.3 Given Wallace’s biracial background, it is difficult not to read this

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scene as Wallace being coaxed to reject his supposed Black side in favor of his white side. The same outing, if undertaken by Silver Age Barry and Wally, would have none of these connotations and could simply be read as the heartwarming bridging of a generational divide (combined with a wink to future Kid Flash finding baseball “too slow”). Such a reading now becomes nearly impossible. It is here that I link the postracial with the concept of repression. The premise of a postracial world is that race simply does not matter, on either a personal or a social level, but such a world is only possible if everyone simultaneously “forgets” the history of racism and racial struggle while ignoring continued social inequality and institutional racism. The New 52 Flash comics act in precisely this way, literally giving us the same character (Wally West / Kid Flash, with father Rudy West and aunt Iris West) but somehow of a different race, implying strongly that race has no impact on identity. However, the details of the baseball scene reveal postracial color blindness to be categorical nonsense. While the characters can avoid or repress racial connotations (or, in Ralina Joseph’s phraseology, “postpone[] or silence[]” them [10]), readers cannot evade the racial subtext of mass incarceration, Black criminality, or stereotypical associations with sports. If Wallace West is biracial, he cannot be the same character as his white namesake because the experiences he would undergo as a Black man in American society, along with his own experience of double consciousness, must affect him in some way.4 Even “identical” events take on different meanings when experienced by people of different races. Attempts to act otherwise result in stereotypical representations that contribute to racist assumptions rather than subverting them. As David Theo Goldberg argues, “Racisms proliferate in the wake of the supposed death of race” (70).

Race-Bending and Postracialism in The Flash The postracial approach just discussed is even more evident on the CW television show, leading both to an avoidance of matters of racial justice and to expressions of racism that function as the “return of the repressed.” The casting of Candice Patton as Iris set the stage for an interracial romance with Barry, played by white actor Grant Gustin. Likewise, African American actor Jesse L. Martin was cast as Iris’s father, police captain

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Joe West.5 Mixed-race actor Keiynan Lonsdale, is introduced as Wally West / Kid Flash during season 2, this time as Iris’s brother (though this is unknown at first to both Iris and Joe), not nephew. As mentioned earlier, the show retains the story line wherein Reverse Flash kills Barry’s mother and frames his father. In the show, however, it is family friend Joe West, not Darryl Frye, who raises Barry as his son.6 These changes have significant effects, though they are typically ignored in the diegesis. Barry, though biologically and, to all appearances, culturally white, can now be seen as a symbolically mixed-race character. Though he has white biological parents, he also has a Black father who calls him “son.” In keeping with the postracial approach of the show, however, Barry does not share any culturally “Black” characteristics, concerns, or tastes with his new family, nor does he engage in any kind of introspection as a result of being part of “two [racial] worlds.”7 In this context, the wrongful incarceration of his white father by a police department most prominently represented by his Black father could be read as a bracing and disorienting reversal of (stereo)typical social roles. In this world, it is white fathers who are wrongfully incarcerated and taken from their families, and it is Black father figures who represent the unjust law. In another reversal of gender and racial stereotypes, it is revealed that Iris’s Black mother (Joe’s ex-wife) has been absent from the family because of a history of drug abuse, while it is the “strong Black man” (not woman), Joe, who has toughly but tenderly held the family together. As in the comics, race is almost never depicted as a contributing factor to the characters’ lives, but it is possible for inclined viewers to see the show as subverting racial stereotypes, asking them to question the “justness” of the justice system by implying that white people might feel differently about the fairness of the police if it were good white fathers who were routinely incarcerated for lengthy periods on scanty, fabricated, or no evidence. The show does little to explicitly support this reading, as Barry follows in his Black father’s footsteps and enters law enforcement as a crime scene investigator, while also “fighting crime” as The Flash. The show does not address unjust incarceration on a broader scale or in a racial context, and nobody seems to notice these ironic racial reversals.8 Rather, Barry and Joe have unshakable faith in the law as an equivalent to justice and the show ignores opportunities to explore ambivalent feelings the protagonists might have about policing, whether based on the unjust incarceration of millions of Black men or one white father. On The Flash, the structural racism that

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underlies so much unjust incarceration in our own America is ignored (or repressed) and it instead becomes a matter of isolated and correctible error (and time-traveling supervillains). Barry cannot think of himself as biracial in a political sense in a world in which race has no substantive meaning. Candice Patton indirectly confirmed the show’s approach in an interview, in which she simply stated that race is “irrelevant” on The Flash (Burlingame). Likewise, the vexed history of American interracial romance, particularly between white men and Black women, is repressed on the show. While it might be unlikely on breezy superheroic entertainment for such matters to be discussed directly, there is also no indication that this history has any effect on the Barry-Iris union. As Patricia Hill Collins notes, the history of such relationships often has a significant impact on presentday couples. While contemporary interracial romances certainly do not directly mirror the history in which white male enslavers raped and victimized Black women with impunity under the protection of law, Collins notes how this “history of sexual abuse” both generates the stereotypical “controlling image” of the Black jezebel and also “contributes to a contemporary double standard where Black women who date and marry White men are often accused of losing their Black identity” by those in the Black community (176). Likewise, as Collins notes, for “Black women, the historical relationship with White men has been one of legal but not sexual rejection” (175). That is because the power discrepancy between white men and Black women has historically been so vast, Black women have been most frequently treated by white men simply as easily accessible sexual objects and mistresses, while love, family, and (especially) marriage are saved exclusively for white women. As Walter Benn Michaels notes, because of this history, in the early twentieth century “the willingness of a white man to marry a black woman becomes the supreme test of . . . ​white ‘liberality’ ” (55). In regard to contemporary relationships, Angela Onwuachi-Willig argues that even though the incidences of such relationships have increased in reality, they are still often portrayed in popular culture as secret and scandalous rather than proclaimed proudly by characters in love. None of this registers in any way on The Flash. In reference specifically to the Iris-Barry relationship, Shannon Gibney says that there is an “unwritten rule for successfully creating interracial relationships on television and in pop culture: You can’t actually be Black, or have a Black consciousness in said union. . . . ​ You can be cute, in the hip Black way, but please don’t show your blackness, or God forbid, the often casual, everyday ways that race and racism affect

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your life and relationships.” In the world of The Flash, interracial romance asserts the unimportance of race instead of grappling with its traumatic history, though the repressed inevitably returns.

Incest and / as Miscegenation The studious avoidance of the idea of racial mixing is mirrored by a similar repression of the problem of incest, not surprising given Freud’s contention that the child’s incestuous desire for the mother is the origin of all repression. Here, however, the repression of the desire for the mother is linked to the postracial repression of racism and white supremacy. Nobody on The Flash ever mentions the incestuous nature of the Barry-Iris romance despite the fact that many fans have identified it as such. Because Barry is taken in by Joe, he is a de facto brother to Iris, and they treat each other as siblings in many contexts. Once Barry declares his love, their “will they or won’t they” romance plays out in predictable fashion, culminating in a season 4 marriage. There is never an explanation for why the show-runners would create a metaphorically incestuous relationship between two of its most important characters yet ignore that fact as a site of drama, conflict, or interest. The simultaneous inclusion and avoidance of incest and interracial romance here can only be understood in light of each other and their mutual histories. In the classic Elementary Structures of Kinship, Claude Lévi-Strauss removes the incest taboo completely from biology (and psychoanalytic psychology) and instead argues that this “first rule” is primarily about managing excessive endogamy for social reasons. By virtue of the prohibition of  certain kinds of inwardly directed (endogamous) desires, groups are required to form alliances with others and construct more complex and more powerful societies. The incest taboo is designed to prevent a society from becoming too solipsistic and inwardly directed, which would prevent it from becoming powerful and influential. At the same time, Lévi-Strauss notes that there are marriage taboos that prevent excessive exogamy. Taboos against miscegenation, for instance, put a limit on relationships with those “too different” in order to establish a self-other distinction that would give the power of the self its binarily derived meaning. Maintaining the difference between the white “self” and the Black “other” is necessary, of course, if all of the advantages of white privilege and white supremacy are to be enjoyed. Thus the injunction against incest is both oppositional to the

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injunction against miscegenation and equivalent to it. One is a rule against endogamy and one exogamy, but they both claim biological danger where none exists and are used either to structure societies around self-other distinctions or to perpetuate those distinctions to the advantage of the self. As Werner Sollors discusses, this similarity historically led to sociological and legal conflations of the two transgressions, which seem incongruous when viewed only through the endogamy-exogamy prism. Nineteenth-century white supremacist Henry Hughes declared in his 1854 Treatise on Sociology, “Hybridism is heinous. Impurity of races is against the law of nature. Mulattoes are monsters,” but he more puzzlingly concluded that “the same law which forbids consanguineous amalgamation forbids ethnical amalgamation. Both are incestuous. Amalgamation is incest” (qtd. in Sollors 298). That is, those most committed to racist models of ethnic purity often incongruously used the threat of incest, an example of exaggerated purity, as part of their condemnation of interracial relationships. Sollors also notes that long-standing laws against incest proved to be “useful precedent” for white supremacist legal efforts to forbid racial intermarriage, including a law in Arizona that declared interracial marriage “incestuous and void” (Sollors 316). At first Lévi-Straussian blush, then, incest and miscegenation are polar opposites. In a vacuum, it might be possible to understand this paradox in the Barry-Iris relationship as a silent (and postracial) “deconstruction” of the simple binary presented, an effort to expose the illogic of the taboos themselves and to encourage “free love” unencumbered by arbitrary restrictions. This is too simplistic and dehistoricized a reading to stand where race in America is concerned. To tackle the paradox, it is worthwhile to recall the many instances of simultaneous incest and miscegenation in both literary history and actual American life in antebellum and post–Civil War America. Even Lévi-Strauss admits that “in some countries” incest “combines . . . ​ with its direct opposite, inter-racial sexual relations, an extreme form of exogamy, as the two most powerful inducements to horror and collective vengeance” (qtd. in Sollors 285). In his book on interracial love, Sollors devotes an entire chapter to literary instances of simultaneous incest and miscegenation, noting how common such situations have been in the literary imagination. Historically, the white male enslaver’s free and unencumbered access to enslaved women led to large numbers of mixed-race children who were not acknowledged as the offspring of the enslaver. Of course, the enslaver might also have

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“legitimate” white children, some of whom would rape enslaved women, including many who might (unknowingly or otherwise) be their half sisters. Likewise, the enslaver would often rape his own daughters and granddaughters, as the incest taboo was frequently discarded when there were no public repercussions. That is, the evils of slavery encouraged miscegenation by making rape legal and unpunishable, even as it publicly warned against it, and in so doing encouraged a paradoxical form of incestuous miscegenation. In this context, the conflation of incest and miscegenation cannot be read as some kind of injunction to free love but as a historical descendant of the least free intercourse imaginable. As a result, as we shall see in the following discussion of William Faulkner and The Flash, the conflation of the two taboos is historically most frequently employed not as a means of deconstructing or rejecting the idea of racial difference but as an additional means of warning against the supposed horrors of that difference.9 As both Walter Benn Michaels and Sollors show, then, incest, for white supremacist society, can be understood both as a “desirable” bulwark against miscegenation, a “secret or not-so-secret incest wish” (Sollors 322) (if one keeps marriage and sex within the white “family,” miscegenation cannot occur), and as a traumatic result of miscegenation (interracial love leads to “accidental” transgressions of the incest taboo through the creation of additional, “illegitimate,” Black families). In the context of historical white supremacy in America, then, the taboo against miscegenation may “put a veil over—and simultaneously permit—incest fantasies” (323).

Faulkner and The Flash It is in the foregoing context that Michaels reads incest plots as indicative of nativism in literary modernism,10 and Michaels, Sollors, and John  T. Irwin all devote significant attention to the dynamics of incest and miscegenation in William Faulkner’s work, particularly The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! The Sound and the Fury (1929) partially revolves around a young white Mississippi man, Quentin Compson, who erroneously claims to have had an incestuous relationship with his sister Caddy (77) not only because he desires her but also as a means of “protecting her” from “outside” contamination, including miscegenation. This structure repeats in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in which Quentin recurs as a character and uncovers, retells, and invents (with his friend Shreve) the antebellum

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story of Thomas Sutpen, a self-made plantation owner and his children Henry and Judith. Like the CW’s Flash, Absalom, Absalom! presents incest and miscegenation not as mere opposites (as in The Sound and the Fury) but as coterminous, through the introduction of a secret / passing brother of both Henry and Judith, Charles Bon, who is the offspring of Sutpen and Eulalia Bon, herself mixed race, though Sutpen initially takes her for white. The taboo against miscegenation is then embodied both in Sutpen’s abandonment of Eulalia in favor of the white Ellen Coldfield Sutpen (Henry and Judith’s mother) and in Henry’s ultimate murder of his best friend (and “dark twin”), Charles, in order to protect Judith from racial contamination. Henry’s motivation for killing Charles is never incontrovertibly clarified, but Sollors, Michaels, and Irwin all argue that the incestuous desires of Henry for Judith and Quentin for Caddy indicate that it is not the threat of incest that merits violent brotherly protection but rather the possibility of miscegenation that actually authorizes incest, as long as it ensures the “purity” of whiteness.11 When Charles characterizes himself as “the nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister” (refuting Henry’s claim that they are brothers), from a nativist / racist perspective, he authorizes both Henry’s incestuous desires and his own murder. As Charles confirms, “It’s the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant [sic] bear” (285–286; emphases in original). None of this seems to have much to do with The Flash’s televisual efforts to foil bad guys until season 3, when the repressed elements of the IrisBarry relationship begin to return. In season 3, “big bad” villain Savitar is revealed to be not only the god of speed but also a version of Barry Allen himself, a “Time Remnant” created by an emotionally devastated 2024 version of Barry with black hair (called “Emo Barry” by fans) who attempts to stop Iris’s “preordained” death through time travel but instead accidentally manages to create the version of himself that kills her. This time loop is initiated when present-Barry gains a glimpse of the near future, May 23, 2017 (conveniently the airdate of the season finale), and witnesses Savitar killing Iris (3.9).12 As Savitar explains, he must work to bring about events that have already happened to him as present-Barry. “I . . . ​need . . . ​Iris to die so that you are driven so far into the dark that I can be born” (3.21). That is, Savitar undertakes exactly what Irwin identifies as Faulkner’s literary project, “a revenge against time” (1). Earlier in the season (3.14), Barry had proposed to Iris, partially in a calculated effort to avoid the potential future in which Savitar kills her (as Iris was not wearing an engagement

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ring in the future he glimpsed). Thus, the show sets up two potentially contradictory futures, one in which present-Barry marries Iris in a mixed-race, (symbolically) incestuous union and one in which Savitar-Barry kills Iris, preventing that marriage. Though the racial elements of this plot line receive no attention in the storyworld, the plot line is positively Faulknerian. As Sollors and Irwin discuss, Henry and Charles Bon are “doubles” of each other, both brothers of Judith who love her, and thus represent facets of the same personality in both psychoanalytic and racial or social registers. Ultimately, the racially passing Bon represents the id in Freudian terms, or the illicit oedipal desire to violate the incest taboo (a “dark” desire made more legible by its displacement onto a Black man and its affiliation with miscegenation), while Henry symbolically settles into the role of the superego, protecting his sister from incest and miscegenation and denying the desire he himself feels. As Irwin argues, “Quentin projects onto . . . ​Bon and Henry opposing elements of his own personality—Bon represents Quentin’s unconsciously motivated desire for his sister . . . ​, while Henry represents the conscious repression or punishment of that desire” (28). Thus, on a psychological level, Quentin is “locked in an incestuous, suicidal struggle with his dark twin” (Irwin 20), a struggle embodied in the relationship of Henry and Bon. Otto Rank’s study of literary doubles identifies “the brother and the shadow” as “two of the most common forms that the figure of the double assumes” (Irwin 33), and Bon falls into both categories, as he is “throughout the novel . . . ​identified with the image of the shadow” (Irwin 30), an image that is itself racialized through Quentin’s claim that “a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among” (Sound 86). In the case of The Flash, the “doubling” is even more obvious, as rather than half brothers, presentBarry and Barry-Savitar are the same person (with the latter “passing” as a supervillain) from different places in the timeline.13 Likewise, shortly after being reunited with Iris and Joe, Wally bitterly refers to Barry as Iris’s “white shadow” (2.10), one of the show’s extremely rare allusions to race. Here, one can read the Faulknerian plot in reverse. It is the goody twoshoes and whitebread present-Barry who wants to marry Iris, and thus to initiate a transgressive interracial, incestuous union. Likewise, it is the “remnant” (or the double of the double) of black(-haired) Emo Barry (Savitar) who works to prevent his sister(/ lover) from incestuous intermarriage, though this time not by killing her suitor, but by killing her. Thus, it is here

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not the sexually threatening Black (actually mixed) brother who threatens to despoil the white sister, but a white (even if symbolically mixed) brother who hopes to marry his Black sister. Iris, in this scenario, must be threatened with death, because it is always the Black person who is symbolically blamed by white society for the dangerous impurity of miscegenation. In the white supremacist imaginary, Black men rape white women, while Black women seduce upstanding white men away from their “legitimate” white families. Thus, it is always Black people who must be punished for the contamination of racial mixing, an act that Savitar (Barry himself!) almost carries out when he attempts to kill Iris. A more straightforwardly Faulknerian understanding of the situation is also legible, however. Savitar, though Barry, is also the more racialized of the pair. The comics version of Savitar is not Barry at all, but an “unnamed pilot from a third world nation” who adopts the name of the Hindu “god of motion,” Savitr (Waid et  al.). Even on television, Savitar’s origins are racialized and exoticized as he interrupts an archaeological dig in India in order to infect Julian Albert with portions of his speed-force power. In this context, Emo Barry’s black hair takes on a less humorous subtext, as, until Savitar is revealed as a future version of Barry, he is built up as racially exotic, associated with brownness and eventually with Blackness. Andrew Kreisberg, The Flash executive producer, calls Savitar our “darkest villain” (Dyce). In this context, it is not surprising that in the “killing” of Iris, Savitar (in black costume) stabs and penetrates her with a metal blade from behind, at groin level, as present-Barry fails to save her (3.22) (fig. 4.2). During this climactic scene, Barry’s slow-motion effort to intercede is intercut with Iris’s recorded message agreeing to marry him. Thus present, white, virtuous Barry becomes the object of her (legitimate) affections, as black-clad, black-haired, future-Barry violates her against her will. None of this seems possible without Barry’s own metaphorically mixed-race status, in which he (like Quentin) can be both the unambiguously white Henry Sutpen protecting his sister and the “dark twin” Charles Bon, who wishes to violate her, both “brother-seducer” and “brother-avenger,” in Irwin’s terms (37). This might seem like a far-fetched reading of a television show that resists all but the most fleeting references to race and includes no references to incest or miscegenation. Again, however, as with the comics portrayal of Wallace, the studious avoidance of references to racial politics actually leads to racially charged scenarios. While, for Freud, incest, particularly masculine desire for the mother, is always the foundational trauma that is repressed and then

FIG. 4.2  ​Candice Patton as Iris “killed” by Savitar in season 3, episode 22, of The Flash. Original airdate: May 16, 2017.

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returns, as Sollors and Irwin detail, in U.S. history incestuous desire is explicitly configured as both the opposite and the instantiation of interracial desire. Thus the taboo against miscegenation is concealed beneath and alongside the incest taboo even in more traditional oedipal repression. As Jolie Sheffer argues, “Personal psychology and social forces are inextricably linked through the peculiar racial history of the United States” (43). Even the scenario wherein The Flash travels back and forth through time in order to save his sister from a time-traveling speedster who wishes to kill her can be linked oedipally to Barry’s own mother, Nora, whose death is the foundational trauma of the whole series. As mentioned earlier, the Reverse Flash (another double for Barry) travels back in time to kill Nora, but it is only after his (white) father, Henry, is also killed by yet another speedster double, Zoom, that Barry momentarily abandons his resolve to not alter the timeline and races back in time to stop Reverse Flash (2.23). Here again, an oedipal love triangle emerges, wherein Barry’s love for his mother finds expression in his race through time to save her (a desire repressed through his double’s successful efforts to murder and “bury” her). Iris, then, is a double for the mother, as one part of him expresses the desire to violate the incest taboo (with his sister) while another part of him attempts to bury (Barry?) that desire. As Rank notes, “Brother-sister incest is a substitute for child-parent incest—what the brother seeks in his sister is his mother” (Irwin 43). Through the two story lines, Barry and the viewer can have it both ways as the incestuous desire for the mother can be denied or repressed by Barry’s ultimately unsuccessful efforts to save her, while they can also be achieved through Team Flash’s successful efforts to save Iris and their eventual marriage. Likewise, Iris’s oedipal affiliation with Nora links her to the idea of sexual purity and innocence associated with psychoanalytic motherhood and with whiteness, a link that makes sense given her role in “mothering” and taking care of Barry after his mother dies. Again, the taboo against and the attraction to mother-love is presented concurrently with the taboo against and the attraction to miscegenation: the white mother is affiliated with the Black sister and vice versa, and both are potential love objects that must be both denied and embraced. If this repressed dynamic becomes “conscious” anywhere, it is in the weird and troubling online discussion of the Barry-Iris relationship, wherein some online fans embrace the union as true to the comics and praise the show’s effort to be more diverse, while others state their objections either in nakedly racist terms or more covertly through preferences for other

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matches (not-so-coincidentally intraracial ones). While there is no space to detail them here, fans’ racist objections to Barry and Iris’s union can be understood as the conscious version of the unconscious linking of incest and miscegenation in the show itself. It is not simply that the incest taboo is used as an excuse to authorize racist objections to interracial love, but that incest and miscegenation have historically been not only overlapping but frequently coterminous acts, wherein incest functions both as a racist objection to miscegenation and as a fulfillment of it. Other elements of The Flash might also be read in this context. For example, Wally West’s characterization on the show is curious. While the casting of mixed-race actor Keiynan Lonsdale seems to overcome entrenched resistance to interracial relationships, the role he plays on the show is not a mixed character. Additionally, Wally is Iris’s brother, as the “family circle” of the West-Allens tightens in increasingly endogamous formations. Whereas in the comics Barry and Iris are unrelated and Wally is Iris’s nephew, on the show all three are siblings, while Iris is also a mother figure to both, and Barry becomes a father figure and mentor to Wally when he takes on the mantle of Kid Flash. That is, while the West-Allens represent racial diversity and interracial unions on one level, on another level, as Michaels says, “family is the essential form of nativism” (11). This increasing endogamy is reinforced by the way in which the show, like a Faulkner novel, produces so many doubles of its main characters, whether through the parallel-Earth motif, through time travel, through the same actor playing multiple characters, or through combinations of all of these tropes. In the world of The Flash, everything and everyone appears to be part of the same “endogamous” family, just as The Sound and the Fury produces shadows, mirrors, doubles, and characters who share the same name, as if to unconsciously deny the existence of the outside or (racial) other. Michaels discusses the ways in which nativist ideology substitutes “ ‘country’ for ‘right or wrong’ ” (107) and how family becomes the symbolic replacement for country. Superhero stories first and foremost always present themselves as being about right or wrong, or about justice, but in The Flash’s increasingly insular obsession with family (and doubles), one can see a nativist logic in which justice, particularly racial justice, is forgotten. The introduction of Barry and Iris’s time-traveling mixedrace daughter from the future (also named Nora) in season 4 might be read in similar contexts.

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White Wally and the “Rebirth” of White Supremacy To conclude, I return briefly to comics and particularly the 2016 DC Rebirth initiative. Given my discussion, it seems appropriate that the Savitar story line that indirectly revolves around both incest and miscegenation took place in the 2016–2017 season, a time parallel to the campaign and presidential election of Donald Trump. Trump’s presidency has, of course, been marked by nakedly nativist and racist appeals and policies, including the Muslim ban on immigration; the demands for a border wall to keep out Mexican immigrants; the long-term incarceration of immigrants, including children, in cages; fearmongering about MS-13 and a caravan of “illegals”; the appointment of white supremacist Steve Bannon to Trump’s cabinet; the assertion that four congresswomen of color should “go back to [the] places from which they came”; and the statement that a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, included “very fine people on both sides.” That is, Trump’s presidency has brought white supremacy back into mainstream public discourse. Like repressed memories, white supremacy has always been part of American culture, but in the Trump presidency it has come to the surface and can be expressed consciously. Neither The Flash comics nor the show consciously embraces racism or white supremacy, but DC’s 2016 Rebirth initiative nevertheless reflects this shift in American public life. Fearing that fans were rejecting New 52–era continuity changes, DC reintroduced the bulk of previous continuity through a story line indicating that a villain had either altered everyone’s memories or erased years from the universe’s timeline. Thus, characters from that timeline were adrift and invisible until somebody remembered them. The character most important to this plot line, as played out in DC Universe Rebirth no. 1, is the original, white Wally West, who drifts through several scenes, glowing and indistinct, unsuccessfully attempting to prompt various people (including his Korean American wife, Linda Park) to remember him (Johns, Van Sciver, et  al.). When Barry Allen finally remembers their shared history, Wally materializes and returns to the DC Universe, the first of several characters to do so. In Rebirth, DC admitted the folly of discarding seventy-plus years of comics continuity and attempted to recapture old fans through an act of overt nostalgia, bringing back a timeline that had been deemed stale five years previously. The primary representative of this nostalgia was Wally West. Though DC argued that the reversion to its “original” timeline was

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a conscious rejection of the past thirty years of “grim and gritty” revisionist comics that traded in joy and wonder for deconstruction and self-examination, it is difficult not to see the explicit use of white Wally as the metasymbolic center of Rebirth as an unconscious capitulation to the idea of white supremacy. Here, as in so much of the Silver Age that Rebirth selfconsciously brings back, heroism and virtue are white, while Black or mixed-race heroism is marked as less real or is problematically associated with a “dark” and dangerous path for superhero comics.14 Likewise, Wally’s connection with another white hero is deemed here more important than his connection to the woman of color he married, privileging intraracial relationships over interracial ones, endogamy over exogamy. While DC ultimately decided to keep both Wallace and Wally as part of Rebirth continuity and also introduced story lines in which Wally searches for his children and reintroduces himself to Linda Park, the identification of Wally with DC’s return to its roots reveals how much those roots are associated with white supremacy, with resolute endogamy, and with resistance to racial mixing in a moment in American history, 2016, when white supremacy was resurgent both in the comics community, particularly in the antidiversity 2017 Comicsgate movement (a movement led by Flash: Rebirth and DC Universe Rebirth artist Ethan Van Sciver) and in the public at large.15 If anything, what the Flash New 52 comics and television show reveal is that the postracial repression of racial histories does not erase those histories. Rather, they can be seen in partially hidden but troubling ways before emerging full-bloom to be confronted directly, like a supervillain, again and again.

Notes 1 The Comics Code (1954) was the industry’s attempt at self-regulation, following

the hysteria encapsulated by Fredric Wertham’s book Seduction of the Innocent, his (and others’) attempts to link juvenile delinquency to comics consumption, and the subsequent congressional hearings. The code neutered violence and sexuality in commercial comics, mandated positive portrayals of law enforcement, and eliminated horror and crime comics for more than a decade, among other effects (Nyberg; Hadju). 2 For an excellent account of Gwen’s importance to superhero comics’ history, psychology, and philosophy, see Saunders. Gwen’s death is typically seen as the end of the Silver Age and the beginning of the Bronze, “the passage from . . . ​joyful optimism . . . ​to the more uncertain, pessimistic and cynical” (Saunders 87).

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3 The whiteness of baseball is, of course, associated with its status as our “national

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14

15

pastime”—that is, its Americanness—despite the fact that baseball was the first of America’s major team sports to be integrated, by Jackie Robinson, in 1947. The term “double consciousness,” of course, comes from W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). In the comics, Iris’s father, Ira, is a white scientist, not a Black police officer. Whether he legally adopts Barry or is a foster father is mostly avoided, though it has sparked some disagreement among fans in connection with incest, as discussed in this chapter. Both this quotation and the title of this essay obliquely refer to what is perhaps the most famous Flash story of them all, “Flash of Two Worlds” from The Flash no. 123 (Sept. 1961) (Fox, et. al.). The story has no bearing on the racial matters of this essay. It is a standard plot element that metahuman villains (a.k.a. supervillains) are incarcerated without trial at S.T.A.R. Labs because a standard prison could not hold them, a legally problematic practice that is rarely (but not never) discussed on the show. See also Michaels’s discussion of Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–1903) (59–60). Useful here is the connection between early twentieth-century nativism and the origin of the superhero. While Michaels cites Thomas Dixon’s Clansman (1905) as a representative of literary nativism (16–18, 57) and Sollors discusses Dixon’s other work in the context of interracial incest (305–306), Chris Gavaler cites The Clansman as an ür-superhero story, focusing as it does on (racist) “justice” meted out by a masked vigilante in a costume (188–189). For further discussion, see the introduction to this volume. Sollors and Irwin note that the simultaneously incestuous and miscegenous love triangle does not originate with Faulkner, but perhaps finds its apotheosis in his work. Irwin cites Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Robinson Jeffers, whereas Sollors begins with the anonymous Adventures of Jonathan Corncob (1787) and traces a longer historical trajectory that covers more and less canonical authors, Black and white, American and European (288–323). Throughout this chapter, season and episode numbers of The Flash are presented as they are here: season 3, episode 9, appears parenthetically as 3.9. Again, Irwin’s reading of Faulkner proves applicable, as Irwin discusses the “clear distinction between the spatial aspect of doubling—the way in which one person can be a spatial repetition of another person—and the temporal aspect of doubling—the way in which one person later in time recognizes another person earlier in time as a double of himself ” (55). Through time travel, Savitar is both the spatial and temporal double of Barry. See Singer (86–93) for an account of how other “reconstructive” comics nostalgic for the Silver Age link all that is “wrong” with revisionist superhero comics with racial diversity. It is worth mentioning that the cocreator of both of these books, and of The Flash television show, Geoff Johns, is himself of mixed descent (Arab and European).

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Works Cited Berlanti, Greg, Andrew Kreisberg, and Geoff Johns, creators. The Flash. Bonanza Productions, Berlanti Productions, DC Entertainment, Warner Bros. Television, 2014. Broome, John, writer, Carmine Infantino, penciller, and Joe Giella, inker. The Flash, vol. 1, no. 110, Jan. 1960. Second story. Burlingame, Russ. “The Flash’s Candice Patton: ‘It’s about the Story and Race Is Irrelevant.’ ” Popculture, 28 July 2014, popculture.com/blog/2014/07/28/the-flashs​ -candice-patton-its-about-the-story-and-race-is-irrele/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2000. Conway, Gerry, writer, Gil Kane, penciller, John Romita and Tony Mortellaro, inkers. The Amazing Spider-Man, vol. 1, no. 121, June 1973. Cunningham, Phillip Lamarr. “Donald Glover for Spider-Man.” Web-Spinning Heroics: Critical Essays on the History and Meaning of Spider-Man, edited by Robert Moses Peaslee and Robert G. Weiner, McFarland, 2012, pp. 22–28. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk [1903], with The Talented Tenth and The Souls of White Folk. Penguin, 2018. Dyce, Andrew. “Savitar’s True Identity Is Flash’s ‘Darkest Villain’ Yet.” Screen Rant, 2 May 2017, screenrant.com/flash-savitar-evil-barry/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! The Corrected Text (1936). Vintage, 1990. ———. The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text (1929). Vintage, 1990. Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York University Press, 2016. Fox, Gardner, writer, Carmine Infantino, penciller, and Joe Giella, inker. The Flash, vol. 1, no. 123, Sept. 1961. Fu, Albert S. “Fear of a Black Spider-Man: Race-Bending and the Colour-Line in Superhero (Re)casting.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, vol. 6, no. 3, 2015, pp. 269–283. Gavaler, Chris. On the Origin of Superheroes: From the Big Bang to “Action Comics” No. 1. University of Iowa Press, 2015. Gibney, Shannon. “Color Blindness and the Black Girlfriend: The White Male Superhero’s Ability to Erase Race.” Nerds of Color, 9 Dec. 2014, thenerdsofcolor​ .org/2014/12/09/color-blindness-and-the-black-girlfriend-the-white-male​ -superheros-ability-to-erase-race/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Goldberg, David Theo. Are We All Postracial Yet? Polity, 2015. Hadju, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America. Picador, 2009. Irwin, John T. Doubling and Incest / Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner. Expanded ed., Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Johns, Geoff, writer, Andy Kubert, penciller, Sandra Hope and Jesse Delperdang, inkers. Flashpoint, vol. 2, nos. 1–5, July–Oct. 2011. Johns, Geoff, writer, and Ethan Van Sciver, artist. The Flash: Rebirth. DC Comics, 2010. Johns, Geoff, writer, Ethan Van Sciver, Gary Frank, and Ivan Reis, artists, Phil Jimenez, penciller, Joe Prado and Matt Santorelli, inkers. DC Universe Rebirth, vol. 1, no. 1, July 2016.

102  •  Eric L. Berlatsky

Joseph, Ralina. Postracial Resistance: Black Women, Media, and the Uses of Strategic Ambiguity. New York University Press, 2018. Kanigher, Robert, and John Broome, writers, Carmine Infantino, penciller, and Joe Kubert, inker. Showcase, vol. 1, no. 4, Oct. 1956. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Translated by J. H. Bell and J. R. von Sturmer, Beacon, 1969. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Duke University Press, 1996. Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Duke University Press, 1995. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Duke University Press, 2003. Nyberg, Amy Kiste. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. University of Mississippi Press, 1998. Onwuachi-Willig, Angela. “Is Interracial Romance Still Scandalous?” Huffpost, 24 May 2013, www.huffpost.com/entry/is-interracial-romance-st_b_3331640. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Saunders, Ben. Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy, and Superheroes. Continuum, 2011. Sheffer, Jolie. The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1880–1930. Rutgers University Press, 2013. Singer, Marc. Breaking the Frames: Populism and Prestige in Comics Studies. University of Texas Press, 2018. Sollors, Werner. Neither Black, nor White, Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. Harvard University Press, 1997. Venditti, Robert, and Van Jensen, writers, Ron Frenz and Brett Booth, pencillers, John Livesay and Norm Rapmund, inkers. The Flash. Vol. 6, Out of Time. DC Comics, 2015. Waid, Mark, writer, Oscar Jimenez, penciller, and José Marzan Jr., inker. The Flash, vol. 2, no. 109, Jan. 1996. Wertham, Fredric. Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth. Rinehart, 1954. Wolfman, Marv, writer, George Pérez, penciller, and Jerry Ordway, inker. Crisis on Infinite Earths, vol. 1, no. 8, Nov. 1985.

5

“Let Yourself Just Be Whoever You Are!” Decolonial Hybridity and the Queer Cosmic Future in Steven Universe CORRINE E. COLLINS

Cartoon Network’s popular show Steven Universe (2013–) chronicles the coming-of-age journey of a young, part-human, part-alien boy as he learns to manage his superpowers in order to defend Earth from the invasion of a space-faring race of aliens called Gems from a technologically advanced alien planet called Homeworld. As a show for children, Steven rewrites many genre restrictions regarding topics of gender, sexuality, and race that are typically omitted from children’s entertainment. Although most Gems are femme presenting, use she / her pronouns, and have physical features that are recognizable within our racially coded system, the show presents gender as culturally constructed and performative (Butler 2), as the Gems’ bodies are made of the light emanating from the gemstones through which 105

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they draw their power, and they can change their physical forms at will. The characterization of Gems as nonbinary women highlights gender as a governing ideology of performance and presentation, rather than a static embodied identity emanating from biological sex (Butler 6), and draws attention to the ways that we read and perceive gender through these social constructions.1 Steven belongs to a plethora of new television shows for children that present young viewers with normalized depictions of gender diversity that encourage younger audiences to examine the nature of gender, race, and sexual hierarchies in addition to increasing the representation of multiraciality in popular media, as this book attests. The show’s narrative sequence begins in the aftermath of the Gems’ colonization of Earth and an ensuing civil war where a rebel faction called the Crystal Gems has successfully stopped the colonization of Earth under the instruction of Homeworld’s ruling matriarchy, a group of powerful giant nonbinary women called the Great Diamond Authority. On Homeworld, Gems are created for specific roles, and their physical appearances correspond to their functions, a caste system that approximates a white supremacist model of racial categorization where Gems have racial appearances that reflect their value to Gem society. Under the direction of the Great Diamond Authority, Gems are sent to colonize nearby planets and extract mineral resources. However, Pink Diamond ends her colonization of Earth by assuming the secret identity of Rose Quartz and forming the Crystal Gems to fight the other Diamonds for decolonization. Steven is born when his mother, Rose Quartz, gives up her physical form to create him, thousands of years after the Gem rebellion, and he is considered by many Gems to be a “fusion” of Rose and his human father, Greg. Although fusion is a transformative process and battle strategy Gems typically use to create bigger, stronger beings with enhanced superpowers, Steven is the result of a previously unknown type of fusion because he is a permanent human-alien hybrid who has an organic body and Rose Quartz’s superpowers but none of his mother’s memories. Steven lives with the remainder of the Crystal Gems—Pearl, a white ballerina who is Pink Diamond’s former servant and Rose Quartz’s lover; Amethyst, a fun-loving, rebellious Gem created on Earth during occupation who is coded as Latinx; and Garnet, a dark-skinned, curvy, romantic permafusion of Ruby and Sapphire with Afro hair (fig. 5.1). Unlike other Gems, Steven can perform fusion with humans. Steven’s fusion into Stevonnie, an intersex, nonbinary Gemhuman of color,2 with his best friend, Connie, signals Steven’s commitment

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FIG. 5.1  ​The Crystal Gems in “Change Your Mind,” season 5, episode 29, of Steven Universe. Original airdate: January 21, 2019.

to racially and gender-diverse narratives and cements postcolonial Earth as a  queer-inclusive, egalitarian utopia where Gem- and humankind have autonomy. The series tracks Steven’s life as a mixed-race superhero as he continues Rose Quartz’s defense of Earth and discovers his superpowers. Extant scholarship on Steven has categorized the series as a direct challenge to the genres of science fiction and children’s television, through its predominantly queer-inclusive and diverse cast of characters and actors. Kat Ottoway states that Steven “fails completely in agreeing with social normalization or aligning itself with mainstream children programs, being dissident and anti-colonial,” and presents young viewers with normalized depictions of nonbinary gender and queerness. Additionally, Eli Dunn notes that Steven provides viewers with the opportunity to question the nuances of gender, sexuality, and performance, especially since the Gems’ female-coded bodies are immediately constituted as unreal and illusory (47). However, this scholarship tends not to examine gender intersectionally with race, or how Steven contributes to a growing trend of mixed-race superhero and science fiction narratives. The show’s central themes of decolonization, gender diversity, and emotional intelligence interrupt queerphobic and anti-Black narratives of cosmic futures in the science fiction genre and masculinist superhero narratives that have frequently perpetuated colonial legacies of dehumanization and ecocide. Taking José Vasconcelos’s theory of racial “fusion” as a way for humanity to create a harmonious cosmic race, I contend that Steven Universe’s exploration of fusion as a process that uses nonsexual

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intimacy to make new forms of Gem-human beings with open-ended gender expressions confronts interracial heteronormativity and multiracial exceptionality (Mills; Le Page), reinforced in the aftermath of Loving v. Virginia,3 through Steven’s racially diverse, nontraditional family of nonbinary women and fusion as a pleasure process. In contrast to Vasconcelos and mixed-race narratives that have tended to similarly prioritize lightskinned, racially ambiguous, cisgender representations of multiraciality, Steven rejects the white supremacist gender binaries and colorist and queererasing depictions commonly found within superhero culture by celebrating racial and gender diversity within narratives of mixed race. As a cross-genre show, Steven revises science fiction and superhero narratives through its inclusion of gender and sexual diversity. Scholarship on queerness in sci-fi and fantasy has attended to the ways that LGBTQ+ characters have typically been erased from science fiction narratives,4 and Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel have noted correlations between the representations of alien life as monstrous and queer genders and sexualities as deviant, asserting that “the experience of people who are sexually different is that in ‘a largely heterosexual society we are, after all, often treated as aliens’ ” (9). Though some science fiction authors, such as Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia Butler, explicitly challenge gender binaries through narratives of race, the figures of the alien and the queer typically represent terrifying threats to normative human life within the genre.5 However, in Steven, the alien threat is allegorical of global white supremacy and its racial and gender hierarchies, making the Crystal Gems’ decolonial efforts attempts to dismantle systems of oppression that approximate our current white supremacist system. Steven and the Crystal Gems also revise the superhero tradition as a squad of mostly nonbinary femme-of-color superheroes (excluding Steven and his human friend Connie in their unfused forms) who reject the centrality of cis masculinity to the superhero genre. Neil Shyminsky notes that superheroes traditionally preserve normative discourses of “nation, sexuality, gender, race, and ability” (289), whereas in Steven the Crystal Gems represent the decolonial forces protecting Earth from our current politicized notions of white supremacy and gender normativity in the form of Homeworld Gems and the Great Diamond Authority. Although Steven is a superhero comingof-age story, Steven never approximates the traditionally masculine lonewolf superhero, and the show instead focuses on his contributions to his superhero team and their collective emotional intelligence. Steven is white

“Let Yourself Just Be Whoever You Are!” • 109

and cisgender, but despite his gender identity and superhero status, he is not normatively heroic or masculine. His superhero costume features a pink shirt and flip-flops; he is often depicted as sentimental, loving, trusting, and innocent; and his superpowers are frequently linked to his shifting emotional state.6 Steven is not tall, muscular, or emotionally distant, and while he struggles with moral quandaries and negotiating his hybridity, it is noteworthy that his most potent powers are caring for and healing others. Throughout the show Steven heals cracked gems and even brings people back to life, and although he can and does fight, the show advances communication as the primary means of conflict resolution.7 Steven’s power, his ability to “connect to others” (5.29),8 is not a trait associated with the perfected masculinity of the superhero genre (D’Agostino 255), and Steven instead works to revise both narratives of masculinity and the superhero genre by prioritizing communication as the means of resolution for conflict. In contrast to Steven, who takes an altruistic approach to conflict, White Diamond represents the evil mastermind supervillain who attempts to control Earth and everyone around her, but her characterization also challenges traditional superhero narratives through her nonsexualized high-femme gender presentation. Although White Diamond’s whiteness is central to the show’s allegory of the Great Diamond Authority as white supremacists, her high-heeled shoes, stiletto nails, and floor-length gown with waist-high slits prioritize a femininity that typically exists within the superhero genre to satisfy the male gaze. However, in Steven, White Diamond is not hypersexualized.9 She is the most powerful Gem, and as the leader of the Great Diamond Authority she is able to control all other Gems like marionette puppets by spreading her “white light” into them. White Diamond believes that controlling other Gems perfects their impurities by changing them from “worthless” “lower lifeforms” to their true selves (5.29). This dispossessing power is a violation of Gems’ bodily autonomy and directly contrasts with the Crystal Gems’ mission to create an Earth where humans and Gems are autonomous. White Diamond’s assault on the Crystal Gems and attempted control of Steven and Connie is an allegorical representation of white supremacy’s desire to regulate those it considers deviant. However, despite White Diamond’s belief that humans are lower life-forms, as organics, Steven and Connie are invulnerable to her power, and the surprise of this ineffectuality causes a crisis of being that allows Steven to reason with White Diamond to accept her own imperfections and consequently those of others (5.29).

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Even though Steven’s hybridity enables him to resolve thousands of years of Gem conflict through conversation, the show does not position him as a mixed savior or locate his multiraciality within the same normative frameworks advanced by mainstream media celebrations of mixed race’s transformative potential.10 Naomi Zack argues that what has emerged in the aftermath of Loving is often a discourse that positions multiracial people as “saviors and redeemers” (ix) whose revolutionary superpowers are to erase race through racial mixing and ambiguity, and mainstream media reporting has frequently celebrated mixed-race people as intellectually and physically superior to our “monoracial” counterparts.11 Rainier Spencer criticizes these narratives of transformative ambiguity as hegemonic and powerful in affecting the attitudes of the general public (164), and recent mixed-race science fiction narrative trends certainly reflect a racially ambiguous optics rooted in future narratives of the human race and planet Earth.12 My choice to read Steven and Vasconcelos in unison is informed by Vasconcelos’s use of the cosmic, Steven’s interplanetary scope, and the presentation of fusion as a metaphor for racial mixing in both texts. While Vasconcelos’s writing has been heavily criticized for anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and antiqueer tenets (Hedrick 74), I assert that his concept of fusion correlates with the United States’ mainstream conceptions of racial mixture’s power to evolve society out of racial injustice. However, as an alienhuman hybrid, Steven is never positioned as superior to the unfused Crystal Gems or the organic life they are trying to save, and Steven explores fusion as a metaphor for communication beyond physical amalgamation. In this measure, the show counteracts the ableist discourse of the Great Diamond Authority, theories of exceptional multiraciality, and traditional masculinist superhero narratives by asserting that the true fight is for everyone to have the freedom to be “whoever they are” (5.29). Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica (1925) represents the logical endpoint of an obsession with racial mixture and is an ideological precursor to mainstream media’s hegemonic representations of mixed race. As a manifesto, La raza asserts that “racial fusion” has the power to remake the world through the “fusion and mixing of all peoples” that brings humanity toward its “sublime purpose” (30, 16, 20). However, despite claims that this fusion of “all” people ushers in a cosmic future that unlocks humankind’s full potential, Vasconcelos is clear that “inferior types” (35) will be excluded through a process of selective breeding, making this new, superior cosmic race a replication of colorist and ableist colonial ideologies. In a reading of Vasconcelos’s

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influence on Chicanx writers Gabriela Mistral and Gloria Anzaldua, Tace Hedrick asserts that La raza is “firmly, even a tad hysterically, heterosexual” (74) in its complete reliance on procreation and insistence that all others are “inferior types” and “monstrosities” (Vasconcelos 35). Vasconcelos’s project of achieving spiritual, racial, and cultural harmony through racial mixing is a proposal for an “esthetic eugenics” (Hedrick 74) that runs parallel to mainstream discourses of exceptional multiracial beauty in the contemporary moment. Vasconcelos’s exclusion of queer genders and sexualities, Blackness, indigeneity, and differently abled people as “inferior types” rests on a eugenicist model of selective breeding and biological race. Steven’s celebration of a variety of fusions signals that no single type of fusion or Gem-human life is more important, powerful, or revolutionary than another, or nonfused, being, and it consequently disrupts discourses on mixed-race exceptionality. Although the Gem Homeworld opposes Gem-human fusion whereas Vasconcelos advocates racial fusion, their seemingly divergent worldviews instead represent two sides of a racist, queerphobic, ableist coin that restrict fusion to groups they have deemed desirable. On Homeworld, intra-Gem fusion is acceptable in battle. However, when Gems do not meet the Great Diamond Authority’s standards and emerge with unique characteristics, they are considered “wrong, not right, flawed.” These Gems “don’t belong” and “aren’t needed,” and many are shattered for simply existing (5.3). Additionally, Steven and the Crystal Gems are considered abominations: their forms are unacceptable, and their powers are unnecessary because they are not fulfilling their Homeworld functions (2.21). The Diamonds’ attempt to exclude and marginalize all of these “inferior types” from their “perfect empire” (5.29) engages the same logic Vasconcelos utilizes to assert that humankind will evolve to reproduce according to our hierarchical value (35). Contrastingly, the Crystal Gems value Gem and human diversity and celebrate everyone’s consensual fusion choices. Furthermore, because fighting is not always the resolution for conflict in Steven, fusion is not idealized as the most functional method for defending Earth’s future. Instead, fusion is just one type of acceptable battle formation for the Crystal Gems and is generally a process through which Earth Gems can come closer together as a team because it requires cooperation and trust. Moreover, Gem fusion’s link to pleasure and intimacy for and of itself, rather than the production of bigger, stronger Gems, is a significant departure from Vasconcelos’s compulsory heterosexuality as means to reproduce

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desirable human characteristics. Vasconcelos’s emphasis on racial fusion as the method for evolving humanity also moves away from the pleasure of intimacy to the outputs of these relationships. In a critique of modern multiracialism, Jared Sexton notes a similar reliance on the multiracial child as a justification for interracial relationships and asserts that this desexualization of interracial desire conforms to a bourgeois politics of middle-class respectability that prioritizes procreative potential at the cost of sexuality (154). This same stress on functionality is reflected in a Homeworld society that allows intra-Gem fusion for the functional purpose of creating bigger, stronger Gems, but also dismisses emotional fusion as a process that makes Gems “sentimental” and weak (5.1). The Great Diamond Authority’s emphasis on functionality does not allow for pleasure or feeling, and those who feel too much or too deeply are considered morally aberrant and defective.13 When Ruby and Sapphire form Garnet for the first time, Homeworld Gems yell that Garnet is “unbelievable,” “disgusting,” and “unheard of!” and Blue Diamond threatens to shatter Ruby for daring to fuse with Sapphire (2.22). This outrage is reflective of Ruby and Sapphire’s emotional connection being unintelligible to their Gem audience, in addition to echoing antimiscegenation sentiment in the United States. However, while Steven connects Blue Diamond’s threat to white supremacist America, it also undermines stereotypical mixed-race aesthetics of light skin and racial ambiguity that Vasconcelos privileges, by constructing Garnet as a Black, nonbinary woman. This moment demonstrates that ideologies of white supremacy and racial mixing can perpetuate anti-Blackness and thus undermine racial mixing as an inherently egalitarian or transformative process. The transgressive nature of inclusive fusion is also connected to theorizations of queer desire and pleasure explored by Black feminist theorists such as Audre Lorde. Without the same restrictions on participation advanced by Homeworld and Vasconcelos, fusion is a dynamic process that allows beings to connect but also exists within a framework of valuing fused and unfused selves. Lorde asserts that lesbian sex is an embodied process that has the power to both make and break the world, and Sarah Chinn’s reading of Lorde highlights queer love and sex as a “conduit for entering into some kind of communion with another, a way authentically to love others and oneself” (184). As the first known inter-Gem fusion, Garnet is a manifestation of Ruby and Sapphire’s forbidden lesbian relationship that anchors fusion in this theoretical framework of queer desire.14 When Sapphire and Ruby, after splitting upon learning that Rose Quartz

“Let Yourself Just Be Whoever You Are!” • 113

was also Pink Diamond, decide to reunite as Garnet, Ruby tells Sapphire that being Garnet has transformed her feelings of self-worth: “I used to feel like I wasn’t much good, just one of me on my own. But when we’re together it feels like it’s okay to just be me” (5.23–24). Rubies are disposable to the Diamonds on Homeworld, but living on Earth with Sapphire develops Ruby’s ideas of her value and purpose, allowing her to experience the pleasure of autonomy. Garnet’s fusion is similarly expansive for Pearl and Rose Quartz. Although Rose Quartz is a Diamond, she is unaware interGem fusion is possible until she sees Garnet. This advances Rose Quartz’s reason for staging a rebellion that includes the defense of Gems’ rights to authentically love themselves and each other without the regulation of the Great Diamond Authority (5.19). Ruby and Sapphire’s nonbinary love exemplifies Lorde’s authentic affection and centers individual and communal pleasure in the process of decolonization. Similarly, Stevonnie’s characterization is deeply rooted in their physical embodiment and experience of pleasure, and their intersex and nonbinary identities have been celebrated as much-needed representations in superhero, science fiction, and children’s entertainment. Autostraddle’s Mey Rude notes that Stevonnie is a groundbreaking character because they are a celebration of nonbinary identity that moves beyond “a specific type of white and thin androgyny.” Stevonnie is a person of color with curly hair, tan skin, long legs, wide hips, a small waist, and light facial hair. Like Garnet, Stevonnie’s narrative focuses on the pleasure of their existence and physical experience. Upon their initial formation, Stevonnie runs barefoot through Beach City, before leaping and cartwheeling off a cliff into the ocean and washing up on shore laughing to themselves as serene piano music plays in the background (1.37). When Stevonnie is stranded on the moon of a completed Gem colony, they grow facial hair for the first time, and after shaving, they sit back and admire their stubble in the reflection of a glass shard while waiting out an incoming storm (5.12) (fig. 5.2). These moments are reminders of the choices the Crystal Gems fought to preserve and emphasize fusion’s bodily and emotional pleasures. Steven reflects on Homeworld’s white supremacy by replicating Garnet’s experience with the Diamonds and contrasting it with Stevonnie’s celebration on Earth. When Stevonnie accidentally forms at a Homeworld ball Steven throws to gain an audience with White Diamond, Blue Diamond yells that Stevonnie is “completely unacceptable” and Yellow asserts that Steven (whom she calls Pink) has “gone too far” (5.27) before throwing

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FIG. 5.2  ​Stevonnie admires their facial hair in “Jungle Moon,” season 5, episode 12, of

Steven Universe. Original airdate: January 5, 2018.

Stevonnie in a cell. When Steven refuses to apologize for fusing, Blue angrily states that Pink Diamond’s time on Earth has warped his or her “sense of right and wrong” (5.29), asserting that Steven and Connie’s fusion is immoral. The Diamonds’ rejection of Stevonnie as a human-alien fusion restates the antiqueer and antimiscegenation rhetoric of Garnet’s first formation and represents the queerphobia and racism of white supremacy and Vasconcelos’s theorization of racial mixing. In contrast, on Earth, Stevonnie’s presence silences rooms and inspires admiration. When Lars and Sadie—two Beach City locals and good friends of Steven—meet Stevonnie in the donut shop, they fumble over their words, blush, shy away, and are generally in awe of Stevonnie’s presence. As Stevonnie wrings some seawater out of their hair because they have been swimming, diamonds flutter around their form, making them glisten and glow, and both Lars and Sadie are gobsmacked. When Stevonnie exits the shop, the animation cuts back to Lars and Sadie standing open-mouthed (1.37). Lars and Sadie’s bashful admiration reflects show creator Rebecca Sugar’s intention to depict Stevonnie as a “stunning, incredible epiphany of a person” (“Fusions”) who encourages celebrations of intersex, nonbinary femininity, and androgyny. However, while Stevonnie’s racial ambiguity and beauty certainly conform to mainstream standards of mixed-race aesthetics, their androgyny challenges the predominantly cisgender representations of mixed race in mainstream

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media and superhero narratives.15 Stevonnie is a literal representation of the mixed-race and mixed-gender possibilities Siobhan Somerville unearths in her readings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sexological texts in Queering the Color Line (2000). Somerville’s study illuminates the ways that multiraciality and homosexuality emerge as coeval, overlapping categories in white supremacist hierarchy and observes that the mixed-race, mixed-gender individual was considered a danger to normative society (80). As an intersex, nonbinary, part-human, part-alien person of color, Stevonnie is not the inferior queer of Vasconcelos’s manifesto, the absent queer in mainstream multiraciality, or the moral aberration of Homeworld, but a dynamic individual who is a celebration of Steven and Connie’s friendship. As such, Stevonnie’s existence is a further reminder that gender and sexual identities are not self-disclosing and static embodiments, that dismantling white supremacy requires the rejection of gender normativity and anti-Blackness. These various fusion experiences collectively assert that fusion is not unequivocally about producing somebody entirely new as much as it is about exploring innovative pleasurable possibilities outside the known frameworks of human-Gem connection. While this process yields insights that aid the reconciliation of the Crystal Gems and the Great Diamond Authority, it is the Crystal Gems’ commitment to teamwork and diversity that makes the decolonization of Earth possible. Further, even though it is through fusion that the Crystal Gems expand their views of the world and their purposes for rebellion, Steven always emphasizes that Earth is a space where all Gem- and humankind are free to live harmoniously. Steven’s superhero team encounters the same conflicts and disagreements as other superhero squads. However, unlike other superhero stories, the show rejects ableist narratives that create hierarchies of value and exclusionary practices within the group. Although fusions like Garnet and Stevonnie are stronger than the singular beings of which they are composed, Connie and other unfused Gems are never excluded from the fight. Even though Connie is a full human and more susceptible to injury than her teammates, in battle Steven and Connie typically fight separately, and Connie’s swordfighting abilities are as instrumental to the Gems’ success as Steven’s shield. Connie’s centrality to the Crystal Gems’ mission demonstrates the ways that Steven consistently makes space for all who wish to contribute to the revolutionary cause, dismantling ableist narratives of physical superiority typically seen in superhero narratives and multiracial exceptionality.16

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That Steven and Connie remain unfused throughout the duration of the final battle with White Diamond emphasizes the radical inclusivity of the Crystal Gems superhero squad and cements fusion as a process that prioritizes pleasure over function. Although Stevonnie does not form during battle, they do form when Steven and Connie are dancing together at the Gem ball that precedes the final action, much to the disgust of Blue Diamond, Yellow Diamond, and White Diamond (5.27). Steven’s ideologies of inclusion and diversity, and their ability to enact radical social change through communication, may seem like a different version of the love-conquers-ideology advanced by many proponents of multiracialism. However, Steven’s focus on equality between fused and nonfused beings refuses to replicate gender and racial hierarchies that typically exclude queer people of color. As Steven creates a utopic version of Earth that is accepting of people’s differences, its centering of queer multiracial characters challenges the fact that queerness and mixed race are not frequently discussed together. Steven never takes for granted that interracial love is normative, and yet it is always celebrated as a valid and beautiful means of interpersonal connection that centers on the pleasure of the participants. Steven’s subversion of racial and gender hierarchies creates the potential for what science fiction scholar Wendy Pearson calls acts of slippery but pleasurable queerness that revel in “resisting attempts to make sexuality signify in monolithic ways” (3), and fusion’s joyful combination of consensual beings demonstrates Steven’s commitment to pleasure through performance and embodiment. Stevonnie’s and Garnet’s very existence is predicated on love, yet this fused love is not the only means of achieving revolution or being happy in the world of Steven. The show’s focus on decolonizing Earth to create the space for everyone to be whoever they are is a utopian project, and yet the centrality of queerness to Steven’s conceptions of mixed race and fusion is radical in its revision of superhero and science fiction narratives to include gender and racial diversity. The show’s focus on teamwork and inclusion as ways to defend Earth from colonization, and Steven’s investment in communication across boundaries of difference, also positions the work of decolonization as a community project to which everyone can contribute unique talents and gifts. While Vasconcelos argues that the cosmic future will be achieved through procreation, Steven asserts that it will be through cooperation, where everyone is respected, loved, and treated equally and is able to be whoever they are.

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Notes 1 Show creator Rebecca Sugar says that though the Gems are “all non-binary

women,” they are “coded female” (Pulliam-Moore).

2 Sugar revealed that Stevonnie is intersex and nonbinary in a Dove Self Esteem

Project and Steven Universe short in June 2019 (“Dove Self-Esteem”).

3 Habiba Ibrahim argues that Loving “reinforce[s] heterosexual marriage, and by

extension the heteronormative family, as private units that fortify national wellbeing” (44). Also see Somerville; and Sexton. 4 See Wendy Pearson’s “Alien Cryptographies” and coedited volume with Veronica Hollinger, Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (2008); Brooke M. Beloso’s queer reading of E.T.; and Paul Venzo’s explication of queer erasure in Star Trek for some examples. 5 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Alien (1979), Predator (1987), and Independence Day (1996) are prominent examples. 6 Steven’s gem activates because he feels happy while enjoying his favorite ice cream in season 1, episode 1, and his floating power is linked to his emotional state in season 3, episode 6. 7 Steven heals Connie’s eyesight and Lapis Lazuli’s cracked gem in season 1, episodes 24 and 26, respectively, and brings Lars back to life in season 5, episode 3. 8 References to specific episodes of Steven Universe will be cited by season and episode, separated by a period, as I have done in this instance. Season 5, episode 29, is thus 5.29. 9 Emma Frost, Lady Mastermind, and Mystique are a few examples of hypersexualized femme supervillains. 10 See Time’s 1993 cover and article “The New Face of America,” which asserts that interracial couples are changing America (Smolowe), and the 2013 National Geographic article “The Changing Face of America: We’ve Become a Country Where Race Is No Longer So Black or White” by Lise Funderburg. Rainier Spencer also provides a thorough analysis and catalog of this mainstream discourse in “ ‘Only the News They Want to Print’: Mainstream Media and Critical Mixed-Race Studies.” 11 One such headline in New Scientist encourages readers to “find an exotic stranger” (Le Page) if they want taller, more intelligent children, and mixed-race people are frequently celebrated as having the best of both worlds in this logic of biological race. 12 See Extant (2014) and Altered Carbon (2018) for some recent science fiction examples. 13 Yellow Diamond even dismisses Blue Diamond’s feelings of sadness over losing Pink Diamond in the Gem Rebellion (4.14). 14 In “ ‘My Race, Too, Is Queer,’ ” Dariotis asserts that interracial relationships are “transgressive love” and are therefore queer (35). 15 Halle Berry’s Catwoman and Storm in the X-Men franchise, Miles Morales in The Ultimate Spider-Man, Jason Momoa in Aquaman (2018), and Zendaya in Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) are some examples. A notable exception to this is Jennifer Beals (Bette) in The L Word (2004–2009). 16 See José Alaniz’s discussion of ableism through the superhero genre’s privileging of the “healthy, hyper-powered, and immortal body” (6).

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Works Cited Alaniz, José. Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond. University of Mississippi Press, 2014. Alien. Directed by Ridley Scott, 20th Century Fox, Brandywine Productions, 1979. Aquaman. Directed by James Wan, performance by Jason Momoa, Warner Bros. Pictures, DC Films, Safran Company, 2018. Beloso, Brooke M. “Making E.T. Perfectly Queer.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, 2014, pp. 222–236. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1999. Catwoman. Directed by Pitof, performance by Halle Berry, Village Roadshow Pictures, Di Novi Pictures, Frantic Films, Mapleshade Films, Catwoman Films, 2004. Chaiken, Ilene, Michael Abbot, and Kathy Greenberg, creators. The L Word. Anonymous Content, Dufferin Gate Productions, Coast Mountain Films, Posse, Showtime Networks, MGM Television, 2004–2009. Chinn, Sarah E. “Feeling Her Way—Audre Lorde and the Power of Touch.” GLQ, vol. 9, nos. 1–2, 2003, pp. 181–204. D’Agostino, Anthony Michael M. “ ‘Flesh-to-Flesh Contact’: Marvel Comics’ Rogue and the Queer Feminist Imagination.” American Literature, vol. 90, no. 2, 2018, pp. 251–281. Dariotis, Wei Ming. “ ‘My Race, Too, Is Queer’: Queer Mixed Heritage Chinese Americans Fight for Marriage Equality.” Chinese America: History and Perspectives, 2007, pp. 33–37. “Dove Self-Esteem Project x Steven Universe: Social Media.” YouTube, uploaded by Cartoon Network, 24 June 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKohUwlaWA4. Dunn, Eli. “Steven Universe, Fusion Magic, and the Queer Cartoon Carnivalesque.” Gender Forum, no. 56, 2016, pp. 44–57. Fisher, Mickey, creator. Extant. 22 Plates Productions, Amblin Television, CBS Television Studios, 2014–2015. Funderburg, Lise. “The Changing Face of America: We’ve Become a Country Where Race Is No Longer So Black or White.” National Geographic, vol. 224, no. 4, 2013, p. 76. “Fusions.” The Steven Universe Podcast from Cartoon Network, 22 Mar. 2018, podbay. fm/show/1261418557/e/1521698400?autostart=1. Griffith, Nicola, and Stephen Pagel, editors. Bending the Landscape: Original Gay and Lesbian Writing. Overlook, 1998. Hedrick, Tace. “Queering the Cosmic Race: Esotericism, Mestizaje, and Sexuality in the Work of Gabriela Mistral and Gloria Anzaldua.” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, vol. 34, no. 2, 2009, pp. 67–98. Ibrahim, Habiba. Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Independence Day. Directed by Roland Emmerich, Centropolis Entertainment, 1996. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Directed by Don Siegel, Walter Wanger Productions, 1956. Kalogridis, Laeta, creator. Altered Carbon. Virago Productions, Mythology Entertainment, Phoenix Pictures, Skydance Television, 2018–2020.

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Le Page, Michael. “Want Tall, Smart Children? Find an Exotic Stranger.” New Scientist, 1 July 2015, www.newscientist.com/article/dn27816-want-tall-smart​ -children-find-an-exotic-stranger/. Accessed 4 Apr. 2019. Mills, Jen. “Mixed Race People ‘Taller and Smarter,’ Study Finds.” Metro, 3 July 2015. metro.co.uk/2015/07/03/mixed-race-people-taller-and-smarter-studysays-5277767/. Accessed 4 Apr. 2019. Ottoway, Kat. “Steven Universe: A Queer Television Show Analysis.” Screen Squinty Blog, 14 July 2016, screensquinty.wordpress.com/2016/07/14/steven-universe-a​ -queer-television-show-analysis/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2018. Pearson, Wendy. “Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, 1999, pp. 1–22. Pearson, Wendy, and Veronica Hollinger. Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction. Liverpool University Press, 2008. Predator. Directed by John McTiernan, Lawrence Gordon Productions, Silver Pictures, Davis Entertainment, 1987. Pulliam-Moore, Charles. “Steven Universe’s Rebecca Sugar on How She Expresses Her Identity Through the Non-binary Crystal Gems.” Gizmodo, 16 July 2018, io9. gizmodo.com/steven-universes-rebecca-sugar-on-how-she-expressesher-1827624015. Accessed 20 Nov. 2018. Rude, Mey. “Steven Universe’s Stevonnie Is Bringing Non-binary Representation to TV in a Brand New Way.” Autostraddle, 8 Jan. 2018, www.autostraddle.com/steven​ -universes-stevonnie-is-bringing-non-binary-representation-to-tv-in-a -brand-new-way-407120/. Accessed 10 June 2019. Sexton, Jared. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Shyminsky, Neil. “ ‘Gay’ Sidekicks: Queer Anxiety and the Narrative Straightening of the Superhero.” Men and Masculinities, vol. 14, no. 3, 2011, pp. 288–308. Smolowe, Jill. “The New Face of America: How Immigrants Are Shaping the World’s First Multicultural Society.” Time, 18 Nov. 1993, content.time.com/time/covers​ /0,16641,19931118,00.html. Accessed 8 Feb. 2017. Somerville, Siobhan. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Duke University Press, 2000. Spencer, Rainier. “ ‘Only the News They Want to Print’: Mainstream Media and Critical Mixed-Race Studies.” Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp. 162–182. Spider-Man: Homecoming. Directed by John Watts, performance by Zendaya, Columbia Pictures, Marvel Studios, Pascal Pictures, 2017. Sugar, Rebecca, creator. Steven Universe. Cartoon Network Studios, 2013–2019. Vasconcelos, José. “Mestizaje.” The Cosmic Race: Bilingual Edition (1979), translated by Didier T. Jaén, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, pp. 7–40. Venzo, Paul. “To Boldly Go Where We Should Have Gone Before: Symbolic Annihilation and Queer Interventions in the Star Trek Textual Universe.” Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, vol. 1, no. 3, 2016, pp. 285–295. X-Men. Directed by Bryan Singer, performance by Halle Berry, Marvel Entertainment Group, Donners’ Company, Bad Hat Harry Productions, 2000. Zack, Naomi. Preface. Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects, edited by SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs, University of Texas Press, 2004, pp. ix–xii.

6

The Hulk and Venom Warring Blood Superheroes GREGORY T. CARTER

Thinking about racially mixed characters across media and historical periods, the term “warring blood” communicates three notions that have endured since the antebellum period: First, a character’s positive characteristics are bestowed by their racially white essences and their undesirable characteristics are brought by their minority essences, literally through the blood. Second, the racialized bodily fluids are engaged in a winner-takes-all struggle with the highest of stakes in our racialized society: the privileges of whiteness. Third, the minority blood inevitably triumphs over the white, regardless of the character’s parent races, although, most prominently in U.S. history, the other is Black. As the engine driving many tragic mulatto stories, facets of the warring blood idea have endured into the post–civil rights era, drawing on white audiences’ identification with mixed characters’ white parentage, and then drawing out the pathos that comes with those characters’ undoing. In retracing Sterling Brown’s dissection of the tragic mulatto trope in  his 1933 essay “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors,” Werner 120

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Sollors attributes the term “warring blood” to the elder poet and scholar. But the closest Brown comes to this phrase is in excerpting a passage from Evans Wall’s novel The No-Nation Girl (1929) that describes the heroine’s “warring qualities” (Sollors 224; Brown 194–195; Wall 17). The phrase likely hails from the work of Georgia Douglas Johnson, an African American writer based in Washington, D.C., and active during the New Negro movement. Over four decades, she wrote poetry, plays, and a syndicated newspaper column. Her home became known as the S Street Salon, a regular meeting place for writers, including Jean Toomer. The two used some of the same imagery to herald a new race whom Johnson also described as a “scion of fused strength” that was aware of “the Earth’s frail dilemma” (Johnson 59). Circulating through the core of the Black intellectual world, their ideas were not marginal; they were discussed by Alain Locke, Jessie Fauset, and likely W.E.B. Du Bois (Foley 55–58). Johnson’s poem “Fusion” (1922) celebrates the potential that comes from acknowledging one’s roots: How deftly does the gardener blend This rose and that To bud a new creation, More gorgeous and more beautiful Than any parent portion, And so, I trace within my warring blood The tributary sources, They potently commingle And sweep With new-born forces! (Johnson 60)

Johnson evokes blood as indicative of racial essence. At the same time, the poem disrupts the negative connotations “warring blood” had before this point. Knowing that Johnson’s poems from that time “blend conventional themes of uplift with expressions of political radicalism” (Foley 57), these verses suggest that the speaker is affirming not just her own worth but also her membership in larger groups participating in social change. “Fusion” draws from the theory of hybrid vigor, which agricultural scientists had accepted long before it began circulating as an antithesis to the hybrid degeneracy idea that had survived the transition from nineteenthcentury Lamarckism to twentieth-century eugenics. As W. E. Castle, the

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geneticist who introduced Gregor Mendel’s work to the United States in 1903, argued, “It is a fact well known to breeders of animals and plants that crossing two pure breeding but different strains or varieties of the same species, as a rule produces offspring more vigorous in growth than either parental variety” (16). Johnson’s poem, like Castle’s article, argues that this was true for humans as well. By attaching positive meanings to warring blood, the poet has complicated its usage, making it hard to think only of its connection to the tragic mulatto. More than this, “Fusion” offers a way to evaluate positive statements about mixed race on two levels, the individual and the collective. I bring together warring blood, the works of Johnson, and the science of hybrid vigor to examine the Hulk and Venom, two comics characters who, by alternating between two forms and containing two personas within them, operate in a way distinctively resonant with past tropes about mixture. More than racially stable superheroes like Captain America, Iron Man, and Black Panther, who make up the majority; more than shape-shifting heroes like Mr.  Fantastic, Mystique, and Martian Manhunter, whom some presume are metaphorically mixed; and more than Firestorm and Ghost Rider, who share bodily control with another spirit, Marvel’s The Incredible Hulk and Venom tell stories offering visual, verbal, and diegetic evidence that they are, on a symbolic level, biracial. However, the creators of the Hulk and Venom have offered interventions in their relationships that give them chances to enjoy equilibrium similar but not identical to the potential to which Johnson refers. For Bruce Banner and the Hulk, and for Eddie Brock and the alien symbiote, this comes with setting ground rules, agreeing on how the relationship operates, and dictating how they will fit in society. As I write elsewhere, praise of racial mixing in the United States often falls on any of five tiers of sophistication, from mere flattery of comeliness to acknowledging how it is a by-product of a broader program of reform (Carter 221–224). “Fusion” opens with the former but ends with the latter, using terminology that has been misconstrued for decades. Similarly, examining the Hulk and Venom offers distinctive examples of superpowers brought on by mixture that ultimately transform the world. I point out these tropes not to reify them but to show how they echo in characters seemingly unconnected to racial mixture. Like cyborgs in science fiction, the characters with two physical forms yet two personas “must be read as a powerful metaphor for the historical bogeyman of contamination—racial mixing” (Nishime 34). Their conditions symbolize a type of

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racial mixture that comics creators, readers, and viewers may easily overlook, even as their popularity has grown. Simultaneous with the movie industry’s self-censorship in the early twentieth century, comic books furthered the “impulse to deny, or at least dramatically revise, narratives that point to the decidedly miscegenated America of the past” (Courtney 105). Like the movie studios, comics publishers formed a regulatory organization when they came under attack for indecency. The Association of Comics Magazine Publishers began issuing seals of approval only to morally upright titles in 1948, yet inconsistent participation by publishers hampered their effectiveness. Claiming a direct relationship between comics and juvenile delinquency, midcentury crusaders wrote editorials, made demands at community meetings, and led burnings to destroy the threat of comic books. The successor to the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers, the Comics Magazine Association of America, continued its mission. Fredric Wertham, an esteemed psychiatrist, gave credibility to their arguments in his book Seduction of the Innocent, already a Book-of-the-Month Club selection by the time he testified before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in 1954. Soon after, the Comics Magazine Association of America’s new rules, famously known as the Comics Code, added guidelines for presenting sexual relations to its restrictions on sympathetic portrayals of illegal activity. “Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Violent love scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable. . . . ​The treatment of live-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage” (qtd. in Nyberg 166). This echoes Wertham’s assertions that Batman, Robin, and Wonder Woman are gay. But a rulebook meant to deflect 1950s moralistic criticism would surely have miscegenation, our nation’s greatest taboo, in mind. At a time when twenty-seven of forty-eight states were prosecuting interracial marriage, the depiction of those relationships and their offspring would rarely appear. Decades later, those prohibitions expired and transformed into slightly more permissive, but still repressed, standards. Even now, with a higher acceptance rate, increasingly diverse demographics, and the appeal of ethnically ambiguous public figures, portrayals of mixture have concealment as a starting point. But racial mixture has been a central feature in the history of the United States, and the Americas as a whole. Since “seeing race is making race,” Americans learn to discern ambiguous bodies just as they learn to spot

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their homogeneous kin (Guterl 4). Because racial mixture pervades so many facets of our society, its concealment has been happening in clear sight. Whether on the debut cover of The Incredible Hulk or in the most recent Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies, it takes an astute eye to notice racial mixture in media like movies and comics.

Warring Blood Superheroes Superheroes such as Namor, Peter Quill, and Damian Wayne are biracial in either a conventional or metaphorical sense, having parents from two different racial groups or species. Their story lines explore their births, unpack their inheritances, and wrestle their loyalties. However, the Hulk and Venom reflect the warring blood motif in far more dramatic ways. Essentialism, zero-sum conflict, and atavism are so much of their operations that I consider them a separate classification: warring blood super­ heroes. As for the “biracial” superheroes just mentioned, membership in this group requires that their origin stories and general descriptions include mixture. Possessing two personas and two physical forms is the distinguishing prerequisite for warring blood superheroes. Warring blood superheroes like the Hulk and Venom share another key experience with racially mixed Americans: they have bodies difficult to categorize. In their more famous forms, they look like nothing from the regular world, something new and imaginative. Their selves come from distinct places and are perceived to be biologically dissimilar, like racially mixed people. A muckraking journalist and a ravenous alien parasite? A Hollywood stuntman and a demon? A nuclear physicist and a rage giant? These are varieties of what horror films scholar Noel Carroll calls “fusion monsters,” who, like many inventions within the genre, are impure. Those created by fusion “transgress categorical distinctions such as inside / outside, living / dead, insect / human, flesh / machine, and so on” (Carroll 43). As Justin Ponder further describes in analyzing the blaxploitation movie The Thing with Two Heads (1972), fusion monsters violate physical difference, combine multiple psychologies, and unite multiple souls, functions of the Hulk and Venom (Ponder 141–142). Bruce Banner (the Hulk’s alter ego) and Eddie Brock (Venom’s alter ego) expose themselves to gamma radiation or encounter contraband aliens, then they acquire a second form and a second persona. At that point, they become unstable and thus symbolically mixed.

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The tensions between the two personas within the Hulk and Venom follow the three aspects of the negative warring blood assumptions in tragic mulatto literature. The good qualities come from the human ingredients, and the bad qualities come from the inhuman. For the elder superhero, the intellect comes from Banner, while the destruction, ill manners, and unkempt presentation come from the Hulk. Whether in comics, the 1970s television show, or motion pictures, most stories of the Hulk also rely on the unstoppable power of his monstrous, racialized characteristics. His body is big and differently colored. Unable to speak and act like a civilized person, he may resort to violence. He behaves like a fugitive, often hiding from authority. In a way, he resembles a runaway from abolitionist slave narratives, constantly on the run, relying on kind-hearted strangers, and likely to be killed or dissected if caught. But eventually the beast passes out and resumes life as the genius. Venom debuted in 1988, around the same time opponents of presidential candidate Michael Dukakis began associating Massachusetts’s weekend furlough program with Willie Horton, a convict who committed rape, assault, and armed robbery while disregarding the conditions of his release. Venom’s creators may not have had the associations between Black men and violent crime in mind, but George  H.  W. Bush’s campaign demonstrated they were active in American minds. As a representation of nightmares of Black men, Venom is a descendant of Birth of a Nation’s Gus and a distant cousin to the Black criminals from Dirty Harry movies. In the Venom comics, Brock has lost his job as a journalist because Spider-Man revealed how he misreported the culprit of the “Sin Eater” murders. After this loss of reputation and employment, vengeance consumes the journalist, and the symbiote, once partnered with Spider-Man (see Dagbovie-Mullins in this volume), amplifies that bitterness. Venom’s muscular build and his association with urban spaces code him as African American. Again, the character’s coloring brings racial associations the creators never intended with his white, spider logo popping out from his black skin, suggesting he is the opposite of Spider-Man, not friendly, not beneficial to the neighborhood, and not well intentioned. Most of the Hulk’s and Venom’s adventures, whether in print or on film, present a zero-sum conflict between their two sides. At least a dozen times in the comics, Banner has achieved his goal and cured himself of the Hulk. Eddie Brock has been separated from the symbiote nearly half a dozen times. In both cases, the men eventually go back to their rival

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identities. Even though readers sympathize with Banner and Brock, the two seem destined to fail in their efforts to become wholly human. The effectiveness of these characters is based on the same kind of empathy white audiences feel when they see the goodness and whiteness in themselves reflected in that of the tragic mulatto. Readers of comics see the normalcy, stability, and whiteness of their lives in the lives of comics characters, but they also relish the suffering Banner and Brock must endure. The physical body is not the only site of this conflict. If we think of culture as ways of living, beliefs, and practices, then the personalities within the Hulk and Venom have representatives of different cultures within them. In each, they are so disparate from each other that conflict seems unavoidable. According to many opposed to interracial marriage, disparate cultures will produce a home unsuitable for a family. They often say, “What about the children?” revealing that the negative associations with warring blood persist, even if they are spoken of in terms of warring traditions.

The Hulk: 1962–1986 The Hulk, perhaps the most powerful superhero in the MCU, has one of the longest careers in comic books across all publishers. The cover of The Incredible Hulk’s debut calls him “the strangest man of all time,” promising readers something new (fig. 6.1). Then the text asks, “Is he man or monster or . . . ​is he both?” a question with racial undertones that hint at mixture. As opposed to wearing his better-known green skin, the Hulk appears mostly ashen in May 1962, resembling Boris Karloff’s portrayal of Frankenstein’s monster. After his gamma radiation accident, he must be normal Banner by day and the Hulk at night, a system resembling that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, another of Stan Lee’s inspirations. The gray coloring was the result of Lee’s wish that the Hulk not mirror any specific racial group, thus distancing him from known racial stereotypes (Lee 76–77). The truth is, because of the standard four-color printing of the time, this gray was difficult to sustain in early issues. Since the covers are printed on better paper, the color appeared correctly there. But inside, it alternated between gray, blue, and black. Lee never intended that the gray color would symbolize an intermediary racial status between Black and white, but by questioning the Hulk’s humanity, the words on the cover resonate with long-standing discourses about mixture. Those discourses are strong

FIG. 6.1  ​Cover for The Incredible Hulk, vol. 1, no. 1, May 1962, Marvel Comics, art by Jack

Kirby and George Roussos.

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enough to cast the gray color along racial lines as well. After all, gray is a mixture of black and white, and it is often used to describe ambiguity. Two years later, Avengers no. 3 explained that emotional distress sparks Banner’s transformation. As an in-universe patch, Marvel explained that he turned into an intermediary gray hulk automatically at night (S. Lee, Kirby, and Reinman, Avengers). The Incredible Hulk no. 227 (1978) provided another retcon, attributing Banner’s transformation into the Hulk to a multiple personality disorder and explaining that the giant was an expression of repressed childhood experiences—plus gamma radiation (Stern et al.). This alteration replaces mixture with trauma as the source of his challenges. In a decade with increased acceptance of psychotherapy, this plays on a less racialized sort of empathy than the white narcissism that made the tragic mulatto effective. This maneuver was more effective at deracializing the Hulk than choosing the color gray in 1962. Taken seriously, the change could make the Hulk of the comics no longer fit into the tragic mulatto mold. However, the character’s similarities were renewed with The Incredible Hulk television series (1977–1982). Even though the show took liberties with some of the original elements—for example, the show creates a backstory about Bruce Banner’s wife and her tragic car accident—it was very popular, serving as an introduction for viewers. In terms of the three aspects of the warring blood idea that pathologize mixed people, the juxtaposition of Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno (the actors who played Banner and the Hulk, respectively) makes the essentialist attribution of positive and negative traits even more pronounced. Similarly, having Ferrigno appear and Bixby disappear when he “Hulks out” confirms the winner-takes-all dimension of the warring blood trope. These moments of transformation were the highlights of every episode. They were inevitable, spectacular, and necessary for the show’s sustainability.

Venom: 1988–2018 In the comics, Spider-Man brings an alien symbiote to Earth from Battleworld, acquired in Secret Wars no. 8 (Shooter et al.). Peter Parker believes it to be a set of clothing to be put on and taken off, allowing it to bond with him. When he realizes that wearing the suit has invited a ravenous, unrestrained, predatory personality into his mind, he seeks the help of Mr. Fantastic. They work together, using sonics to remove and imprison the suit (DeFalco et al.). After it escapes and rebonds with Spider-Man, he manages

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to expose the living suit to the high-decibel sound of church bells, and it unwillingly separates. Then, like a faithful rescue dog, the symbiote pulls Parker’s body to safety and slinks away (Simonson et  al.). Soon after, it spots the unemployed journalist Eddie Brock and senses that he holds a grudge against Spider-Man that may resemble its own resentment. The interaction between these two produces a much deeper case of the twoforms-and-two-selves configuration. As opposed to when Spider-Man wears the black suit, when the symbiote joins with Brock, it transforms his body. The exaggerated features and tendrils make it clear that he is not just dressed differently (Michelinie and McFarlane). By the time Spider-Man and Venom spar again, Brock has enjoyed the augmentation the symbiote brings him, and he is even more determined to act on his grudge against Spider-Man. Brock does seem to possess some mastery in the relationship, transforming into Venom at will, rather than at sunset, or when his guest decides to. In the subsequent showdown between Spider-Man and Venom, Brock describes what has happened in rather erotic terms: “A shadow moved, caressed me. I was joined.” He calls the shadow an “it,” but he uses the plural, first-person pronoun, “we,” when bragging of finding Peter Parker’s wife. Parker shoots him with the Venom blaster developed by Mr. Fantastic, but it does not separate from Brock’s body. “It must have completely bonded,” he thinks, echoing what Brock has already said (Michelinie and McFarlane). Eventually, living as Venom dominates Brock’s life. Years later, they go their separate ways, as the symbiote grows tired of having a terminally ill host and Brock rejects its growing bloodlust (Jenkins et al.; Millar et al.; Aguirre-Sacasa et al.). The Venom movie fared badly with critics upon its release in 2018, but fans regarded it more highly (“Venom,” IMDb; “Venom,” Metacritic). At $855 million worldwide, it ranked thirteenth in movies released in that year (“Venom,” Box Office Mojo), a result of good timing, the increased popularity of the character, and the movie’s distinctiveness from the MCU. In this version, the symbiote’s natural form is a constantly moving, dogsize amoeba. As in the comics, Brock, the white journalist, brings gentleness, principles, and a sense of right and wrong, while the symbiote, who sneaked into the country from Asia, brings impulsiveness, a ravenous appetite, and selfishness. Following Robert G. Lee’s six faces of the Oriental, the symbiote is a pollutant while working alone. Like a Chinese worker in the 1870s disrupting the fantasy that California was a promised land for free, white people, the symbiote ruins our idea of a humans-only world;

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out of place, its “presence constitutes a boundary crisis” (R. Lee 3). It ends up in the lab of Carlton Drake, a suspicious biotechnology tycoon. But another symbiote, Riot, follows by possessing one Malaysian woman’s, and then another’s, body. That symbiote compels each host body to amble around like a zombie until it spots a more suitable one. Prowling at an airport terminal, the second woman targets a young girl with blond hair and white tights and follows her into the bathroom. Lee argues that, in the later decades of the nineteenth century, American antipathy toward Asians went from considering each as a pollutant, which described individual aliens, to considering them all a yellow peril, or a mass “threat to nation, race, and family” (10). When the Venom symbiote reveals that it and the other are the vanguard of many of their kind coming to Earth, the menace to the United States and its people becomes even more urgent. In the hands of Columbia Pictures, Eddie Brock is a San Francisco journalist covering corruption. He encounters the symbiote while investigating Drake. Some aspects of the symbiote’s backstory resemble American beliefs about Asians, as just discussed. But upon its joining with Brock, his racialization increasingly follows that of Black men. The beast that results from their union possesses a much larger physique than his hand-drawn counterpart. His eyes and mouth recall caricatures of African American men from blackface minstrelsy in the 1830s. In Venom’s initial on-screen appearance, the symbiote wields more control over their actions, compelling Brock to feed its urges, mainly for freshly killed flesh, actualizing the common stereotype of the primitive cannibal. Brock’s enlightened consciousness remains present, feeling disgust over the deeds he must commit while the guest does its work. Rather than follow a specific schedule, like the early Hulk, motion picture Brock might change into Venom at any time, changing back when the symbiote’s current objective is met. As opposed to the comics, here the symbiote speaks to Brock in his head and Brock responds out loud. Much of the movie’s wit comes with the dialogue between the two. “Why are you putting your hands up?” the symbiote asks Brock when faced with armed burglars. “You’re making us look bad!” Lastly, Venom eschews conventional morality and justice. For example, it seems natural for them to sever the heads of the people they have just killed and stack them in a corner of the room. While Venom debuted in print after the Willie Horton incident, he appeared on-screen after the escalation of the War on Drugs, the 1994 crime law, and what Mark Mauer calls “the race to incarcerate.” Here, he has transformed from the Black criminal waiting to jump you into the

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desensitized menace who might kill you for fun. His allure as an antihero resembles that of gangsta rap; through his Blackness, physicality, and criminality, mainstream fans get to dabble in an idea of a perspective about which they only have a sliver of understanding. Both literally and symbolically, Venom and his kind resemble what Hillary Clinton notoriously labeled “superpredators” in a 1996 campaign speech in New Hampshire: he is a hunter from outer space with superpowers, and he evokes the stereotype of minority youths who act with “no conscience, no empathy,” and who are allegedly connected to drug cartels (“Mrs.  Clinton”). Venom is colored black, he threatens our safety, and he should be contained. In a way, Brock’s story is one of crime and punishment. Having snooped around his lawyer girlfriend’s confidential emails, Brock has fallen from grace and he must do penance. He ends up a symbolic cellmate to a black figure who frightens, provokes, and dominates him. Following the depiction of prison relationships in much popular culture, the relationship between Brock and the symbiote is also sexual and not consensual. The symbiote has entered Brock and uses his body as he pleases. With their bodily systems so intertwined, they become physically codependent on each other. Facing consequences resembling those of a sexually transmitted disease, both will die if separated. It is only near the end of the movie that the characters talk of encountering the symbiote as erotic. Brock’s exgirlfriend has temporarily joined with the symbiote to rescue him. When Brock and Anne reflect on the experience, they acknowledge “the power . . . ​ you know, when it’s inside you.” Venom’s final appearance in the film takes place in a convenience store where Brock has witnessed periodic armed robberies. It is about to happen again, and instead of watching from a safe spot, Brock confronts the thief. Unlike in the many strenuous transformations throughout the movie, Brock has learned to be calm during this one. Scared for his life, the thief asks what he is. He and the symbiote speak in unison, “We are Venom,” before he devours the thief. When his face peels back, we are invited to judge Venom, not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character: the composed white man with a strong moral compass (fig. 6.2). As the movie ends, Brock and the symbiote discuss the ground rules for their relationship. They will remain joined, but they cannot just kill people on a whim. Under Brock’s tutelage, the symbiote will learn to appreciate the many good people on Earth and may only eat the very bad ones. It

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FIG. 6.2  ​Tom Hardy as Venom in Venom. Columbia Pictures, 2018.

seems that Venom is also a buddy cop movie, many of which feature two men from different races learning to deal with each other’s differences. Though Lethal Weapon is an exception, these films often make the white cop the rule-bound one and the Black cop the rebel (e.g., Beverly Hills Cop and Training Day). In the end, as in romantic comedies, they commit to their relationship. Rather than producing a child, they bring about a new conception of law-making, combining the procedural acumen of one with the street smarts of the other. Brock and the symbiote do the same, and they combine into a new body as well. This resolution follows the three components of the warring blood idea by preserving their racialized traits. But by submitting to Brock’s rules, the story diverges from those components by neutralizing the winner-takes-all conflict and tempering the black side’s possession of the body. Recalling the positive use of warring blood by Georgia Douglas Johnson, they have come to appreciate all sides of Venom’s background and they can fulfill their potential as a force for change, by punishing the bad guys—the ones Brock chooses.

The Hulk: 1986 to the Present Between the reappearance of his gray coloring in 1986 and the beginnings of the MCU in 2008, Marvel comics put the Hulk through many changes.

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He undergoes psychotherapy more than once, alternately integrating and dissembling his differently hued personas. Generally, the Hulk gets smarter, communicating less often in the way ascribed to the developmentally delayed. He spends long stretches in his Hulk body. His experiences expand, and by the Planet Hulk series (2006–2007), he has become a military tactician and global leader (Pak et al.). However, some of the tensions within his treatment remain—namely, whether Bruce Banner’s affliction was because of repressed emotions, or because of the existence of two different personas. I argue for the latter, because of the monumental success of the MCU. These movies have sold so many tickets, provided so much content for media outlets, and appeared on so much merchandise that they have essentially become the Marvel canon that moviemakers had cherrypicked from. So many non–comics readers have followed the movies that the character arcs there are the most known. In the first Avengers movie, everyone calls the Hulk “the other guy,” whom you may or may not want to wake. In the final battle, Banner says, “That’s my secret, Cap: I’m always angry.” Does this affirm the repressed emotions model, or is it ironic? Does Banner maintain a sort of pilot light of rage, or is it more like a fire alarm, present if necessary but unused on most days? In any case, Banner seems the boss of the relationship. He can call on the Hulk, and he can compel him to stay even when the combat has ended. But by the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015), Banner and the Hulk’s relationship follows the separate-personas model, which the MCU commits to from that point onward. They inhabit the same body, kind of like roommates in a two-bedroom apartment who work opposite shifts, rarely sharing the same space at the same time. They can read the signs of what the other has been up to, but they do not know exactly what those activities were. The Hulk knows what has distressed Banner but probably does not know the lead-up. Banner knows the Hulk must have been smashing things but does not know for how long. If it were the repressed feelings model, then they would know more about each other. At the end of that movie, the Hulk flies off into the sunset, piloting his and Banner’s journey. When we see the Hulk again in Thor: Ragnarok (2017), he has been in control for two years. Like his 1980s comic book counterpart, he has become calm, conversational, and attentive to the demands of a professional combatant. Until Thor shows him a video of Black Widow (Natasha Romanoff) addressing him, the Hulk is successful at suppressing Banner. When she asks him to “turn this bird around,” he is

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unable to buttress his emotions. After Banner returns, he wants to stay because he fears that if he changes again he may never come back. Regardless, for the sake of defending Thor’s home world in the movie’s final showdown, Banner is willing to change. Avengers: Infinity War (2018) picks up soon after that, with Thanos attacking the refugee Asgardians. The Hulk and the Mad Titan fight hand to hand, and the villain gives him what seems to be his first beating. For the rest of the movie, Banner is unable to transform into the Hulk, offering Tony Stark opportunities to tease him (“Come on, you’re embarrassing us in front of wizards”). It appears that the Hulk is suffering performance anxiety. However, on MTV’s Happy, Sad, Confused podcast, Anthony and Joe Russo reveal a dynamic far more complex: the Hulk is refusing to come out. “If the Hulk were to say why, it’s that Banner only wants Hulk for fighting. He’s had enough of saving Banner’s ass. People have interpreted it as the Hulk’s scared. But it’s really reflective of his journey from Ragnarok, that these two characters are constantly in conflict with each other over control” (Horowitz). This expands the two-personas motif, suggesting that both personas want to dominate, but neither can have total control. As in the warring blood theory, this competition is forever active for them, but each has tricks to make the other submit. What are the tricks? Will the war end? Will one of them have to die for there to be peace? The Hulk and Banner’s subsequent appearance in Avengers: Endgame (2019) offers some answers to these questions. Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, and Scott Lang (Ant-Man) catch up with “the Bulk” (my portmanteau, combining “Banner” and “the Hulk,” much as how “Blasian” combines “Black” and “Asian”) at a diner. He speaks in Mark Ruffalo’s casual yet concise voice, goes around in a sweater, and chats it up with young fans. They take a booth, and he explains his new form: “For years, I’ve been treating the Hulk like he’s some kind of disease, something to get rid of. But then I start looking at him as the cure. Eighteen months in the gamma lab, I put the brains and the brawn together and now look at me. Best of both worlds!” The colors of the background, his skin, and his clothing are very muted (fig. 6.3). In a way, he has returned to the gray color of the debut issue, and his words emphasize this embrace of hybridity. Beyond the coloring, the Bulk does not just look like the Hulk in clothes, he looks like the offspring of Mark Ruffalo and the “enormous green rage monster” Iron Man describes in The Avengers (2012). His facial features, his musculature, and his gait are all blends of the other two.

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FIG. 6.3  ​Mark Ruffalo as “the Bulk” in Avengers: Endgame. Marvel Studios, 2019.

The scene does not take the time to explain the process or share the Hulk’s side of the story, so it appears that Banner got the winning hand. But the Hulk must have gained something he always wanted. Judging by how much he enjoyed fighting, receiving adulation from fans, and unwinding at his apartment on the planet Sakaar, it seems likely that what he wanted most was to be in his body as much as possible. As the symbiote and Brock do in Venom, he and Banner must have set agreeable ground rules, and the Hulk must be fine with letting the professor take the wheel most of the time as long as they can be big and green. His calling himself “the best of both worlds” brings a cringe to viewers aware of the adulation Americans often direct at racially mixed people. The praise of their physical appearance, the assumption that they are bridges between their parents’ racial groups, and the fascination with their genealogy often reveal that the speakers have good intentions about race relations. This single-serving flattery works on the individual level, like the first half of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s “Fusion” and the Bulk’s self-description. Another set of compliments works on the more collective level: predictions that everyone will be mixed, pointing to intermarriage rates as a gauge of racial progress and suggesting that ambiguity will dissolve racial identities. The latter part of Johnson’s poem promises to use ambiguity for social change. The Hulk’s long career has compelled his creators to explore, complicate, and expand the relationship between Bruce Banner and the Hulk. Spanning six decades, his stories reflect changes in social mores about psychotherapy, trauma, and racial mixture. Over these years (and quite by accident), the creators have moved the story from one that embodies the

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traditional facets of the warring blood idea, which undergirds the whole tragic mulatto myth, to one that reflects the ideas in Johnson’s poem, which deploys the term “warring blood” to communicate positive attitudes toward mixed race. Like Eddie Brock and the symbiote, Banner and the Hulk reach a compromise that gives the nonhuman partner more visibility while letting the human dictate personal relationships, decorum, and morals. Stated explicitly in Avengers: Endgame, the Bulk is a combination of the two, ready to do his job as an Avenger.

Works Cited Aguirre-Sacasa, Roberto, writer, Lee Weeks and Rich Hoberg, pencillers, Stefano Gaudiano, inker, and Clayton Crain, artist. The Sensational Spider-Man, vol. 2, nos. 38–39, Aug.–Sept. 2007. Avengers. Directed by Joss Whedon, performance by Mark Ruffalo, Marvel Studios, 2012. Avengers: Age of Ultron. Directed by Joss Whedon, performance by Mark Ruffalo, Marvel Studios, 2015. Avengers: Endgame. Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, performance by Mark Ruffalo, Marvel Studios, 2019. Avengers: Infinity War. Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, performance by Mark Ruffalo, Marvel Studios, 2018. Birth of a Nation. Directed by D. W. Griffith, David W. Griffith Corp., 1915. Brown, Sterling A. “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors.” Journal of Negro Education, vol. 2, no. 2, Apr. 1933, pp. 179–203. Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. Routledge, 2015. Carter, Greg. The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing. New York University Press, 2013 Castle, W. E. The Laws of Heredity of Galton and Mendel: And Some Laws Governing Race Improvement by Selection [. . .] (1903). Nabu, 2012. Courtney, Susan. Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967. Princeton University Press, 2005. DeFalco, Tom, writer, Ron Frenz, penciller, and Josef Rubinstein, inker. Amazing Spider-Man, vol. 1, no. 258, Nov. 1984. Foley, Barbara. Jean Toomer: Race, Repression, and Revolution. University of Illinois Press, 2014. Guterl, Matthew Pratt. Seeing Race in Modern America. University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Horowitz, Josh. “Joe & Anthony Russo, Vol. II (Avengers: Infinity War Spoiler Interview!).” Happy, Sad, Confused, MTV, 6 May 2018. The Hulk. Universal Television, Marvel Television, 1977–1982. Jenkins, Paul, writer, Humberto Ramos, penciller, and Wayne Faucher, inker. The Spectacular Spider-Man: The Hunger. Marvel Comics, 2003. Johnson, Georgia Douglas. Bronze: A Book of Verse (1922). Kessinger, 2009.

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Lee, Robert G. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Temple University Press, 1999. Lee, Stan. Origins of Marvel Comics. Simon and Schuster, 1974. Lee, Stan, writer, Jack Kirby, penciller, and Paul Reinman, inker. The Avengers, vol. 1, no. 3, Jan. 1964. ———. The Incredible Hulk, vol. 1, no. 1, May 1962. Mauer, Mark. Race in Incarcerate: The Sentencing Project. The New Press, 2006. Michelinie, David, writer, and Todd McFarlane, artist. Amazing Spider-Man, vol. 1, no. 300, May 1988. Millar, Mark, writer, Terry Dodson and Frank Cho, pencillers, and Rachel Dodson, inker. Spider-Man by Mark Millar: Ultimate Collection. Marvel Worldwide, 2011. “Mrs. Clinton Campaign Speech.” C-SPAN, 25 Jan. 1996, www.c-span.org/video/?696​ 06-1/mrs-clinton-campaign-speech. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Nishime, LeiLani. “The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future.” Cinema Journal, vol. 44, no. 2, 2005, pp. 34–49. Nyberg, Amy Kiste. Seal of Approval: The Origins and History of the Comics Code. 1994. University of Wisconsin–Madison, PhD dissertation. Pak, Gregory, and Peter David, writers, Carlo Pagulayan, Michael Avon Oeming, Marshall Rogers, et al., pencillers, Jeffrey Huet, Mike Allred, Tom Palmer, et al., inkers, Takeshi Miyazawa and Alex Niño, artists. The Incredible Hulk: Planet Hulk. Marvel, 2008. Ponder, Justin. “ ‘We Are Joined Together Temporarily’: The Tragic Mulatto, Fusion Monster in Lee Frost’s The Thing with Two Heads.” Ethnic Studies Review, vol. 34, no. 1, 2011, pp. 135–155. Shooter, Jim, writer, Mike Zeck, penciller, John Beatty, Jack Abel, and Mike Esposito, inkers. Marvel Superheroes Secret Wars, vol. 1, no. 8, Dec. 1984. Sollors, Werner. Neither Black nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. Harvard University Press, 1999. Stern, Roger, and Peter Gillis, writers, Sal Buscema, penciller, and Klaus Janson, inker. The Incredible Hulk, vol. 1, no. 227, Sept. 1978. Thor. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, Marvel Studios, 2011. Thor: Ragnarok. Directed by Taika Waititi, performance by Mark Ruffalo, Marvel Studios, 2017. Venom. Directed by Ruben Fleischer, performance by Tom Hardy, Columbia Pictures, 2018. “Venom (2018).” Box Office Mojo, 2 June 2019, www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id​ =venom2018.htm. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. “Venom (2018).” IMDb, 2 June 2019, www.imdb.com/title/tt1270797/. Accessed 2 June 2019. “Venom (2018) Reviews.” Metacritic, 2 June 2019, www.metacritic.com/movie/venom​ -2018. Accessed 13 Oct. 2019. Wall, Evans. The No-Nation Girl. Century, 1929.

7

Monsters, Mutants, and Mongrels The Mixed-Race Hero in Monstress CHRIS KOENIG-WOODYARD

In the comic series Monstress (2015–), writer Marjorie Liu and illustrator Sana Takeda realize Jennifer  K. Stuller’s call to aesthetic arms in InkStained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors that “there is no one way to be heroic”: “What we need are heroes and heroisms: Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, Aboriginal, Middle Eastern, gay, straight, male, female, transgender, fat, skinny, [and] somewhere-in-the-middle” (162). Monstress portrays the reluctant heroism of a somewhere-in-the-middle female protagonist, Maika Halfwolf, as she fends off supernatural and political factions that persecute and tyrannize her and her kind, the mixed-race Arcanics. As Liu interleaves alternative history, epic, fantasy, and the anti-bildungsroman (aptly suiting Maika’s multiraciality), she constructs a generically hybrid comic that portrays a post–World War II superheroine. Liu embraces Lillian S. Robinson’s 138

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assertion that “the female superhero originates in an act of criticism” by challenging “the masculinist world of superhero adventures” (7). For Liu, who identifies as “mixed race” (as Asian American, with a Taiwanese father and white mother of French, Irish, and Scottish descent), such a critique is personal and grows out of her work writing for Marvel, about which she notes, “For years I was the only woman of color, the only person of color, at these gatherings [Marvel retreats]. I did fine, but that’s not the point. Why didn’t that ever strike anyone as odd or problematic?” She continues, “Well, here’s the deal: being a woman or person of color in a space dominated by white men is like wearing a Klingon cloaking shield: as long as you don’t need to open fire, no one is going to notice whether you’re there or not. No one at these Marvel retreats noticed the absence of women because even the possibility of their participation didn’t exist. ‘Women can’t write superheroes,’ I was told by a top dude in the company” (Alleyne). From 2008 to 2016, Liu worked on multiple Marvel characters and story lines, mostly in the X-Men family, and Maika can be viewed as one of the many offspring of Wolverine—as a sibling to Daken and X-23, Wolverine’s biological offspring and a genetic clone, respectively. In Maika (and the Arcanics), Liu develops a cluster of related figures of the mixed-race “other”—monsters, mutants, and mongrels—as she critiques what Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has dubbed the “kyriarchy”: a system of political supremacy that “masks the complex interstructuring of patriarchal dominations inscribed within women and in the relationships of dominance and subordination between women” (123). Schüssler Fiorenza’s model is apt for a reading of Monstress because of Liu’s engagement with what Anna Beatrice Scott calls “in-sinew-ated perspectivalism” in her reading of Black superheroes and mutants. Scott’s contention that “the drawings of the superhero body function as a fascinating interpolation of fantastical imaginaries and studied anatomical renderings” materializes in the skin and flesh of Liu’s development of “other” identities and ontologies as she depicts an alternative model of racialized (super)heroism in Maika (Scott 296).

Marvel: Mutants and Mongrels While practicing law—biotech and international law, areas that surface thematically in Monstress (Alleyne)—Liu began in 2004 to write the first of the now close to twenty paranormal romance novels that she has

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published. While a discussion of these novels is beyond the scope of my chapter, Liu’s treatment of race, power, identity, and gender in these crossgenre works parallels her aesthetic and political approach to the story of Monstress. From 2008 to 2016, Liu worked on a variety of Marvel characters and story lines in close to eighty comics, from one-shots to multi-issue stories. Her characterization of no fewer than eighteen female characters provides the foundation for her conception of Maika as a mixed-race superheroine. The vast majority of these characters are mutants, and the metaphor of the mutant offers Liu a framework, as Ramzi Fawaz describes it, “for reimagining the superhero as a figure that, far from drawing readers to a vision of ideal citizenship through patriotic duty or righteous suffering, dramatized the politics of inequality, exclusion, and difference” (144). In Monstress, the mutant (manifested in the Arcanics, and Maika in particular) emerges as an important vehicle in a cultural and political metaphor that frames “religious persecution, racism, homophobia, terrorism, genetics debates, disabilities, sexually transmitted diseases, immigration issues, sexism, and classism” (Brown 120). Several stylistic markers typify Liu’s characterization of a heroic mutant—and by extension the mixedrace Maika, who possesses a “power that will reshape the world” (Liu and Takeda, Awakening 153). Liu’s fusion of the personal and political (and the understanding that the two are always already interconnected) shapes the emotional and ethical elements of superfigures. As characters reflect on their external and internal identities, they search their souls while considering their superphysicality—and their place in a human society that often discriminates against nonhumans. Searching the “super” soul mirrors the process of coming to terms with the superpowered body, and both are often framed in origin stories (in the bildungsroman) that focus on constituent elements of racial and gendered identity. For Liu, characters’ super or mutant identities are culturally and politically dynamic as they face multiple challenges in finding their individual place in human society. In a 2016 essay titled “Mutants,” Liu describes X-23 as “a girl . . . ​manufactured by scientists for a single purpose: to kill,” and explains that she is thus burdened by “the loneliness of that life, and the coldness. No love. No kindness” (189). An engineered mutant, X-23 is a hero—but an emotionally and ethically complicated protagonist—and “heroes,” Liu argues, “are those we can admire without apology”: “Heroes are varied, some flesh and blood . . . ​some are humans, some are mutants and vampires, or aliens. . . . ​ What they all show us is hope. What they show us is that we, as a people

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who love them are hopeful. . . . ​Hope is our superpower” (191). In her work for Marvel and in Monstress, Liu politicizes hope. Refracted through the lens of gender and race, her treatment of hope is shaped by the figure of the mutant, drawing on Armand Marie Leroi’s Mutants: On Genetic Variation and the Human Body (2003)—a book that, on her blog, Liu notes she has read (Liu, “How Long”). In her study of genetics and humanity, Leroi’s claim that “we are all mutants. But some of us are more mutant than others” shapes Liu’s depiction of mutant, mixed-race, and super characters who struggle to fit normative human and social categories (Leroi 19). Liu offers such a characterization in her work for Marvel. In issue 68 of the Astonishing X-Men, Northstar, who believes that as a gay superhero he can claim common social ties with married homosexual humans, is informed, “You’re a superhero. A mutant. That makes people act weird sometimes”—a sentiment that fuels the narrative and thematic center of Monstress (Liu et al. 207). The hybrid state of a mutant, as interracial or interspecies, posits two (or more) identities, and the mutant body is encoded textually and visually based on the phenotypic elements of skin color and other physical features. In Monstress, Liu and Takeda depict Maika as suggestively Asian, a slender, lateteenage girl with jet-black hair, tan skin, and manga-inspired facial features. Her surname, Halfwolf, embodies the hybridity of the mutant and of the Arcanics (see figure 7.1). A mutant (or alien, whether racial, geopolitical, or extraterrestrial) is often viewed for his or her nonhuman features and is thus registered, dismissed, and anathematized zoologically as a subspecies of humanity. Liu links the racial (and the mixed race in particular) with the mutant in a 2016 interview: “As someone who witnessed racism and experienced racism, to read these stories about people who didn’t belong—even though they were human beings, they weren’t quite considered human—and that resonated with me on a powerful level” (Yu). In Monstress, Liu explores this profound prejudice in the configuration of Maika as a mongrel. Of the dozens of canonical characters that Liu writes of in the eighty issues she produced for Marvel, one in particular is most apposite to a ­discussion of the ontology of the Other and the mongrel in Monstress: Daken—the mixed-race (Asian and white) son of Wolverine and his Japanese wife, Itsu Akihiro. Daken is the character that Liu has written most frequently for Marvel, working on him in twenty-four comics: in a fifteenissue arc of Dark Wolverine (nos. 75–90) in 2009, cowritten with Daniel Way, and in a nine-issue continuation, Daken: Dark Wolverine (nos. 1–9) in 2010–2011. Liu notes that Daken was “known by the name he was

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taunted with as a child: the Japanese term for ‘Mongrel,’ Daken,” and that he was “teased by neighborhood kids for his mixed ancestry” (Way et al. 3, 76). As a mixed species or breed in the canine genus, the mongrel embodies the hybridity of the mutant and the multiraciality of a biracial person. Moreover, Maika’s and Daken’s biological and cultural identities as heroes are constantly assailed because of their biraciality. A “mongrel,” a term that appears often in Monstress and is always applied to Maika and the Arcanics, is perpetually liminal, suspended in the cultural, logical, political, and linguistic space between the oppositional terms of a racial binary that polarizes white and Black, self and other, and thesis and antithesis. The mongrel is dialectic, synthesizing both poles, and thus is often denigrated for not falling precisely into one or the other. Indeed, the term has a long linguistic and political history in American and Asian (and other) cultures as an insult, freighted as a racial epithet that disparages along sexual, social, economic, and genetic lines (especially as it pertains to crossbreeding, miscegenation, and mixed marriage). Etymologically, a now obsolete sense of “mongrel” designates the interbreeding specifically of a wolf and dog, deepening the sense of hybridity conveyed by Maika’s surname, Halfwolf. In her treatment of Daken for Marvel, Liu explores this very hybridity. In the opening scenes of issue 75 of Dark Wolverine, the first in the fifteenissue arc, Daken is attacked because of his mixed raciality. The nefarious Norman Osborn has supplanted Tony Stark as head of the Avengers (and will, in time, form the Dark Avengers), and as Osborn chairs a meeting, Liu captions the cynical quips that Daken thinks but does not speak aloud: “Look at him, enjoying his power. Big man on top, surrounded by his dogs . . . ​But dogs bite” (Way et al. 5). Liu engages the very dog imagery that Daken applies to himself (that he will bite, will resist, Osborn), as Venom taunts him with an implied mongrel metaphor, associating the canine with Daken’s mixed-race heritage: “Bet your claws make good chopsticks”—to which Daken responds, “Being half-Asian, I can’t but feel a bit insulted by your racial insensitivity. But then again you are a moron . . . ​so I’ll forgive you” (6). Hawkeye joins Venom in disparaging Daken, insulting his father, Wolverine, because of his mutant identity. Hawkeye expands on Daken’s “half-Asian” comment, remarking that Daken is “half Asian . . . ​ and half Something Else” (7). Hawkeye’s phrasing is telling, and this “something else” serves as a fit companion to Stuller’s call for “heroes and heroisms” that are “somewhere-in-the-middle”—that are dialectic, combining multiple subject positions and racial and cultural types.

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Liu’s development of Daken embodies the methodology of an intersectional sensibility toward character building in all of her writing: in her twenty novels, eighty Marvel issues, and twenty-seven Monstress issues (as of May  2020), she perspicaciously constructs the racial, psychological, emotional, and intellectual scope of her characters within a kyriarchal context. She disentangles the politics of mongrelization, a process of perpetual intersectionality, and realizes Patricia Hill Collins’s contention that “intersectional paradigms remind us that oppression cannot be reduced to one fundamental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice. In contrast, the matrix of domination refers to how these intersecting oppressions are actually organized” (18). Liu explores the aesthetics of such organization visually, narratively, and thematically as she engages the cultural and political institutions and methods of ontological and epistemological scripting, legislating, and encoding of bodies and minds, imaginations, and faiths that dominate and denigrate the Arcanics as monsters, mutants, and mongrels. In part, such a project is personal for Liu, who comments in an interview, “It’s taken me all these years to wrap my head around all those different forces surrounding me, what that was doing to my sense of self. But I see it most clearly in my work, because I was obsessed with the ‘other,’ with telling stories about monsters that are misunderstood, monsters that are incorrectly judged, that are vilified because of the way they look” (Alleyne). As Liu explores the kyriarchal and genetic exploitation of the racialized and gendered body, the seemingly monstrified body, Maika epitomizes (begrudgingly) an alternative model of superheroism.

Monstress: Monsters and Heroes The winner of multiple British Fantasy, Eisner, and Hugo Awards (2016– 2019), Monstress is a visually arresting, cross-genre comic that incorporates diverse artistic styles. In the twenty-seven issues published to date, Liu commingles alternative history, anime, art deco, the bildungsroman, dark fantasy, the dystopian, epic, the gothic, history, Kaiju, manga, mythology, propaganda, revenge tragedy, science fiction, Shenmo fantasy, steampunk, and superhero comics—among other genres and modes. She presents a matriarchal world that explores the intersection of race, gender, and genre (as she explores the hybridized ontology of each of those categories). Indeed, the etymological playfulness of the title Monstress (a neologism of Liu’s that

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combines the terms “mistress” and “monstrous,” playing off the sonic similarity of the words’ second syllables). The word serves as a mise en abyme of Liu and Takeda’s governing creative technique: the hybridity that suffuses their treatment of genre and narrative. In doing so, Liu positions the monster as the vehicle in an ontological metaphor about race and identity, arguing that “monsters have long reflected humanity’s internal flaws.” She is interested in “monstrousness in all its forms. And how it deforms people—how it deforms their psyches, how it deforms their bodies and how it deforms worlds” (Tutton). A monster, who we eventually learn is named Zinn (Liu and Takeda, Blood 101–102), emerges from the end of Maika’s amputated arm as a mass of black, twisted vines and branches, often humanoid-shaped (figure 7.1). Maika’s monster offers Liu a framework in which to develop a rich psychological character, and also offers a thematic and cultural locus for Liu to mount a generic and political interrogation of the kyriarchal mode that has dominated the racial and gender aesthetics of the superhero in the history of comics since the late 1930s. Throughout Monstress, Maika struggles to develop an autonomous physical and psychological identity. Her declaration, “I don’t want to be a monster,” registers her mixed-race identity as an Other who is discriminated against, physically enslaved, scientifically experimented on, and politically oppressed by characters who view themselves as racially, even genetically, superior (Liu and Takeda, Blood 113). Five races populate the “Known World” of Monstress: humans, cats, the Old Gods, and two mixed races—the Arcanics and the Ancients. As Maika comes to terms with the monster residing inside her, she is pursued by a human society of witch-nuns, the Cumaea, who prey on the Arcanics. The Arcanics are “hybrids of Humans and Ancients,” and they inherit some magical abilities from the latter (Liu and Takeda, Awakening 173). The Ancients are an immortal and magical race that appear most often with humanoid bodies and animal heads. Although Arcanics often appear with animal and mammal-like features and body parts (a second genetic inheritance from the Ancients), “a few look most[ly] human” as Maika does (145). Two other races populate the world. Once threatening the destruction of the world, the Godzilla-size Old Gods were banished and forced to wander the Known World as apparitions, although they are sometimes discernible by Arcanics and Ancients. It is rumored that an Old God (Zinn) “slumbers” in the Known World (173). Serving as poets, philosophers, and historians of the world, the final race, multitailed cats, are the oldest race in Monstress. A constellation of species and races thus orbits around the narrative and generic

FIG. 7.1  ​From Monstress, vol. 3, Haven, Image Comics, 2018, art by Sana Takeda.

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center of Monstress, as Liu self-reflectively scrutinizes the politics and aesthetics of racial taxonomies and phenotypes. In the opening issues of the series, Maika believes that the monster Zinn (before it physically emerges) is a kind of psychic power, a voice in her head, that causes her to question her sanity. It eventually emerges as a physical being with a voracious appetite (which is often satisfied by eating humans). Maika serves as a vehicle—an “inheritor” (Liu and Takeda, Haven 40)—for Zinn, who has “passed into” a succession of her ancestors, including Maika’s mother, Moriko, who is a direct descendent of the Shaman Empress (Liu and Takeda, Awakening 190; Blood 112; Haven 56). The powers of the Shaman Empress, the first Arcanic, exceed those of the Ancients and Old Gods, and Maika is viewed as the person who “will resurrect” her (Liu and Takeda, Haven 102). Maika learns this ancestry incrementally across twenty-seven issues and begrudgingly accepts the political and military role imposed on her to combat the Cumaea. Late in the series, following the defeat of an Old God who has migrated back into the Known World, Maika is hailed as a “hero”—to which she responds, “I’m no fucking hero.” Another character clarifies—and captures Liu’s characterization of Maika as a morally and psychologically fraught protagonist: “He didn’t say you were a good person. He said you were a hero. There’s a difference” (158). Zinn’s presence in Maika makes her militarily appealing to three factions who believe she contains a power that they can deploy as a weapon against each other. The Cumaea, the Ancients, and the Arcanics are engaged in a conflict that is geopolitical, economic, and ideological in scope. The Cumaea, a radical religious sect of humans, perceive themselves as superior to all other species. They scientifically cannibalize the Arcanics, extracting lilium from their bones for its ability to enhance “human minds,” to regenerate “powers” and heal wounds, and to “extend human lifespans” (Liu and Takeda, Awakening 27, 202). As Maika notes, they “chop us up, [and] drink our blood” (12). The Cumaea also use lilium to incarcerate and inhibit the Arcanics by suppressing their magical abilities with slave collars made from the substance (58). The Cumaea justify their actions through their faith, believing they are divinely sanctioned in their racial exploitation of the Arcanics and their quest to rule the world (Liu and Takeda, Awakening 100). Historically, Liu echoes the Nazis’ experiments on humans during World War II, as well as the biography of Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman who, unknowingly, was first exploited by medical researchers in 1951. While she was receiving treatment for cancer, they extracted samples from a biopsied

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tumor, eventually developing the HeLa immortal cell line, which has been used in thousands of experiments for close to seventy years (Greely and Cho 849). Monstress is a story about power—about the kyriarchal struggles between warring races and species striving to dominate one another politically, socially, militarily, and technologically from a position of perceived genetic superiority. “The allure of power is blinding,” as a character remarks in Monstress, and Liu depicts how the corrupt and unscrupulous pursuit and employment of power has traumatic political and personal, as well as emotional and ethical, consequences for characters in the story (Liu and Takeda, Blood 111). Monstress opens as an uneasy “stalemate” of five years between the Cumaea and Arcanics appears on the verge of collapse (Liu and Takeda, Awakening 8)—a tense atmosphere that infuses the series. This troubled state of political affairs parallels Maika’s state of mind, and two genreinfused journeys shape her character. The first journey is couched in a bildungsroman as she grapples with the trauma of the war against the Cumaea, in which she witnessed the death of 146,000 Arcanics at the Battle of Constantine (50). Maika is shaped by an anger that stems from the Cumaea’s persecution of the Arcanics in warfare and the incarceration of her people in “slave camp[s],” scenes that visually echo Art Spiegelman’s Maus, “the first graphic novel [that Liu] ever read” (Liu, “Mutants,” 188). After a truce ends the war, the Cumaea begin to genetically harvest Arcanic lilium through a systematic (gradual, and thus tortuous) series of amputations (Liu and Takeda, Awakening 51). In addition to struggling with the Cumaea’s treatment of her race, Maika wrestles with grief over the presumed death of her parents—which fuels her desire for revenge—and with the difficulty of coming to terms with Zinn. Liu composes what, in The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, Michele Elam dubs a “mixed race bildungsroman”—an anti-bildungsroman, in which a central character serves, as Elam puts it, as “a modernizing agent of a new multicultural world,” often a “biracial character” portrayed as “feeling invisible” (126–127). Arcanic bodies are palimpsestic, rendered increasingly invisible through the genetic and demographic incarceration and erasure of their race. Maika becomes a heroic agent of political change who is enraged and demands humane acknowledgment and treatment of the Arcanics. In Monstress, Maika and the Arcanics are disempowered and disenfranchised politically, economically, and genetically by the Cumaea because of their multiraciality. At times the Ancients, and other Arcanics, are also

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part of this political oppression, when they perceive individual Arcanics, like Maika, as too human. The Cumaean kyriarchal oppression of Arcanics stems from a religious authority “outside the jurisdiction of law . . . ​ without punishment or oversight” that focuses on genetic homogeneity. The Cumaea “are supposed to keep their blood pure,” so “illicit” sexual interaction and intermarriage between races and species is forbidden— echoing the antimiscegenation laws in America that began to be lifted, state by state, with the Supreme Court ruling in 1967 (in Loving v. Virginia) that declared such laws as unconstitutional (Liu and Takeda, Awakening 120). The Cumaea follow the “one-drop rule,” the cultural and legal practice of hypodescent in America that defines racial purity along blood lines (in which a single drop of “black” blood from an ancestor who is African delineates all subsequent family members as Black). Indeed, Liu herself is mindful of such Cumaean practices in her own life, noting in an interview that her mixed-race “parents got married in 1977, less than 10 years after the Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to ban mixed marriages” (Alleyne). In Monstress, Maika’s multiraciality becomes increasingly targeted by characters as they learn that she is tri-racial. A biracial (or bi-species) Arcanic (a hybrid offspring of humans and Ancients), Maika is inhabited by a third being, the Old God Zinn, leading her to agonize, “What Am I? What is inside me?” (Liu and Takeda, Awakening 105). Maika’s ontological doubt about her identity only deepens the Cumaean belief in their genetic superiority, intensifying their efforts to cast Arcanic identity in negative zoological, ideological, and gothic terms. The second journey that Maika undertakes in Monstress is radically different in narrative scale, shifting from the emotional and individual dynamics of the bildungsroman to a global epic infused with the fantastic. She is the subject of a power struggle because she is believed to possess knowledge of “a weapon capable of murdering whole nations in the blink of an eye” (Liu and Takeda, Awakening 125). The bulk of the physical action of Monstress sees Maika pursued by competing cabals. Her adventure-packed journey careens across the continent of the Known World and is punctuated with psychological moments of dreams and flashbacks that flesh out Maika’s taciturn character. Liu offers a series of accumulating flashbacks, for example, that map Maika’s past and frame contexts for the grief, trauma, rage, and violence that fuel her behavior—from childhood to her war experiences (21–26, 149–151, 182–190). While on these two journeys, Maika also attempts to solve several mysteries, including the enigma of her parents’

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deaths or possible disappearances, as well as the nature and identity of Zinn. Accompanying these is a quest narrative as Maika seeks the fragments of an ancient mask that can “awaken the lost power of the Shaman-Empress.” The mask combines “technology and magic” and is a weapon of unimaginable superpower that, as a character notes, everyone seeks: “there is no government, no general, no mercenary, no captain of industry who doesn’t covet” the Shaman Empress’s powers (101, 183, 53–54). Thus Maika embodies a supernatural and superheroic identity and power that she is not fully aware of, and her journeys in Monstress are shaped by an ontological quest to discern her true identity in racial, political, and familial contexts as she thwarts the efforts of racialized factions to locate the Shaman Empress’s mask.

Monstress and the Mongrel: White Bodies, White Lies, White Heroes, and White Writing Liu sets the characters and events of Monstress in a matriarchal world in which she subverts the patriarchal representation of women in the arts: “I grew up reading fantasy stories that were about men. Even if there were female characters in the book, she had no female relationships. . . . ​They were these highly masculinized stories. . . . ​And it’s like that everywhere, in  books, on television, in movies. . . . ​There were almost no women of color. . . . ​I wanted to reverse this, I wanted to tell a story where almost all the major characters were women” (Ganesan). In personal ways, Liu’s and Takeda’s identities shape Monstress in response to the aesthetics of patriarchal representation. Takeda is Japanese and Liu is Asian American, and both wanted to produce a comic that explores race alongside “gender, colonialism and slavery” (Serrano). Genre was a primary consideration for the series’ narrative scope. Liu remarks that, growing up, she was an avid reader of epic fantasy but did not encounter any texts that “had any Asian theme[s]” and “there were never any Asian protagonists in the epic fantasies, anyone that [she] could really identify with” (Davis). The exclusion of characters of her gender and ethnicity, Liu realized in time, led her to embrace the genre of fantasy as a “useful tool of estrangement” for elucidating “themes about race, themes about colonialism, slavery, misogyny, patriarchy” (Davis). Monstress thus can be viewed in the context of Fawaz’s reading of Marvel’s “New Mutants” in The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (2016). Liu composes, as

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Fawaz puts it, a “postwar superhero comic” that makes “fantasy a political resource for recognizing and taking pleasure in social identities . . . ​commonly denigrated as deviant or subversive”—a contention that fits Liu’s view of fantasy as a genre for depicting estrangement. Monstress can be seen, in Fawaz’s terms, as “visually celebrat[ing] bodies whose physical instability” deviates from “social and political norms” and from the racial and gender predominance of white male-centered superheroes in the history of comics (4). Kippa, a fox-appearing Arcanic, for instance, cautions Master Ren, a member of the cat species, not to anathematize the Arcanics like the Cumaea do: “Don’t be like the witches. . . . ​They call us monsters because it makes it easier to hunt us” (Liu and Takeda, Awakening 178). Through the critical lens of race, Liu subverts kyriarchal aesthetics that marginalize and fetishize women of color. More specifically, Liu comments that she and Takeda wanted to engage the “Orient” and devise “a fantasy world that took in all these hybridic elements of Asia.” She wanted to see characters who are “mixed race,” not ones who “were being written as white” (Davis). The narrative and generic architecture of Monstress, moreover, has a sweeping ethnic and geopolitical sensibility, as Liu and Takeda deconstruct cultural constructions of the Orient—as Liu comments in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session, “I wanted to tell a story that subverted the ‘orientalist’ stereotypes of ‘Asian Cultures’ that I grew up seeing on television and reading in books. . . . ​I wanted to tell an epic fantasy that wasn’t Eurocentric. I’m Chinese, and the China, the Asia, I grew up with is by its very nature hybridic: ‘Asia’ is not a monolith; the historical ‘Orient’ was composed of North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia” (Liu, “I’m Marjorie Liu”). Liu’s rejection of fantastic aesthetics founded on “Western feudalism” (Serrano) stems from her sense of the politics of racial representation in literature—she notes that as a child, she “was deeply immersed in Chinese culture” in her community and family. “So how come when I was writing fiction as a kid, all my stories were about white people? Even though my personal life was incredibly diverse, my imaginary life was very white” (Cruz). Monstress is motivated by an interest in developing multicultural and multiracial representation—or as Liu puts it, developing “structural diversity over the optics of diversity” (Cruz). Liu evinces a nuanced post-Saidian sense of the Orient, articulating a vision that substantially extends the historical, political, and geographical model of the Orient that Edward Said discusses in Orientalism (1979). Set in an extensive secondary world, the Known World of Monstress is capaciously

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epic, traversing the history, architecture, geopolitics, economies, and ideologies of the Far East, the Middle East, and northern Africa. Through such a series of creative and cultural lenses, Liu examines two kyriarchal “lies,” which she describes as the following: “the civilizational lie about women that we don’t have agency, that women on average don’t make an impact on  the world. . . . ​That’s the great lie of patriarchy”; and the “lie of white supremacy,” “the visual lie that tells us our heroes, our stories, our love lives” are “white. Being surrounded by that, I think, really deforms the imagination, and it deforms the heart as well” (Alleyne). The thematic heart of Monstress sees Liu address these two lies as she challenges the history of kyriarchal aesthetics that shape the racialized body of the supernatural and superheroic Maika. In Monstress, gender and race are biotextual discourses that are registered visually—that optically focus on cultural and corporeal ontology—and one of the central tensions of the story focuses on the politics of racial passing. Maika, to adopt Teresa Kay Williams’s model of racial passing, has the ability to adopt (but is also forced into) a specific “racial positionality”; her human appearance is viewed by others, especially other Arcanics, as too human, evincing a “phenotypical ambiguity and cultural fluidity” that threatens to transgress the kyriarchal authority of the Cumaea to regulate race (Williams 166). Throughout the series, the Arcanics, and Maika in particular, become the focal point of the “lie of patriarchy” and the “lie of white supremacy” as the Cumaea mount a sustained informational and “endless propaganda” campaign to disparage and a scientific program to exploit and kill the Arcanics (Liu and Takeda, Awakening 158). A Cumaea intelligence report that contends that Arcanics “are abominations who thrive off the anguish and suffering of our kind” with souls “contaminated with evil” gothicizes Maika’s race along ideological, biological, and ethical lines (76). Three scenes in particular reveal the political and racial gothicization of Maika as a mongrel, effectively capturing Cumaean racial ideology. The first of these is the opening scene of Monstress. The other two depict Maika traveling to the Isle of Bones in order to search for the fragments of the Shaman Empress’s mask. In the series’ opening scene, Liu underscores Maika’s too-human appearance when she is sold at a slave auction, where she is billed as an “Arcanic but with a fully human appearance” (Liu and Takeda, Awakening 3). One of the human slave owners who is bidding on Maika seeks racial reassurance: “Are you certain she’s Arcanic? We wouldn’t want to buy a human by mistake.

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We’re criminals not savages”—to which the auctioneer responds that “not all Arcanics resemble monsters” (4). Across the narrative arc of the series, Maika (and all Arcanics by association) is denigrated as an “inhuman freak,” a “fucking animal,” an “abomination,” a “demon,” a “beast,” and “meat”—a process of denomination that steadily imbrutes the Arcanics’ multiraciality (13–14, 71, 94, 101, 123). Through the development of this discourse of racial and genetic segregation, the Arcanics experience a version of the enslavement, incarceration, and genocide of the Africans who were brought to America during the three hundred years of the transatlantic slave trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The Arcanics are stripped of their rights, identity, and agency, as well as any free agency of their bodies and minds. In the second scene that highlights the politics of the mongrel in Monstress, Maika travels to the Isle of Bones aboard an all-female-crewed ship of Arcanic sailors. She, the foxlike Kippa, and the cat Ren, are viewed with contempt by the crew, leading Master Ren to rebuke Jan, a tigerlike crew member who has been taunting him: “I am sick to death of being threatened by mongrel tiger-kin” (Liu and Takeda, Blood 34). Ren, although an ally of Maika’s, falls into the discourse of Arcanic mongrelization perpetuated by the Cumaea and Ancients. The crew similarly mock Maika, believing that her trip to the Isle of Bones is too dangerous and puts them at mortal risk. During this vignette, the crew are infuriated by Maika’s boast that she can outswim the captain. They call Maika a “halfpup,” an insult directed at her age and lack of worldly experience. It is also a zoological insult, and as in Ren’s insult of Jan as “mongrel tiger-kin” (both are felines), Maika is labeled “halfpup” by an Arcanic who embodies the very hybridity that characterizes Maika. Liu thus highlights the intraracial and intraspecies tension that fuels the Arcanic-on-Arcanic prejudice that operates alongside the interracial and interspecies prejudice of the series. The crew scold Maika and a human-octopus Arcanic says to her, “You, Halfpup. I  heard the way you talked to the captain just now. That won’t do. Not from a human. Not from anyone,” to which Maika retorts, “I’m as Arcanic as you.” The Arcanic sailor responds, “You’re gonna need more than a drop of true blood to make you one of us. Right now you smell like a dirty human. You look like a dirty human. That makes you a dirty human,” and then she tentacle-slaps Maika. Heated words lead to fisti- and tentaclecuffs, and Maika eventually tears off one of the sailor’s tentacles (37). In the third encounter, once Maika has landed on the Isle of Bones, she encounters the Blood Fox, an Ancient who has been exiled to the island.

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Ancients, like Arcanics (who half-descend from Ancients), are bi-species, and the Blood Fox blames the Arcanics for what he perceives as the waning supernatural power of the Ancients: “In many epochs past I led a pogrom against your half-breed ancestors. . . . ​[O]ur power began to decline [and] it seemed [the] halfbreed[s] were draining our magic. I tried to reverse our losses by killing you all. I nearly succeeded” (Liu and Takeda, Blood 106). The Blood Fox shares the Cumaea’s hatred of the Arcanics, believing that Maika embodies the Shaman Empress. The fox remarks that the Shaman Empress “spoke of final war . . . ​and that it would be her blood that would decide the fate of all races.” Maika carries (or embodies) the empress’s “blood” and “stand[s] at the centre of the Prophecy.” He tells her, “You are the Shaman-Empress’s Doom.” He then maligns her, believing that she does not “deserve that power,” and furiously declares that the fate of his “great race should not be in the hands of the defiled. Of mongrels”—“of repulsive mongrel[s]” (113, 131). Collectively, these three scenes evince the dynamics of racial passing at the heart of Liu’s treatment of mixed-race identity in Monstress. If, as I have argued, Maika is not simply biracial but rather tri-racial, her uncertainty about her monstrous identity in a world in which the Cumaea persecute the Arcanics (and she is possessed by the Old God Zinn) is compounded by another complicating ontological layer, as a character notes of Maika’s lineage, “No matter how human she looks, she is only two generations removed from the most powerful Ancient still alive,” the Shaman Empress (Liu and Takeda, Blood 71). Thus Maika incarnates no fewer than four competing racial elements in her hybrid (and always ontologically fluctuating) identity. She personifies, to use Williams’s words, “the cultural and phenotypical ambiguity of [an] Asian-descent multiracial” who “operates as the fulcrum upon which ‘passing’ teeters back and forth” (167). Indeed, throughout Monstress, Maika is constantly reconstructed and reconstituted along lines of slipping racial persecution and disparagement. She does not readily fit into any one racial category because she is not “Arcanic” enough: she alternates between being too human, too animal-like, too Old God–like, and too like the Shaman Empress. She struggles, for instance, with her humanlike appearance. As Liu notes, Maika does not alter physically and metamorphose as she ages like other Arcanics (“changelings”) do: “Their eyes change, or their teeth grow sharp . . . ​or their tails appear” (Liu and Takeda, Blood 36, 48). When criticized by Corvin, an Arcanic who can pass as human (when he folds and hides his wings under clothing),

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Maika jokes about a possible method for obtaining phenotypical approval as a truly hybrid Arcanic: “I should glue a fucking tail to my ass.” And in response to another complaint by an Arcanic—that “she’s got enough human blood to be one of them”—Maika responds, “I had enough Arcanic blood to be a Cumaean slave, so fuck off” (Liu and Takeda, Haven 16). Perpetually mongrelized, Maika is rebuffed by several races for not fitting into any racial taxonomy. She is equally and alternately too human and not human enough and so is disdained by humans and by hybrid races like the Ancients and her own kind, the Arcanics. Liu thus positions Maika in a wider racial tradition in literature and politics in America in which multiple racial hierarchies operate (and intersect)—leaving her constantly ranked as racially inferior. In New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States and Multiracial Parents: Mixed Families, Generational Change, and the Future of Race, Joel Williamson and Miri Song, respectively, explore mixed-race identity (especially through the lens of marriage) and account for the historical and political development of racial hierarchies and heterogeneity in America (and England) in two modes: an interracial model that positions white Americans as superior to African Americans; and an intraracial model within the African American community that demarcates some people as blacker than others (along phenotypical, ideological, and culture lines). These two intertwined models operate in Monstress. In the interracial hierarchy, the Cumaea view themselves as the apex humans, above all other human communities, and the Arcanics and cats. Maika is disturbingly human (in human eyes) because she can pass as human. Yet in the intraracial hierarchy of the Arcanics, she is not hybrid enough—her too-human appearance suggests in the eyes of more animal-appearing Arcanics that, in passing as human, she has not suffered the same degree of prejudice and persecution that they have. She faces, in both vertical models, the pressure of prejudice that subordinates her and casts her as zoologically and genetically inferior.

Conclusion: Monstress as a Mongrel Love Song In Monstress, Liu’s characterization of Maika as a mongrel (and the related racial categories of the monster and the mutant) is fueled by an interrogation of the epistemology and ontology of identity. As Joshua Glasgow argues, language shapes racial identity: “The ontology of race . . . ​is often driven by the

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semantics of race, as the race debate frequently takes this tack: if racial terms purport to refer to natural—specifically, biological—kinds, then race is not real (since there appear to be no biological races); but if racial terms purport to refer to social kinds, then race might be real (on the premise that social kinds can count as real). Thus the race debate hinges on what racial terms purport to refer to” (334). While I have argued that Monstress is a story about power—of the Cumaea, Arcanics, and Ancients battling one another for genetic, technological, military, and political supremacy—Liu reveals a selfaware sensibility, an awareness of the gender and racial dynamics at play at the level of genre, and even at the level of language. As Liu composes what Elam would term a “mixed race bildungsroman,” she engages Anthony R. Guneratne’s model of “chronotopes of mongrel literatures”: “If I choose to ignore the generic rules set for me by the laws of white writing, the conventions that dictate what I must say, how I should say it, and what boundaries I must observe when saying it, it is to pay tribute to the ethics of style I find in my subject matter” (6). Liu actively engages and subverts the “laws of white writing” that have shaped the tradition of the comic book superhero since World War II. In doing so, she writes what can be thought of as a “love song,” adopting Salman Rushdie’s description of his Satanic Verses (1988) as a mongrel text. Rushdie contends that his novel is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis (slow or rapid, painful or pleasurable) that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity. . . . ​The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. . . . ​The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves. (394)

Monstress is a love song to monsters, mutants, and mongrels, all modes of the intersectional and hybrid, that presents a vision of the mixed-race supernatural and superheroic female.

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Works Cited Alleyne, Lauren K. “Marjorie Liu: Making a Monstress.” Guernica, 15 Feb. 2016, www​ .guernicamag.com/making-a-monstress/. Accessed 18 May 2020. Brown, Jeffrey A. The Modern Superhero in Film and Television: Popular Genre and American Culture. Routledge, 2016. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2000. Cruz, Lenika. “Marjorie Liu on the Road to Making Monstress.” Atlantic, 14 Sept. 2017, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/09/marjorie-liu-monstress-interview/539394/. Accessed 18 May 2020. Davis, Rachel. “Marjorie Liu Talks the X-Men, Identity, and Monstress at NYCC 2017!” Comicsverse, 4 Nov. 2017, comicsverse.com/marjorie-liu-nycc-2017/. Accessed 18 May 2020. Elam, Michele. The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium. Stanford University Press, 2011. Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York University Press, 2016. Ganesan, Sharmilla. “Monstress Writer Marjorie Liu, the First Woman to Win the Best Writer Eisner Award.” Star, 28 Aug. 2018, www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle​/people​ /2018/08/28/marjorie-liu-sana-takeda-monstress. Accessed 18 May 2020. Glasgow, Joshua. “On the Methodology of the Race Debate: Conceptual Analysis and Racial Discourse.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. 76, no. 2, 2008, pp. 333–358. Greely, Henry T., and Mildred K. Cho. “The Henrietta Lacks Legacy Grows.” European Molecular Biology Organization Reports, vol. 14, no. 10, 2013, p. 849. Guneratne, Anthony R. “The Chronotopes of Mongrel Literatures: Rushdie, Ondaatje, Naipaul and the Problems of Postcoloniality.” World Literature Written in English, vol. 37, nos. 1–2, 1998, pp. 5–23. Leroi, Armand Marie. Mutants: On Genetic Variation and the Human Body. Viking, 2003. Liu, Marjorie. “How Long.” Marjorie M. Liu, 8 May 2005, www.marjoriemliu.com​ /how_long/. Accessed 18 May, 2020. ———. “I’m Marjorie Liu, Writer and Co-creator of the Bestselling Series Monstress. AMA!” Reddit, 30 July 2017, www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/6qimxq/im_mar​ jorie_liu_writer_and_cocreator_of_the/. Accessed 18 May 2020. ———. “Mutants.” Chicks Dig Comics, edited by Lynne M. Thomas and Sigrid Ellis, Mad Norwegian, 2012, pp. 188–191. Liu, Marjorie, writer, and Sana Takeda, artist. Monstress. Vol. 1, Awakening. Image Comics, 2016. ———. Monstress. Vol. 2, The Blood. Image Comics, 2017. ———. Monstress. Vol. 3, Haven. Image Comics, 2018. Liu, Marjorie, writer, and Gabriel Hernandez Walta, Felix Ruiz, and Amilcar Pinna, artists. Astonishing X-Men. Vol. 12, Unmasked. Marvel, 2013. Robinson, Lillian S. Wonder Woman: Feminisms and Superheroes. Routledge, 2004. Rushdie, Salman. “In Good Faith.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–91. Granta, 1992, pp. 393–414.

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Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation. Beacon, 1992. Scott, Anna Beatrice. “Superpower vs Supernatural: Black Superheroes and the Quest for a Mutant Reality.” Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 5, no. 3, 2006, pp. 295–314. Serrano, Zulai. “Monstress Is Marjorie Liu’s Response to ‘Vast Inequality’ of Women in Media.” Player.One, 24 July 2017, www.player.one/monstress-marjorie-liu-image​ -comics-x-23-sdcc-2017-117995. Accessed 18 May 2020. Song, Miri. Multiracial Parents: Mixed Families, Generational Change, and the Future of Race. New York University Press, 2017. Stuller, Jennifer K. Ink-Stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors: Superwomen in Modern Mythology. Bloomsbury, 2010. Tutton, Robert. “Marjorie Liu Raises Dark Questions on War and Slavery for New Image Series Monstress.” Paste, 4 Nov. 2015, www.pastemagazine.com/articles​ /2015/11/marjorie-liu-sana-takeda-explores-the-cost-of-war.html. Accessed 18 May 2020. Way, Daniel, and Marjorie Liu, writers, Tommy Lee Edwards, artist, Giuseppe Camuncoli, penciller, and Onofrio Catacchio, inker. Daken: Dark Wolverine, The Prince. Marvel, 2010. Williams, Teresa Kay. “Race-ing and Being Raced: The Critical Interrogation of ‘Passing.’ ” “Mixed Race” Studies: A Reader, edited by Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Routledge, 2004, pp. 166–170. Williamson, Joel. New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States. Free Press, 1980. Yu, Mallory, “Comic Book Writer Marjorie Liu on How Rejection Shaped Her Writing.” NPR, 22 July 2016, www.npr.org/2016/07/22/487078939/graphic-novel​ ist-marjorie-lui-on-how-rejection-shaped-her-writing. Accessed 18 May 2020.

8

Examining Otherness and the Marginal Man in DC’s Superman through Mixed-Race Studies K WASU DAVID TEMBO

We all know the origin story: Ahead of the cataclysmic explosion of the alien planet Krypton, its foremost scientist, Jor-El, and his wife, Lara LorVan, place their infant son, Kal-El, in an escape shuttlecraft. Narrowly escaping his parents’ fate, Kal-El is sent hurtling into space and subsequently crash-lands in the wheat fields of Kansas, Earth.1 The infant is taken in as a foundling by the Kents, a childless, loving couple. Superman, as a Kryptonian, is an alien life-form sharing uncanny physical and behavioral similarities with human beings. While he is genetically Kryptonian, the destruction of his home world cut him off from Kryptonian culture, language, art, history, ideology, and lifestyle in any kind of lived communal sense. In this way, Superman is more Kryptonian by definition than by experience in that his entire experience of youth, adolescence, and adulthood is circumscribed by human ideology. While Superman may not be 158

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human in an ontological sense, he certainly lives, behaves, and thinks like a white man in an existential sense. The influence of human ideology on the character forms the bedrock of the various impetuses—moral, legal, and social—that govern both his behavior and, more problematically, his power. The central tension here is that the Superman mythos centers on the narrative of a character that looks like a human being but can act in ways humans deem godly; one who intercedes in human affairs in what is often assumed and accepted to be altruistic ways, guided primarily by the often ill-defined and bankrupt ideas of “truth” and “justice.” It is this confluence of the onto-existential mixture of being and experience that makes Superman a particularly interesting, complex, and helpful metaphor in discussions of the issues and debates concerning mixed race.

Among Them, but Not of Them: Reframing Superman in Terms of Mixed-Race Studies The thesis this chapter will pursue concerns Superman’s psychological and emotional turmoil, seen in such recent and controversial examples as Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel (2013) and Batman v Superman (2016) (as well as certain comics), which present the character as a hypersensitive, tragic, confused, overreacting, and untrustworthy Other seeking to be human. As such, he is portrayed as trying to be something he is not. This portrayal problematically reinscribes negative archetypes and stereotypes about mixedness as a necessarily and inescapably tragic subject position. I claim that certain depictions of Superman that portray him as a “marginal man” propagate problematic and offensive discourses about mixed-race people. I would here like to emphasize the fact that Superman is often depicted not as a mixed or marginal man but rather as an explicit figurehead or symbol of white Americana. Many representations of Superman do not pay any particular attention to the character’s Kryptonian heritage, nor do they linger on any kind of “identity” crisis the character may experience as a direct result of his mixed lineage. The typical image of Superman in print or on-screen is one of a truculent, righteous, confident, altruistic, and determined champion of the state and its downtrodden; in essence, a beaming jingo-idealist or saluting neoconservative super public servant. In this mode, the character represents such concepts as power, hegemony, and whiteness.2 Though the character is the invention of two Jewish teenagers, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, what

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we could call the typical depictions of Superman make it difficult not to view or read the character as a symbol of white supremacy. This manifests in numerous ways, but two examples would be the manner in which the character’s immigrant or alien status is downplayed through his conventional physical depiction and the character’s problematic supralegal alliance with repressive state apparatuses of American law and its status quo.3 Though I am unable to pursue the alternative in this chapter, I acknowledge it briefly here. Indeed, there is a tradition within the character’s nearly century-long publication history in which his alienness and “mixed” or marginal status is emphasized.4 However, in terms of the issues and debates of mixed-race studies, this depiction is still often problematic in that it also typically relies on stereotypes of mixedness or marginality. As a result, it too often supports both subtle and overt ideologies of white supremacy, as well as racial purity. Therefore, on the one hand, when Superman’s whiteness or Americanness is emphasized, he is often depicted as a happily assimilated, powerful, and white godlike archon of red-blooded Americana. On the other hand, when the character’s mixedness or marginality is emphasized, he is a monstrously invasive, dangerously violent, and mawkishly lonely figure. Ostensibly, these depictions might appear antipodal. Ideologically, however, particularly within the issues and debates of race, they in fact seem to serve the same ideological ends. At this early stage, I would like to take a moment to outline the methodology being brought to bear in my mixed-race analysis of Superman. As this chapter approaches Superman as a despecialized, deculturalized, detribalized Krypto-Kansan mulatto—that is, a Kryptonian separated from any lived experience within Kryptonian culture and subsequently having his experience of life hybridized with that of Kansas farm life—I feel it necessary to offer some contextualizing remarks concerning two aspects of my analysis in this regard; namely, my use of a certain controversial concept in critical mixed-race studies and my approach to a particular version of Superman as defined by my primary case study examples. My engagement with mixed-race studies mostly revolves around the concept of the “marginal man.” I do this while conscious of the fact that within critical mixed-race studies, the concept of the marginal man as an assessment of identarian plurality has been largely debunked. Scholars such as Sonia Janis have noted that “early works in the field of psychology that addressed multiracial identity development were rife with negative innuendos and implications. A widely referenced work by Everett Stonequist (1937) introduced a multiracial

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identity development model referred to as the ‘marginal man.’ The model’s premise was that individuals who had multiple racial heritages were suffering psychologically” (Janis 450). Other notable works that have analyzed the problematic connections between the marginal man and the tragic mulatto include more recent texts like Ralina Joseph’s Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (32, 40, 98, 164) and Greg Carter’s The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing (4, 58–59, 126). I will use the concept of the marginal man as an analytical frame through which to explore the tensions inherent in Superman’s status as terraformed alien being (a being sociopolitically interpellated and assimilated into human culture as represented by the various DC Comics Earths) and how these resemble similar tensions at play in mixed-race individuals. To be clear, viewing the character in this way is not an attempt to suggest that Superman either comprehensively annuls or ameliorates the concept of the marginal man. In fact, he often reinforces its most troubling conclusions, particularly in terms of the purported psycho-emotional ennui and malaise that result from the sociocultural “inbetweeness” and intercultural mixedness that will be the target of the analysis to follow. There are three further points I need to make about the methodology employed here. First, as aforementioned, my approach to Superman gestures to the various tensions that result from the interaction between the character’s alienness and humanness as a metaphor for racial mixedness. However, since Superman (and the overwhelming majority of depictions of Kryptonians) appears white and is biologically purely Kryptonian, this analogy can, at times, be problematic or insufficient. However, the methodological value of this metaphor centers on the ways in which Superman’s mix of Kryptonian biology and Earth culture can be properly understood or framed in the context of racial mixedness. A simple example of this, which I discuss at length elsewhere, is Superman’s passing as human in the guise of Clark Kent.5 Passing is one of numerous tropes frequently investigated in mixed-race studies. Here, Superman’s “passing” fits into and can be well expressed through a racial context. In other ways, however, the racialized analogy of alienness and humanness is less applicable.6 Throughout this chapter, I will endeavor to be mindful of this issue. Related to this point is the paradoxical logic of “dominant” and “minority” cultures in reference to Superman, Terrans (Earthlings), and Kryptonians and how I treat or use these labels in this chapter. While I refer to Krypton as representative of the dominant culture in Superman’s “mixed”

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life, the character is clearly a minority on Earth. As a result of this paradoxically extreme minority status—extreme in terms of the character’s amazing physical powers and abilities—Superman is, in some depictions, subject to feelings of marginalization and persecution on account of his inability to fully integrate with the Terran majority. In terms of sheer power or aptitude for force, Krypton is or would clearly be “dominant” in any actual physical or technological contretemps between Krypton and Earth.7 However, in terms of a discussion of the “marginal man” and racial mixedness, it is clear that Earth is analogized with white America as the dominant or hegemonic culture or society, while Superman’s Kryptonian alienness is representative of the (racial) Other who does not fully fit in and, as a result, has to try to pass as one of the many. Complicating the racial analogy is the fact that Superman is not only an alien passing as human but also an alien who appears uncannily like a Caucasian man, and thus, as discussed earlier, his symbolic status may oscillate between complex racial passer and simple representative of white-bread Americana. This brief explication of my particular assignment of these terms here is an attempt to acknowledge that the labels of “dominant” and “minority” cultures in the context of Superman and racialized marginality can, indeed, be reversed depending on which version of Superman and in which specific context the character is being discussed. Similarly, I need clarify my use of the “ontological” in reference to Superman’s status as alien or Other. I acknowledge that this is problematic in an analogy to race—being that race is commonly understood as a social construction whereby the ontological reality of skin color, for example, has social ramifications. However, my use of the term in relation to Superman’s status as an outsider is, again, intended to mark my recognition of the paradoxical nature of the character’s marginality. My calling Superman ontologically Other expressly refers to Superman’s alienness and the power and Otherness that are inextricable therefrom. While ontology in this sense has no imperative power in terms of my understanding of the character’s specifically racial Otherness, it does factor into Superman’s Otherness more broadly in terms of powers and abilities. More recently, Superman’s metaphorical mixed-race status has become more literal across various visual media in which the character appears. This literalization of mixedness typically centers on Superman’s child(ren) in the following examples: Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns gives us an asthmatic yet superpowered son of Superman and Lois Lane who is more

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ontologically and culturally mixed than his father, being the hybrid result of both human and Kryptonian DNA. In Tom Taylor’s 2013 prequel comics to the Injustice: Gods among Us video game, the death of Lois Lane and her unborn hybrid child precipitates Superman’s descent into tyranny. The conclusion of Dan Jurgens et  al.’s 2017  in-continuity comics Superman Reborn sees Superman married to Lois Lane and both raising their “mixed” child, named Jonathan Samuel Kent. On television, in the Supergirl episode “Elseworlds, Part 3,” it is revealed that Superman and Lois have to leave Earth because of Lois’s pregnancy. The journey is a precautionary measure in view of the in vitro dangers instantiated by the very “mixedness” of her child, such as the potential risk of their child kicking a hole through Lois’s stomach if they remain under a yellow sun. I have chosen my particular case studies because they represent a specific approach to Superman’s experiential conflict between his humanity and his Otherness, jointly understood as his “marginality” (a term that is cognate with my usage of the term “Otherness” in relation to the character’s mixedness). In these examples, the character’s marginality and the negative psychological and emotional consequences of Superman’s displacement are centralized. While this chapter examines some of the mixed-race consequences of Superman’s alien and human experiences when presented in some contexts as a “marginal man,” I am not suggesting that this means the character is simply a reflection of the “real experiences” of mixed-race people. Instead, bringing Superman into critical mixed-race discourse is intended to point out that many of the arguably uncomfortable implications of reading the character as a marginal man are precisely what lurk in the shadow of Superman’s cape.

The Krypto-anthropological Problem of Superman as a Marginal Man Scholars including Erica Mohan, Leanne Taylor, Terah Venzant Chambers, and Joanne Calore have noted that the marginal man thesis gained popularity throughout the 1930s and 1940s.8 It was sublimated into the discriminatory and repressive ideologies and praxes of colonial state and cultural apparatuses. In this capacity, it came to do the work of legitimizing the colonial order’s increased reliance on racial and social demarcations as a means of justifying said demarcation’s subjugative power and discriminatory efficacy.

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In this way, the marginal man, note Mohan et al., “was not only constructed as tragic and confused, but also as untrustworthy . . . ​hypersensitive, and ultimately as one who ‘never acts but overreacts,’ . . . ​and ultimately is an ‘impudent charlatan’ seeking to be White and effectively ‘be something they are not’ ” (Mohan et al. 230). The marginal man thesis is largely attributable to the American sociologist Everett Stonequist, who developed the concept in his 1937 work The Marginal Man: A Study in Personality and Culture. In it, the term “marginal man” came to define any individual determined to not “properly” belong to a specific culture. For Stonequist, the marginal man was ultimately driven by insecurity, psychological frustration, maladjustment, restlessness, and malaise—all of which are seen as conditions of their inbetween status and struggle to belong to either of their parents’ racial backgrounds (65). There are six explicit comments Stonequist makes about racial mixedness in The Marginal Man that I would like to highlight in relation to my discussion of the same in Superman: (1) the mixed-race individual is the clearest “type” of marginal man; (2) this individual often “possesses some characteristics of manner, thought and speech which are derived from both lines of his ancestry”; (3) because of the sociopolitically and culturally interstitial nature of the mixed-race individual, his or her “place” within the broader body politic and its various ideological apparatuses is unclear; (4) as the mixed-race individual grows and develops, he or she will inevitably become or be made aware of his or her sociopolitically and culturally interstitial status, one Stonequist sees not as a possible strength but as abjectly anomalous; (5) as a direct result of (4), the mixed-race individual will necessarily become a pariah, scapegoat, and strawman for any hostility or resentment that exists between the individual’s parent races; (6) finally, the result of (1)–(5) is that “since the contact of races in the modern age has rarely been smooth and harmonious, there is something universal in the problem of racial hybrids” (Stonequist 65). Stonequist also makes ancillary claims outside this primary sextet that bear on Superman’s “mixed” experience, two of which I draw attention to. First, with the marginal man, “there is an increase in sensitiveness,” and “this may be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending upon the existing social definitions and opportunities. His uncertain social position intensifies his concern about status. His anxiety to solve his personal problem forces him to take an interest in the racial problem as a whole” (Stonequist 67). Second, the marginal man “has an important part in defining and eventually changing the general pattern of race relations” (Stonequist 67).

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How might Stonequist’s conservative conceptualizations of mixedness apply to a star-fallen orphan refugee who is initially the only one of his kind on Earth? If Superman is seen as a cultural alien-human hybrid, Stonequist’s severe appraisals of the experiences of mixed-race individuals resemble, almost exactly, those views of Superman harbored by Lex Luthor, distilled in Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo’s five-issue miniseries Lex Luthor: Man of Steel (2005). Through Lex Luthor, Azzarello emphasizes the underlying aspects of the character’s being that morality (represented in this case by Superman’s credo of “truth, justice, and the American way”) cannot nullify or fully account for—namely, his disruptive power and uncanny Otherness. Bermejo underscores the danger and power of this type of disruptiveness by portraying Superman as violent, grimacing, and frightening in a way that shatters any resemblance between the beaming redeemer of Absolute All-Star Superman (figure  8.1) and the ostensibly demonic being of monstrous fury and power in Lex Luthor: Man of Steel (figure 8.2). Like the Christian conceptualization of God in the Old and New Testaments—which the character has been visually and narratively associated with—there are seemingly two sides to Superman: one of beneficent redemption and one of apocalyptic wrath and power. This paradoxical status, which resembles the half-in, half-out status of the mixed-race individual, albeit magnified exponentially, generates a type of resonant unease based on a confluence of fear, awe, envy, and resentment that the ostensible performance of moral probity Superman is typically known for cannot totally, perhaps even effectively, ameliorate. Therefore, while “racial beliefs helped create two social orders and moral universes . . . ​rooted in white racial fears . . . ​of the invasion of the white social order by the black man” (Füredi 72), Azzarello shows that so too is Superman caught in an invader-redeemer dialectic, a paradoxically white-looking radical Other whose very Otherness has the potential to destabilize the white JudeoChristian ideology of Western society the character subsequently comes to defend and typically represent. Kerry Ann Rockquemore, David Brunsma, and Daniel Delgado offer a clearer life trajectory of the marginal man than Stonequist, stating that the marginal man undergoes three predicable stages of the life cycle: (a) introduction, (b) crisis, and (c) adjustment. In the initial introduction stage, the marginal man experiences some assimilation into the two cultures of his parents. This is followed by a crisis stage, where the individual has one

FIG. 8.1  ​From Absolute All-Star Superman, DC Comics, October 2011, art by Frank Quitely.

FIG. 8.2  ​From Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, vol. 1, no. 1, May 2005, DC Comics, art by Lee Bermejo.

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or more defining experiences that indicate the irreconcilable nature of the cultural conflict that marks his existence. The crisis induces feelings of confusion, shock, disillusionment, and estrangement. Finally, he adjusts to his status and the full understanding of his social location. In most cases, the adjustment is toward the dominant group. However, in the case of Black / White mixed-race people in the United States, where adjustment toward the dominant group (Whites) was impossible because of White supremacy and segregation, the marginal man was predicted to become a leader among the subordinate group (Blacks), or alternatively experience withdrawal or isolation. (16–17)

I argue that these three stages in a mixed person’s life can be directly applied to the three identity markers of Superman as follows: (a) Kal El as introduction, whereby the infant alien Ka-El is introduced to terrestrial life and, more importantly, human ideology’s understanding thereof through the worldview of the Kents; (b) Clark Kent as crisis, whereby the manifestation of superpowers in the preadolescent or adolescent (depending on the version of the origin story) represents a series of onto-existential experiences that disrupt the illusion of Superman’s humanity—along with all the other elements inherent to human maturation and its psychoemotional turmoil and ardor, the young Clark Kent comes to learn of the truth of his provenance and the seemingly irreconcilable nature of the ontoexistential conflict between Kryptonian and human, despite the superficial similarity each shares with each; lastly, (c) “Superman” as adjustment, whereby the character creates a tertiary persona that allows him to synthesize the Otherness of Kryptonian power or the power of Kryptonian Otherness with human ideology. In this way, Superman, realizing his social location as a radically powerful Other on Earth, consistently ameliorates the inextricable conflict that results from said position through an aesthetic phenomenon commonly known as “the superhero.” As stated earlier, because Krypton no longer exists, Superman cannot identify with the dominant group. However, in being the last of his race, endowed with powers as a result of his terrestrial existence, Superman, like the mixed-race individual racially prohibited from identification with the dominant group, becomes a leader among the subordinate group—that is, humanity—as both “the Man of Steel” and “the Man of Tomorrow.” Furthermore, the character’s sequestration in his base of operations, the Fortress of Solitude (an ice castle of Kryptonian design, material, and manufacture situated near the North Pole), is both a

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literal and symbolic manifestation of the withdrawal and isolation Superman experiences while simultaneously being a leader and hero to humanity. All of these mutually contradictory experiences culminate in a subject position predicated on experience of psycho-emotional tragedy. Mark Waid eloquently describes the character’s experience in this regard, stating that the character has vague dreamlike memories of his lost home world, particularly every evening at dusk, when he feels an inexplicable sadness and longing in watching the setting sun turn red on the horizon. And every time, in his Clark identity, that he has to politely forego a pickup touch-football game for fear of crippling the opposing line, every time he hears the splash of an Antarctic penguin while trying to relax on a Hawaiian beach, every time he surrenders himself to a moment of unbridled joy and looks down to see that he’s quite literally walking on air, he gets the message loud and clear: He’s not from around here. He doesn’t belong here. He was raised as one of us, but he’s really not one of us. Superman is the sole survivor of his race. He is an alien being. (8)

From the foregoing examination, we can agree that Superman, to both any surviving Kryptonians and all human beings he encounters, is Other, variant, different. For the young Kal-El / Clark, the dilemmas of cultural identity formation reflect those described as typical to the adolescent development of the marginal man. As Rockquemore et al. note, “Developmental problems may arise when individuals experience conflicts in their efforts to resolve the following five major psychosocial tasks: (a) conflicts about their dual racial / ethnic identity, (b) conflicts about their social marginality, (c) conflicts about their sexuality and choice of sexual partners, (d) conflicts about separation from their parents, and (e) conflicts about their educational or career aspirations” (18). Here, the psychological and emotional tumult of Superman’s mixed experience inheres in the fact that he constantly has to navigate (a) his Kryptonian and human identities, (b) his terrestrial marginality and Kryptonian marginality when encountering other survivors of the calamity that destroyed Krypton, (c) expressing himself sexually to humans like Lois Lane and Lana Lang, as well as nonhumans like Wonder Woman, in view of the physiological conundrums exacerbated by his physical power, (d) his psychological and emotional conflict about the loss of his parents and the world they represented, and (e) his moral and ethical conflict about what it is he should do with his

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power. Thus, in many depictions, Superman’s physical, social, and psychological development follows the trajectory of the “marginal man” theory and reinforces its stereotypical assessment of mixed-race people.

Superman, the Marginal Man, the Problem Approach, and the Variant Approach The problem approach to theorizing multiracial identity is based on the idea that a mixed-race individual is marked by tragedy. This is due to the fact that her or his status as racially mixed in a racially segregated world is tantamount to occupying a fundamentally problematic social position. As Rockquemore et al. note, “theories of racial identity development that take a problem approach focus on deficits, dilemmas, and negative experiences associated with the position of being mixed-race in a racially segregated society. In other words, they specify the rejection, isolation, and stigma that mixed-race people experienced from both dominant and minority groups” (16; emphasis added). When applied to Superman, comics such as Superman / Wonder Woman no. 4 (2014), in which Kal-El encounters other Kryptonians that survived the destruction of Krypton, like the villain General Zod (Soule et al.), illustrate that the latter almost always express antagonistic feelings toward Kal-El and criticize his humanity as a dilution of not only the Kryptonian race he serves as a final representative but also its identity.9 In Zack Snyder and David S. Goyer’s film Man of Steel (2013), Jor-El and Lara have the following exchange in which both parents acknowledge the difficulty their child will face as being part of both the dominant and the minority groups on Earth relative to a Kryptonian: L AR A LOR-VAN  ​He will be an outcast. They’ll kill him. JOR-EL  ​How? He’ll be a god to them.

The dialectical positions expressed by Superman’s parents can be firmly grounded in critical mixed-race studies. The character’s bifurcated and paradoxical status of elevated abjection refers exactly to what Ralina Joseph describes as the “exceptional multiracial” in Transcending Blackness. While Joseph discusses this and other key terms like “hybrid vigor” in a specifically Black mixed-race context, the suspicion, resentment, admiration, and pseudo-worship Superman engenders are similar to the “denigration and

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valorization” experienced by mixed-race individuals (Joseph, “Multiracial” 1583). Therefore, when Lara expresses her fears that Kal-El will be an outcast, her warning recalls all the psychological and emotional torment at the core of the tragic mulatto archetype. Antipodally, when Jor-El suggests that Superman will be as a god to humankind, he invokes what Joseph refers to as the “exceptional multiracial,” a “figure . . . ​scripted to dismiss ‘the black voice’ so much that it erases blackness entirely” (Joseph, Transcending 22). While Joseph subtly gestures at the pseudo-messianic status of the exceptional multiracial, there is an overt messianic implication in Jor-El’s assessment. Implicit is the notion that like the Judeo-Christian God, under whom all men, women, and children are equals, so too would the godlike figure of Superman unite all Earthlings under his power. However, there is another way of interpreting Jor-El’s statement in view of Joseph’s insights into the potential of the exceptional multiracial. When transposed to Superman, the character’s status as a powerful alien trying to assimilate to Terran life represents what Jor-El sees as an opportunity for both Kal-El and his host Earthlings to transcend their previously separate identities (Earthling and Kryptonian) and erase these distinctions entirely, thereby giving way to radically new and hybrid ways of life for a radically new and hybrid species. It is in this idea of possibility that the epithet “Man of Tomorrow” is located. Similarly, the superlative sense of resentment and jealousy against Superman on Earth forms the core theme of Snyder and Goyer’s controversial 2016 follow-up, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. While Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) deplores Superman’s (Henry Cavill) strength and Other abilities in the same way a morally opprobrious “native” of a particular cultural locus may feel threatened by the moral adroitness of a righteous immigrant, Batman’s (Ben Affleck) hatred of Superman is founded on the sustained threat his power represents to all humanity. However, I argue that Batman’s enmity against Superman is truly based on the fact that while Batman can aptly be described as a man playing at being a god, Superman can aptly be described as a god playing at being a man. For Batman, Superman can never be considered human because of the power of his Otherness and the Otherness of his power. To Batman, a Kryptonian on Earth can never experience certain penetrating human frustrations, senses of helplessness, and personal and communal tragedy. This sentiment is distilled in the following lines of dialogue that Batman delivers to his Kryptonian opponent:

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I bet your parents taught you that you mean something, that you’re here for a reason. My parents taught me a different lesson, dying in the gutter for no reason at all. . . . ​They taught me the world only makes sense if you force it to. . . . You’re not brave. [Blocks a punch, shocking Superman.] Men are brave. . . . Tell me, do you bleed? [Superman flies away.] You will.10

For Luthor, Batman, and all of Superman’s other detractors, the rejection, isolation, and stigma he experiences are seen as absolutely necessary. This is due to the fact that the underlying elements of Superman—that is, his supramoral power and Otherness—will always already serve as reminders of Superman’s onto-existential mixedness.11 (Of course, the events that immediately follow in the film suggest the shared humanity of the two heroes, downplaying Superman’s onto-existential Otherness and allowing them to engage in a typical superhero team-up.)

Conclusion What conclusions can be drawn from framing the psycho-emotional conflicts inherent to Superman’s experience of cultural mixedness on Earth through mixed-race studies? For one thing, the recursiveness of stories in the nearly century-long publication history of Superman that refer to the character’s origins and upbringing suggests that the issues and debates concerning assimilation, literal and figurative alienation, and intercultural mixing are central to the character’s mythos. More interesting is the fact that these themes, whether reimagined or displaced onto other characters, from Supergirl to Superman’s son, have always been inextricable from Superman’s most basic narrative premise. The implication here is that despite changing readerships and artistic and editorial input that includes several complete reboots of the entire DC Universe, the process of developing a positive racial identification for Superman is an ongoing one. Inserting this process into mixed-race discourse helps draw out interesting aspects of the character’s interspecial and intercultural mixedness that confirm and renege certain psycho-emotional stereotypes of mixedness and marginality. When read as a mixed individual through the lens of critical race studies, Superman suggests that while being mixed may involve the abjection of certain psychological and emotional difficulties, it does

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not necessarily mean that to be mixed is to occupy an abjectly powerless subject position. It is a constant negotiation and renegotiation between the mixed individual and her or his sociopolitical and cultural locus; said locus’s worldview in terms of racial or cultural segregation, predicated on the power or agency of the Other; and the individual’s personal skills, abilities, or powers. Viewing Superman as a bicultural being also suggests that perhaps what is missing and most exigently required in terms of the ongoing Superman mythos is a greater emphasis on the fact that Superman’s mixedness of alienness and humanity offers an extremely multifaceted experience of being in its broadest imaginings. Instead of viewing Superman’s mixedness as an invariably tragic subject position marred or marked by melancholy and a tragic sense of cultural and identarian displacement and isolation, I contend that more concerted and explicit explorations of the cultural and individual perspective, wisdom, and freedom of such an experience need to be brought to the fore. In so doing, in celebrating as opposed to condemning the character for his Otherness and power, Superman can become far more than an indirect icon of neoconservative white supremacy.

Notes 1 To be clear, not all of these details are consistent across variegated, mixed-media

representations of the character. For example, Kansas is first named as the location of Smallville in Superman: The Movie (1978) and does not become the accepted location of the town in the comics until John Byrne’s Man of Steel reboot miniseries (1986). Smallville is indeed itself unnamed until Al Wenzel’s cover for Superboy no. 2 (Sikela and Dobrotka) in 1949 (Cronin). 2 In the first chapter of his book Super Black (9–35), Adilifu Nama notes that Superman has been known to embody the archetype of the “great white hope.” He cites Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams’s famous one-shot Superman vs. Muhammad Ali (1978) as a potent example of this phenomenon. 3 For 1940s jingoistic or patriotic depictions of Superman that conflate the character with white American values or white supremacy and its symbols, see Siegel and Shuster, as well as Superman, vol. 1, nos. 12 (Siegel, Nowak, et al.), 14 (Siegel and Nowak), 24 (Siegel, Cameron, et al.), and 26 (Finger et al.). See also Munson. 4 There are other fitting examples of this that cannot be fully addressed in this chapter, such as Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s 2005 All-Star Superman; J. Michael Straczynski’s 2010 Superman: Earth One; Bryan Singer’s 2006 film Superman Returns, which focuses on Superman’s lonely return to both the shattered remains of Krypton and a humanity grown hostile to him as a result of his perceived abandonment of Earth; and Jerry Siegel and Wayne Boring’s 1960

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5 6 7 8 9

10

11

comic Superman no. 141, in which the character breaks the “time barrier” and returns to a pre-cataclysmic Krypton. For a comprehensive discussion of Superman, passing, and assimilation, see Tembo (“Re-theorizing”). For further discussion of superheroes and passing, see chapter 3 of Alaniz, “What Can We Ever Have to Fear from a Blind Man: Disability, Daredevil and Passing.” See Tembo (“Among”) for my discussion of such a scenario from a specifically xenological perspective. While Superman was not portrayed as marginal during this period, this is the period in which he was created. It is only during and after Mort Weisinger’s editorship on Superman during the mid-1950s to 1960s—as well as the return of Jerry Siegel to writing Superman during the late 1950s and early 1960s—that Krypton (and Superman’s melancholic relationship to it) start to take a central role. Weisinger’s expansion of the “Superman Family”—including the addition of Supergirl, Krypto the Dog, the Bottle City of Kandor, Zod, other various Kryptonian criminals, and even Superman’s father, Jor-El, himself—indicates that the amplitude of the character’s isolation and solitude is relative or dependent on which story lines and continuities one is referring to. Texts like Azzarello’s have been chosen precisely because they express the maximum possible amplitude of isolation the character experiences, and therefore highlight all the attendant issues and debates of mixedness, integration, literal and figurative alienation, displacement, sociocultural interstices, and psycho-emotional turmoil. This scene, including most of the words, as well as the following action, is cribbed directly from Frank Miller’s seminal graphic novel Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986). To be clear, Batman’s hatred of Superman is also impelled and justified by the fact that Superman, in his battle with Zod in Man of Steel, destroys half of Metropolis, leading to many innocent deaths. Here, Batman’s seemingly xenophobic attitude toward Superman is not based solely on fear of Otherness, but also on demonstrated destructive power that leads to human deaths. That is, the film, at least to some degree, justifies Batman’s xenophobia with “factual” support, lending credence to the notion that “marginal man” depictions of Superman contribute to white supremacist ideology.

Works Cited Alaniz, José. Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond. University Press of Mississippi, 2015. Azzarello, Brian, writer, and Lee Bermejo, artist. Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, vol. 1, nos. 1–5, May–Sept. 2005. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Directed by Zack Snyder, performances by Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, and Jesse Eisenberg, Warner Brothers Pictures, 2016. Byrne, John, writer / penciller, and Dick Giordano, inker. Man of Steel, vol. 1, nos. 1–6, July–Sept. 1986.

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Carter, Greg. The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing. New York University Press, 2013. Cronin, Brian. “When Did Smallville Become Located in Kansas in the Comics?” Comic Book Resources, 11 Jan. 2019, www.cbr.com/superboy-smallville-kansas​ -canon/. Accessed 27 Apr. 2020. “Elseworlds, Part 3.” Supergirl, season 4, episode 9, story by Marc Guggenheim, teleplay by Derek Simon and Robert Rovner, directed by Jesse Warn, CW, 11 Dec. 2018. Finger, Bill, Don Cameron, and Jerry Siegel, writers, Joe Shuster and Ira Yarbrough, pencillers, George Roussos and Paul Fung, inkers, and Pete Riss, artist. Superman, vol. 1, no. 26, Jan. 1944. Füredi, Frank. “Crossing the Boundary.” “Mixed Race” Studies: A Reader, edited by Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Routledge, 2004, pp. 69–73. Janis, Sonia. “The Multicultural, Multilingual, and Multiracial Milieu.” The SAGE Guide to Curriculum in Education, edited by Ming Fang He, Brian D. Schultz, and William H. Schubert, SAGE, 2015, pp. 447–454. Joseph, Ralina. “Multiracial and Multiethnic Identities.” Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education, edited by James A. Banks, SAGE, 2012, pp. 1582–1585. ———. Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial. Duke University Press, 2013. Jurgens, Dan, Peter J. Tomasi, and Paul Dini, writers, Doug Mahnke, Patrick Gleason, et al., artists. Superman Reborn. DC Comics, 2017. Man of Steel. Directed by Zack Snyder, performance by Henry Cavill, Warner Brothers, 2013. Miller, Frank. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. DC Comics, 1986. Mohan, Erica, Leanne Taylor, Terah Venzant Chambers, and Joanne Calore. “Advancing Educational Leadership: Learning from Multiracial Literature.” Handbook of Research on Educational Leadership for Equity and Diversity, edited by Linda C. Tillman and James Joseph Scheurich, Routledge, 2013, pp. 227–249. Morrison, Grant, writer, and Frank Quitely, artist. All-Star Superman, vol. 1, nos. 1–12, Jan. 2006–Oct. 2008. Munson, Todd S. “Superman Says You Can Slap a Jap! The Man of Steel and Race Hatred in World War II.” The Ages of Superman: Essays on the Man of Steel in Changing Times, edited by Joseph J. Darowski, McFarland, 2012, pp. 5–16. Nama, Adilifu. Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes. University of Texas Press, 2011. O’Neil, Dennis, writer, Neal Adams, penciller, Dick Giordano and Terry Austin, inkers. All-New Collectors’ Edition, no. C-56, 1978. Rockquemore, Kerry Ann, David L. Brunsma, and Daniel J. Delgado. “Racing to Theory or Retheorizing Race? Understanding the Struggle to Build a Multiracial Identity Theory.” Journal of Social Issues, vol. 65, no. 1, 2009, pp. 13–34. Siegel, Jerry, writer, Wayne Boring, penciller, and Stan Kaye, inker. Superman, vol. 1, no. 141, Nov. 1960. Siegel, Jerry, and Don Cameron, writers, Ed Dobrotka, artist, Joe Shuster, penciller, Peter Riss and George Roussos, inkers. Superman, vol. 1, no. 24, Sept. 1943. Siegel, Jerry, writer, and Leo Nowak, artist. Superman, vol. 1, no. 14, Jan. 1942. Siegel, Jerry, writer, Leo Nowak and John Sikela, artists. Superman, vol. 1, no. 12, Sep. 1941.

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Siegel, Jerry, writer, and Joe Shuster, artist. “How Superman Would End the War.” Look Magazine, 27 Feb. 1940. Sikela, John, penciller, and Ed Dobrotka, inker. Superboy, vol. 1, no. 2, May 1949. [Writer unknown] Soule, Charles, writer, Tony Daniel, penciller, Matt Banning and Sandu Florea, inkers. Superman / Wonder Woman, vol. 1, no. 4, Mar. 2014. First story. Stonequist, Everett V. “The Racial Hybrid.” ‘Mixed Race’ Studies: A Reader, edited by Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Routledge, 2004, pp. 65–68. Straczynski, J. Michael, writer, Shane Davis and Ardian Siaf, pencillers, and Sandra Hope, inker. Superman: Earth One. Vol. 1. DC Comics, 2010. Superman Returns. Directed by Bryan Singer, performance by Brandon Routh, Legendary Productions, DC Comics, Peters Entertainment, Bad Hat Harry Productions, 2006. Superman: The Movie. Directed by Richard Donner, performance by Christopher Reeve, International Film Productions, Dovemead Limited, 1978. Taylor, Tom, writer, Mike Miller, Jheremy Raapack, et al., artists, Axel Giménez, penciller, Diana Egea, Le Beau Underwood, and Jonas Trinidade, inkers. Injustice: Gods among Us, vol. 1, nos. 1–12, Mar. 2013–Feb. 2014. Tembo, Kwasu. “Among Them but Not One of Them: A Xenological Exploration of the Otherness and Power of DC Comics’ Superman.” Caietele Echinox, no. 34, 2018, pp. 181–199. ———. “Re-theorizing the Problem of Identity and the Onto-existentialism of DC Comics’ Superman.” Word and Text: A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, no. 7, 2017, pp. 151–168. Waid, Mark. “The Real Truth about Superman: And the Rest of Us Too.” Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justice, and the Socratic Way, edited by Tom Morris, Matt Morris, and William Irwin, Open Court, 2005, pp. 3–11.

9

Talented Tensions and Revisions The Narrative Double Consciousness of Miles Morales JORGE J. SANTOS JR.

The story of Miles Morales, successor to the mantle of Spider-Man and the first major Afro-Latinx superhero, begins at the crossroads of chance and destiny. His debut in Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man no. 1 by Brian Michael Bendis (writer) and Sara Pichelli (artist) is prefaced by dual prologues establishing these themes.1 The first features Norman Osborn (a.k.a. the Green Goblin), Spider-Man’s greatest nemesis, narrating the Greek myth of Arachne to an underling who will engineer the spider that will eventually gift Miles his superpowers. The second features the Prowler, worldclass thief Aaron Davis and Miles’s uncle, robbing Osborn Industries and accidentally making off with the same spider that will eventually envenomate Miles. However, readers are first introduced to Miles himself in 179

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a school auditorium, where he sits impatiently awaiting the results of a lottery that will send forty students (of seven hundred applicants) to Brooklyn Visions Academy, a prestige New York City charter school.2 His Puerto Rican mother’s assurances that “no matter what happens today . . . ​this is not a reflection” of his value or intelligence ring hollow for both the disgruntled Miles and his skeptical African American father (Bendis, Pichelli, Samnee, et al.).3 The auditorium is packed with an ethnically diverse array of subjects, both white and nonwhite, all waiting impatiently for their anticipated disappointment as ping-pong balls in a bingo hopper decide their fates. David  E. Low describes the scene: “The ball of destiny rolls along its track, building up narrative tension as it does[,] . . . ​illuminated from above, as if by some celestial force” (288). Miraculously, the final lottery ball bounces Miles’s way, the number 42 emblazoned on the cheap plastic sphere that now represents Miles’s entire world—the same number that marks the back of the spider that will bite Miles in the following scene. These details prompt the question: Was Miles’s emergence a matter of chance or destiny?4 Of equal, if not greater, importance is Miles’s resentful reaction to his selection. The comic establishes a series of thematic tensions essential to the emerging Miles Morales’s marvelous mythos. The first are the tensions inherent in the experiences of young, underprivileged people of color attempting to navigate a world of limited resources and even fewer opportunities. The second, which will ultimately be the focus of this essay, is the tension between giving voice to the ethnic and classist thematics implicit to this Afro-Latinx character and the comic’s choice to downplay that consciousness to make Miles acceptable to a largely white readership. Even though Marvel Comics features a large roster of superheroes of color in the service of their marginalized communities, Miles Morales never discusses issues of race or ethnicity, not even in regard to his own identity, nor does he use his powers to serve communities of color or combat racism as other Black and brown super­ heroes have.5 Thus, Miles’s early stories are marked by visual and verbal tension. Miles’s biracial identity is exclusively coded visually, sidestepping direct discussion of Afro-Latinidad, racialized experiences, biculturalism, or sociopolitical consciousness. As a result, any open discussion of his ethnicity is left for revisions of the character in 2016 and 2019.

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The Talented Tension Miles reacts to his admission to Brooklyn Visions Academy with withering ambivalence generated by the tension between his mother’s expectations and his own guilt in receiving a boon he feels is undeserved (fig. 9.1). His mother embraces him, reveling in his new reality, exclaiming, “Oh— oh—you have a chance. Oh, my God, you have a chance.” The two are framed in the top right of the page, and the diminutive nature of the panel heightens the intimacy of the moment. His mother’s providential faith is visually juxtaposed against Miles’s limp, tepid embrace. Miles’s stoic reaction is depicted just off center, his emotions displaced by his mother’s glee. His reaction is centered in a long, page-width panel immediately beneath them. The silent panel’s width asks us to linger for a moment on Miles’s muted, shocked expression in the way Scott McCloud suggests in Understanding Comics (101). The perimeter of Miles’s world has expanded, but its borders are set. Rather than employ a bleed (an unbordered panel that extends across the entire page, eliminating any gutters), artist and cocreator Sara Pichelli frames the third panel, implying that Miles is now contained by his acceptance to Visions. He gazes helplessly to the right of the page, as if to ponder a future now marked by greater access to both power and responsibility— echoed by a coming, chance encounter on the very next page with the spider that will further lock Miles into his new destiny. At a distance, we might read Miles as gazing into the vexed superhero existence that is to be his inheritance—a destiny set in motion by the death of Peter Parker only pages later. Beneath Miles, the reader encounters two silent students, ethnically ambiguous subjects marked by their detached disappointment in not sharing Miles’s good fortune. Their soft, teary gazes match Miles’s. However, the panel shapes here revert to small squares. This shift in panel size implies a claustrophobic fixity when compared with Miles’s expanding possibilities. Miles manages to speak again in the penultimate panel of the sequence and only meekly offers, “It shouldn’t—all these other kids. Should it be like this?” This verbal quasi-acknowledgment of the troubling societal structures underwriting his sudden elevation is the comic’s lone attempt to vocalize the racial dynamics implied by its visuals in its initial five-year run. If Peter Parker was an everyman, then Miles is every scholarship kid, plucked unexpectedly from the margins and moved toward the center. Miles’s meek attempt to address the sociopolitical dynamics at play (as well

FIG. 9.1  ​Miles gets chosen in Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, vol. 2, no. 1, November 2011,

Marvel Comics, art by Sara Pichelli.

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as their implicit racial dimensions) reads as an early manifestation of a budding political consciousness, or at least an awareness of such issues. Simultaneously, it sets up Miles as something of a parable for the young, talented person of color on the margins suddenly thrust into previously unimagined levels of educational access. Miles perceives an unearned gift, but he also fears the expectations this opportunity will generate, expectations he is not prepared to fulfill.6 This tension is heightened by the reactions of his guarded and apprehensive father and his devoted and hopeful mother. Their presence drives additional thematic tension, implying a narrative of racial uplift accessed through education—a narrative common in both African American and Latinx literary traditions—and signaled visually by the color of their skins. Miles, in a sense, already bore great responsibility but did not (yet) have the great power to fulfill it. If the thematic tension of Peter Parker was that “with great power there must also come great responsibility,” then the story of Miles Morales posits that the inverse, even paradoxically, must also be true—that great responsibility necessitates the attainment of great power. Miles seems acutely aware and fearful of this, as evidenced by the first manifestation of his powers: the deliberately symbolic power to turn invisible (Bendis, Pichelli, Samnee, et al.).7 Compare this with the experience of fellow superhero of color and Champions teammate Kamala Khan, a.k.a. Ms. Marvel. When Kamala’s powers first manifest, she shapeshifts into the form of her idol, Carol Danvers, the original Ms. Marvel (now Captain Marvel after her promotion), a blond, white superhero—a form Kamala almost immediately rejects. Just like Miles’s power to become invisible, the symbolism of a Pakistani American teenager taking on an elevated form of whiteness and beauty clearly is intentional, as is her decision to reject it (Wilson and Alphona). In contrast, Miles’s first use of his powers reveals a longing to return to the anonymity of being average as opposed to the hypervisibility of being exceptional. When I first discovered Miles Morales, the motifs of talent, opportunity, and expectations recalled (at least for this true believer) themes similar to those expressed by W.E.B. Du Bois in his philosophical treatise on education and racial uplift, “The Talented Tenth.” In it, Du Bois discusses the destiny of the top 10 percent of African American men and their duty to lead the race into the twentieth century. Du Bois argues that this group must receive opportunities for uplift via classical education, literature, and social change to benefit the entire African American community. Accordingly, the

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Talented Tenth would be charged with the great destiny of pulling the entire race up from the bottom rungs of U.S. society and into economic and political posterity. Du Bois writes, “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races” (“Talented Tenth”). Du Bois believed that with their destiny laid out before them, the Talented Tenth’s only chance to fulfill it was through formal education, as it holds the key to unlocking their bright futures. Du Bois continues, The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. This is the history of human progress; and the two historic mistakes which have hindered that progress were the thinking first that no more could ever rise save the few already risen; or second, that it would better the unrisen to pull the risen down. How then shall the leaders of a struggling people be trained and the hands of the risen few strengthened? There can be but one answer: The best and most capable of their youth must be schooled in the colleges and universities of the land. (“Talented Tenth”)

Du Bois foregrounds teleology and progress, offering a narrative of futurity embodied in the few destined to lead the many. The language of destiny and the focus on educational opportunity manifest clearly in the narrative of Miles Morales’s empowerment. We might even consider the fact that Miles’s chances of selection reflect diminishing opportunities for communities of color since the time of Du Bois (forty seats for seven hundred students works out to roughly 5 percent). The social obligation to be the “best” in order to save the “masses” from the “worst” implies a moral structure incredibly compatible with the superhero genre. As Adilifu Nama articulates in Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes (2011), “Black superheroes are not merely figures that defeat costumed supervillains: they symbolize American racial morality and ethics. They overtly represent or implicitly signify social discourse and accepted wisdom concerning notions of racial reciprocity, racial equality, racial forgiveness, and, ultimately, racial justice” (4). Stated thus, seeing the social priorities of the Talented Tenth dramatized through the

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superhero genre itself feels fated.8 After all, casting the Talented Tenth’s destiny as leaders, world savers, vanguards, and stalwarts in an undeniably superheroic tone feels prophetic. And Du Bois is writing over thirty years before Superman—the world’s first superhero and America’s greatest immigrant son—would hit newsstands in 1938. Applying these themes to Miles Morales positions his biracial identity in the context of educational uplift, a paradigm that suggests a narrative fusion of his two identities. While the work of Du Bois may be centered on the African American experience, it nonetheless either overlaps with or directly informs the way we imagine the lives of other ethnic subjects. After all, themes of uplift and education permeate Latinx intellectual and literary traditions, and the expression of these priorities often mirrors Du Bois’s. For example, consider this passage from Pedro A. Noguera’s essay “ ‘Y Que Pasara Con Jovenes Como Miguel Fernández?’: Education, Immigration, and the Future of Latinas / os in the United States,” which tracks the difficulties of a promising student named Miguel in accessing the educational resources that can maximize his potential. Noguera writes, “If we are to move from the lower tiers of society and not become a permanent underclass, and if our communities, schools and social institutions are to provide the support and nurturing that our children so desperately need, we will need a new direction and a new strategy. Until that time, we will remain like Miguel—industrious and hopeful but trapped in circumstances that stifle our ambitions and dreams” (212).9 Noguera’s characterization of the difficult relationship Latinx communities have with educational structures and resources, and his focus on futurity and uplift as represented by the education of children, closely matches both Du Bois’s priorities in “The Talented Tenth” and the drama of Miles’s selection to Brooklyn Visions Academy. The comic’s evocation of educational themes allows Miles to implicitly inhabit the overlap in his African American and Puerto Rican heritage. In classic Spider-Man fashion, Miles’s initial stories center on his struggle to balance the demands of his private life and his public superhero career. His struggles pit the demands of the ethnically marked world of Brooklyn Visions Academy against the white, superhero world that contains it. If the world of Miles Morales can be read as activating the philosophical agenda put forth by the Talented Tenth, then the narrative itself can be read as tracing the psychological experience of a young man burdened with its responsibilities and expectations. In this sense, we might read Miles Morales through that better-known staple of Du Boisian

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thought—the evergreen concept of double consciousness. Developed in his classic The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois writes, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (11). The superhero genre seems primed to activate the themes of identity splitting outlined by Du Bois, offering a new interpretation of his “veil” metaphor, which argues that the reality of Black life is hidden from the white world by the barrier of race (131). Miles, after all, has a secret identity, his Afro-Latinidad veiled behind a nonracialized Spider-Man mask.10 Even the name Brooklyn Visions Academy resonates with Du Boisian themes of sight and vision in his discussion of double consciousness. Typically, this sense of double consciousness is developed largely through the visuals, epitomized by Miles’s first superhero costume—an illfitting, store-bought version of Peter Parker’s original suit. In this vein (veil?), Miles is literally always looking at his “self through the eyes of others” as he endeavors to build an authentic spidery-sense of self while simultaneously attempting to fill the shoes of his white predecessor—a turmoil that never explicitly considers race. Additionally, Miles finds himself torn between two worlds marked as separate largely by their visual codes. The progressive, urban space in which Miles lives contrasts starkly (even Tony Starkly) with the largely white, implicitly conservative world of the Marvel superhero.11 Brooklyn Visions Academy is distinguished from the predominantly white superhero world by its diverse, multiethnic student population, emphasized by Ganke Lee, Miles’s Korean American best friend, and Judge, his African American roommate.12 This new multicultural reality is depicted visually much more than verbally (reflecting the name—Visions). Nonetheless, these struggles to fit into two worlds demanding his full participation represent the struggles of students of color, who shoulder the burdens of expectations, right down to the unavoidable imposter syndrome (Miles often feels less than his peers in both communities). Given that so many students of color suffer silently, focusing on delivering these themes visually rather than verbally does build additional thematic resonance. Expressing the themes and priorities set forth by Du Bois’s “The Talented Tenth” almost exclusively through visuals comes with benefits and

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shortfalls. First, one must acknowledge the power of a character with black skin donning the mantle of Spider-Man, one of geekdom’s most recognizable and beloved characters.13 In a sense, this facet of Miles Morales is reiterated by his custom black-and-red Spider-Man costume. For readers of color, seeing oneself represented as something other than stock villain, comic relief, or sidekick is an undeniably powerful experience. As Mario Worlds and Henry “Cody” Miller attest, “By reimagining Spider-Man as an Afro-Latino boy from an urban environment, [Miles Morales] problematizes the belief that heroes must be White males. Visions of who villains are and what they look like, largely perpetuated by racist stereotyping and media representation, are challenged when the hero looks like someone society has historically villainized. The presence of Black superheroes destroys illusions of who commits crimes (Black males) and the heroes who save society from them (White police officers)” (45).14 Placing Miles in the multicultural Brooklyn Visions Academy puts him in the context of a community of characters of color and further destabilizes the contrast between this world and the predominantly white superhero world in which he participates. Reading generously, the contrast between implied racial commentary in the visuals and the verbal reticence to follow suit can generate productive tensions between these two narrative registers. As Charles Hatfield asserts, “Responding to comics often depends on recognizing word and image as two ‘different’ types of sign, whose implications can be played against each other—to gloss, to illustrate, to contradict or complicate or ironize the other. . . . ​This tension between codes is fundamental to the art form” (133). Moving to Miles Morales specifically, Frederick Luis Aldama postulates in Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics (2017) that “names can be used to create tension between a given super­ hero’s identities. There’s visible brown Miles Morales as public civilian. And there’s Miles Morales as masked and costumed (nonethnic) Spider-Man. Bendis creates a certain tension in the comic based on a duality constructed by the interplay of the visuals (phenotype) with the textual (name): Brown (Morales) vs. non-ethnic (Spidey)” (118). Aldama’s observation here is certainly apt. Miles’s name and appearance do create tension between his identity as an Afro-Latinx boy and the Spider-Man mask that veils it, both for the character and for his readers. The title of his comics, which typically include both his names, reiterates this tension, as the very cover reminds us Miles is not a typical superhero. However, one can counter that his name amounts to little more than an icon, signaling the way the character is to

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be read without spurring any further narrative or verbal context. One can likewise extend this critique to the film debut of the character, the Oscarwinning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), which extends the use of visuals to signify race to its soundscape but not its narrative. Dropping the name Miles Morales from the title of the film only further problematizes this dynamic. While this arrangement makes productive use of the comic’s capacity for multiple, simultaneous narrative registers (or, in the case of Into the Spider-Verse, film), it nonetheless limits the extent to which Miles’s identities are explored. The fact that one can detect racially conscious elements in the comic’s visuals forbids us from dismissing them entirely if we accept visuals as a genuine narrative register—as all comic theorists do. Tension produces what we might call a form of narrative double consciousness, as the visuals attend to the implicit racial aspects of Marvel’s first major Afro-Latinx character in the comics, just as the verbal attends to the demands of a largely white readership in order to make Miles compatible with SpiderMan’s everyman mythos without alienating the Spider-Man readership by making Miles too racially specific. In order to fully come to terms with this narrative dichotomy, we must return to Miles’s origin story—but not his superhero one. Rather, we must look at the way the election of Barack Obama and budding twenty-first-century postracial attitudes shaped the character from before his initial publication in 2011. As I will explore in the next section, using visuals to code race in a way that allows the verbal to dismiss or ignore racial matters amounts to little more than a postracial strategy to include race while simultaneously minimizing it.

Post-biracialism in the Ultimate Marvel Universe In true Spider-Man fashion, Miles Morales’s 2011 debut in the Marvel Comics universe as the successor to Peter Parker and the first major AfroLatinx character in either major superhero pantheon (Marvel and DC) was largely a matter of both destiny and chance. Creator Brian Michael Bendis, writer of popular alternate-universe comic Ultimate Spider-Man, decided to pen the tale no creator before him had dared—the death of Peter Parker. According to Axel Alonso, then editor in chief of Marvel Comics, Marvel had been considering an ethnically diverse Spider-Man in Marvel’s Ultimate line for years, but the election of Obama in 2008 offered

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a symbolic opportunity to debut their most high-profile character of color since Black Panther in 1966 (“Biracial Identity”). And as luck would have it, Bendis would find inspiration for Miles’s specific look from a chance encounter with the television sitcom Community: “A year ago, Community star Donald Glover embarked on a Twitter campaign to play an AfricanAmerican version of Spider-Man in a new movie (a role that went to white actor Andrew Garfield for next summer’s The Amazing Spider-Man). As an inside joke, he appeared on the season premiere in Spider-Man pajamas. ‘He looked fantastic!’ Bendis recalls. ‘I saw him in the costume and thought, “I would like to read that book.” So I was glad I was writing that book’ ” (Truitt). In many ways, these two moments shaped so much of the expression (or lack thereof) of Miles’s experiences as an Afro-Latinx boy. First, the context of Obama’s election places us squarely in the context of postracialism, a prevailing cultural belief that his election signified the diminishing importance of racial identity and even the dismantling of racism itself. In my book Graphic Memories, I explore the ways in which Obama’s election and the postracial narrative of America that follows it manifest in comics—particularly in newspaper comic strips and John Lewis’s March trilogy. For the sake of brevity, I will not recap that history here.15 The prevailing cultural attitude that race was simply less important than it once was suggests a societal authorization to minimize such content in Miles Morales’s comics. This idea is, perhaps ironically or perhaps prophetically, best undermined by the reality that Glover’s Twitter campaign was met with such virulent racism that he felt compelled to comment on the controversy in his 2012 stand-up comedy special Weirdo. It is perhaps here that we encounter the greatest tensions exerting force on Miles Morales—the desire to enact a postracial vision of diversity and inclusivity tempered by a counterforce that will chastise writers for making race explicit in any way. We can detect this tension in Alonso’s own defense of the character when he assures fans that the choice to replace Peter with Miles was not motivated by political correctness, as “it’s his heart that matters, not the color of his skin,” while simultaneously expressing his excitement to share “a Spider-Man whose last name is Morales” with his Latinx son (“Biracial Identity”). Perhaps we should not be surprised that the comic settles on a postracial strategy that allows the visuals to texture Miles’s world without ever having to voice any actual commentary on race that risks offending white readers. Coding race in the visuals rather than in the comic’s verbal registers creates a tension between these codes that makes tracing the contours

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of Miles’s ethnicity difficult at best. This is particularly vexing when trying to decipher how the comic represents, or fails to represent, Miles’s biracial identity. As Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores make clear, the very concept of Afro-Latinidad is grounded in a “transnational crucible of struggle and self-determination” (2). Román and Flores go on to offer a variety of configurations of this ethos, as Afro-Latinidad can: signify the experiences of peoples of African descent in Latin America; function as a paradigm for considering the intellectual cross-fertilization across continents; serve as a manner to push back against the homogenizing, even imperial, nature of the neologism “Latinx;” or call attention to the tensions between African American and Latinx peoples in the Americas, particularly those like Miles who belong to mixed-race families and communities. Of course, one need not adhere to limited constructs since, as Raquel Z. Rivera reminds us, African Americans and Latinx Americans alike are already both multiracial and multicultural (382). Yet the comic prefers to leave such considerations in the hands of the visuals and implied themes of educational access and marginalization. The comic settles for peppering the dialogue with occasional Spanish-accented or African American vernacular inflections or affects. The thematic structures locate an overlap between African American experience and Latinx experience based in a mutually marginalized status, but these two identities are hardly synonymous—though they are implicitly treated as such. Any tension between them is never expressed, their particulars never explored. In fact, this calls into question whether Miles is biracial at all, since his mother could easily identify as Black herself, given the large presence and visibility of African descent in Puerto Rican self-imaginings. In this case, Miles would more aptly be described as bicultural rather than biracial. As a result, race functions exclusively as little more than context for a visual reading protocol—rarely do these elements ever reach the level of content. This dynamic only increases in significance when we consider the superhero genre that houses them. While the themes of destiny, uplift, and education permeate both Du Bois and Miles’s Ultimate Comics story lines, rarely does the comic engage with issues of racial struggle or bicultural identity conflict. This appears a glaring omission considering that Du Bois explicitly develops the concepts of the Talented Tenth and double consciousness to foster a pointed racial and political consciousness that must operate deliberately and vocally in the world around it. Du Bois writes, “The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought

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and missionaries of culture among their people. No others can do this work and Negro colleges must train men for it. The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men” (“Talented Tenth”). In this final passage, Du Bois employs the language of exceptionality, a staple of Americanism and superherodom alike, to define the members of the Talented Tenth not only by their potential but also by their destined mission. While Miles’s initial reticence to take on the mantle of Spider-Man can be read as a rejection of the Talented Tenth’s great responsibility, his eventual acceptance of his great power presumes an acceptance of the Tenth’s mission. However, it will be years before we see the comic address the evils of racism or the structures of poverty that necessitated the charter school lottery that opens the narrative. This restrains even the diverse vision of America represented by Miles’s charter school. As Low notes, the lottery that sets Miles’s story into motion “is portrayed as a necessary if imperfect instrument for lucky families who are desperate to escape the perceived ruin of public education,” eliding any consideration of the pernicious structural or capitalist forces that placed the Morales family in such dire straits in the first place (285). In fact, any spoken consideration of racial issues or a biracial consciousness only enters the narrative twice in the original Ultimate run (2011–2016). The first instance comes in Ultimate Comics Spider-Man no. 18 (2013), when Miles is captured by Hydra forces, a well-organized terrorist organization that serve as Marvel’s corollary to the Nazis. His captor reports back to her superiors, saying, “I have Spider-Man. I think it’s Spider-Man. He’s not what you think he’d be at all—.” Miles responds, “Whatever, racist. Or she’s talking about that I’m a kid” (Bendis, Marquez, Larraz, et al.). The second comes in Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spider-Man no. 9 (2014), when his father relates his history as an undercover government agent to his son and responds angrily to a crack about slavery made by one of the mafiosos he was investigating (Bendis, Marquez, Pichelli, et al.). In the former, we get a hint that Miles seems keenly aware that being a person of color in such a prominent superheroic role could be met with racist objections, a possibility heightened by the presence of Hydra in the scene, who often function as a stand-in for organized white supremacy. However, this suggestion is undermined (or arguably sanitized) by Miles’s immediate reconsideration of the comment, as he ponders whether his attacker meant his age or his custom Spider-Man costume, rather than his race. Neither comment does any more than reassure audiences that racism might be difficult to detect, but it is certainly villainous when overt, a platitude that feels more like a disclaimer than commentary.

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The absence of any kind of racial consciousness feels particularly glaring when one reflects on how many issues center on Miles’s difficult relationship with police shootings—one such instance results in Miles’s severe wounding and the other kills his mother (don’t worry, she gets better).16 The fact that the racial dynamics at play in both shootings goes without comment comes across as practically ludicrous given that Bendis is writing on the eve of the Black Lives Matter movement and given Bendis’s own history blending in political commentary in his other comics, such as The Uncanny X-Men. The comic’s nearly exclusive reliance on visual codes to narrate Miles’s experiences as a young man of color leaves these dimensions of the character feeling woefully undeveloped and incomplete. However, since the comic’s initial run, these missing pieces have begun to find their way into Miles Morales’s story after revisions of the character began to appear in 2016.

Miles in (Re)visions In 2016, the character of Miles Morales was incorporated into the mainstream Marvel Universe, and the question of the particulars of his AfroLatinidad began to emerge. This chance to reestablish Miles on ethnoracial grounds was precipitated by a pair of unexpected cataclysms that rocked Miles’s universe—Marvel Comics’ Secret Wars event that collapsed the entire multiverse into one unstable continuum and the election of Donald Trump. The Secret Wars event (2015) sought to consolidate Marvel’s expansive multiversal catalog by canceling the Ultimate line and either killing off those versions of the characters or pulling standouts into the principal Marvel story world (designated as the 616 universe) (Hickman et al.). Doing so allowed Marvel to softly reboot certain characters and reestablish their individual mythos. Regarding Miles Morales, the restructuring of the Marvel Universe results in the resurrection of his mother (after he gives Molecule Man a stale cheeseburger) and his uncle Aaron (who served as his figurative Uncle Ben until Secret Wars). It also offered Bendis the opportunity to age the character and have Miles begin to consider what his racial identity portends for his superhero career. In Spider-Man: Miles Morales no. 2 (2016), Miles expresses frustration that he is known as “the black Spider-Man” because he is “half Hispanic” and states that he would rather just be known as “Spider-Man.” The question of his racial experience arises again in issue 4, when Ganke insists that it is harder to be “fat” in America

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than Black, to which Miles responds, “Try walking into a Duane Reade and have an itchy security guard just follow you around just because. . . . ​When I was nine years old, I saw an old woman cross the street to avoid walking by me. Nine years old,” before reminding Ganke that he is not just Black, he is “also Hispanic” (Bendis, Pichelli, and Carlucci). In this moment, Miles not only acknowledges the tension between his visual identity (he reads as African American to most other characters) but also asks readers to reimagine his entire history in the context of color, as he has. Additionally, Bendis introduces two new, prominent Latinx characters: fellow superhero Fabio Medina (from the X-Men) and Miles’s racist, overbearing grandmother, Gloria Morales. In particular, the character of Gloria deserves further consideration, as her inclusion also introduces a familial tension between her and her son-in-law, Miles’s father, Jefferson, whose Blackness she blames for Miles’s perceived school delinquency (when, in true Spider-Man fashion, Miles is missing classes because he is saving the world, or at least the neighborhood). These additions center Miles’s experiences on the visual implications of his race and also give voice to his self-perceptions and potential biracial tensions both within himself and within his family. In 2019, Bendis retired from Marvel Comics to join rival DC and handed the character off to Eisner Award–winning writer Saladin Ahmed.17 Ahmed builds on the momentum established by Bendis’s 2016 revision of the character and finds ways to organically incorporate racial themes. In Ahmed’s work, titled Miles Morales: Spider-Man, a choice that draws our attention to the subjectivity underneath the mask, Miles Morales struggles with what justice looks like in a world with increasing wealth disparities and racial tensions. Accordingly, the relationship between the visual and the verbal shifts as well, as they begin to generate narrative tension in concert rather than in opposition. Take, for example, an exchange between Miles and his mother at the breakfast table (fig. 9.2). The first panel has Rio express distress over the current state of the world, with the newspaper looming behind her word balloons, contextualizing her fears. The following panel recalls the embrace Miles’s mother gives him when he wins the charter lottery in 2011, this time with their roles reversed as an older Miles becomes the emotional agent in the scene. His mother’s soft, concerned gaze places her in the role of Miles as the one unsure of what the future portends. In this instance, artist Javier Garrón inverts the roles of the visual and verbal registers as established in the comics drawn by Sara Pichelli. Here, it is the verbal that establishes the thematic context of the scene, implying a racial

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FIG. 9.2  ​Miles and his mom contemplate the news in Miles Morales: Straight Out of Brooklyn, Marvel Comics, 2019, art by Javier Garrón.

reading without insisting on it. However, the image of the newspaper in the background provides context, making the racial dimensions of her fear—that undocumented children are being stolen from their parents by the Trump administration—explicit. The newspaper also sets up the conflict of Ahmed’s narrative, as the following scene introduces love interest Barbara Rodriguez and her undocumented cousin Eduardo, whose father has been deported and who will soon be kidnapped by child traffickers who target marginalized children (something Miles will venture to stop). The visuals, then, drive the tension of the scene with his mother and foreshadow the racially inflected superhero story that follows. Additionally, the image of the newspaper forbids a postracial reading as the specificity of the headline calls our attention to real-world politics, creating a tension between the real world of the reader and the fictive world of Miles Morales. If the election of Barack Obama authorized the minimization of racial themes, then the election of Donald Trump reduced that ethos to little more than wishful thinking. Miles’s experiences as an Afro-Latinx superhero do not provide clarity for how to best use his powers to confront the evils of racism. Immediately following the introduction of Barbara Rodriguez, Miles is depicted swinging around the city, pondering his role in the world. As he pauses to look over a line forming outside a local soup kitchen, he thinks, “I’m Miles Morales, Spider-Man. And I’ve never been more sure of my power. But I’ve never been more confused about my responsibility.” This statement reveals so much about the way Miles Morales has evolved since 2011. First, prefacing his given name over his superhero moniker privileges the private,

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Afro-Latinx identity beneath the mask of his public persona. His reference to the mantra “With great power must also come great responsibility” builds a similar tension between his inward understanding of his identity and his role in the communities to which he belongs. His acknowledgment of his great power symbolizes his acceptance of the call of the Talented Tenth to uplift those stranded on the margins. The destitute, multiethnic poverty he is confronted with in the soup line reminds him for whom his power must be used, and the comic’s subsequent focus on an African American girl in the queue acknowledges how communities of color are disproportionately affected by that same poverty. From here on out, the only tension standing between Miles and his destiny as a societal savior remains how to best enact the ethos of the Talented Tenth now that his great power has given him a great chance to do so.

Notes 1 Technically, the first cameo appearance of Miles Morales happened in Ultimate

2

3

4

5

Fallout no. 4, the comic featuring the death of Peter Parker. However, I look to Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man, vol. 2, no. 1, as the full debut of the character, which introduces his supporting cast and narrative themes (Bendis, Pichelli, Samnee, et al.). In the sequence, Miles appears to be wearing a New York Knicks jersey with the number 2 stitched on the front. The number 2 might be thought of as an obvious foreshadowing of Miles becoming the second Spider-Man of this universe. Additionally, if it is indeed a Knicks number 2 jersey, the publication year of the comics would match up with Landry Fields playing as number 2 for the Knicks (2010–2012). Fields is mixed race (Black father, white mother). Anyone familiar with superhero comics understands that they are notoriously difficult to cite since they are typically released monthly. Then, they are often collected after the fact in trade paperbacks, often without page numbers. Therefore, I will refer to the specific trade paperback I read for the in-text citation, but the original issue designation for the images included in this chapter. Additionally, 42 is also the number of famed Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson, the first African American ballplayer to break Major League Baseball’s color line. The number 42 is the only number retired by every Major League Baseball club. Like Jackie Robinson and Peter Parker, Miles also represents Brooklyn. Here I refer to heroes such as Black Panther (who addresses the histories of African colonization), Luke Cage (who protects Harlem), the Falcon (who addresses white supremacist violence at the border when he accepts the mantle of Captain America), Ms. Marvel (whose comic often centers on her life as a Pakistani American and a Muslim), and the X-Men, who are constantly combating marginalization in all forms. Like Miles, however, these characters have also had eras in their fictional character histories wherein their racial consciousness is muted or absent, as well as other eras when it is more central to their stories. This

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often has a lot to do with creator inclination as much as the presumed prevalent cultural attitudes of their readers. 6 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the film debut of Miles Morales, really emphasizes the expectations theme, both through hidden references to the novel Great Expectations and through the mural Miles paints of himself in the first act, which he titles “No Expectations.” 7 We might also read this as a sly shout-out to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Further, later versions of this comic refer to his invisibility as a form of “camouflage,” which is itself ripe with potential metaphorical nuance and symbolism in regard to how students of color attempt to hide in plain sight. 8 This is the premise of Ladee Hubbard’s The Talented Ribkins (2017), a superhero prose novel. However, to my knowledge, no similarly inspired projects proliferate any of the comics-based superhero story worlds. If any true believer reads this and is inspired to create his or her own “Talented Tenth” comic, please give me a shout-out, or better yet, a cameo. 9 Interestingly enough, in 1992 Marvel debuted a half-Irish, half-Latino Spider-Man who also happened to be named Miguel (David et al.). This line of comics imagined the Marvel Universe over a century in the future, where mixed-race (but phenotypically white) Miguel O’Hara is inspired to become the Spider-Man of his era—his futurity can be read as the “hope for the future,” which in turn can be understood as a postracial strategy in and of itself. In my humble opinion, placing him in the context of futurity does not imbue him with the same cultural weight of having a contemporaneous dark-skinned Spider-Man of color standing proudly next to the pantheon of Marvel heroes such as the Avengers or the X-Men. 10 Perhaps this is why Jason Reynolds’s Miles Morales: Spider-Man, a young adult novelization of the comics, opens by quoting Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Masks.” 11 I use “conservative” here as in maintenance of the status quo, not the political position. 12 When Miles does encounter other heroes of color, race is never discussed—like, not even a head nod. 13 It is worth noting that Spider-Man has long been a favorite of the African American community partly because his full mask allows anyone to project themselves into the costume. Writer Paul Jenkins and artists Mark Buckingham and Wayne Faucher offered a one-shot single story in Peter Parker: Spider-Man no. 35 (2001), wherein a young African American boy named LaFronce has conversations with an imaginary Spider-Man, whom he imagines is African American under the mask. Of course, with the debut of Miles, LaFronce no longer has to imagine Spider-Man is Black. 14 Interestingly, Worlds and Miller are discussing the young adult novel by Jason Reynolds, which, besides the cover, contains no images whatsoever. 15 For more, see Santos, chap. 2. 16 In Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spider-Man no. 5 (Bendis, Marquez, Pichelli, et al.) and Ultimate Comics Spider-Man no. 22 (Bendis, Marquez, Larraz, et al.), respectively. 17 It is worth nothing that Ahmed is himself mixed race (Arab and white) and has written about his experience growing up mixed race in What Are You? Voices of Mixed-Race Young People (1999).

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Works Cited Ahmed, Saladin. What Are You? Voices of Mixed-Race Young People. Henry Holt, 1999. Ahmed, Saladin, writer, and Javier Garrón, artist. Miles Morales: Straight Out of Brooklyn. Marvel Comics, 2019. Aldama, Frederick Luis. Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. University of Arizona Press, 2017. Bendis, Brian Michael, writer, David Marquez, Pepe Larraz, and Sara Pichelli, artists. Miles Morales: Ultimate Spider-Man Ultimate Collection. Vol. 2. Marvel Comics, 2015. Bendis, Brian Michael, writer, David Marquez, Sara Pichelli, et al., artists, Mark Bagley, penciller, and Andrew Hennessey, inker. Miles Morales: Ultimate SpiderMan Ultimate Collection. Vol. 3. Marvel Comics, 2015. Bendis, Brian Michael, writer, Sara Pichelli, artist, and Gaetano Carlucci, inker. Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Vol. 1. Marvel Comics, 2016. Bendis, Brian Michael, writer, Sara Pichelli, Chris Samnee, and David Marquez, artists. Miles Morales: Ultimate Spider-Man Ultimate Collection. Vol. 1. Marvel Comics, 2015. “Biracial Identity for America’s Web-Slinging Hero.” NPR, 11 Aug. 2011, www.npr​ .org/2011/08/11/139536090/biracial-identity-for-americas-web-slinging-hero. Accessed 28 Oct. 2019. David, Peter, writer, Rick Leonardi, penciller, and Al Williamson, inker. Spider-Man 2099, vol. 1, no. 1, Nov. 1992. Donald Glover: Weirdo. Directed by Shannon Hartman, performance by Donald Glover, Entertainment One, 2012. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk: A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver, W. W. Norton, 1999. ———. “The Talented Tenth.” Teaching American History, teachingamericanhistory​ .org/library/document/the-talented-tenth/. Accessed 28 Oct. 2019. Hatfield, Charles. “An Art of Tensions.” The Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, University Press of Mississippi, 2009, pp. 132–148. Hickman, Jonathan, writer, Esad Ribic and Paul Renaud, artists. Secret Wars. Marvel Comics, 2016. Hubbard, Ladee. The Talented Ribkins. Melville House, 2017. Jenkins, Paul, writer, Mark Buckingham, penciller, and Wayne Faucher, inker. Peter Parker: Spider-Man, vol. 2, no. 35, Nov. 2001. Low, David E. “Waiting for Spider-Man: Representations of Urban School ‘Reform’ in Marvel Comics’ Miles Morales Series.” Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox, University Press of Mississippi, 2017, pp. 278–297. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Harper Perennial, 1993. Nama, Adilifu. Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes. University of Texas Press, 2011. Noguera, Pedro A. “ ‘Y Que Pasara Con Jovenes Como Miguel Fernández?’: Education, Immigration, and the Future of Latinas / os in the United States.” A Companion to Latino / a Studies, edited by Juan Flores and Renato Rosaldo, Blackwell, 2007, pp. 202–216. Reynolds, Jason. Miles Morales: Spider-Man. Scholastic, 2017.

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Rivera, Raquel Z. “Ghettocentricity, Blackness, and Pan-Latinidad.” The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, edited by Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 373–386. Román, Miriam Jiménez, and Juan Flores. Introduction. The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, edited by Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 1–15. Santos, Jorge J., Jr. Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History in Comics. University of Texas Press, 2019. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, performances by Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, and Hailee Steinfeld, Sony Pictures, 2018. Truitt, Brian. “A TV Comedy Assured New Spidey’s Creator.” USA Today, 2 Aug. 2011, usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/comics/2011-08-02-new-spider-man​ -inside_n.htm. Accessed 28 Oct. 2019. Wilson, G. Willow, writer, and Adrian Alphona, artist. Ms. Marvel: No Normal. Marvel Comics, 2014. Worlds, Mario, and Henry “Cody” Miller. “Miles Morales: Spider-Man and Reimagining the Canon for Racial Justice.” English Journal, vol. 108, no. 4, Mar. 2019, pp. 43–50.

10

“They’re Two People in One Body” Nested Sovereignties and Mixed-Race Mutations in FX’s Legion NICHOL AS E. MILLER

In 2017, the FX television series Legion introduced Kerry and Cary Loudermilk, characters not featured in the Marvel comics that inspired the series (Hawley). Played by Bill Irwin (Cary) and Amber Midthunder (Kerry), the Loudermilks are mutant superheroes whose powers include sharing a single body and sharing sensory experiences. By depicting their mutation primarily through the absorption of a Native body (Kerry) into a white body (Cary), the creators of Legion developed two characters who negotiate a single mixed-race identity as they grapple with bodily autonomy and racial affiliation.1 Mysteriously born as a young white boy to Native parents, Cary meets Kerry when he is eight years old. Viewers are told that she simply appears in his room one night. Over time, Cary 199

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realizes that Kerry is not an imaginary friend but a real person who sometimes shares his body. He also learns that she does not age while inside him. When viewers first encounter the Loudermilks, Cary is an older man and Kerry is a woman in her twenties. Although they often share a body, each character also plays a distinct role: Cary is a scientist and the “brains” of the relationship, while Kerry is a fighter and the “brawn” of the team. While Cary handles the quotidian functions of human existence, Kerry finds herself bored by mundane tasks such as eating, sleeping, or using the bathroom. Through these distinctions, Legion traffics in fraught tropes about Native people. For example, Kerry is valued primarily for her physical prowess and defaults to Cary’s modes of knowledge making. Yet representations of Kerry and Cary (I will use “Kerry-Cary” when referring to them as a single character) also speak to the lived experiences of mixed-race people who must perform their identities differently—or choose an identity—in various contexts.2 Moreover, these identities cannot be considered without addressing how “national and racial discourses [are] inextricably intertwined” for Native persons (Mahtani, “Interrogating” 75).3 To this end, I draw on the work of Audra Simpson to examine how the Loudermilks’ mutation leads them to negotiate “nested sovereignties” through their mixed-race body and the bodies politic they inhabit. Broadly speaking, sovereignty is the ability to exercise political power as a government, nation-state, or tribal entity, although competing definitions remain a central tension in Native studies as scholars negotiate issues of independence and recognition. Simpson argues that “sovereignty may exist within sovereignty,” and while “one does not entirely negate the other . . . ​they necessarily stand in terrific tension and pose serious jurisdictional and normative challenges to each other” (10). That is, one nation may exist within another with overlapping jurisdictions, as is the case with tribal governments within U.S. borders. Yet such challenges are not strictly jurisdictional in Legion; they are also racialized, as Kerry-Cary embodies mixture through the image of a Native woman absorbed into a white man. By depicting a mixed-race superhero who is neither autonomous nor fully dependent, Legion’s showrunners destabilize the racialized boundaries of political membership that often determine Indigenous identity. Kerry and Cary thus serve as productive sites of inquiry into the effects of theorizing race and sovereignty as mixture (or the failure of mixture). Rather than presenting an assimilationist “melting pot” narrative, the Loudermilks either remain distinct entities who are primarily represented by a single white body or are visualized as a grotesque mixture of bodies.

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Nested Sovereignties and the Limits of Hybridity When the cast for Legion was announced, critics praised the show for including a Native woman superhero. Yet that praise rarely engaged with the fraught politics of race and sovereignty in the series. As Jeremy  M. Carnes argues, scholars must be careful about how they engage with representations of indigeneity in comics and other media because “embedded practice[s] of settler colonialism [can] skew seemingly progressive representations” (70). Whereas Carnes focuses on a different Native mutant in the Marvel Universe (Danielle Moonstar), his argument that “the appearance of a nuanced character . . . ​does not disassemble the representational logics of settler colonial tactics” holds true for Legion as well (70). I am particularly interested in Kerry for how explicitly she is (dis)possessed by settler colonialism, even as she represents the possibility for mixed-race people to be understood “outside a settler-Indigenous binary opposition” (Allen xxv). Whereas scholars frequently note that racialization tends to divorce indigeneity from questions about sovereignty (subsuming Native persons under white perspectives about racial markers of difference), I argue that Kerry-Cary invites us to bring both race and sovereignty to bear on the representational logics in Legion. To this end, I am drawn to how Jodi A. Byrd describes “the entanglement of colonization and racialization” as two systems that work together toward white dominance while maintaining clear distinctions between them (xxiii). I do not want to conflate colonization with racialization and thus validate blood quantum logics, yet I cannot ignore how the embodiment of colonization via Kerry-Cary also speaks to the representational logics of race. Such tensions between race and sovereignty recall Byrd’s argument that “the Indian is left nowhere and everywhere within the ontological premises through which U.S. empire orients, imagines, and critiques itself” (xix). These claims also align with the work of Sara Ahmed, who invokes “orientation” to argue that “colonialism makes the world ‘white,’ which is of course a world ‘ready’ for certain kinds of bodies” (153). This emphasis on how whiteness can orient nonwhite bodies highlights the limits placed on Indigenous life by settler-colonial attempts to contain indigeneity, even as popular narratives simultaneously invoke that indigeneity to celebrate and claim cultural diversity. Homi Bhabha notes that such celebrations always include a corresponding attempt at “containment” and argues that “a transparent norm is constituted, a norm given by

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the host society or dominant culture, which says that ‘these other cultures are fine, but we must be able to locate them within our own grid’ ” (Bhabha 208). The use of terms like “host” and “containment” to describe how colonialism orients us toward certain identities is particularly striking in the case of Legion, in which Cary literally acts as a “host” capable of “containing” Kerry. In response to these colonialist narratives, scholars often reject the binaries associated with Indigenous racial and political identities. Some, like Kevin Bruyneel, draw on Bhabha to theorize indigeneity through hybridity or a “third space.” At the heart of such scholarship is the claim that “indigenous tribes and nations claim a form of sovereignty that is unclear because it is not easily located inside or outside the United States” (Bruyneel xiii). This colonial bind, or disorientation, is often used by political actors to contain and even to define indigeneity. They “tell tribes they should be self-sufficient and then seek to narrowly constrain tribal sovereignty in a way that forestalls their effort to achieve this very self-sufficiency” (xv). Such claims also speak to Kerry’s experience. Her relationship with selfsufficiency is largely determined by Cary, who enables her to avoid the “boring” tasks most humans must perform. This relationship generates a dependence that is at odds with her official position as an autonomous agent. Kerry-Cary thus represents a mixed-race person who has internalized dependence in ways that limit Native consciousness. Neither Kerry nor Cary can imagine a racial identity for Kerry that is not determined by whiteness. The need to decenter whiteness triggers Bruyneel’s theorization of a “third space of sovereignty”—one that defines “political space” as “the lived and envisioned territorial, institutional, and cultural location through which a people situates its past, present, and future identity” (xiv). In other words, Bruyneel expresses the need for real and conceptual spaces in which selfdetermined sovereignty is made possible for Native peoples without those spaces being defined primarily in relation to white people and white institutions. Yet Bruyneel’s claims raise questions about whether such spaces are viable within a mixed-race framework. How does political hybridity function when it intersects with racial hybridity? In this analysis of Legion, I argue that third-space narratives are insufficient for understanding the representational politics of race and sovereignty. While I am persuaded by Bruyneel’s claims about Indigenous refusal “to accommodate itself to the political choices framed by the imperial binary: assimilation or secession,

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inside or outside, modern or traditional, and so on,” I am less convinced that such refusals result in a “third space of sovereignty” (217). Instead, I argue that Audra Simpson’s model of nested sovereignties offers a more robust theorization of Indigenous identities, one that acknowledges the cultural capital of racial and political binaries but also interrogates how they are positioned or oriented toward each other. Examining Legion through the language of nested sovereignties keeps us attentive to power dynamics while also taking seriously embedded modes of Indigenous autonomy. While such a formulation might lack the liberatory promise of third-space narratives, it better reflects the representational logics of Legion while avoiding the dominant rhetoric of assimilation.

Visual Sovereignty and Racial Disorientation The racial logics of Legion speak directly to how “Indigenous identity is fuzzy around the question of identity based in blood degree, cultural attributes, linguistic characteristics, and descent” (Coates 144–145). Indeed, scholars have long struggled to define indigeneity along racial lines. Instead, sovereignty and the language of membership serve as primary markers of Indigenous identity. By examining Kerry-Cary as a mixed-race character, I suggest that imagining Native sovereignty as a racialized and embodied status helps us to understand how the logics of (dis)possession function in American media. As Coates notes, “The expansion of the concept [of sovereignty] beyond Western legal philosophies is an exciting endeavor in Native American Studies and correlates more smoothly with current trends in ethnic studies” (125). In what follows, I demonstrate how reading KerryCary through mixed-race studies opens up similar approaches to understanding popular representations of Native sovereignty. The Loudermilks are first introduced to viewers as separate people with distinct identities. Kerry appears in the opening episode, emerging from an unmarked vehicle and pursuing a mutant named David Haller through an astral projection. She does so in a stark black and off-white outfit that foreshadows her status as a mutant who negotiates multiple racial identities. Her clothing is notable not only for the clear boundaries between colors but also for being asymmetrical and torn in multiple places. She is visually projected not as “mixed” but as a composite of distinct colors that are both sewn together and torn apart. As this projection eventually gives

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FIG. 10.1  ​David imagines Kerry as his friend Lenny and blurs their features together. From season 1, episode 1, of Legion. Original airdate: February 8, 2017.

way to reality, Kerry is shown in a more muted outfit instead. Yet even in his first encounter with Kerry’s “real” self, David struggles to see her as a coherent subject. She briefly morphs into David’s friend Lenny, a white woman he knew previously (fig.  10.1). Before viewers even meet Cary or know of their shared mutation, they are given a visual foreshadowing of Kerry’s ambiguous (and potentially unstable) racial status. In addition to being represented as racially ambiguous, Kerry is initially portrayed as an autonomous character. Indeed, we might be tempted to imagine her opening scenes as a form of what Michelle  H. Raheja calls “visual sovereignty,” or “a way of reimagining Native-centered articulations of self-representation and autonomy” (200). It is not until the next episode that viewers meet Cary and confront what Aileen Moreton-Robinson refers to as “the possessive logics of patriarchal white sovereignty” (xi). Cary appears as an unnamed white man in a suit and viewers learns that he is the lead scientist running tests on David. His first interactions with David hint at the relationship between Kerry and Cary. While preparing David for a scan, Cary begins talking to Kerry—although he appears to be talking to himself, as Kerry is not visible. David is confused but responds by mentioning that he, too, talks to himself. Cary corrects him: “I wasn’t talking to myself, I was talking to Kerry.”4 Viewers hear their names spoken for the first time, and—like David—remain confused: “I thought your name was

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Cary.” As Cary affirms this, David remains puzzled: “So you’re talking to Kerry, just not the Cary that happens to be yourself?” While the specific nature of their relationship remains unclear, our introduction to Cary mirrors that of Kerry. He, too, inhabits an ambiguous (and potentially unstable) identity, just not one that is imagined primarily through racial cues. This confusion is partially resolved when David imagines hearing a woman’s voice. As the scene continues, Cary turns to Kerry and asks if she said anything. The camera then pans to Kerry, who is standing in the corner of the lab in a space where she was previously not visible. As he tries to make sense of the situation, David remains confused as to whether Kerry and Cary are the same person, thus operating as a stand-in for the uncertainty of viewers. What audiences do get in these scenes is a first glimpse of the interactions between Kerry and Cary and a clearer sense of the roles that each of them plays: Cary is the scientist, and Kerry is the fighter. As Kerry responds to Cary, we also get insight into their personalities. Kerry is visibly annoyed by the questions and childishly turns away to resume her training. Moments later, she is missing from the same camera angle and Cary’s attention returns to David. As Fiona Nicoll argues, we “have a political and intellectual responsibility to analyze and evaluate the innumerable ways in which white sovereignty circumscribes and mitigates the exercise of Indigenous sovereignty” (19). In this case, the appearance of Cary not only challenges Kerry’s autonomous status, it mimics the first episode, in which David makes Kerry appear and disappear via astral projection. What initially seemed to be an independent and sovereign Native body (Kerry) gets resituated within a narrative of whiteness that “orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ‘take up’ space” (Ahmed 150). Kerry’s ability to “take up” space here, or even to exist as an autonomous and embodied self, gets reoriented within a framework of white sovereignty. In the third episode, questions about Kerry’s autonomy are foregrounded as viewers learn that she and Cary share a body. In an early montage, the two turn away from their activities and walk directly into each other. Kerry vanishes as she is completely absorbed into Cary’s body. This scene makes it clear that their relationship, like Kerry’s first outfit, is not symmetrical. Her next appearance builds on this asymmetry. Cary is working in his lab and says aloud that he wants a tool fetched. Syd Barrett5 is also in the room and wrongly assumes that Cary is speaking to her. Instead, Kerry emerges from him in the role of a reluctant lab assistant called in to work. In this way, the asymmetry of Kerry-Cary comes into

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focus by invoking a colonialist politics of recognition. As Glen Sean Coulthard argues, “In situations where colonial rule does not depend solely on the exercise of state violence, its reproduction instead rests on the ability to entice Indigenous peoples to identify, either implicitly or explicitly, with the profoundly asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of recognition either imposed on or granted to them by the settler state and society” (25). In this instance, Kerry is invisible until Cary calls her to labor, summoning her forth in the role of his assistant. The politics of recognition here are tied to Cary as knowledge maker and Kerry as laborer. Their nonreciprocal form highlights this asymmetry. These power dynamics become even more apparent as Kerry narrates her origin story to Syd in the next episode. Syd asks, “So, you live inside his body?” Kerry quickly interrupts her and says, “We share.” Syd then wants to know whether that is “weird,” to which Kerry responds with a story that is told in her voice and Cary’s voice, and sometimes by both voices together: K ERRY  ​Ray and Irma Whitecloud. They’re having their first kid, and it’s a girl.

Native girl. They decide to name her Kerry. K ERRY- CARY  ​Nine months later . . . CARY  ​ . . . ​a skinny white boy comes out. K ERRY  ​Ray decides Irma had an affair. He leaves her, so now Irma’s a single mother raising this bastard runt. CARY  ​Then eight years later, little boy Cary wakes up in his room . . . K ERRY  ​ . . . ​and there is an eight-year-old Native girl playing with his train set. So for the next year, he thinks maybe he made her up, like his imaginary friend who comes and goes, but . . . K ERRY- CARY  ​ . . . ​then he figures out that . . . CARY  ​ . . . ​she lives inside of him . . . K ERRY- CARY  ​ . . . ​that they’re two people in one body. SY D  ​That’s his side. What about you? K ERRY  ​Mm, what do you mean? SY D  ​You’re a person too, with feelings. I’m asking what it’s like for you. K ERRY  ​Okay. He does the boring stuff, okay? Eating, sleeping, whatever it is you guys do in the bathroom, and I get all the action. He makes me laugh, and I keep him safe. If that’s weird, I’m okay with it.

This exchange marks the first reference to their racial identities in the series. It also raises questions about membership and legitimacy (Cary is a

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“bastard runt”), as well as their division of labor (Kerry performs the “action” while Cary does the “boring stuff”). Kerry implicitly reveals how their identity is grounded in whiteness. While it is told as their origin story, viewers never actually learn about her origins. Cary is born, but Kerry just appears.6 In addition, Cary initially thinks of Kerry as an imaginary friend, in an echo of the “spectral Indian” trope common in American literature as a form of discursive removal or dispossession.7 Yet her narrative also claims that they are “two people in one body,” a line that invites us to read KerryCary as a mixed-race figure. The response by Syd is also striking. She both advocates for Kerry’s autonomous personhood and fails to acknowledge what Kerry and Cary share. The assumption that two or more autonomous identities cannot (co)exist in a single body speaks to a tension that mixedrace people often face when they are asked to explain themselves to others.8

Reservationization and the Politics of Shared Trauma With her Native identity made explicit, viewers gain information about Kerry and her shared mutation. Kerry only ages outside Cary’s body, a detail that becomes important as Cary begins to express concerns about what happens to her when he dies. Cary often imagines her in a childlike or dependent state that invokes a longer history of infantilizing Natives. Such representations of Kerry are also emphasized through her singular focus on fighting, as if combat were a game. The fourth episode leads to an actual fight, where Kerry gleefully asserts, “All day it’s talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk—my turn,” in response to Cary’s “boring” life. As she leaps out a window to fight Division 3—a government agency seeking to control and weaponize mutants and their powers—the scene quickly shifts to Cary, who is dancing in his lab miles from the action. Visually, his movements match hers. He no longer seems to have control over his body, although they are not merged. He also seems exhilarated, as if he shares her feelings. On one hand, this scene raises questions about his ability as a white man (or a mixed-race character) to “play Indian” in ways that are safely removed from the experience of being “fully” Native. On the other hand, his experience is more than that. He takes blows when she is struck and passes out as she is knocked unconscious. As a mixed-race character, Cary shares some of the pains of being Native even though he does not experience the direct suffering that Kerry does.

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This shared pain is instructive. Kerry and Cary may occupy separate bodies in this scene, but that does not shield Cary from the violence leveled against Kerry. This moment reflects how mixed-race people may be denied the pain of their marginalized status when they occupy spaces where they benefit from whiteness. Cary’s ambiguous relationship to real and imagined injury makes it possible to reflect on being a mixed-race person who experiences violence at the hands of white institutions. As the fifth episode begins, Melanie Bird—a human leader who helps mutants to control their powers and resist Division 3—asks Cary why he cannot absorb Kerry to heal her. He responds that such a move would send him into shock, as “it’s a very delicate ecosystem.” On the surface, this seems like a logical claim about his age and frailty. Yet this claim also echoes damaging tropes about nonwhite women and the idea that they experience pain differently.9 That Cary invokes their mutation as a “delicate ecosystem” is also telling. It reveals the fragility of their relationship and speaks to the delicate balance struck by mixed-race people as they negotiate their identities. As Kerry wakes up, Cary leans over her and asks, “Are you ready?” She consents, and he absorbs her into himself. As he does this, he says, “It’s okay. I got you.” Once she has been fully absorbed, he begins to visibly manifest wounds (fig. 10.2). The image of a white man embodying the pain of a Native woman is complex. On one hand, it envisions a world in which white people could

FIG. 10.2  ​Cary absorbs Kerry into his body and visibly begins to manifest her wounds.

From season 1, episode 5, of Legion. Original airdate: March 8, 2017.

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use their bodies to protect others from the pain caused by white systems of power. Yet such fantasies also risk becoming a form of erasure in which protection becomes a mode of silencing or erasing. This tension leads to several important questions: Does making trauma visible on a white body operate on the false assumption that such wounds can be experienced by white people? And does it somehow represent how Native suffering could be confused for white suffering in mixed-race bodies? Perhaps this scene captures the complexity of mixed-race life in a way that points toward frameworks for healing that are reparative of both physical traumas and historical ones. In that vein, Kerry-Cary demonstrates that there is no way to survive in a multiracial world without white people being willing to absorb and suffer the violence that their systems have created. Still, such claims also invoke a problematic “white savior” narrative. To some extent, this scene seems to promote assimilationism as Kerry is absorbed into Cary’s body in order to heal, mirroring an all-too-familiar narrative of racial “reconciliation” through erasure. Still, I believe the image of Cary being wounded (and literally darkening) resists such facile interpretations and is striking for its interpretive potential as a narrative of race mixture. That said, this interaction also provides a complicated narrative about sovereignty. Although depicted as consensual, Cary’s paternalistic absorption of Kerry potentially echoes protectionist narratives tied to reservations in the United States. Simpson, for example, writes about how “reservationization” alters not only bodies politic through narratives of political health but also physical bodies through diet and lifestyle changes. Cary’s body serves visually as a reservation—one to which Kerry must return for her own health and protection.10 While it is contextualized as a benevolent act, reading this absorption as reservationization demonstrates how Cary restricts (intentionally or unintentionally) Kerry’s autonomy and her sovereign status. When we consider that Division 3 functions as an extension of official white institutions, it appears that Cary contains her within his whiteness in order to “protect” her from an institutional form of that very whiteness. The rest of the first season mostly tracks Kerry and Cary in an attempt to make sense of them as autonomous identities. With everybody trapped inside David’s mind on the astral plane, the sixth episode places the characters in a fictional mental institution where the Shadow King, a villainous mutant telepath, plays therapist. Kerry and Cary sit down for a session in which they are asked about the unhealthy nature of their attachment (in

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this reality they do not share a body). Much as in the voiceovers mentioned earlier, in this scene they often speak together or finish each other’s sentences. They even say in tandem that they are “the same person . . . ​basically.” Realizing that might sound creepy, they then backtrack and emphasize that they know they are not “literally the same . . . ​like, sharing a body.” Still, the implication that they are a single self remains. This tension between subjectivity and otherness mirrors their other reality, in which negotiations of race and embodiment are also considered “weird.” Later, they sit together in the cafeteria, taking turns flinging food into each other’s mouths. Unlike in their previous reality, this episode explores their relationship as one of codependence rather than dependence. This codependence is highlighted through repeated images of symmetry between Kerry and Cary—a nod to them as two parts of a shared body or self. This symmetry collapses, however, as they walk hand in hand down a hallway and only Cary breaks off to use the bathroom. This moment of asymmetry reminds us that their roles and functions are not equal, even in an alternate reality. They are not a blend of two identities, but a pair of codependent identities whose performances of selfhood are determined by context. In this case, however, they are literally contained within the settler colonialist system they inhabit (the mental institution). When they go to bed, they have separate rooms divided by a wall, allowing viewers to again see them as symmetrical, although that symmetry is also a form of segregation. And this scene, too, is eventually disrupted as the two of them are again separated shortly thereafter. In the aftermath of their separation, Kerry wakes up to find herself alone and eventually chased by a powerful Division 3 mutant, Walter (a.k.a. the Eye). Meanwhile, we see Cary working with Oliver Bird, during which he shows little apparent concern for Kerry—who is now fleeing from Walter and a horde of zombielike creatures. Eventually they all escape the astral plane, but as they reconvene the entire team sits down to eat—everyone except Kerry. Cary approaches and asks whether she wants to merge, but she says, “I’m good,” and accuses him of abandoning her: “You left me. I needed you, and you left me.” The politics of this scene demonstrate that Kerry is awakening to the lack of protection Cary’s white body actually affords her. She realizes that his protection can be withdrawn at any time without her consent. The politics of their bodies reflect those of the bodies politic they represent by revealing the limited protections available to Native identities constituted within structures of whiteness. Their exchange mirrors the

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experiences of mixed-race persons who may be accustomed to the protections of whiteness but are denied those protections as contexts change. As Mahtani argues, mixed-race women’s “identifications with whiteness [shift] through different spaces depending on the tensions of race, gender, and class” (Mixed 164).11 While Mahtani also notes how mixed-race women are often able to choose their racial classifications in some contexts, “it would be naïve to presume that the mixed race woman always experiences an unopposed freedom to choose how she wishes to be perceived racially” (151). In the case of Kerry, this tension also speaks to a core issue with the experience of nested sovereignties. When one sovereignty is nested within another through a rhetoric of protection, how is that body politic conditioned to survive when protection is removed? Such dynamics make dependence a necessary condition for those who are nested within. Even as this scene highlights the limits of Kerry’s autonomy, it also gestures to the importance of decolonization. Kerry insists on a sustained decoupling from Cary as the season ends, at one point refusing a glass of water and rejecting Cary’s offer to “recharge.” This intentional separation recalls Bruyneel’s theory of a boundary politics “that views indigenous tribes and indigenous political identity as neither wholly separate from nor seamlessly assimilated within settler-societies; it is concomitantly the case that these very dominant societies can neither ignore nor absorb indigenous people” (220). Applying this rhetoric to Kerry and Cary illuminates how Cary cannot simply ignore Kerry (the language of “recharging” reminds us of her value as Indigenous labor), nor can he simply absorb her against her will (she maintains a limited sense of autonomy in refusing his offers). While these circumstances obviously do not realize the liberatory promise of decolonization, they do demonstrate the inability of white, settler-colonialist structures to fully contain and control Kerry as a Native woman.

Monstrous Mutations and the Politics of Passing The second season of Legion opens with a shift in political affiliations for those at Summerland—the mutant sanctuary that once served as their base of operations. Summerland is assimilated into the same government agency (Division 3) that tried to contain and study mutant threats in the first season. Examined alongside the body merging of Kerry-Cary, this assimilation of bodies politic provides an additional window into the

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politics of sovereignty in Legion. Just as Kerry represents a marginalized and dispossessed identity that is absorbed into a normative white body, Summerland represents an entire community of marginalized and dispossessed people (mutants) being absorbed into a normative government entity, albeit one run by a cyborg who is ethnically coded as Japanese. In this way, the newly merged Summerland–Division 3 becomes a mixed body politic that must negotiate its own memberships, nested sovereignties, and allegiances. As members of a government task force that seeks to contain the threat of mutants, Kerry and Cary find themselves protecting the very apparatus that hates and fears them (perhaps the most common trope in X-Men narratives), even as they struggle to better understand their relationship to each other and to their primarily white allies. Their own nested sovereignties thus become manifestations of a larger instability tied to political affiliation and membership. Their relationship remains tense in this space, with Cary scolding Kerry at one point for making others feel uncomfortable. She calls him out for this double standard by noting that he walked around on Wednesday without pants, but eventually obeys the command to merge inside him. The explicit reason for discomfort is her gender (she would see David naked), yet that discomfort is noticeably directed at the only nonwhite person in the room. In this way, their exchange resembles passing narratives, as Kerry-Cary literally hides the Native part of themselves (i.e., performs whiteness) in order to comfort David and access the privileges of being white and male. Amy Robinson has argued that passing “poses the question of identity as a matter of competing discourses of recognition,” and this scene highlights Cary’s fear that they should be recognized as a Native woman in this moment (728). He feels embarrassed when his Native self emerges and even tells David and Syd that he is “so sorry about that” after Kerry disappears back into him. That Cary suddenly feels the need to apologize for Kerry (and thus for himself) is particularly striking in the wake of the recent merging of Summerland and Division 3, in which the mutant group has become hidden within an official government institution. Again, we see an implied racial discourse speaking to representations of political membership. In the following episode, Cary is again separated from Kerry. After a frantic search, she eventually finds him, but they are no longer able to merge easily. It takes several attempts for the two characters to become a single body. And instead of a clean absorption, viewers see Cary’s arm

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FIG. 10.3  ​Cary’s arm reaches out from Kerry’s chest after a failed attempt at merging together. From season 2, episode 2, of Legion. Original airdate: April 10, 2018.

sticking out from Kerry’s chest and hear his muffled voice coming from inside her (fig. 10.3). The first image of Cary being absorbed into Kerry is explicitly monstrous. The idea that mixed-race people are monstrous is not a new one, as Christina Sharpe notes in her study of a nineteenth-century slavery apologist, who wrote, “Hybridism is heinous. Impurity of races is against the law of nature. Mulattoes are monsters” (27). This scene between Kerry and Cary, then, raises questions about power, passing, and what is deemed natural. Why, when Kerry-Cary were merged into a white-passing body in the first season, was it considered reparative and healing? And why, when they are merged into a nonwhite body, is their mixture represented as monstrous? I argue that the nonnormative appearance here speaks to sovereign power. Cary’s extended arm signals that, when bodies politic are not nested in ways that privilege whiteness, the result is an unnatural figure who cannot fit neatly into established categories. No longer seen as an act of “recharging,” the merging of Kerry and Cary is now something to be “fixed.” Later, as Kerry lies in bed, we learn that Cary has been fully absorbed. David asks whether Kerry-Cary is okay, to which Kerry responds, “Try getting flipped inside-out, see how you like it.” The language of being “inside-out” speaks to a common mixed-race experience: the need to explain one’s identity by reconciling exterior racial markers with interior subjectivities. As Teresa Kay Williams has noted, when mixed-race people

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are unable “to code, categorize, and attach racial meaning to . . . ​‘obvious’ visual classifications” (193), it can lead to what Michael Omi and Harold Winant refer to as “a momentary crisis of racial meaning” (62). Kerry’s response highlights the expectation that a normative nesting of their identities makes them visibly white, and this new positioning is therefore disruptive. Yet it is David who experiences a crisis of racial meaning here. He cannot decode Kerry-Cary. This is apparent as David decides that he needs to talk to Cary through Kerry, providing viewers with the image of a white person talking past Native voices. Later, when Kerry-Cary suggests a plan, David says, “I trust you—him.” His stutter highlights how authority is visualized and racialized. David even yells into Kerry’s face at one point, making it clear that he wants to address Cary without Kerry as mediator. Even as a mediating voice, Kerry gets erased. To compensate, she models a code-switching that is common to mixed-race people.12 She must ventriloquize whiteness in order to be heard and then wield white modes of knowledge in order to “fix” the problem of nested sovereignty. As Kerry and Cary attempt to separate themselves, however, their narrative embraces a new rhetoric of birth that invoke the characters’ origin stories. Drawing on a shared childhood memory, Kerry begins to sing Cary out of herself. Sweating and struggling for breath, Cary eventually emerges from her as the camera pans along the laboratory bed to her abdomen. This scene again highlights the complex racial politics of Cary, who is—for the second time, it seems—birthed into existence by a Native woman. That Cary is repeatedly pulled back into a narrative of Native birth challenges facile readings of him as an unambiguously white character. Even as he leans into whiteness elsewhere, he must always be attentive to how his identity remains mixed. His response to Kerry as she articulates her unhappiness being on the outside reflects his conflicted views: “We never had a choice. . . . ​For the time being, we’re going to have to learn to exist like this.” Even as his language implies a lack of choice, his comments also point to a certain intentionality in his decision to remain separated. For example, Cary tells Kerry that “there’s not much room to move in there,” a remark that indicates he is uncomfortable with the possibility of again being subject to Native containment. That Cary feels crowded in her “reservation” system marks an end to their shared existence for most of the season and implies that the old system of sharing a body (or perhaps a body politic) is no longer of interest to him if he can no longer benefit from the (in)visibility and mobility attached to his whiteness.

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Yet full separation is not possible, just as some mixed-race people find it impossible to abandon their various racial identities and Native people cannot always embrace a single political membership. What could have been a narrative of decolonization and fully realized sovereignty for Kerry instead turns into a fraught negotiation of identities and cultural practices that reveal how “authenticity” remains insufficient for understanding Indigenous identity in terms of race and sovereignty. The inability to locate authenticity is made clear when the previous head of Division 3, Melanie, explicitly questions whether Kerry is “real.” She proposes that Kerry is just a fantasy in Cary’s head: “Think about it, you might not even be here right now—you’re just his fantasy.” Melanie’s reference to fantasy speaks to the romanticization of Native identities (via the “vanishing Indian” trope) and to the gender politics of their relationship. She imagines Kerry as a manifestation of Cary’s desire to be a “sensuous young woman” in ways that construct Kerry as an exotic, sexualized subject. Such claims also reveal how the performance of colonized identities by mixed-race people can result in accusations of merely “playing” at their marginalized identity before retreating into whiteness. Melanie later flips this script and suggests that perhaps Kerry is real and Cary is the fantasy. In this scenario, he embodies a whiteness and masculinity that speaks to her “desire for authority.” This statement implies that mixed-race Native people want to perform a normative whiteness in order to pass through the world unquestioned. Yet neither of Melanie’s scenarios imagines a “third space” or “hybrid” mode of being. Instead, they speak to the nested identity of Kerry-Cary. They are each expected to access only one racial identity or mode of sovereignty at a time, and those identities must always be positioned hierarchically in relation to other racial and political identities. Ultimately, this inability to find a third-space narrative in Legion speaks to the complex intersections of race and sovereignty in Native studies more broadly. By introducing a pair of characters whose mutation allows them to share a single body, the series provides viewers with an unsettling superhero allegory for white settler colonialism in which the mixed-race status of two heroes complicates negotiations of indigeneity and whiteness, or recognition and power. In highlighting the stakes of such an allegory, however, I want to close by suggesting that scholarship on superheroes and race mixture might productively look beyond characters who are explicitly identified as mixed. Instead, I encourage us to also consider the politics of  other mixed representational strategies. Within the Marvel television

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universe, for example, such a project might examine the complementary powers exhibited by the characters in Cloak and Dagger (Pokaski). Or, in the DC television universe (a.k.a. the Arrowverse), one might look at the character(s) of Firestorm in DC’s Legends of Tomorrow—another example of two characters with different racial identities who inhabit the same body (Berlanti et al.). As these fictional stories continue to imagine the merging of bodies (or powers) between superheroes, they highlight the limited ways in which narratives of hybridity account for the multivalent experiences of mixed-race people as they negotiate societal expectations about race and political membership.

Notes This chapter would not have been possible without the research assistance of Jason Smith. Leah Misemer and Elizabeth Nijdam read early drafts and provided me with invaluable feedback. In addition, the encouragement and suggestions I received from Jeremy M. Carnes and Margaret Galvan helped me to improve the chapter considerably. Finally, I would like to thank Eric Berlatsky and Sika Dagbovie-Mullins for their generous editorial guidance. 1 I want to acknowledge that Kerry and Cary should both be read as mixed-race

characters, even as they perform distinct racial identities. Cary is not unambiguously white. His racial status is complicated by Native parentage and his relationship with Kerry. In addition, their shared mutation speaks to how Kerry and Cary may represent nonbinary gender identities. An analysis of Legion through the lens of two-spirit identities, however, falls beyond the scope of this chapter. 2 My decision to hyphenate Kerry-Cary is motivated by Minelle Mahtani’s use of “hyphen-nation” to exemplify the relationship between hyphenated identities, multiculturalism (including mixed-race identities), and the nation-state (sovereign bodies politic). Mahtani argues that “the ‘mixed race’ person resists the occupation of a single space,” a claim that should extend to how we theorize the occupation of sovereign spaces as well (“Interrogating” 79). 3 Concerns about race and national identity are not new. As Renisa Mawani argues, “Determining who was ‘Indian’ and ‘white’ was important to the making of colonial identities[:] they specified who had access to land, citizenship, and nation” (49). Mawani notes, “Those of mixed-race ancestry enjoyed fewer rights,” and their in-between status enabled government officials to displace them to the margins (69). 4 Kerry-Cary is not the only dual identity in Legion. David and Syd swap bodies, the Shadow King possesses multiple bodies, characters exist in various versions across realities, and David is described as both schizophrenic and having dissociative identity disorder. Yet within that constellation of identities, the relationship between Kerry and Cary is the only one that speaks explicitly to how race (or race mixture) affects identity formation.

“They’re Two People in One Body” • 217 5 Syd Barrett’s name refers to the original lead singer of Pink Floyd, known for his

mental illness, institutionalization, and psychedelia.

6 While this scene erases Kerry from their shared origin story, it also inverts

7

8

9

10

11

12

normative colonizing narratives. We see Kerry, as a Native woman who shows up and begins playing with Cary’s toys, not only acting as colonizer but also reclaiming spaces that are rightfully hers. Renée L. Bergland argues that “the discursive removal of Indians . . . ​[explains] the ideological power of the figure of the Indian ghost. The image also draws ideological power from the sense of fait accompli (the Indians are already gone)” (5). As Marc P. Johnston and Kevin L. Nadal note, “Existing literature on multiracial people tends to focus primarily on identity and internal struggles in ‘choosing’ between their multiple racial backgrounds instead of examining race-related experiences within a monoracially-designed society” (124). They argue that “potential discrimination or exclusion . . . ​may lead to some multiracial individuals choosing to identify with monoracial labels” (131). Such narratives have a history in the United States that stretches back to Thomas Jefferson’s claims in Notes on the State of Virginia that Black people “require less sleep” because their afflictions are “less felt” (139). Contemporary research continues to find inequalities in pain treatment for nonwhite communities. See Bonham; Institute of Medicine. Raheja might argue that Legion, as a series, also functions as a reservation: “Visual culture has been both the site of the most visible forms of discursive violence committed against Native people and a space where Indigenous directors and actors have created virtual reservations that have fostered a complex grid of agency and empowerment” (52). This fictional experience speaks to a lived reality for mixed-race people by demonstrating that “close proximity to whiteness does not necessarily mean close proximity to everything positive and automatic transfer of white privilege” (Chang 118). Code switching, or being bidialectical, is often considered important to people of mixed-heritage or mixed-race identities (Wallace 203).

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory, vol. 8, no. 2, 2007, pp. 149–168. Allen, Chadwick. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Bergland, Renée L. The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects. University Press of New England, 2000. Berlanti, Greg, Marc Guggenheim, Andrew Kreisberg, and Phil Klemmer, developers. DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. Berlanti Productions, DC Entertainment, Warner Bros. Television, 2016–present. Bhabha, Homi. “Interview with Homi Bhabha: The Third Space.” By Jonathan Rutherford. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 207–221.

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Bonham, Vence L. “Race, Ethnicity, and Pain Treatment: Striving to Understand the Causes and Solutions to the Disparities in Pain Treatment.” Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, vol. 29, no. 1, 2001, pp. 52–68. Bruyneel, Kevin. The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.Indigenous Relations. University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Byrd, Jodi A. Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Carnes, Jeremy M. “ ‘The Original Enchantment’: Whiteness, Indigeneity, and Representational Logics in The New Mutants.” Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics, edited by Martin Lund and Sean Guynes, Ohio State University Press, 2019, pp. 57–71. Chang, Sharon H. Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-racial World. Routledge, 2015. Coates, Julia M. “ ‘This Sovereignty Thing’: Nationality, Blood, and the Cherokee Resurgence.” Who Is an Indian? Race, Place, and the Politics of Indigeneity in the Americas, edited by Maximilian C. Forte, University of Toronto Press, 2013, pp. 124–150. Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skins, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Hawley, Noah, creator. Legion. 26 Keys Productions, Donners’ Company, Bad Hat Harry Productions, Kinberg Genre, Marvel Television, FX Productions, 2017–present. Institute of Medicine. Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. National Academies Press, 2003. Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Edited by William Peden, University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Johnston, Marc P., and Kevin L. Nadal. “Multiracial Microaggressions: Exposing Monoracism in Everyday Life and Clinical Practice.” Microaggressions and Marginality: Manifestation, Dynamics, and Impact, edited by Derald Wing Sue, Wiley and Sons, 2010, pp. 123–144. Mahtani, Minelle. “Interrogating the Hyphen-Nation: Canadian Multicultural Policy and ‘Mixed Race’ Identities.” Social Identities, vol. 8, no. 1, 2002, pp. 67–90. ———. Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality. University of British Columbia Press, 2014. Mawani, Renisa. “In Between and Out of Place: Mixed-Race Identity, Liquor, and the Law in British Columbia, 1850–1913.” Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, edited by Sherene Razack, Between the Lines, 2002, pp. 47–70. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Nicoll, Fiona. “Reconciliation in and Out of Perspective: White Knowing, Seeing, Curating, and Being at Home in and against Indigenous Sovereignty.” Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004, pp. 17–31. Omi, Michael, and Harold Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. Routledge, 1994. Pokaski, Joe, creator. Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger. Wandering Rocks Productions, ABC Signature Studios, Marvel Television, 2018–present.

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Raheja, Michelle H. Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film. University of Nebraska Press, 2010. Robinson, Amy. “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 20, no. 4, 1994, pp. 715–736. Sharpe, Christina. Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-slavery Subjects. Duke University Press, 2010. Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States. Duke University Press, 2014. Wallace, Kendra R. “Situating Multiethnic Identity: Contributions of Discourse Theory to the Study of Mixed Heritage Students.” Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, vol. 3, no. 3, 2004, pp. 195–213. Williams, Teresa Kay. “Race as Process: Reassessing the ‘What Are You?’ Encounters of Biracial Individuals.” The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier, edited by Maria P. P. Root, Sage, 1996, pp. 191–210.

11

Into the Spider-Verse and the Commodified (Re)imagining of Afro-Rican Visibility ISABEL MOLINA-GUZMÁN

The opening credits of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (ISV) feature a montage of the presumably original Spider-Man illustrated as a racially white Peter Parker (voiced by Chris Pine). It includes a scene of a masked Spider-Man staring into a mirror. And it ends with Parker claiming, “There’s only one Spider-Man. And you are looking at him.” Setting up the playful narrative of the multiverse, Parker’s voice-over narration cuts to the character of a decidedly not-white Miles Morales, who is listening to R&B while drawing in his Brooklyn bedroom. Fast-forward thirty minutes into the animated film and Mary Jane Watson-Parker (voiced by Zoë Kravitz, who herself is the daughter of mixed-race parents) is giving a eulogy for her recently murdered husband, Peter Parker.1 In that time span, a teenage Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), who has been transformed by the bite of a psychedelic genetically modified 220

Into the Spider-Verse and (Re)Imagining Afro-Rican Visibility • 221

FIG. 11.1  ​Miles Morales sees himself as Spider-Man in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Sony Pictures, 2018.

spider, finds himself in a subway bathroom wearing a recently purchased and ill-fitting Spider-Man costume with the price tag still attached. He hesitantly holds the mask in his hands while staring into his reflection as he faces the decision to take up the mantle and responsibilities of being the city’s Spider-Man (fig. 11.1). As he stares, Mary Jane’s voice-over concludes, “He didn’t ask for his powers. But he chose to be Spider-Man.” In that moment in front of the mirror, millions of fans and Hollywood audiences throughout the world are invited to stand in Miles Morales’s space, the space of a mixed-race African American and Afro–Puerto Rican (Puerto Rican of African descent) teenage boy who now holds the fate of the city in his brown hands. In that moment, audiences are called to root for the young, mixed-race teenager and the Afro-futuristic possibilities of a spectacular present, a present moment where an awkwardly average, hoodie-wearing teenager becomes the new Spider-Man and saves the day. In that moment, Miles Morales is handed the cultural baton of one of Marvel Comics’ most iconic superheroes. Given the troubling real-world context of U.S. state-sanctioned violence against youths of color, that moment in front of the mirror is transcendent. In this chapter, I explore the politics of cultural production surrounding the movie’s representation of a mixed-race superhero in the era of postracial film, a politics that benefits from the commodification of a mixed-race and Afro-Latino identity that can perform and embody a range of related identities. First, I focus on the pessimistic limitations of the

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movie’s production with a focus on color-blind writing and color-blind and color-conscious casting. Next, I examine the possibility of “critical celebratory” readings by mixed-race, Afro-Latina / o, African American, and Latina / o audiences of the film (Nama).2 I reflect on the online responses by Black, Latina / o, and mixed-race audiences who express pleasure in the act of becoming culturally visible and feelings of recognition in ISV. To do so, I examine the cinematic depiction of Miles Morales (visual and sonic) and reviewers’, bloggers’, and audiences’ responses to ISV. Specifically, I analyze the comments of writers who self-identify as African American or Black, mixed race, Latina / o, or Afro-Latina / o / x.3 Together the set of audience readings brings the complexity of ethnic and racial identity to the foreground in spite of the movie producers’ color-blind character development and narrative. Instead, audience readings privilege the visual and sonic pleasure of cultural recognition in spite of the producers’ color-blind cinematic practices—practices that rely on the commodification of ethnic and racial minorities through the decontextualization and depoliticization of mixed-race identity to make a profitable text.

Miles Morales and the Cinematic Era of Postracial Production Sony Pictures’ ISV has to date grossed over $375 million, with almost half of its sales coming from outside the domestic United States (“SpiderMan”). With a spectacular mix of cutting-edge animation, highly regarded writing and voice acting, and a slew of music hits, the movie won the 2019 Oscar for Best Animated Film. However, cultural critics, movie audiences, and fans of color celebrated not the accolades but the fact that an AfroRican (African American Puerto Rican) teenager from Brooklyn survived the violence around him, found his unique voice, and got to save the day for the rest of the spider-heroes and New York City. As such, the mixedrace character of Miles Morales presents an interesting challenge to popular constructions of African American and Latina / o communities. By developing a character that occupies multiple ethnic and racial categories, Sony producers created a cultural opening for representing a nonwhite mixed-race multicultural superhero for the consumption of global audiences. Representing Spider-Man as ethnically and racially fluid and markedly not white is culturally transgressive yet economically conservative

Into the Spider-Verse and (Re)Imagining Afro-Rican Visibility • 223

in that it does not displace one of Sony’s most marketable representations of white, heteronormative, heroic masculinity—Peter Parker (Frank 242).4 Peter Parker’s Spider-Man is one of Marvel’s most popular comic book heroes and Sony Pictures’ most profitable franchise, and the Miles Morales character and story line (2011 to present) is one of the most successful to come out of the Marvel’s Ultimate comic book series. In the Ultimate comic book universe, the story lines operate distinctly from those in the original Marvel comic universe and many of Marvel’s canonical superheroes are reconceptualized through different gender, ethnic, racial, and religious identities. Marvel Comics’ more diverse takes on its originally white heroes include a Chicana Spider-Woman, Muslim Ms. Marvel, and Black Captain America. It is the mixed-race Spider-Man Miles Morales who has made the first leap to the movie screen, even if only in animated form. This is perhaps not surprising given the popularity of Peter Parker and Miles Morales with comic book fans and the Spider-Man franchise’s importance to Sony. Thus, the decision by Sony Pictures executives to cinematically develop the mixedrace character of Miles Morales, a young, insecure teenager, through an animated feature is a financially and culturally safe choice given the contemporary economic dynamics of the entertainment industry. According to the 2018 Motion Picture Association of America THEME Report, African American audiences represent 16 percent of moviegoers, and Latina / o audiences make up 24 percent (2018 THEME Report 25–26). Both African American and Latina / o moviegoers are overrepresented as ticket buyers given that African Americans make up 12.6 percent and Latinas / os make up 18  percent of the U.S. population. In other words, ethnoracial minority audiences are more active moviegoers, with Latinas / os having the highest rate of movie attendance among ethnic and racial minority audiences. The most financially successful movies reflect this demographic trend. For example, the highest-grossing film in 2018, Black Panther (another film based on a racially diverse Marvel superhero), attracted a record diverse audience, with 58  percent of its U.S. ticket sales going to African American, Latina / o, and Native American audiences (21). Such examples of blockbusting ticket sales confirm the findings of Darnell Hunt et al.’s 2019 Hollywood Diversity Report: “America’s increasingly diverse audiences prefer diverse film and television content” (4). In sum, diversity on the movie screen results in more diverse audiences and, by implication, increased U.S. ticket sales. However, Hollywood cinema executives must walk a fine line between drawing diverse U.S. audiences and catering to the industry’s growing

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global market. According to the 2019 THEME Report, the global market grew to $42 billion with Asia (China, Japan, and Korea) the biggest consumer of U.S.-made film (THEME Report 2019 11–12). By comparison, in 2019 the U.S.-Canada market dropped to $11.4 billion (18). Thus, in spite of the demand by increasingly diverse U.S. movie audiences, executives of the major Hollywood production studios have been slow to adapt to moviegoers’ changing demographics, with slightly less than 20 percent of cinematic leads in 2018 going to actors of color (14). Marvel Studios is one of the exceptions to the norms of Hollywood representation practices. For the past ten years, Marvel executives have intentionally built a profitable and inclusive representation strategy by participating in what I term “post-racial era” production practices (Molina-Guzmán, Latinas and Latinos 63). Postracial movie production practices engage in color-blind and color-conscious multicultural ensemble casting and color-blind storytelling and character development. These production strategies have allowed movie and television executives to tap into contemporary audiences’ demands for more inclusive representations through globally commodifiable depictions of U.S. ethnic and racial minorities (Warner 112). Thus, following Ashley Doane’s lead, I do not use the term “color-blind” in this essay to suggest that race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual differences are not visible or significant in ISV; rather, I suggest these differences are central to the film’s production and marketability in culturally, economically, and politically complicated ways. The final section of the chapter examines how the visual and sonic visibility of these differences— especially in the context of representational invisibility—plays a significant role for U.S. ethnic and racial minority audiences. Although the film is situated within this postracial production context, the use of animation allows ISV’s producers to engage in a more complex negotiation between color-blind casting practices and a color-conscious approach to casting key roles. Throughout the past decade, color-blind casting, which is more predominant in theater and television, is slowly gaining traction in film as well. The practice, also referred to as “blind casting,” assumes that skin color or other physical markers of racial or ethnic identity are irrelevant to an actor’s ability to perform the role. Color-conscious casting practices foreground the ethnic and racial identity of the actor and the character as significant to the story. Color-conscious casting and writing make the actors’ differences a central component of the narrative, plot, and character development, such as in the role of antihero Erik

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Killmonger (Michael  B. Jordan) in Black Panther, whose identity and experiences as an African American man drive the central conflict of the story. The producers of ISV engage in color-blind casting and color-conscious casting and writing. Similarly, a color-blind writing approach strives for diversifying the visual representation of bodies on the screen without requiring the writers to foreground the ethnic, racial, or gender identities or cultural contexts of the actors in developing the characters or narratives (Warner 13). The characters of James Rhodes / War Machine (Don Cheadle) in Iron Man 3 and Sam Wilson / Falcon (Anthony Mackie) in Captain America: The Winter Soldier are two examples. Although the African American characters are performed by African American actors, race and the racial identity of the actors or the characters do not inform the narrative, plot, or character development. Color-blind casting and writing allow movie executives to market the film domestically and globally by making the characters and the story lines more universal. In other words, to make the movie marketable, the characters must often exist in a fictional world that erases U.S. ethnic or racial context and specificity. Given cocreator Stan Lee’s observation that anyone, regardless of ethnicity and race, can see themselves behind the mask, Spider-Man as a character is particularly ripe for this type of color-blind casting and color-blind writing approach.5 ISV’s directors and writers carefully straddled U.S. audience demands for color-consciousness and global imperatives for color-blind approaches when they developed the characters and narrative of the film. For example, ISV’s ensemble of characters and the actors who play them are diverse in terms of nationality, gender, ethnicity, and race. And the producers’ casting of several of the roles was done through a color-conscious approach with regard to the ethnic and racial identities of the characters—for example, the decision to cast Afro-Rican actor Luna Lauren Velez as Rio Morales, who is also Afro-Rican. Yet the role of Miles Morales was filled through a color-blind casting process with audio-only auditions. Such processes create increased opportunities for ethnic and racial minority actors because the expectation is that the actors do not have to “look” like or be identified with the ethnicity, race, or gender of the envisioned character. This was the case for ISV, as U.S.-born Jamaican actor Shameik Moore was invited to audition and, after a national casting call, eventually earned the role of Miles Morales. Ultimately, postracial-era Hollywood storytelling

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depends on diverse and multicultural ensemble casting alongside the development of story lines for ethnic and racial minority actors and characters that are sometimes not contextualized by the lived ethnic, racial, or gender identities or experiences of the actors or characters. Specifically, ISV’s producers intentionally develop the character of Miles Morales as visually and sonically situated within specific gender, ethnic, and racial identities, but the values that motivate the character’s development are universal. In a 2019 interview with NPR on his storytelling strategy, ISV director Peter Ramsey discussed his approach to directing the Miles Morales character: “ ‘We wanted to put our best foot forward and create something that people would be able to relate to and love.’ At the same time, Ramsey also noted the movie ‘means a lot for young Black and Latino kids to see themselves up on screen in these iconic, heroic, mythic stories,’ he says. ‘It’s a need being fulfilled’ ” (Bowman and GarciaNavarro). Thus, movie audience members who are not readers of the comics come to know that Miles Morales is Latino because of his name and the scenes with his mother and friends speaking to him in Spanish and Spanglish, to which he responds fluently. During his walk to school, Miles Morales’s bicultural, mixed-race, Afro-Rican identity is sonically signaled to audiences through the off-screen soundtrack playing the song “Mi Familia,” a bilingual English-Spanish song about unconditional love within complicated family dynamics. The character’s African American identity is developed through his relationship with his father and uncle, the movie’s R&B and hip-hop soundtrack, the animation’s Afro-futuristic visual aesthetics, and the character’s love of urban cultural forms of music and art such as R&B music, tagging, and graffiti. Deborah Thomas and Kamari Maxine Clarke argue that visual and sonic performances of U.S. Blackness are globally hegemonic and thus globally marketable (8–9). At the same time, sonic and visual performances of Latina / o and African American identity also cue audiences who are cognitively primed to interpret these signs to read Miles Morales’s specific mixed-race and bicultural identities without the producers having to explicitly reference or develop them in the film. By engaging in a mixed color-blind and color-conscious production strategy, the movie’s directors balance the desire to signal Miles Morales’s differences for the pleasure of U.S. racialized audiences with the demand to tell a story that sells to global and nonethnic white U.S. audiences. As director Peter Ramsey explained, “It erased a lot of the burden about having

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to make any greater statement about race because simply portraying characters of color in more than two dimensions and getting past the usual tropes and issues helped us say, ‘Hey, it’s a story about people.’ Which is, to me, a statement in and of itself when it comes with dealing with characters of color” (Reisman). In other words, the character and narrative do not depend on Miles Morales’s mixed-race identity, and the off-screen context of those identities does not drive the plot or motivations of the character.

Marketing Mixed-Race Identity and Color-blind Narratives in Into the Spider-Verse ISV’s narrative depends on the marketability of more universal story lines through color-blind writing, thus constraining the representational potential of the movie. The following scene illustrates the limits of such writing. Miles and his father are arguing about his attendance at an elite New York City magnet school, while the father drives him there in his police car: miles  And I would prefer to be at a normal school among the people. jefferson  The people? These are your people! miles  I’m only here ’cause I won that stupid lottery. jefferson  No way. You passed the entry test just like everybody else, okay!

The dialogue implicitly nods toward the specific ethno-racial politics that surround U.S. housing and public education—in this case, school integration and educational equity. And the scene subtly nods to Miles’s comfort and desire to return to a more multicultural and likely less financially resourced school through the phrase “the people.” Within the U.S. context, the phrase “to be among the people” or “la gente” references racial social justice movements and political-economic solidarity with working ethnic and racial minority communities. The montage before this scene depicts Miles effortlessly moving through his ethnically and racially diverse Brooklyn neighborhood and community. Thus audiences can read references to “the people” as references to this community. However, because the movie has already established Miles’s mixed-race identity, specific references to which people, gente, or communities are purposefully left ambiguous. Such a strategic creative move illustrates the color-blind ethos of the film.

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Mixed-race characters are particularly effective for the development of  marketable color-blind narratives since they occupy a multiplicity of identities—African American, Afro-Rican, both, neither, and ambiguously Other. Avoiding the specificity of U.S. ethnic and racial identity within the narrative arc, the writers develop a hero of color who does not draw attention to complicated U.S. ethno-racial politics. The police car scene exemplifies the color-blind writing practices and postracial ethos by invoking ethno-racial identities while avoiding ethnic and racial specificities. Given the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and ongoing conflicts around the policing of U.S. ethno-racial minority communities, the decision of the writers and producers to represent the character of Jefferson as a caring and involved father and a law-and-order policeman is savvy, particularly as he is not a policeman in the comics. Such a creative move situates Jefferson as a nonthreatening Black man and therefore more universally appealing while at the same time meeting audience-of-color demands for socially respectable representations. That this loving interaction between father and son occurs inside a police car is probably not lost on some U.S. audiences of color. When executives from Sony Pictures first approached Phil Lord and Christopher Miller about making an animated Spider-Man movie, they initially declined but then changed their minds when the possibility of being the first to cinematically portray Miles Morales arose: “So on the first page of the first draft of his script, Lord wrote out a mission statement for the film, proclaiming that if anyone can identify with Spider-Man, then anyone could be the character, too” (Vary). Inspired by the Spider-Man comic books, the creative team decided to build on Marvel Comics’ Spider-Verse series and Stan Lee’s proposition that it could be anyone behind the mask. Doing so allowed Sony Pictures to build on Marvel Entertainment’s depictions of superheroes of color, thus benefiting from fan and audience reception of movies like Black Panther and the Ms. Marvel comics. The creative decision to develop the mixed-race version of the character instead of Marvel’s other iteration of a mixed-race Spider-Man, Irish Latino Spider-Man Miguel O’Hara, provided the writers the opportunity to develop a nonwhite character located within urban Black culture yet with a more fluid ethnic and racial identity. In doing so, both Marvel’s and Sony’s versions of Miles Morales straddle a more marketable and less politicized color-blind approach to mixed-race representation. Questioning the commodified use of gender, ethnicity, and race to expand the global

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cinematic economic market, Robert Saunders argues, “The superhero movie represents the current pinnacle of this trend, as historically ‘American’ caped crusaders have been retooled for global consumption through a post-9 / 11 discourse of the ‘benevolent peacekeeper who stands for supposedly universal interests’ ” (142). Following this representational pattern, the writers of ISV develop Miles Morales’s character without explicitly calling attention to his mixed-race identity but by celebrating his universally legible morals and values. In an interview with Deadline, ISV writer and producer Phil Lord emphasized the color-blind writing strategy: “His experience is universal, which was our experience as filmmakers going into it. This story is so resonant because we all feel like the only one who is on this quest to be their best self. And when you find kindred spirits and realize that they’re all just as vulnerable as you are, and just as worried that they won’t be good enough, that felt like a movie” (Grobar). Sony’s Miles Morales is not motivated by his specific mixed-race identity or experiences as a young Black and Latino man. He is driven instead by a set of universally accepted values and globally familiar life experiences.6 The writers’ and directors’ color-blind approach to narrative and character development alongside Miles Morale’s mixed-race identity is a key part of the movie’s financial and critical success. Miles’s mixed-race heritage and the movie’s integration of a diverse set of visual aesthetics and spidermen and spider-women from different universes and cultures work to create a profitable text for domestic and global consumption. Indeed, reviewers of the film, such as Abraham Reisman, who is Jewish and white, easily picked up on the universally compelling characteristics of Miles Morales and the color-blind ethos of the movie’s story line: “Whether you are African-American, Latino, of mixed-race, or whatever you might be, I think everyone can find something to relate to with Miles because of his moral center. . . . ​But especially people of color can, because someone who still retains that moral center despite everything else going on around him? That’s such a special story to tell” (Reisman). Reisman’s review demonstrates the complicated reception of postracial era cinema, a type of cinema that seeks to market U.S. ethno-racial difference without cultural specificity or context. Nevertheless, the mixed-race identity of the leading character emotionally speaks to the cultural desires of U.S. ethnic and racial minority audiences. Afro-Latina / o communities, similar to other mixed-race and multicultural communities, occupy both a racialized Latina / o identity

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and an ethnic Black identity, resulting in the sometimes competing cultural pulls of Black and Latina / o cultural life. The continuing binary racial logics of the United States and the push and pull of living within and across the borders of multiple ethno-racial identities point to the growing inadequacies of commonsense definitions and media representations of ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality (Román and Flores). A 2015 Pew Research Center report on U.S. demographics documented a young population that is increasingly mixed race and multiethnic, with more than 3 percent of people and 10 percent of all babies born in 2013 identified by parents as multiracial (Multiracial in America 29). Within the United States’ adult mixed-race population, 11  percent identify as Latina / o and multiracial, which is roughly equivalent to the mixed-race population who identity as “non-Hispanic white” and Black. And of the more than sixty million people who identify as Latina / o, 24  percent identify as AfroLatina / o (Latin Americans of African descent). And 34 percent of Latinas / os from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico identify as Afro-Latino or Afro-Caribbean. According to a 2014 study by Ann Morning of the censuses of 130 countries (69 percent of the world) from 1995 to 2004, a similar demographic trend exists for the growing category of multiethnic identity, or identification with two or more ethnic groups (3–4). Thus, in developing a mixed-race cinematic character that is multicultural, the fluidity of Miles Morales’s identity provides an opening for the writers and directors to universalize and commodify his differences for a broad range of U.S. and global audiences. The ethno-racial fluidity or hybridity of Miles Morales’s character, who lives comfortably within and bridges his African American and Latino identities and communities, contributes to the effective commodification of this character. Miles is an animated example of the racial flexibility employed by Afro-Latina / o actors who can perform across a range of ethnic and racial identities, such as Zoë Saldaña, who has the ability to play African American and Latina characters and roles without a specific ethnic or racial identity. Because these characters and actors can embody and perform a range of ethnic and racial identities, I argue they are the ideal Hollywood vehicle for marketing films to a diverse set of global and U.S. domestic audiences (Molina-Guzmán, “Commodifying Black Latinidad”). As a Black and Latino character, Miles disrupts normative industry assumptions about who can be African American or Latina / o and how Latinas / os should look in the movies (Valdivia).

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The animation medium gives the writers and directors of ISV more liberty to use creative practices that produce a character that pushes against ethno-racial binaries and the tendency of the mainstream media to flatten out differences in African American and Latina / o representations. Bringing the character to the screen through animation rather than a live-action movie allows the producers to avoid the typecasting culture of the industry and expectations of the audience—both of which often demand that only actors who share the identity of the fictional character play the role. In an interview with Jasmine Hardy of TheGrio, Moore commented, “To be honest with you, to be completely honest with you, I just saw that he was Black. . . . ​I didn’t even know about the Afro-Latino part.” Had ISV been produced as a live-action movie, the producers would have faced increased pressure to cast a mixed-race or Afro-Latino actor to embody the role instead of casting Moore. Because Miles Morales is an animated character whose “real” body is not connected to the specific ethnic or racial embodiment of a particular actor, the character is able to exist outside the preconceived cognitive expectations of U.S. and global audiences. Miles Morales, as a mixed-race superhero, moves through, across, and against dominant cinematic representations of U.S. Black and Latino identity by implicitly claiming all of them while refusing to privilege whiteness or a racially ambiguous Latino identity. By developing the character outside U.S. ethnic and racial binaries, the movie’s producers and writers (Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman) challenge commonsense understandings of U.S. ethno-racial identity while still operating within the postracial capitalist logics of color blindness. Color-blind production practices enable the productive commodification of mixed-race identity. Yet, as I discuss in the final section, it appears that color-blind productions and mixed-race representations also call for, enable, and provoke racially conscious or color-conscious audience responses.

A Mixed-Race Superhero and Critical Celebratory Possibilities Although the color-blind production of mixed-race Afro-Rican identity in ISV constrains the narrative and character development, the producers still create a complicated, multilayer world, a multiverse that calls to the desires of U.S. fans and audiences of color. Writing about the creation of

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Black superheroes by white writers and artists, Adilifu Nama suggests that the superheroes are “significant (even if problematic) expressions of a science fiction (re)imagining of black racial being that reflects and reveals a myriad of racial assumptions, expectations, perceptions and possibilities” (135). Nama calls this interpretive perspective a “critical celebratory response”—a response that accounts for the textual limitations as much as the spectacular possibilities for audiences. Indeed, writing specifically about the comic book character Miles Morales, Nama and Maya Haddad argue that the economic or political intent of the producers in creating the character is not as important as what the character symbolizes to audiences about “race, hybrid racial identities, and multiculturalism in America” (255). Responding to initial fan criticism of Marvel Comics’ decision to develop the Miles Morales comic book character, the former editor in chief Axel Alonso commented, “The superhero genre has been dominated by Caucasian superheroes from Superman to Batman. When Spider-Man peels back that mask, there will be a whole new demographic of kids who we’ll be reaching on a new spiritual level” (“Peter Parker Replaced”). In the spirit of privileging the celebratory perspectives of mixed-race, African American, Afro-Latina / o, and Latina / o/x audiences, the final section of this chapter examines two themes embedded in the responses by reviewers, writers, and journalists to watching Miles Morales on the big screen—themes of self-recognition and optimistic reimagining. Within the cultural context of comic books and Hollywood superhero movies defined by white masculinity, the response by racial minority audiences to the movie’s depiction of an Afro-Rican mixed-race Spider-Man speaks to a desire for recognition through cultural visibility. Writing about the cultural invisibility of Afro-Latinas / os, Agustín Laó-Montes suggests, “In the Americas, processes of nationalization of memory, language, and identity, are predicated on a nationalist narrative in which ‘white’ male Euro-American elites metonymically represent the nation, and the subaltern others (especially ‘Blacks,’ ‘Indians,’ and ‘Orientals’) are marginalized and virtually erased from national imaginaries” (120). In this context, global Hollywood visibility creates a cultural space for the celebration of racialized experiences and marginalized peoples. For audiences of color in particular, the act of seeing themselves through the cinematic mirror is a powerful moment of cultural visibility. Encountering the depiction of Miles Morales, an intelligent, compassionate, empowered subject, is a culturally transformative act. An illustration of

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this can be seen in a commentator’s response on a podcast about ISV: “I saw the excitement in the eyes of kids and adults alike who felt seen in ways they rarely have in the past. I can tell you from personal experience that feeling seen represented is a very unreal feeling that makes you feel like you can be a hero yourself” (Olmedo). The depiction of an iconic superhero, even if animated, who physically and figuratively looks like how “we” desire to see “ourselves” affirms the possibilities for people of color in an optimistic and yet-to-be-imagined future (Nama 135). Miles Morales’s nonwhite mixed-race identity produces a transformative moment of sonic, visual, and cultural recognition for a range of communities often left off Hollywood movie screens and soundtracks—African American, Latina / o, Afro-Latina / o, and mixed-race audiences. Responses from audiences across generational and ethno-racial identities often focus on that moment of cultural visibility and recognition. Within this thematic frame, audiences celebrate the cultural acknowledgment embedded in the mixed-race identity of Miles Morales. In doing so, the character symbolizes a redemptive present and optimistic future. As an example, speculative fiction writer Victor LaValle’s love letter to Miles Morales, published in the New York Times Style Magazine, illustrates this type of response: “I spent 39 years without you, but you’ve been a part of my kids’ imagination for their whole lives. They didn’t get emotional because, for them, a brown-skinned Spider-Man with big, beautiful curly hair is a commonplace. NBD. Other people may take it for granted that they have a face like a superhero’s. I’m happy my kids get to feel that way. I spent too long without such a thing; my big feelings about you reflect how much I needed it.” LaValle, who is of Ugandan and white descent, thanks the animated Miles Morales for allowing him the opportunity to finally realize his childhood desire to be the hero behind the mask. The opportunity to return to the memories of growing up as the mixed-race child of a single mother living in Queens, New York, helps him to fulfill his own desire for mainstream visual recognition and cultural validation. In another example that emphasizes the redemptive power of visual recognition, seventeen-year-old mixed-race Lyric Eschoe shares a similar response in his column for VOX ATL: “[The movie is] a love letter to 11-year-old me who wanted nothing more than to be just as cool as SpiderMan. It’s the perfect amount of adventure and joy that will leave you wanting to stay in the ‘Spider-Verse’ forever.” For the young Eschoe, the animated character affirms his own racial, ethnic, and cultural worth and, as he

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phrases it, allows for the fulfillment of “black boy joy.” The act of seeing themselves in Hollywood’s cinematic mirror provides mixed-race audiences a moment of reflection and healing from the wounds of cultural invisibility. Writing for the Washington Post, David Betancourt, whose father is Puerto Rican and mother is African American, shares a similar response: “When Miles pulls down his mask, that was me, as a kid, pretending my winter caps were a Spider-Man mask.” Audiences also focused on the significance for children of seeing and hearing characters that look and sound like them. For instance, the editor in chief of Bustle, Jada Gomez, who identifies as mixed race and Latinx, nostalgically observed that “for some children, their first vision of SpiderMan will be an image of a Black and Puerto Rican teen, saving the world— and even alternate universes—in a hoodie and limited edition kicks. That’s some badass, powerful imagery.” To all these audiences it is the mixed-race cinematic representation of Miles Morales that opens a space of cultural healing and empowerment. Many audiences and writers move from the redemptive power of the visual toward a politically conscious response to seeing urban youths of color imaginatively controlling the arts, science, and technology. To do so, audiences read against the movie’s color-blind narrative to reimagine Black and brown lives in the more optimistic terms of a future defined by dignity and respect, turning upside down U.S. racism and xenophobia. For instance, audiences focus on the representation of Miles Morales wearing a hoodie—a piece of clothing made infamous in the shooting of teenager Trayvon Martin—over the new high-tech spider-suit he has designed.7 Writing specifically about Miles’s hoodie, Gomez hopefully reads the producers’ intent as an implicit critique of state-sanctioned violence against youths of color: “In real life, this is the same style of dress that causes women to clutch their purses when a black man passes them on the street, and prompts people to avoid sitting next to young men of color on the subway. It’s similar to the attire a 17-year-old Trayvon Martin wore the night of his death, when he was gunned down with only a bag of Skittles in his hands.” At the center of the racial politicization of the hoodie is the way it challenges the Eurocentric politics of respectability and the relationship of the politics of respectability to maintaining structural inequality for Black men and youths of color (de Casanova and Webb). It is interesting that the scene in which Miles Morales finally owns his superhero destiny and dons his new high-tech costume, hoodie and all, is

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FIG. 11.2  ​Miles and his hoodie turn the world upside down in Spider-Man: Into the

Spider-Verse. Sony Pictures, 2018.

visually inverted. During the scene the animated frame is abruptly turned upside down, visually and figuratively. Doing so creates the appearance that Miles Morales is flying rather than falling through the New York City skyline (fig. 11.2). It is a jarring and unsettling visual sequence that reinforces the narrative that Miles has the power to control what happens to his life and the lives of others across the multiverse. For Gomez and other audiences, the producers’ decision to draw Miles Morales’s Spider-Man in this moment with the socially laden hoodie presents an opening to optimistically reimagine a present-future in which youths of color live their lives without worrying about the life-and-death consequences of their skin color or attire. Although Peter Ramsey, the African American director of the movie, has stated that he approached ISV as a vehicle for representing the lives and communities of people of color with nuance and complexity without making racism the explicit focus of the narrative (Bowman and Garcia-Navarro), the use of less explicit ethno-racial symbols provides an interpretive space for audiences to feel and read race. Writing for Latino Rebels, Afro-Latina Lauren Lluveras discusses her critical celebratory response to the messages about race in the movie: “I’m not alone in this feeling of warmth toward the hoodie-clad hero: at a time of an American history when Black boys are especially vulnerable victims of extrajudicial murders and just a little over a

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year since Hurricane María devastated Puerto Rico, Miles Morales means something.” The endless possibilities embedded in the depiction of Miles’s control over the multiverse allow audiences the opportunity to reimagine themselves across geographic spaces, in a present time and a future community where the hoodie is the cultural normative, a symbol of dignity, respectability, and heroism. Looking into ISV’s cinematic mirror provides a moment of external validation and healing from the pain of racism and invisibility. Writing for Slate, Lawrence Ware shares his emotional reaction: “The film takes seriously what it feels like to be a black teenager in a predominately white and affluent school, and while I was not expecting the film to work on me as it did, I found myself getting misty-eyed in the movie theater. Quinn [Ware’s son], meanwhile, smiled the whole time. He was having the time of his life. He loved seeing a Spider-Man who looked like him.” Ware compellingly articulates audiences’ feelings of affirmation elicited by the movie’s depiction of the unlimited and resourceful resilience of African American, Latina / o, bicultural, and mixed-race youths of color. In another example of this type of response, queer Latino movie critic Manuel Betancourt celebrates the depiction of Miles effortlessly living in the “in-between-ness,” a state of being that is all too familiar to Afro-Ricans and other mixed-race, multicultural people: “To live in a liminal space—as a bicultural kid, as a superhero-in-hiding—stresses the animated feature’s positive message about what it means to feel different from those around you. In doing so, the film swaps out Spidey’s most famous tagline—‘With great power comes great responsibility’—for a much more relatable if no less empowering one: ‘What makes you different is what makes you SpiderMan’ (“What Latino Critics”). The directorial decision to represent a mixed range of animation, clothing, music, art, and technology through the Spider-Verse of different genres, times, and countries enhances the feeling of the productive possibilities created by living in between languages, cultures, and identities. In these reimagined worlds, as Betancourt proposes, difference and liminality are the source of strength and superhero power. For some audiences, the cinematic depiction of Miles Morales disrupts the cultural erasures and exclusions of color-blind Hollywood productions. The producers and directors depict the character of Miles Morales as living on the border, and in doing so they normalize the awkward, different, and marginal. That decentering of cultural power invites audiences to celebrate and reimagine the possibilities of a fantastical future. Writing one year

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before the release of the move, Latinx cultural critic Christopher Aguiar observed, “Afro-Latinx’s are a necessity to the Hispanic voice, as much as a small section of the culture aims to alienate them. Miles has always felt like a middle-finger to that. Now imagine this on screen. It could completely empower those who have felt powerless in the past due to their identity.” As Aguiar proposes, audience responses to the cinematic representation of a mixed-race, bicultural teenage boy who becomes a superhero celebrate the empowerment of the next generation to reimagine our collective future.

Conclusion ISV is a moment of critical celebration; a bilingual, mixed-race, multicultural future where mixed-race, Black, and brown men and boys are afforded the privilege of vulnerability, are safe from state-sanctioned violence, are loved and celebrated for the way they disrupt commonsense definitions of race, ethnicity, and gender. Audience writings about the movie collectively will ISV and the depiction of Miles Morales toward a reimagined present and future where young men of color are the powerful heroes, the drivers of the cinematic narrative, the characters who live to the end of the story and save their families, their communities, and the rest of the world. Such colorconscious responses by U.S. audiences powerfully illustrate that (in spite of the commodification of Afro-Latina / o identity and the postracial production practices of the producers, writers, and directors) the cultural politics of ethno-racial and mixed-race differences will never be fully erased. The postracial cinematic strategies of the production team, combined with the color-conscious audience response to ISV’s depiction of AfroLatina / o identity, demand that analysis of globally commodified texts continues the move away from the study of negative and positive representations. Instead, the cinematic depiction of Miles Morales and audience responses illustrate the limits and possibilities of postracial, color-blind production practices. Rather than focus on the color-blind narrative and character development, audiences celebrate the representational transgressions embedded in the global commodification of mixed-race, AfroLatina / o, African American, and Latina / o characters and actors. Discussing the role of stereotypic representations of ethnic and racial Others, postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha suggests, “The stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It

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is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of difference (that the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject in significations of psychic and social relations” (27). The cinematic representation of the multiverse disrupts that fixed version of reality by inviting audiences to join Miles Morales in “the play of difference.” For U.S. ethnoracial minority audiences, it is those moments of representational instability and fluidity surrounding Miles Morales and the multiverse that are taken up as a challenge to dominant Western ways of knowing and marketing mixed-race and Afro-Latino difference—his brown skin, his curly hair, Spanglish, the hoodie, the music, the art. Despite the marketplace demand for Hollywood movies that are able to draw in diverse domestic and global audiences, in the end, ISV and the production team’s depiction of ethno-racial difference (mixed race, African American, Latina / o, and Afro-Latina / o) reveals the boundaries of contemporary cinematic representations that depend on fixed visual stereotypes of ethnicity, race, and gender. In doing so, the movie enables a set of critical celebratory responses by audiences that disrupt Western sense-making of U.S. mixed-race, multicultural, Black, and Latina / o identity. What a spectacular moment in front of the cinematic mirror, indeed.

Notes 1 Borrowing from Stephen Small and Rebecca King-O’Riain, I use the term

“mixed-race” to signify people who “are descended from and attached to two or more socially significant groups” (vii). 2 In using the term “Latina / o,” I follow the lead of scholars such as Richard T. Rodriguez (204), who troubles the use of “X” in terms of the identities, histories, and experiences its use potentially erases. “Afro-Latina / o” as an identity label references people of African descent from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Mexico. Within contemporary U.S. culture, “Afro-Latino” is also used by people who identify as mixed race of African or African American descent. The terms “Blaxirican” and “Blaxican” are also used by people who identify as mixed-race African American and Puerto Rican or Mexican, respectively. In the analysis, I refer to characters, actors, writers, and audiences by using their preferred identities and ethnicity-specific labels (Puerto Rican). 3 Jessica Robinson, PhD student at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, collected the movie reviews, columns, blogs, and wikis analyzed for this chapter using Google and the Lexis-Nexis database. She used the search terms “Miles Morales” and “Into the Spider-Verse” to collect texts dating

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4

5

6

7

from 2000 to May 2019. After eliminating documents focused on the comic books, I analyzed a total of thirty-five texts focusing on audience responses to the movie. For more information on the comic book creation of Miles Morales, see Bacon, as well as Santos in this volume. Eventually, the characters and story lines of the Ultimate Marvel universe were retroactively merged into Marvel Comics’ main 616 Universe. The 2014 hack of Sony emails revealed the Spider-Man licensing agreement between Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios, including his “mandatory character traits” as “Caucasian,” male, and heterosexual. Responding to the leak, Stan Lee reaffirmed his support for keeping the comic books’ original character as white, male, and heterosexual; at the same time, he observed that because of the nature of the costuming, fans of any background can imagine themselves as Spider-Man (white). Yet Lee also signaled his support for developing original characters, such as Miles Morales, who are not white, male, or heterosexual (Miller). Even the milestone movie Black Panther is vulnerable to the critique of color-blind ideology. Its antihero, Killmonger, is motivated by his experiences of U.S. and global economic racism, yet his challenge to racist structures results in his death. And the Black Panther character is an isolationist who lives in an economically and technologically idealized pan-ethnic African state and is openly resistant to engaging with local and global racial, economic, and military politics. The editors of this volume note that, although it is no longer available online, Curt Franklin and Chris Haley’s online comic strip Let’s Be Friends Again draws a connection between Miles Morales as Spider-Man and Trayvon Martin. In it, Miles removes his Spider-Man gear, puts on a hoodie, and self-consciously eats Skittles. See Hudson for a reference to the comic strip.

Works Cited Aguiar, Christopher. “Why the World Needs a Miles Morales Spider-Man Movie.” Audiences Everywhere, 10 Oct. 2017, www.audienceseverywhere.net/why-the​ -world-need-a-miles-morales-spider-man-movie/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019. Bacon, Thomas. “Brian Bendis: Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse Interview.” Screen Rant, 17 Mar. 2019, screenrant.com/brian-bendis-spider-man-spider-verse-interview/. Accessed 4 May 2020. Betancourt, David. “Miles Morales Is a Spider-Man Who’s Biracial like Me. So Why Wasn’t I More Excited for His Movie?” Washington Post, 13 Dec. 2018, www. washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2018/12/13/miles-morales-is-spider-man​ -whos-biracial-like-me-so-why-wasnt-i-more-excited-his-movie/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 2004. Black Panther. Directed by Ryan Coogler, performance by Michael B. Jordan, Marvel Studios, 2018. Bowman, Emma, and Lourdes Garcia-Navarro. “Peter Ramsey Put the 1st Afro-Latino Spider-Man on Screen. It May Win Him an Oscar.” National Public Radio, 24 Feb. 2019, www.nprillinois.org/post/peter-ramsey-put-1st-afro-latino-spider-man​ -screen-it-may-win-him-oscar#stream/0. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019.

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Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, performance by Anthony Mackie, Marvel Studios, 2014. de Casanova, Erynn Masi, and Curtis Webb. “A Tale of Two Hoodies.” Men and Masculinities, vol. 20, no. 1, 2017, pp. 117–122. Doane, Ashley. “Shades of Colorblindness: Rethinking Racial Ideology in the United States.” The Colorblind Screen: Television in Post-racial America, edited by Sarah Nilsen and Sarah E. Turner, New York University Press, 2014, pp. 15–38. Eschoe, Lyric. “With #Blackboyjoy to Spare, Miles Morales Is the Heart of Into the Spider-Verse.” Vox ATL, 19 Dec. 2018, voxatl.org/miles-morales-black-boy-joy/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019. Frank, Kathryn. “Everyone Wants to Rule the Multiverse: Latino Spider-Men in Marvel’s Media Empire.” Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González, University of Texas Press, 2016, pp. 241–251. Gomez, Jada. 2018. “Miles Morales in Into the Spider-Verse Is the Afro-Latinx Representation We Were Missing—and Not Just Because He’s a Superhero.” Bustle, 12 Dec. 2018, www.bustle.com/p/miles-morales-in-into-the-spider-verse-is​ -the-afro-latinx-representation-we-were-missing-not-just-because-hes-a-super​ hero-14947742. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019. Grobar, Matt. “Spider-Man Producers Phil Lord & Christopher Miller Bring Miles Morales to Big Screen in Spectacular Style.” Deadline, 10 Dec. 2018, deadline. com/2018/12/spider-man-into-the-spider-verse-phil-lord-christopher-miller-sony​ -interview-1202517039/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019. Hardy, Jasmine. “Shameik Moore Says Playing an Afro-Latino ‘Spider-Man’ Taught Him to Appreciate LatinX Cultures.” TheGrio, 11 Dec. 2018, www.thegrio. com/2018/12/11/shameik-moore-says-playing-an-afro-latino-spider-man-taught​ -him-to-appreciate-latinx-cultures/. Accessed 18 Nov. 2019. Hudson, Laura. “Parting Shot: ‘Let’s Be Friends Again’ Puts Ultimate Spider-Man in a Hoodie.” Comics Alliance, 29 Mar. 2012, comicsalliance.com/trayvon-martin​ -ultimate-spider-man/. Accessed 7 May 2020. Hunt, Darnell, et al. Hollywood Diversity Report 2019: Old Story, New Beginning. College of Social Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, 2019. Iron Man 3. Directed by Shane Black, performance by Don Cheadle, Marvel Studios, 2013. Laó-Montes, Agustín. “Afro-Latinidades and the Diasporic Imaginary.” Iberoamericana, no. 17, 2005, pp. 117–130. LaValle, Victor. “How Miles Morales Changed the Spider-Verse.” New York Times Style Magazine, 14 Feb. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/t-magazine/miles​ -morales-spiderman.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019. Lluveras, Lauren. “My Great Expectations for Miles Morales.” Latino Rebels, 25 Feb. 2019, www.latinorebels.com/2019/02/25/milesmorales/. Accessed 20≈Nov. 2019. Miller, Michael. “Peter Parker, a.k.a. Spider-Man, Should Be Straight and White, Says Co-creator Stan Lee.” Washington Post, 25 June 2015, www.washingtonpost.com​/news​ /morning-mix/wp/2015/06/25/peter-parker-aka-spider-man-should-be-straight-and​ -white-says-co-creator-stan-lee/. Accessed 9 Apr. 2020. Molina-Guzmán, Isabel. “Commodifying Black Latinidad in US Film and Television.” Popular Communication, vol. 11, no. 3, 2013, pp. 211–226.

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———. Latinas and Latinos on TV: Colorblind Comedy in the Post-racial Network Era. University of Arizona Press, 2018. Morning, Ann. “Multiraciality and Census Clarification in Global Perspective.” Global Mixed Race, edited by Rebecca C. King-O’Riain et al., New York University Press, 2014, pp. 1–15. Multiracial in America: Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers. Pew Research Center, June 2015. Nama, Adilifu. “Brave Black Worlds: Black Superheroes as Science Fiction Ciphers.” African Identities, vol. 7, no. 2, 2009, pp. 133–144. Nama, Adilifu, and Maya Haddad. “Mapping the Blatino Badlands and Borderlands of Pop Culture.” Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González, University of Texas Press, 2016, pp. 253–268. Olmedo, Cam. “Miles Morales: Our Afro-Latino Spider-Man.” But Why Tho?, 10 Oct. 2018, butwhythopodcast.com/2018/10/10/miles-morales-our-afro-latino​ -spider-man/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019. “Peter Parker Replaced by Miles Morales: The New Spider-Man.” PRI, 3 Aug. 2011, www.pri.org/stories/2011-08-03/peter-parker-replaced-miles-morales-new-spider​ -man. Accessed 4 May 2020. Reisman, Abraham. “Is Miles Morales Finally Getting His Due as Spider-Man?” Vulture, 14 Dec. 2018, www.vulture.com/2018/12/miles-morales-of-into-the-spider​ -verse-the-race-problem.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019. Rodríguez, Richard T. “X Marks the Spot.” Cultural Dynamics, vol. 29, no. 3, 2017, pp. 202–213. Román, Miriam Jiménez, and Juan Flores. Introduction. The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, edited by Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 1–15. Saunders, Robert. “(Profitable) Imaginaries of Black Power: The Popular and Political Geographies of Black Panther.” Political Geography, vol. 69, Mar. 2019, pp. 139–149. Small, Stephen, and Rebecca C. King-O’Riain. “Global Mixed Race: An Introduction.” Global Mixed Race, edited by Rebecca C. King-O’Riain et al., New York University Press, 2014, pp. vii-xxii. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, performance by Shameik Moore, Sony Pictures, 2018. “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018).” Box Office Mojo, 8 Mar. 2019, www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt4633694/?ref_=bo_se_r_1. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019. THEME Report 2019: A Comprehensive Analysis and Survey of the Theatrical and Home / Mobile Entertainment Market Environment for 2019. Motion Picture Association of America, 2019, www.motionpictures.org/wp-content/uploads​/2020​ /03/MPA-THEME-2019.pdf. Thomas, Deborah, and Kamari Maxine Clarke. “Introduction: Globalization and the Transformations of Race.” Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness, edited by Kamari Maxine Clarke and Deborah A. Thomas, Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 1–34. 2018 THEME Report: A Comprehensive Analysis and Survey of the Theatrical and Home Entertainment Market Environment (THEME) for 2018. Motion Picture

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Association of America, 2018, www.motionpictures.org/wp-content/uploads​ /2019/03/MPAA-THEME-Report-2018.pdf. Valdivia, Angharad. Latino/as in the Media. Polity, 2010. Vary, Adam. “The Revolutionary Inclusion of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” BuzzFeed, 14 Dec. 2018, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adambvary/spider​ -man-into-the-spider-verse-miles-morales. Accessed 9 Apr. 2020. Ware, Lawrence. “I’m Still Waiting for the First Black Spider-Man to Get His Own Movie.” Slate, 12 Dec. 2018, www.slate.com/culture/2018/12/spider-verse-miles​ -morales-first-black-spider-man.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019. Warner, Kristen J. The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting. Routledge, 2015. “What Latino Critics Are Saying about Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.” Remezcla, 12 Dec. 2018, remezcla.com/lists/film/latino-critics-review-spider-man-into-spider​ -verse/. Accessed 20 Nov. 2019. White, Caitlin. “Stan Lee Talks about New Bi-racial Marvel Spider-Man Miles Morales.” Bustle, 24 June 2015, www.bustle.com/articles/92555-stan-lee-talks-about​ -new-bi-racial-marvel-spider-man-miles-morales. Accessed 9 Apr. 2020.

12

Truth, Justice, and the (Ancient) Egyptian Way DC’s Doctor Fate and the Arab Spring ADRIENNE RESHA

Five years after the Arab Spring began in North Africa, DC Comics launched the fourth comic book series under the name Doctor Fate (2015–2016), with a new character under the old helmet: Khalid “Kent” Nassour. In the series, which explicitly references the Arab Spring, the ancient Egyptian goddess Bastet and Mesopotamian god Nabu ask Khalid, a Millennial Egyptian American medical student, to “heal the world.” Khalid, the child of an Arab, Muslim father and white, Christian mother, could be understood as white if one were reading these comics only in the context of the United States Census, which defines people of Middle Eastern and North African descent (ethnically Arab or not) as white. However, within a society that racializes Arab and Muslim peoples, Khalid must be read and understood as mixed race. Before the Arab Spring, and even 9 / 11 the decade prior, Arabs and Arab-Americans in the United States experienced racialization, what 243

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Michael Omi and Howard Winant define as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group” (111). Historically, as evidenced by the Census, this has meant an extension of whiteness to Arabs and Arab-Americans, but more recently, whiteness has been withdrawn, a withdrawal in which these comics take part. Racialization, according to Omi and Winant, takes place on two scales: macro- and microsocially. The former describes a systemic scale (like Census data collection, which affects legislation concerning things such as hate crimes), while the latter describes interactions between individuals (like racial profiling). In Doctor Fate, the Helmet of Fate facilitates microsocial racialization. The helmet, like hijabs worn by Muslim women, functions as a medium into and through which information about race is encoded and decoded. It is microsocial because it functions on an individual level, personally (e.g., Khalid becoming Fate, see the discussion later in this chapter) or between two or more people (Khalid and other characters in the text, Khalid and the reader), rather than between individuals or people and systems (when individuals self-report race for the Census). Comics, too, function as media into and through which information about race is encoded and decoded. They do so in visuals (e.g., color and costuming) and narrative (storytelling). This is not to suggest that visuals and narrative are discrete elements but instead to argue that here, using Doctor Fate, they may be analyzed apart (although never entirely) in order to understand how they work together to facilitate the racialization of Arabs and ArabAmericans. When Khalid becomes Fate, which requires that he don the Helmet of Fate, he is forced to choose racialization over Americanization, which are personified in Doctor Fate by his love interests: Akila and Shaya. Shaya, like Khalid, is a medical student. She represents Americanization and belonging, the latter of which might also be characterized as citizenship. Akila, in contrast, is a hijabi revolutionary. She represents racialization and nonbelonging, and her headscarf, like the Helmet of Fate, mediates microsocial racialization. In the United States, the hijab facilitates racial profiling, and thus Akila, wearing it, may be read as a woman of color, while the Americanized (nonveiling) Shaya may be read as white. Doctor Fate’s love triangle between Khalid, Shaya, and Akila—and, consequently, the binary opposition formed between Shaya and Akila, which might more simply be characterized as “West versus East” or, even more simply, “white versus Arab”—serves a contemporary (post-9 / 11, post–Arab Spring) Orientalist narrative that does not allow Khalid Nassour to become a fully

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realized mixed-race superhero. These comics, like the Helmet of Fate, facilitate the racialization of Arabs and Arab-Americans, and the historical, sociopolitical, and theoretical contexts in which they were produced are key to understanding how.

Historical, Sociopolitical, and Theoretical Contexts In 2010, the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, precipitated a series of democratic protests across the Middle East and North Africa that would come to be known as the Arab Spring. In January 2011, just a month after protests had begun in Tunisia, Egyptians, organized in part over social media, gathered in Cairo and demanded that longtime president Hosni Mubarak resign. He did. In the subsequent 2012 presidential election, the country chose candidate Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group. “Egyptians,” Lin Noueihed and Alex Warren write, “once too apathetic to vote, have embraced democracy and no longer shy away from street protests as a means of expressing their opposition to unpopular policies and unfair judicial rulings” (133). Following protests in 2012 and 2013, Morsi was ousted by the Egyptian military (Kirkpatrick). General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi won the subsequent 2014 and 2018 elections, which have been characterized as “flawed” post–Arab Spring (Walsh). Because of social media, the 2012–2013 protests were more visible to nation-states in which they were not (or not yet then) occurring (Vaidhyanathan 138–139). Representations of Arabs in mainstream superhero comics changed after (and partially because of) the initial protests in 2011, as evidenced in both Doctor Fate and DC’s Green Lantern, vol. 5 (2011–2016), wherein Arab-American characters become superheroes (for the introduction of Simon Baz as a Green Lantern, see Johns et al.). Before 2001, Arab-Americans were rarely represented as protagonists in popular media, let alone titular superheroes of comic books (Shaheen). After 9 / 11, the number of Muslim superheroes increased significantly (Phillips and Strobl). In 2007, DC introduced its first post-9 / 11 Arab-American superhero, recasting Ibis the Invincible as the Egyptian American Danny Khalifa, but it was not until a decade after 9 / 11, following the Arab Spring, that Arab-American superheroes were made lead characters of ongoing comic books (Resha). However, unlike Lebanese American Green Lantern Simon Baz, cocreated by Lebanese American writer Geoff Johns, Egyptian

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American Khalid Nassour does not assume the title of the text. He becomes Fate, not Doctor Fate, because he cannot reconcile his Egyptian/immigrant and American  /  citizen identities. He cannot reconcile these identities because of the vestiges of Arab exceptionalism—the antithesis of the selfgoverning American exceptionalism that superheroes often embody—that Paul Levitz and Sonny Liew perpetuate in their Orientalist narrative. The “Arab exception” was articulated in a post–Cold War world. Noueihed and Warren write, “The club of Arab dictators had proven so resilient that a whole body of academic literature and journalistic commentary had developed to explain why emerging countries [first in Europe, then Asia and South America] were industrializing, growing, creating jobs and shifting towards more representative government, while the Middle East fell ever further behind” (16). Explanations for the exception suggested either that the Middle East and North Africa were unready for democracy or that Islam, practiced in different ways by a majority of, but not all, Arabs, was inherently incompatible with that political system. “Another explanation,” Noueihed and Warren write, “was that the United States had propped up authoritarian rulers in countries including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain and Tunisia because a confluence of geopolitical interests in the region—its desire to defend Israel, to ensure a steady supply of affordable oil, to hold back Iranian influence following the 1979 revolution, and to curtail any Islamist threat—trumped any ideological desire to spread democracy” (16). In reality, if Middle Eastern and North African nation-states were not ready for democracy, then it was more due to American imperialism than Islam. Arab exceptionalism itself might be understood as a derivative of what Brian T. Edwards terms “global racial time.” Edwards defines “global racial time” as a logic “by which Arabs, Africans, and their descendants in the United States were [in the twentieth century] seen on a different place in the evolutionary scale and understood as not ready for rights and responsibilities” (3). By this logic, by which Arabs are not racially white, and that of the Arab exception, both of which are fundamentally Orientalist, Arabs could not govern themselves because they were unfit to do so. These ideas predate the Arab Spring, 9 / 11, and the 1979 Revolution in Iran, after which the Iran hostage crisis of the same year took place. Evelyn Alsultany identifies the hostage crisis as significant to the conflation of Arab and Muslim identities. Alsultany writes, “Though Iran is not an Arab country, during the hostage crisis Iran came to stand in for Arabs, the Middle East, Islam, and

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terrorism, all of which terms came to be used interchangeably” (9). What she describes is the racialization of Middle Eastern and North African people at a macrosocial level. As Arab was conflated with Muslim, the latter understood in the popular imagination of the United States to be a nonwhite signifier, Arabs and Arab-Americans became marginalized not for their minority ethnic identity or religious affiliations but for their perceived race.1 Despite this racialization, which was in recent memory exacerbated by 9 / 11 and subsequent legislation like the Patriot Act, Arabs in the United States are still officially counted as white and have been since the turn of the twentieth century. In the early 1900s, Arabs left the Levant (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Palestine) and settled in the United States. Most Arab immigrants, at this point in history, were Christian. Arabs who qualified for citizenship before the 1924 Immigration Act (also known as the Johnson-Reed Act) were sorted into the racial category of white because they were neither Asian, which would preclude them from citizenship, nor Black (Gualtieri 1–2). In the decades between the Johnson-Reed Act and World War II, Arabs went to court to establish their whiteness. They emphasized not just their religious identity as Christians, because Americans were not necessarily familiar with Eastern rite churches, but also their ethnic identity as Semites (Gualtieri 57). Khalid and his father, Mohammed, would be in the minority of a minority: most Arab-Americans—historically, postwar, and today—are Middle Eastern and Christian as opposed to North African and Muslim. After World War II, Christian and Muslim Arab-Americans alike were counted in the Census as white (Gualtieri 159–160). While they still constitute a minority, Arab immigrants to the United States have been increasingly Muslim since the passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act), which eliminated the National Origins Formula (a quota system). Today, Middle Eastern and North African Americans can be counted as racially white despite lobbying for a distinct category on the 2020 Census (Parvini and Simani). While, as David Parker and Miri Song write, “most social scientists describe ‘race’ as a social construction with potentially pernicious effects[,] . . . ​racialised identities can be an important mobilising force for those struggling against discrimination and disadvantage” (4–5). Distinction on the Census would allow for legal protections afforded to marginalized racial groups not otherwise guaranteed to ArabAmericans as a statistically invisible minority. Khalid Nassour’s reluctance to identify as Egyptian or Arab and American (as early as Levitz and Liew’s

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second issue, he says, “I’m an American,” without any hyphenation) while being illustrated as a person of color in Doctor Fate might better represent an older generation of Americans of Middle Eastern and North African descent, one more eager to pass as white than Generation Y: the generation to which Khalid, a recent college graduate, ostensibly belongs.

(Doctor) Fate Doctor Fate begins just days before Khalid is supposed to begin medical school. A storm of biblical proportions rages, drawing comparisons to 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. This story is very much set after the height of the Arab Spring. In the opening scenes of Doctor Fate’s prelude, Khalid; his father, Mohammed; and his mother, Elizabeth, appear together in the kitchen of their Brooklyn home. Khalid takes after his father, an Egyptian immigrant to the United States. Mohammed is, by all appearances, a person of color. He has a darker complexion than his wife. His hair is black, albeit graying at the temples, while hers is blond. He has a prominent nose, which Khalid has inherited, while his wife has a dainty, European one. Parker and Song write that the experiences of mixed-race people, through what they term “facilisation,” “tell of how the face gets figured as the repository of racial truths and suggestive of where you ‘really’ come from” (14). Khalid, like his father, appears to be a person of color. They both appear to come from somewhere else. Khalid’s mixed-race identity is communicated to the reader not through his visual appearance (he bears no resemblance to his mother and does not look “mixed”) but through his parents, how they look, and their relationship. Elizabeth Nassour is a museum professional. She works at the American Museum of Natural History and is a citizen of the United States. Mohammed Nassour is a taxi driver. Having emigrated from Egypt, where he trained as a doctor, Mohammed is unable to practice medicine in the United States. His (American) dream is for Khalid to be able to practice medicine. In imperfect English, he says to his son, “You will learn to be doctor like me . . . ​except you will be allowed to practice here” (Levitz and Liew). Mohammed is racialized by his appearance, his accent, and his vocation. It is unclear whether he has become a citizen of the United States. Levitz and Liew represent Mohammed as something other than white, although they do not give it a name. “Racial categories,” Omi and Winant

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write, “and the meanings attached to them, are often constructed from preexisting conceptual or discursive elements that have crystallized through the genealogies of competing religious, scientific, and political ideologies and projects” (111). This nonwhite racial category is derivative of Arab exceptionalism. In Doctor Fate, Mohammed is not white because he is Arab, and because he is Arab, he is not white. The logic is circular. Mohammed, who here represents the ethnically Arab citizens of twenty-two nation-states, including Egypt, does not fit into any existing racial (white, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, or Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander) or ethnic (Hispanic or Latinx) category popularly used in the United States. The creative team of Doctor Fate does not explicitly articulate a distinct racial category for Arab-Americans or non-Arab Americans of Middle Eastern and North African descent, but they implicitly recognize and capitalize on racial(ized) difference. Khalid is a mixed-race character because he has a white mother and an Arab father. Arab, an ethno-national identity, becomes an ethno-racial identity that, paired with his mother’s whiteness, makes Khalid mixed race.

“Blood of the Pharaohs” When Khalid takes refuge from the ongoing storm in Doctor Fate’s fictionalized Brooklyn Museum, he passes through its collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts. This collection includes a statue of the cat goddess Bastet. Trespassing the glass barrier separating the statue from museum patrons, the statue extends an arm holding the Helmet of Fate, gold against an otherwise monochrome panel. A voice emanating from the helmet says to Khalid, “You are the blood of the pharaohs, Khalid, and you must preserve the maat before the flood takes us all. Atum [king of the gods] commands us, and your place in the divine order is decreed” (Levitz and Liew). Maat (or ma’at) is the ancient Egyptian concept of truth, justice, and, perhaps most importantly, balance. The blood of the pharaohs is invoked here and on the page that follows. There, the Nassour family cat, Puck, possessed by the goddess Bastet, says, “We need a pharaoh.” The Arab Spring in Egypt originally manifested as protests against Mubarak, a man many likened to a pharaoh. A “pharaoh” is an antagonist—a villain—not a protagonist. Levitz and Liew’s protagonist does not become a superhero because he is mixed race. Khalid is not what Minelle Mahtani describes as a mixed-race

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“rainbow child” who is the “solution to the world’s racist problems in a vacant celebration of sanitized cultural hybridity” (470). Nor is he demonized for being mixed race. Khalid becomes a superhero by virtue of his (father’s) blood and a sort of “divine right of kings.” The invocation of Atum is deliberate. A divine king is invoked as power is bestowed, through the Helmet of Fate, upon an otherwise mortal Khalid. The “blood of the pharaohs” makes Khalid a Chosen One, an archetype more consistent with (although not exclusive to) fantasy than science fiction or superhero genres, as opposed to a mixed-race savior (a better example of this latter archetype being DC’s Aquaman or Marvel’s Namor). He is chosen by an external force—here, derived from ancient Egyptian cosmology—to restore balance, but cannot find balance in himself. Unlike the overwhelming majority of American (like Batman) and Americanized (like Superman) superheroes who choose to fight for truth, justice, and the American way, Khalid is chosen to fight for truth, justice, and the (ancient) Egyptian way by gods.2 Over a two-page sequence in Doctor Fate no. 2, an embodied Nabu (usually a spirit represented by a voice) greets Khalid. He has kohl applied over his eyes, wings extending outward from the center of his face, and a long goatee. These facial features are superimposed on a sphinx on the bottom left-hand corner of the spread, which reinforces the association between this character and ancient Egypt. Nabu, the god, is indigenous not to Egypt but to Mesopotamia, a historical region supported by the Tigris and Euphrates, not the Nile. Doctor Fate’s Nabu identifies himself as a priest of Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom. Nabu attributes ownership of the Helmet of Fate to Thoth and then says to Khalid, “The goddess Bastet gave much to place it in your hands, cradled with the warmth of the blood of the pharaohs that flows in your veins. May you use it justly” (Levitz and Liew). Khalid responds, “I’m no pharaoh, and whatever this—this thing is supposed to do, I’m not the guy to do it. Find another sucker.” Khalid does not accept that he is the Chosen One of this narrative. He continues, “I’m an American, not some would-be pharaoh. Find someone else to lead your Arab Spring, if that’s what this is about. Egypt’s my dad’s country—not mine.” Then, “I’m going to be a doctor—not a revolutionary” (fig.  12.1). Khalid attempts to dissociate from Egypt’s ancient and immediate (Arab Spring) pasts in favor of his own present and future in the United States.3 Doctor Fate does not allow him to do so. In these comics, ancient Egyptian and modern Arab ethno-national identities are compounded into one (Middle) Eastern ethno-racial identity.

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FIG. 12.1  ​From Doctor Fate, vol. 1, The Blood Price, DC Comics, 2016, art by Sonny Liew.

The creation of ethnic and racial (and ethno-racial) categories, as Parker and Song write, “does not occur in a vacuum” (15). Levitz and Liew represent Egypt itself as both a kingdom of pharaohs and a nation-state of revolutionaries. In doing so, they perpetuate Arab exceptionalism and Orientalism. Edward Said originally defined Orientalism as, in part, “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3). Over an Egypt still affected, in 2015 and 2016, by democratic protests attended by millions of Egyptians across of the country, Levitz and Liew superimpose ancient Egyptian structures, physical and political. They even go so far as to reference Tutankhamun. For the average American, “King Tut” is perhaps the most easily recognized pharaoh. Concerning Khalid, Bastet says, “Tutankhamun was no wiser at that age” (Levitz and Liew). In actuality, Tutankhamun would not have lived long enough to complete a four-year undergraduate degree, let alone enroll in medical school. In Doctor Fate, Egypt is simultaneously ancient and modern, but more often ancient, and when he becomes Fate, Khalid cannot be both Egyptian and American, which are diametrically opposed identities according to this Orientalist narrative. In order to become Fate, which he

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does—often enough—for Akila, Khalid must wear the Helmet of Fate and reject Americanization (and whiteness) in favor of racialization. In Doctor Fate no. 10, Khalid, confronted by the phantoms of Roman centurions just after defeating similarly ghostly ancient Egyptian warriors, asks Nabu, “How am I supposed to do this?” (Levitz et al.). “This” could just as much refer to being Fate as it does to dealing with the situation at hand. Nabu replies, “Find the answers within.” Khalid, already wearing the Helmet of Fate, looks within. Over another two-page sequence, Khalid is suspended in the center of the spread. His head is uncovered. Around him, images of, to use Levitz’s words, “thousands of years of Egyptian history” swirl. The Nassour family cat, Puck, vessel of the Egyptian goddess Bastet, appears in the upper left-hand corner of the spread next to the withered profile of a human being. To the right of Puck there are what appear to be soldiers in gas masks standing behind a miniature rendering of one of Egypt’s famous pyramids. Below the soldiers, younger versions of Mohammed (absent his graying temples) and Elizabeth appear. The present, or five years prior at the height of the Arab Spring, is framed by the past. Below Puck, on the left-hand side of the spread, there appears a man in a military uniform, solemnly gazing downward. Behind him, there are skyscrapers. Next to him, framed by Khalid’s body at the center of the page, are soldiers from an earlier time period than depicted above them. A British flag, the Union Jack, appears in this panel. It is bordered, to the reader’s right, with hieroglyphics, and at the bottom of the page by the head of a smiling sphinx. The sphinx is both a recurring icon and a character in Doctor Fate. In the lower left-hand corner of the spread, Liew includes a scene in which an ancient Egyptian woman, accompanied by attendants, applies makeup. The relationship between these panels and Khalid is less clear than those described earlier. There is nothing in this two-page spread that, explicitly or implicitly, confirms that Khalid is in fact the descendant of pharaohs. There is no family tree. Instead, it suggests that he, as Fate, embodies ancient and modern Egypt, excluding the period during which Arabs entered North Africa in the centuries in between. On the right-hand side of the spread, Khalid’s silhouette falls over a golden-hued skyline marked by a minaret, which, as a recognizable element of a mosque, alludes to Islam. That silhouette then falls into flames, where it appears alongside silhouettes of a cat and an ankh, an Egyptian symbol nearly as recognizable to Americans as Tutankhamun’s name. Khalid lands in an underground chamber at the lower right corner of the spread.

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FIG. 12.2  ​From Doctor Fate, vol. 2, Prisoners of the Past, DC Comics, 2016, art by Sonny Liew.

As he is suspended in the center of this two-page spread, Khalid remarks to himself that the images that the reader sees, which mediate Khalid’s experience of looking within, represent the history he inherits from his father (fig. 12.2). He thinks, again to himself, “But I’m Mom too . . . ​Why isn’t any of that in me . . . ​or any of my own time, my own world . . . ​America . . . ,” and “Is this crazy helmet just pulling me back into one portion of my history . . . ?” Then, “Thought I was getting a handle on these powers. On who I am now.” Khalid is both his father and his mother, Egyptian and American, but Fate is not. In becoming Fate, putting on the helmet and assuming the mystical powers that entails, Khalid dissociates from his mother, her history, and the citizenship afforded to him by their relationship, by her blood. He also dissociates from hegemonic whiteness and any privileges afforded to it. The Helmet of Fate microsocially racializes Khalid. The Helmet of Fate, then, functions like a hijab. Here, “hijab” refers specifically to the style of scarf that Akila wears. In other instances, it may refer to the general practice of veiling. Akila’s headscarf signifies to a white, Christian majority that she belongs to a nonwhite minority, regardless of

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whether that is statistically true. The hijab functions as a medium across which racial meaning can be extended, although it is gendered in ways that the Helmet of Fate is not. While Akila seemingly chooses to wear the hijab (the choice is really that of the creative team), she does not decide whether others (including the reader) see her as a woman of color as a result. This story is not, however, about Akila. Alia al-Saji argues that Western representations of Muslim women rarely, if ever, are about those women: “Western representations of Muslim women are not simply about Muslim women themselves. Rather than representing Muslim women, these images fulfill a different function: they provide the foil or negative mirror in which western constructions of gender and identity can be positively reflected” (877). Her argument resonates with Said’s work, but with greater attention paid to gender. Akila is the only visibly Muslim woman in the supporting cast of Doctor Fate. By virtue of being the only one, she serves as the negative mirror in which Shaya, her secular counterpart, is reflected. Racialization is represented as negative while Americanization is represented as positive. Shaya, who reciprocates Khalid’s feelings, may appear to be the obvious choice for Khalid. However, he frequently chooses (to rescue) Akila, the damsel in distress. Akila embodies racialization through her wearing of the hijab, which makes her appear as a racial Other in the United States, but Doctor Fate is not about Muslim women or their bodies. Doctor Fate is about Khalid Nassour. It is his origin story. In order to become the superhero Fate, Khalid must put on the Helmet of Fate, which, like Akila’s hijab, is a medium across which racial meaning can be extended. For Khalid, the helmet signifies something other than whiteness, and the act of putting it on is a rejection of hegemonic whiteness. It is also a rejection of citizenship. His decision to wear the Helmet of Fate (not so much a choice as the fulfillment of a preordained destiny), like Akila’s decision to veil, is political.

Politics of the Past By the time Akila first appears in Doctor Fate no.  3, Khalid has not yet started medical school, but he has started saving people as Fate. In that issue, Akila invites Khalid to a protest, initiating a plot picked up six issues later. In Doctor Fate no. 9, aptly titled “Protest,” a massive demonstration at the United Nations Plaza in Manhattan goes awry. Khalid, as Fate, asks

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himself if he can “break this up without getting labeled some kind of supervillain or costumed terrorist” (Levitz et al.). The use of “terrorist” acknowledges the racialization of this mixed-race protagonist. When the Patriot Act first went into effect, it did not include a definition of terrorism that encompassed domestic acts, only international ones (“How”). While a white character (even the original Doctor Fate, Kent Nelson) in the same position would likely not have to worry about being labeled a terrorist— only a supervillain, if that—Khalid is keenly aware that he is not afforded the same protections as a person of color, let alone a person of color with an Arabic-language name and Muslim father (it is unclear whether Khalid himself identifies as Muslim, as he struggles between his father’s Islamic faith and his mother’s Christianity throughout the series). Khalid’s rights as a citizen can be impinged on at any time for the “greater good,” according to a logic of exception articulated by Alsultany. She writes, “An exceptional or emergency situation lends credibility to arguments that would otherwise be discredited as unfair or illegal. The logic that 9 / 11 is an exceptional moment of crisis—and therefore demands exceptional measures— becomes crucial in producing a new kind of racism, one that purports to be antiracist while perpetrating and justifying racism” (50). Arabs and ArabAmericans in the United States are still affected by such exceptional measures and made political by them, and this logic is evident in Doctor Fate. In Doctor Fate no. 10, Mohammed says to Elizabeth, “That boy [Khalid] has no politics in him. He is much too busy changing . . . ​becoming American . . . ​a doctor . . . ​whatever he’ll be” (Levitz et al.). Becoming a physician is a metonymy for Americanization and, by extension, becoming white. Even the name Khalid chooses to use at school, Kent, reflects this and, further, connects him by name to his mother’s uncle, the aforementioned Kent Nelson. The processes of becoming a physician and becoming American are, according to Mohammed, apolitical. By his logic, being Egyptian or Arab and becoming Fate are political. Fate stands opposite “doctor,” offering a potential explanation for why, besides not having completed medical school (and very nearly flunking out during his first semester), Khalid never becomes Doctor Fate. He never uses the name diegetically. Doctor Fate is the name of the series. Fate is the name Khalid Nassour takes on as its superpowered protagonist. Then, when Fate rushes to Akila’s aid, he lends his supernatural ability to her cause. Before the protest can turn into an all-out riot, Fate does crowd control. He singles out Akila and prevents her arrest and detainment.

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Other protesters are not so lucky. Akila asks Fate to go to their rescue, and Fate complies. It becomes part of Khalid’s effort to “heal the world,” which he was charged to do in the first place by Bastet and Nabu. The detained protesters, Khalid discovers, are being held at the Egyptian consulate. There, they are guarded by ancient Egyptian phantoms led by a living Egyptian general. The conflation of modern with ancient, described in detail earlier, is made especially apparent in this story arc. Khalid defeats the Egyptian phantoms. Then Roman phantoms, those aforementioned centurions, replace them. In the following issue, titled “Great Caesar’s Ghost,” Khalid puts those ghosts to rest.4 He asks the Egyptian general who, using magic, summoned them why he would “use that magic to turn a protest into a riot, to hurt innocent young people who want to make this a better country” (Levitz et  al.). The simultaneously ancient and modern Egypt, which Levitz and Liew ahistorically represent as unaffected by American imperialism, serves as an allegory for the United States before the 2016 presidential election when the general replies, “Better . . . ​Fah! We must make Egypt great again!” Regardless of whether such rhetoric was being employed in Egypt before or during the period in which Levitz was writing Doctor Fate, the call to make a nation “great again” evokes, for American readers, conservatism in the United States. Specifically, the general represents then presidential candidate Donald Trump. The Egyptian general appears not against the city of Cairo but rather against pyramids like those in Giza, on the outskirts of the Egyptian capital where so many protested authoritarianism. This sequence’s liberal, but postracial, politics would suggest that contemporary American conservative political rhetoric has no place in the present (or in the United States even) despite very much existing now (and in the United States) and having very real consequences for people of color like Khalid Nassour, domestically and abroad. One such consequence was President Trump’s Executive Order 13769, popularly known as the Muslim ban, affecting not just Arab League states Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen but also Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela. Protesters against the ban organized largely over social media (Manjoo).

Conclusion The Arab Spring, despite its name, was a global phenomenon. Some nationstates were more successful in democratizing than others, but regardless of

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whether domestic politics changed, the protests had a measurable effect on American popular media. This is evidenced in Doctor Fate. Khalid Nassour is an Arab-American superhero. He is one of two to appear in solo titles of mainstream superhero comic books from an American publisher more than a decade after 9 / 11 and not long after the Arab Spring, which the text invokes through Khalid even if only to repudiate a potential personal connection to it. While this representation does signify a shift in American attitudes toward the Middle East and North Africa, it still perpetuates logics like Arab exceptionalism and Orientalism. Arabs and Arab-Americans are still racialized according to such, at best, outdated and, at worst, racist logics. The existence of mixed-race individuals, Parker and Song write, “does not in itself end racism. Instead, a different racial hierarchy can be set in place, where divisions and exclusions are far from dissolved” (9). Despite being counted in the United States Census as white, Americans represented by Khalid Nassour are viewed as people of color and represented as such in popular media like comics, yet they are not afforded the same official legal protections as individuals of other marginalized racial categories. Such legal protections often go unenforced, to the detriment of those whom they are meant to protect; however, legislation like the Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer National Opposition to Hate, Assault, and Threats to Equality (NO HATE) Act is nonetheless important. So, too, are heroes like Khalid Nassour and series like Doctor Fate, despite its flaws. In Doctor Fate, women personify racialization and Americanization. Akila personifies the former while Shaya personifies the latter. These women’s bodies—one visibly Muslim by way of a hijab, the other not— become metaphors for mixed-race identity. While Khalid is romantically attracted to the secular Shaya, he frequently chooses (to become Fate for) her foil: Akila, the Muslim girl next door. This love triangle perpetuates a false binary between racialization and Americanization: the former does not necessarily preclude belonging in or to the United States. Khalid should already be a citizen because he is the child of an American citizen. It should not take more than that for him to belong. However, as a mixed-race individual, racialization of his Arab ethnic identity, such that it becomes an Arab ethno-racial identity, marginalizes Khalid. It removes him from the category of white, into which earlier generations of Arab immigrants to the United States sought to assimilate and from which his white, ethnically (if ambiguously) European American mother benefits. He cannot, according to Doctor Fate, be white and Arab and a superhero. Khalid fails to reconcile his

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Egyptian / immigrant and American / citizen identities because Arab exceptionalism and ethnicity are, in these comics, incompatible with American exceptionalism and citizenship. Khalid Nassour’s Fate is not a mixed-race superhero. However, racialization, such that Khalid can be read as mixed race despite Levitz and Liew’s focus on his Egyptian ethnic identity, occurs, and it occurs on the macrosocial level with global events like the Arab Spring and on the microsocial level through objects like Akila’s hijab and the Helmet of Fate. Read together, the visuals and the post–Arab Spring narrative of these comics, which intersect when Khalid Nassour becomes Fate, mediate the racialization of Arabs and Arab-Americans in the United States.

Notes 1 I use ethnic, here and throughout, to refer to singular groups with which

individuals identify culturally. Race, in this essay, is understood as coalitions of ethnic identities (such as white, Black, and Asian). 2 There are exceptions to this rule, among them Green Lanterns (like Simon Baz) who are chosen to serve in the Green Lantern Corps. However, such exceptions are often, but not always, alienated from their own nationalities in service to something other than the American way: the Green Lanterns of Earth (not the United States) serve Sector 2814. 3 Such reluctance is not unique to Khalid Nassour or a particular genre; however, here it serves an overarching “West versus East” narrative. “Doctor” and “revolutionary” are as opposed to each other explicitly as American and Egyptian are implicitly. 4 “Great Caesar’s Ghost” is known in the DC Universe as a catchphrase of Perry White, Clark Kent’s editor at the Daily Planet.

Works Cited Al-Saji, Alia. “The Racialization of Muslim Veils: A Philosophical Analysis.” Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 36, no. 8, Oct. 2010, pp. 875–902. Alsultany, Evelyn. Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9 / 11. New York University Press, 2012. Edwards, Brian T. Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express. Duke University Press, 2015. Gualtieri, Sarah M. A. Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora. University of California Press, 2009. “How the USA PATRIOT Act Redefines ‘Domestic Terrorism.’ ” ACLU, www.aclu​ .org/other/how-usa-patriot-act-redefines-domestic-terrorism. Accessed 12 May 2019.

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Johns, Geoff, Peter J. Tomasi, Tony Bedard, et al., writers, Doug Mahnke, Ethan Van Sciver, Miguel Sepulveda, et al., artists, Pete Woods, Carlos Urbana, Fernando Pasarin, et al., pencilers, Cam Smith, Scott Hanna, Marlo Alquiza, et al., inkers. Green Lantern: Rise of the Third Army. DC Comics, 2014. Kirkpatrick, David D. “Army Ousts Egypt’s President; Morsi Is Taken into Military Custody.” New York Times, 3 July 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/world/middle​ east/egypt.html. Accessed 12 May 2019. Levitz, Paul, writer, and Sonny Liew, artist. Doctor Fate. Vol. 1, The Blood Price. DC Comics, 2016. Levitz, Paul, writer, Sonny Liew and Ibrahim Moustafa, artists. Doctor Fate. Vol. 2, Prisoners of the Past. DC Comics, 2016. Mahtani, Minelle. “What’s in a Name? Exploring the Employment of ‘Mixed Race’ as an Identification.” Ethnicities, vol. 2, no. 4, Dec. 2002, pp. 469–490. Manjoo, Farhad. “The Alt-Majority: How Social Networks Empowered Mass Protests against Trump.” New York Times, 30 Jan. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30​/tech​ nology/donald-trump-social-networks-protests.html. Accessed 10 May 2019. Noueihed, Lin, and Alex Warren. The Battle for the Arab Spring: Revolution, Counterrevolution and the Making of a New Era. Updated ed., Yale University Press, 2013. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. 3rd ed., Routledge, 2014. Parker, David, and Miri Song. “Introduction: Rethinking ‘Mixed Race.’ ” Rethinking “Mixed Race,” edited by David Parker and Miri Song, Pluto, 2001, pp. 1–22. Parvini, Sarah, and Ellis Simani. “Are Arabs and Iranians White? Census Says Yes, but Many Disagree.” Los Angeles Times, 28 Mar. 2019, www.latimes.com/projects​ /la-me-census-middle-east-north-africa-race/. Accessed 9 May 2019. Phillips, Nickie D., and Staci Strobl. Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice, and the American Way. New York University Press, 2013. Resha, Adrienne. “Saladin Ahmed and Sara Alfageeh’s Amulet Offers Hope for Good Comic Book Arab Representation.” WWAC, 7 Feb. 2020, womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2020/02/the-comic-book-arab/. Accessed 28 Mar. 2020. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1994. Shaheen, Jack G. “Jack Shaheen versus the Comic Book Arab.” Link, vol. 24, no. 5, Nov.–Dec. 1991, pp. 1–11. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. Oxford University Press, 2018. Walsh, Declan. “Egypt Quietly Buries Former President Morsi, Muting Coverage of Death.” New York Times, 18 June 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/06/18/world/middle​ east/egypt-morsi-burial-coverage.html. Accessed 12 July 2019.

Acknowledgments

In a way, Mixed-Race Superheroes began four years ago when we began cowriting a chapter for what is now Ms. Marvel’s America (2020). We were interested in how the Ms. Marvel comic engages in postracialist discourse and struck by the ways in which the struggles and experience of Kamala Khan / Ms. Marvel mirrored those of Black and white mixed-race fictional characters. This collaboration set the stage for three more projects (including this anthology), bringing together two colleagues (and friends!) from different fields who otherwise might not have crossed paths in terms of scholarship. Eric is, among other things, a comics scholar while Sika is, among other things, a Critical Mixed-Race Studies scholar. Before working together, neither of us had substantial experience working in the other’s fields, making a collaboration on this project a necessity. When we sent out our call for abstracts, we did not know to what degree scholars in both fields existed. Would there be Critical Mixed-Race Studies scholars who had a secret or not-so-secret love affair with superheroes? Would there be comics scholars knowledgeable about or situated in Critical Mixed-Race Studies? While we did not receive a large number of responses, we were delighted with the diverse range of ideas that eventually turned that call into the book you are reading. We would first like to thank our individual contributors for their enthusiasm and creative acuity. Thank you as well to Jessica Baldzani and Hussein Rashid, who, unbeknownst to them, planted the seed for this project. Special thanks, as well, to Hussein and Hicham Mazouz for 261

262  •  Acknowledgments

serving as readers for chapters, as well as to the anonymous readers solicited by the press. Additionally, we wish to thank our editor, Nicole Solano, as well as Hope Dormer, Malaika Jawed, Maggie Tibbitt, Alissa Zarro, and other staff at Rutgers University Press who navigated the technical aspects of this project. Also thanks to the meticulous David Luljak, our indexer. Special thanks to Tanna Tucker for creating the beautiful artwork that appears on the cover. Her fierce and compelling superheroes subtly capture a range of concepts and ideas covered in the project. Thanks as well to our shared friends in the Florida Atlantic University Department of English, many of whom often found us in Eric’s office discussing this project: Adam Bradford, Papatya Bucak, Andrew Furman, Wendy Hinshaw, Ashvin Kini, and Becka McKay. Thanks also to perennially supportive mutual friends Elena Machado Sáez and Rafe Dalleo. Sika would like to thank her family, especially her husband, Chris; daughter, Asilah; and parents, Prospero and Frances. Special thank you to the East Lansing crew: Pero, LaShawn, Perovi, Kokou, and Bé. Thanks always to her friends. Eric would like to thank his wife, Jennie; his daughters, Katie and Julia; his parents, Joel and Teddi; his brother, Noah, and his family; and his friends from all walks of life for their unconditional support and occasional interest.

Notes on Contributors

is professor of English and associate dean in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University. He authored The Real, the True, and the Told: Postmodern Historical Narrative and the Ethics of Representation (2011) and edited Alan Moore: Conversations (2012). His writing on fiction and comics also appears in a variety of journals and edited collections.

ERIC  L. BERL ATSK Y

is associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His writing has appeared in Ethnic Studies Review, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union, edited by G. Reginald Daniel and Hettie V. Williams. He is author of The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing (2013).

GREGORY T. CARTER

CORRINE E. COLLINS is assistant professor in the Department of English at the

University of Southern California. Her research examines representations of interracial relationships and multiracial identity in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Black women’s literature in the United States, Caribbean, and Europe. is associate professor of English in the Department of English at Florida Atlantic University. She is author of Crossing B(l)ack: Mixed-Race Identity in Modern American Fiction and Culture

SIK A  A. DAGBOVIE-MULLINS

263

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(2013). Her articles have appeared in journals such as the African American Review, the Journal of Popular Culture, The Lion and the Unicorn, the Mississippi Quarterly, and Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International. is associate professor of English at Washington and Lee University. He has published four books on comics: On the Origin of Super­ heroes (2015), Superhero Comics (2017), Superhero Thought Experiments (with Nathaniel Goldberg, 2020), and Creating Comics (with Leigh Ann Beavers, 2021).

CHRIS GAVALER

teaches eighteenth- to twenty-first-century literature at the University of Toronto. He is a contributing editor to The Broadview Anthology of British Literature and is a coeditor of Transatlantic Romanticism: An Anthology of American, British, and Canadian Literature, 1767–1867 and a special issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly on “monster studies.” He has published on global Romanticism, the pedagogy of literary studies, the digital humanities, the novel, and the gothic. His current research focuses on posthumanism and monster studies.

CHRIS KOENIG-WOODYARD

is assistant professor in the Department of English at Valdosta State University, where he teaches American literature, gender and sexuality studies, and comics studies. His research has appeared in Feminist Media Histories, INKS, Literature and Medicine, and The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies. He is currently coediting a collection of essays on X-Men: The Animated Series and is a periodic contributor to The Middle Spaces.

NICHOL AS  E. MILLER

is assistant professor of American studies and media studies and communication at the State University of New York–Old Westbury. Her research focuses on transnational constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and national identity in U.S. and Brazilian media. Her work has been featured in several edited collections and online journals. She is author of Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U.S. and Brazilian Media (2020).

JASMINE MITCHELL

is professor in Latina / Latino studies and communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is coeditor of the journal Feminist Media Studies and author of Dangerous Curves:

ISABEL MOLINA-GUZMÁN

Notes on Contributors • 265

Latina Bodies in the Media (2010) and Latinas and Latinos on Television: Colorblind Comedy in the Postracial Network Era (2018). Her works on difference, inequality, and the media have appeared in numerous edited collections and academic journals. is an American studies PhD candidate at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Her research interests include Arab and Muslim representation in American popular media, the superhero genre, and media theory. She serves on the executive board of the Comics Studies Society’s Graduate Student Caucus.

ADRIENNE RESHA

serves as associate professor of Multiethnic Literature of the United States at the College of the Holy Cross. His work has appeared in MELUS, College Literature, and Image / Text, as well as in a number of edited collections. His first academic monograph, Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History with Comics (2019), was awarded the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society in 2020.

JORGE J. SANTOS JR.

is a PhD graduate from the University of Edinburgh’s Language, Literatures, and Cultures Department. His research interests include—but are not limited to—comics studies, literary theory and criticism, and philosophy, particularly the so-called prophets of extremity— Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida.

KWASU DAVID TEMBO

Index

ableism, 110–111, 115 Action Comics (comic), 10–11, 72 Affleck, Ben, 171 African Americans/Blacks: cultural signifiers of, 226, 234–235; Du Bois on experience of, 183–186; in Faulkner novels, 91–94; Hulk and Venom likened to, 125, 126, 130–131; Jackson’s Missing You, Metropolis and, 64–78; as moviegoers, 223; racial mixedness in relation to, 17–18, 48, 57–58; status of, in Amer­i­ca, 31; ste­reo­t ypes of, 30–31, 38, 85–88, 94, 125, 130–131; structural racism against, 87–88; as superheroes, 68–69, 184, 187. See also Afro-­Latinidad; blackness Afro-­Latinidad: concept of, 190, 229–230, 237; cultural visibility of, 232; Miles Morales and, 19, 179, 180, 186–195, 221–222, 226–227, 229–230, 237; Tessa Thompson and, 46, 57; in U.S. population, 230 Afro-­R ican. See Afro-­Latinidad Aguiar, Christopher, 237 Ahmed, Saladin, Miles Morales: Spider-­Man, 193–194 Ahmed, Sara, 29–30, 35, 201 Alaniz, José, 15 Alba, Jessica, 57

Aldama, Frederick Luis, 187 Allen, Barry (a.k.a. The Flash, character). See Flash, The All-­Star Superman (comic), 165, 166 Alonso, Axel, 188, 189, 232 Al-­Saji, Alia, 254 Alsultany, Evelyn, 246–247, 255 Amazing Spider-­Man (comic), 17–18, 27–36, 41, 68, 71, 82 Amazing Spider-­Man (film), 189 Ancient One (character), 58 Anderson, Brent, and Chris Claremont, X-­Men: God Loves, Man Kills, 72 Animal Man (a.k.a. Buddy Baker, character), 15 anti-­utopia, 77 Ant Man (a.k.a. Scott Lang, character), 134 Ant-­Man and the Wasp (film), 2, 3–6, 15–16, 20n2 Anzaldua, Gloria, 111 Aquaman (a.k.a. Arthur Curry, character), 6–10, 14, 250 Aquaman (comic), 7 Aquaman (film), 2, 6–10, 15 Arabs and Arab Americans, 243–258; Arab exceptionalism, 246, 249, 251, 257–258; early twentieth-­century immigration of, 247; Muslims identified with, 246–247; racialization of, 243–245, 247, 249, 267

268  •  Index

Arabs (cont.) 254–255, 257–258; as superheroes, 243, 245–246, 257; and whiteness, 243–244, 246–249, 253–255, 257 Arab Spring, 243, 245, 249, 256–258 Asano, Tadanobu, 57 Asians: absence of, in fantasy lit­er­a­ture, 149; American antipathy to, 129–130; ste­reo­t ypes of, 150 Association of Comics Magazine Publishers, 123 Astonishing X-­Men (comic), 141 Auden, W. H., “Musée des Beaux Arts,” 74 audience, for superhero genre: expectations of, 37, 46, 47, 52, 57, 225, 231, 232; predominant whiteness of, 56, 67, 180, 188, 189; racial composition of, 223–224, 226; reactions of, to diversity in superhero genre, 57–59, 84–85, 189, 232–237; reflection of, in films, 226, 232–236 Avengers: Age of Ultron (film), 133 Avengers: Endgame (film), 134, 136 Avengers: Infinity War (film), 134 Avengers, The (film), 134 Avengers (comic), 128 Azzarello, Brian, and Lee Bermejo, Lex Luthor: Man of Steel, 165, 167 Banner, Bruce (a.k.a. The Hulk, character). See Hulk, The Bannon, Steve, 98 Batalon, Jacob, 28 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (comic), 13 Batman (a.k.a. Bruce Wayne, character), 13, 15, 76, 123, 250 Batman (comic), 67 Batman v Superman (film), 159, 171–172 Baz, Simon (a.k.a. Green Lantern, character). See Green Lantern (a.k.a. Simon Baz, character) Bell, W. Kamau, 1–2 Bendis, Brian Michael, 193; Spider-­Man: Miles Morales, 192–193; Ultimate Comics: Spider-­Man (with Sara Pichelli), 179, 188; The Uncanny X-­Men, 192 Bermejo, Lee. See Azzarello, Brian

Betancourt, David, 234 Bhabha, Homi, 201–202, 237–238 bildungsroman, 138, 140, 143, 147, 148, 155 bisexuality, 47 Bishop, Lucas (character), 68 Bixby, Bill, 128 Black Lightning (a.k.a. Jefferson Pierce, character), 69 Black Lives ­Matter, 53, 192, 228 blackness: colonialism/imperialism and, 47–51, 53; as component of racial mixedness, 17–18, 48, 57–58, 171; The Flash and, 84–88, 94, 96–97; in popu­lar culture, 88, 226; queerness of, 52, 59; Spider-­Man and, 27–40; ste­reo­t ypes of, 27–29, 193; Steven Universe and, 107, 112, 115; Tessa Thompson’s, 57–58; in Thor: Ragnarok, 46–60; warring blood theory and, 120; whiteness vs., 49–50, 54, 56–59, 112, 115. See also African Americans/Blacks Black Panther (a.k.a. T’Challa, character), 69, 122, 189 Black Panther (film), 2, 54, 56, 59, 223, 225, 228, 239n6 Black ­Widow (a.k.a. Natasha Romanoff, character), 55, 133, 134 Blade (a.k.a. Eric Brooks, character), 15, 69 Bouazizi, Mohamed, 245 Bright, M. D., 68 Brock, Eddie (a.k.a. Venom, character). See Venom Bronfen, Elizabeth, 32 Brown, Jeffrey, 13 Brown, Sterling, 120–121 Brunsma, David, 165, 168 Bruyneel, Kevin, 202–203, 211 Bukatman, Scott, 31, 35 Bush, George H. W., 125 Butler, Octavia, 108 Byrd, Jodi A., 201 Byrd, William, 78 Byrne, John, Man of Steel, 173n1 Cage, Luke (a.k.a. Power Man, character), 14, 68, 69–70, 73 Calore, Joanne, 163

Index • 269

Captain Amer­i­ca: The Winter Soldier (film), 225 Captain Amer­i­ca (a.k.a. Steve Rogers, character), 122, 134, 223 Captain Amer­i­ca (comic), 14 Captain Marvel (a.k.a. Carol Danvers, character), 55, 183 cárdenas, micha, 35 Carnes, Jeremy M., 201 Carrel, Alexi, 77 Carroll, Noel, 124 Car­ter, Gregory, 77; The United States of the United Races, 161 Cartoon Network, 105 ­Castle, W. E., 121–122 Catanese, Brandi Wilkins, 58–59 Cavill, Henry, 171 Cawalti, John, 76 Chabon, Michael, 74 Chambers, Terah Venzant, 163 Chang, Sharon, 10, 19 Cheadle, Don, 225 Chinn, Sarah, 112 Clan of the Fiery Cross (radio serial), 14 Claremont, Chris, 70; X-­Men: God Loves, Man Kills (with Brent Anderson), 72 Clarke, Kamari Maxine, 226 Clinton, Hillary, 131 Cloak and Dagger (TV series), 216 Coates, Julia M., 203 Cocca, Carolyn, 69 Cockrum, Dave, 72 Collins, Patricia Hill, 88 colonialism: Legion and, 19; marginal man concept and, 163–164; and Native ­peoples, 201–202, 206, 211, 215; racialization and, 201–202; Steven Universe and, 106–108, 113, 115–116; Thor: Ragnarok and, 47–51, 53. See also postcolonialism color-­blind ideologies: Black Panther and, 239n6; color-­conscious compared to, 224–225; critiques of, 86; in cultural production, 58–59, 224–227; racial mixedness and, 228; Spider-­Man: Into the Spider-­Verse and, 224–231, 234; Thor: Ragnarok and, 47, 54; universal messages linked to, 225–229. See also postracialism

color-­conscious ideologies, 224–226, 234–235, 237 Comics Code, 81, 99n1, 123 Comicsgate, 99 Comics Magazine Association of Amer­i­ca, 123 Community (TV series), 189 Coulthard, Glen Sean, 206 Creed (film), 57 Crèvecoeur, Hector St. John de, 77 Crisis on Infinite Earths (comic), 82 critical mixed-­race studies, 17, 29, 159–161, 163, 170, 172, 203 CW, 18, 82, 86, 92 Cyborg (a.k.a. Victor Stone, character), 15 cyborgs, 15, 32–33 Daken (a.k.a. Akihiro, character), 139, 141–143 Danvers, Carol (a.k.a. Captain Marvel, character). See Captain Marvel Darkwing Duck (TV series), 68 Dazzler (a.k.a. Alison Blaire, character), 73–74 DC, 1, 6, 14–15, 65, 67, 68, 82–84, 172, 193, 216, 243, 245; New 52, 82–86, 98, 99; Rebirth, 82, 98–99 DC Rebirth. See DC: Rebirth DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (TV series), 216 DC Universe Rebirth (comic), 98 Deadpool 2 (film) 20n1 Dear White ­People (TV series), 57 Deathlok (a.k.a. Michael Collins, character), 15 Defenders, The (comic), 47 Delany, Samuel R., 108 Delgado, Daniel, 165, 168 Deodato, Mike, 69 Díaz, Junot, 74 Dickens, Lyn, 10 Dietrich, Bryan D., Drawn to Marvel, 73 Dirty Harry movies, 125 Dixon, Thomas F., Jr., The Clansman, 11, 12–13, 100n10 Doane, Ashley, 224 Doc Savage (character), 12, 66, 76 Doctor Fate (comic), 19, 243–258 Doctor Strange (film), 58

270  •  Index

double consciousness, 186, 188, 190 Du Bois, W.E.B., 19, 121, 183–186, 190–191; “Jesus Christ in Waco, Texas,” 78; The Souls of Black Folk, 75; “The Talented Tenth,” 183–186, 190–191 Dukakis, Michael, 125 Dunn, Eli, 107 Eco, Umberto, 74 educational opportunities of racial minorities, 180–186, 191, 227 Edwards, Brian T., 246 Edwards, James, 4 Egypt, 245–246, 250–252, 256 Eisenberg, Deborah, 74 Eisenberg, Jesse, 171 Elam, Michele, 68, 77–78, 147, 155 Elba, Idris, 57, 60 Eschoe, Lyric, 233 eugenics, 11, 14, 66, 70–71, 77, 111, 121 exceptional multiraciality, 3, 110–111, 115, 170–171 Exiles (comic), 59 Falcon (a.k.a. Sam Wilson, character), 225 Fantastic Four (film), 57 Faulkner, William, 18, 91–94, 97; Absalom, Absalom! 91–92; The Sound and the Fury, 91–92, 97 Fauset, Jessie, 121 Fawaz, Ramzi, 13, 31, 83, 140; The New Mutants, 149–150 Ferrigno, Lou, 128 Firestorm (a.k.a. Jason Rusch and Martin Stein, character), 122, 216 Fishburne, Laurence, 4 Flash, The (a.k.a. Barry Allen, character), 81–90, 92–94, 96–98 Flash, The (comic), 3, 18, 81–85 Flash, The (TV series), 18, 82–99 Flores, Juan, 190 Foster, Jane (a.k.a. Thor, character). See Thor Frankenstein’s monster (character), 126 Freud, Sigmund, 82, 89, 94 Fury, Nick (character), 69 fusion: monsters created by, 124; racial mixedness as, 121–122, 135–136; Steven

Universe and, 106–116; Vasconcelos’s theory of, 107, 110–112 FX, 19, 199 Garfield, Andrew, 189 Garrison, William Lloyd, 77 Garrón, Javier, 193 Gavaler, Chris, 10–15 gender, in Steven Universe, 105–116. See also ­ omen masculinity; queerness; w Ghost Rider (a.k.a. Johnny Blaze, a.k.a. Danny Ketch, a.k.a. Robbie Reyes, character), 122 Gibbons, Dave, and Alan Moore, Watchmen, 64, 75, 76, 77 Gibney, Shannon, 88 Glasgow, Joshua, 154 Glover, Donald, 189 God, Superman as, 165, 166, 171 Goldberg, David Theo, 86 Gomez, Jada, 234 gothic lit­er­a­ture, 4 Goyer, David S. See Snyder, Zack Green Goblin (character), 179 Green Lantern (comic), 245 Green Lantern (a.k.a. John Stewart, character), 69 Green Lantern (a.k.a. Simon Baz, character), 245 Griffith, D. W., Birth of a Nation, 11, 13, 125 Griffith, Nicola, 108 Grossman, Austin, 74 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (film), 28 Gustin, Grant, 86 Haddad, Maya, 232 Halfwolf, Maika (character), 138–154 Happy, Sad, Confused (podcast), 134 Hardy, Jasmine, 231 Hardy, Tom, 132 Harrier, Laura, 28, 37 Harris, ­Will, Mixed-­R ace Superman, 2 Hart-­Celler Act, 247 Hatfield, Charles, 187 Hawkman (a.k.a. Car­ter Hall, a.k.a. Katar Hol, character), 15 Hawkwoman (a.k.a. Sharon Parker, a.k.a.

Index • 271

Sharon Hall, a.k.a. Shayera Hol, character), 15 Hedrick, Tace, 110–111 Hemsworth, Chris, 50, 60n1 Hepburn, Katharine, 28 Hercules (character), 15 heteronormativity, 18, 52 Hitler, Adolf, 14 Hogun (character), 57 Holiday, Billie, 72 home: mixed-­race individuals’ lack of, 32, 37, 38–41; postcolonial critique of, 30, 35; racial security in, 28–29, 37; Spider-­Man and, 28–30, 32, 35 Horton, Willie, 125, 130 Hubbard, Ladee, 74 Hughes, Henry, 90 Hughes, Langston, Mulatto, 78 Hulk, The (a.k.a. Bruce Banner, character), 18, 122, 124–128, 132–136 Hunt, Darnell, Hollywood Diversity Report, 223 Huntington, John, 76–77 Ibis the Invincible (a.k.a. Amentep, a.k.a. Danny Khalifa, character), 245 Icon (a.k.a. Augustus Freeman, character), 68 Immigration Act, 247 Immigration and Nationality Act, 247 imperialism. See colonialism incest, 18, 89–97 Incredible Hulk, The (comic), 122, 124–126, 127, 128 Incredible Hulk, The (film), 124 Incredible Hulk, The (TV series), 128 Indigenous ­peoples, 199–216; Australian/ New Zealander, 50, 54; colonialism and, 201–202, 206, 211, 215; and definition of indigeneity, 202–203; Hemsworth and, 50, 60n1; identity issues for, 200–203, 205–207, 215; reservations for, 209; whiteness and, 201–202, 205–211, 214 Injustice: Gods among Us (video game), 163 interracial romance and marriage: anx­i­eties concerning, 20n8, 88, 112, 126; in The Flash, 86, 88–89; in Jackson’s poems, 70–71; ­legal issues involving, 13, 123, 148; morality codes concerning, 78, 123;

nineteenth-­century advocates of, 77; in superhero comics, 13–14. See also miscegenation intersectionality, 107, 143 Iron Fist (TV series), 58 Iron Fist (a.k.a. Danny Rand, character), 13, 16, 58 Ironheart (a.k.a. Riri Williams, character), 55 Iron Man (a.k.a. Tony Stark, character), 55, 122, 134 Iron Man 3 (film), 225 Irwin, Bill, 199 Irwin, John T., 91–93, 96 ISV. See Spider-­Man: Into the Spider-­Verse Jackson, Gary, 65, 67–69; “Autumn in Chestnut Falls,” 71; “A Beautiful Lie,” 74; “Bleed,” 74; “Confessions from a Mutant Disco-­Queen,” 73; “A Conversation about Superheroes,” 69, 70; “The Dilemma of Lois Lane,” 71, 74; “Elegy for Gwen Stacy,” 75; “Emergency,” 74; “Fade,” 68; “The ­Family Solid,” 75; “The Golden Avenger,” 75–76; “Gothamites,” 76; “Home from Work, I Face My Newborn Mutant Son,” 72; “How the Unstoppable Juggernaut Makes a Living ­a fter Retirement,” 74; “How to Get Lynched on the Job,” 70, 74; “Kansas Winter Blues,” 70; “Listening to Plath in Poetics,” 70, 74; “Luke Cage Tells It like It Is,” 73; “Magneto Eyes Strange Fruit,” 72, 74; “Missing You, Metropolis,” 76; Missing You, Metropolis, 18, 64–78; “Natalie Pays the Neighbor Boy a Visit,” 70; “Nightcrawler Buys a ­Woman a Drink,” 70, 74; “Origin of Memory, 76; “A Poem for Jesse Custer,” 67, 72; “Pretend,” 69, 76; “Reading Comic Books in the Rain,” 76; “Saturday Mornings with Andrea True,” 67; “The Secret Art of Reading a Comic,” 74; “Storm on Display,” 72–73; “Stuart,” 68; “Superman’s Funeral,” 70; “Upon Seeing Spider-­Man on My Way to Work,” 76; “Watchmen,” 75; “When Loving a Man Becomes Too Hard,” 71, 74; “Winter Photo,” 74; “Xorn,” 67

272  •  Index

Janis, Sonia, 160 John-­Kamen, Hannah, 3 Johns, Geoff, 245 Johnson, Georgia Douglas, 121, 132; “Fusion,” 121–122, 135–136 Johnson, Jason, 38 Johnson-­Reed Act, 247 Joker (character), 76 Jones, Finn, 58 Jones, Jessica (character), 14, 69–70 Jordan, Michael B., 57, 225 Joseph, Ralina L., 2, 3, 68, 86; Transcending Blackness, 161, 170–171 Jurgens, Dan, Superman Reborn, 163 Juvenal, 75 Kal-­El (a.k.a. Clark Kent, a.k.a. Superman, character). See Superman Karloff, Boris, 126 Keaton, Michael, 37 Kent, Clark (a.k.a. Kal-­El, a.k.a. Superman, character). See Superman Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer National Opposition to Hate, Assault, and Threats to Equality Act, 257 Khalifa, Danny (a.k.a. Ibis the Invincible, character). See Ibis the Invincible Khan, Kamala (a.k.a. Ms. Marvel, character). See Ms. Marvel Kid Flash (a.k.a. Wally/Wallace West, character), 82–87, 93, 94, 98–99 Kidman, Nicole, 6–7 Killmonger, Erik (character), 224–225 Kravitz, Zoë, 220 Kreisberg, Andrew, 94 Ku Klux Klan, 11–14, 72 kyriarchy, 18, 139, 143, 144, 147, 148, 150, 151 Lacks, Henrietta, 146 Lamarckism, 121 Lane, Lois (character), 71, 76, 162–163, 169 Lang, Lana (character), 169 Lang, Scott (a.k.a. Ant Man, character). See Ant Man Laó-­Montes, Augustín, 232 Latinx: associated with whiteness more than blackness, 57–58; critique of concept of, 190, 238n2; educational

opportunities for, 185; Miles Morales and, 19, 193; as moviegoers, 223. See also Afro-­Latinidad LaValle, Victor, 233 Lee, Robert G., 129–130 Lee, Stan, 126, 225, 228 Legends of Tomorrow (TV series). See DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (TV series), 216 Legion (TV series), 19, 199–216 Le Guin, Ursula K., 108 Leroi, Armand Marie, Mutants, 141 Lethem, Jonathan, 74 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 89 Levitz, Paul, and Sonny Liew, Doctor Fate, 19, 246, 247, 249, 251, 252, 256, 258 Lewis, John, March trilogy, 189 Liew, Sonny. See Levitz, Paul Lincoln, Abraham, 12 Liu, Marjorie, 18, 138–141, 143, 147–150; Daken: Dark Wolverine, 141; Dark Wolverine (with Daniel Way), 141–142; Monstress (with Sana Takeda), 18, 138–155; “Mutants,” 140–141 Lluveras, Lauren, 235–236 Locke, Alain, 121 Lonsdale, Keiynan, 86 Lord, Phil, 228, 229, 231 Lorde, Audre, 112–113 Loudermilk, Kerry and Cary (characters), 19, 199–216 Loving v. ­Virginia (1967), 13, 108, 110, 148 Low, David E., 180, 191 Lowe, Lisa, 82 Luthor, Lex (character), 165, 171 Mackie, Anthony, 225 Mahtani, Michelle, 29, 211, 249–250 Man of Steel (comic), 173n1 Man of Steel (film), 11, 159, 170 Maori ­people, 7, 54 marginal man: colonialism and, 163–164; critiques of concept of, 160–161; features of, 164, 170; and race, 164; stages in life cycle of, 165, 168; Stonequist’s theory of, 160–161, 164–165; Superman as, 159–173 marriage. See interracial romance and marriage

Index • 273

Martian Manhunter (a.k.a. J’onn J’onzz, a.k.a. John Jones, character), 122 Martin, Jesse L., 86 Martin, Trayvon, 234 Marvel: Cinematic Universe (MCU), 3, 57–59, 124, 129, 132–133, 223–224, 228; Comics, 13–16, 55–59, 65, 72, 73, 84, 122, 128, 132, 139–143, 149, 180, 188, 192–193, 199, 221, 223, 228, 232; tele­vi­sion, 58, 215–216; Ultimate Universe, 14, 188–189, 191–192, 223 Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars (comic), 192 Marvel Team-­Up (comic), 13 masculinity: dominance of, in cultural productions, 149; ste­reo­t ypes of black, 31, 87, 94, 125, 130–131; superheroes associated with, 107–110, 139; white, 47, 50, 215, 223, 232 Mason, Hollis (a.k.a. Nite Owl I, character), 64 Mauer, Mark, 130 McCarten, Anthony, 74 McCloud, Scott, 181 McDuffie, Dwayne, 68 McGruder, Aaron, The Boondocks, 68 MCU. See Marvel: Cinematic Universe Meeropol, Abel, “Strange Fruit,” 72 Mendel, Gregor, 122 Michaels, Walter Benn, 88, 91–92, 97 ­Middle East politics, 243, 245–246 Midthunder, Amber, 199 Miles Morales: The Ultimate Spider-­Man (comic), 191 Milestone Media/Comics, 68 Miller, Christopher, 228 Miller, Henry “Cody,” 187 miscegenation: in American culture, 78; fear of, 3, 12, 56, 68, 70, 112, 148; The Flash and, 89–91, 93–94, 96–98; incest linked to, 90–97; taboos against, 89. See also interracial romance and marriage Mistral, Gabriela, 111 Misty Knight (character), 13, 15, 16 mixed-­race studies. See critical mixed-­race studies Mohan, Erica, 163–164

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 82 Momoa, Jason, 6–7 Monstress. See Liu, Marjorie: Monstress Moody, Rick, 74 Moonstar, Danielle (a.k.a. Psyche, a.k.a. Mirage, character), 201 Moore, Alan, 13; Miracleman, 74; Tom Strong, 14; Watchmen (with Dave Gibbons), 64, 74, 75, 76, 77 Moore, Perry, 74 Moore, Shameik, 220, 225, 231 Morales, Miles (a.k.a. Spider-­Man, character). See Spider-­Man (a.k.a. Miles Morales, character) morality codes, 81, 99n1, 123 Moreton-­Robinson, Aileen, 204 Morning, Ann, 230 Morrison, Grant, 2 Morrison, Temuera Derek, 6–7 Morrison, Toni, 28–29, 37 Morsi, Mohamed, 245 Motion Picture Association of Amer­i­ca, THEME Report, 223–224 Motion Picture Production Code, 78 Mr. Fantastic (a.k.a. Reed Richards, character), 122, 128–129 Ms. Marvel (a.k.a. Kamala Khan, character), 55, 183, 223 Ms. Marvel (comic), 228 MTV, 134 Mubarak, Hosni, 245, 249 mulattos/as. See tragic mulatto/a trope multiculturalism, 19, 37, 82–83 multiraciality/multiracialism, 57, 106, 110, 112, 116. See also exceptional multiraciality Muslim ban, 256 Mystique (a.k.a. Raven Darkholme, character), 69, 122 Nama, Adilifu, 13, 184, 232 Namor (a.k.a. Sub-­Mariner, character), 14, 124, 250 Nassour, Khalid “Kent” (a.k.a. Doctor Fate, character). See Doctor Fate (comic) Native persons. See Indigenous ­peoples nativism, 82, 91, 97–98. See also white supremacy

274  •  Index

Nazis, 14, 77, 146 Netflix, 58 New Avengers (comic), 14 New 52. See DC: New 52 New Negro movement, 121 New X-­Men (comic), 67 Nicoll, Fiona, 205 Nietz­sche, Friedrich, 11 Nightcrawler (a.k.a. Kurt Waggoner, character), 70 9/11 terrorist attack, 245, 247, 255, 257 Nishime, LeiLani, 15, 32–33, 58 Noguera, Pedro A., 185 Northstar (a.k.a. Jean-­Paul Baubier, character), 141 Noueihed, Lin, 245, 246 Obama, Barack, 2–3, 82, 188–189 O’Hara, Miguel (a.k.a. Spider-­Man 2099, character), 196n9, 228 Omi, Michael, 214, 244, 248–249 Onwuachi-­Willig, Angela, 88 Orczy, Baroness, The Scarlet Pimpernel, 12 Orientalism, 150, 244, 246, 251, 257 Other: Aquaman as, 9; cyborgs as, 33; mixed-­race individuals as, 33; Monstress and, 139, 141, 143, 144; racial minorities as, 42n10, 89, 97, 120; Spider-­Man as, 28, 36; ste­reo­t ypes of, 237–238; superheroes as, 66, 78; Superman as, 159, 162–163, 165, 168–169, 171–173; Valkyrie as, 53 Ottoway, Kate, 107 Paddison, Joshua, 36 Pagel, Stephen, 108 Parker, David, 247–248, 251, 257 Parker, Peter (a.k.a. Spider-­Man, character). See Spider-­Man (a.k.a. Peter Parker, character) passing: Monstress and, 151, 153–154; Spider-­Man: Homecoming and, 28, 38, 42n5; superheroes and, 15; Superman and, 161–162; whiteness as norm for, 213–214 patriarchy, 47–48, 54, 151 Patriot Act, 247, 255 Patton, Candice, 84, 86, 88, 95 Pearson, Wendy, 116

Pellow, David Naguib, 9 Phillips, Wendell, 77 Pichelli, Sara, 179, 181, 193 Pine, Chris, 220 Pitkethly, Clare, 15, 66, 73, 74 Poitier, Sidney, 28 Ponder, Justin, 124 postcolonialism, 30, 35. See also colonialism postracialism: ambivalent strategies of, 188, 189; critiques of, 82–83; cultural production and, 58–59, 224–227, 229–230, 237; The Flash and, 82, 86–89; hopes and disappointments connected to, 2–3, 86; Obama and, 189; racial mixedness as symbol of, 10, 19; repression of whiteness in, 82–83, 86, 89, 99; Spider-­Man: Into the Spider-­Verse and, 19; Spider-­Man/Miles Morales and, 188–192, 194. See also color-­blind ideologies Powerpuff Girls (TV series), 2 Preacher (comic), 67, 72 Prowler (a.k.a. Aaron Davis, character), 179 Punisher (a.k.a. Frank ­Castle, character), 13 purity. See racial purity Pynchon, Thomas, 74 queerness: Comics Code and, 123; as a concept, 52; desire and sexuality, 112–113, 116; in sci fi and fantasy, 108; Spider-­Man and, 30; Steven Universe and, 18, 105–116; Valkyrie and, 18, 47–48, 51–53, 59 Quill, Peter (a.k.a. Star-­Lord, character), 124 race: colonization and, 201–202; cultural visibility of, 224, 232–236; Doctor Fate and, 250–254; and double consciousness, 186; and educational opportunity, 180–186, 191, 227; The Flash and, 81–88, 94, 96–99; home as secure place concerning, 28–29, 37; intraracial hierarchies, 152, 154; marginal man concept and, 164; Monstress and, 150–154; norms of, in cultural production, 47, 55–59, 155, 222–227; Spider-­ Man: Into the Spider-­Verse and, 225–226; Spider-­Man/Miles Morales and, 186–193; Spider-­Man/Peter Parker and,

Index • 275

17–18, 27–40, 42n4, 220, 223; Superman and, 161–162, 172; in United States, 230, 231, 243–244; warring blood theory and, 120–121. See also African Americans/ Blacks; Asians; blackness; color-­blind ideologies; Indigenous ­peoples; interracial romance and marriage; Latinx; postracialism racialization: of Arabs/Arab-­A mericans, 243–245, 247, 249, 254–255, 257–258; colonialism and, 201–202 racial mixedness: ambivalence/ambiguity associated with, 19, 110, 135, 236; in American culture, 77–78, 123–124, 135, 154; bildungsroman based on, 147; blackness as component of, 17–18, 48, 57–58, 171; color-­blind ideologies and, 228; as contrary to popu­lar assumptions/ expectations, 37, 47; cultural status of, 57; cyborgs associated with, 32–33; The Flash and, 84–99; the Hulk and, 122, 124–128; identity issues and, 200, 207–208, 213, 215; incest as allusion to fears of, 18; Jackson’s Missing You, Metropolis and, 65–73; Johnson’s “Fusion” and, 121–122, 135–136; Kerry and Cary Loudermilk and, 19, 199–216; lack of identity or home attendant on, 32, 37, 38–41; Liu’s Monstress and, 138–155; marginal man concept and, 164, 170; as monstrous, 213; negative attitudes ­toward, 29, 68; physical appearance and, 248; po­liti­cal hybridity and, 202–203; salvific and redemptive power attributed to, 110; Spider-­Man/Miles Morales and, 190, 192–193, 229–230; Spider-­Man/ Peter Parker and, 28, 31–36; ste­reo­t ypes of, 3, 6, 17, 19, 29, 112, 159–160, 170, 172, 187; Steven Universe and, 107–116; in superhero comics, 13–14, 228–229, 231–234, 249, 258; superheroes’ nature likened to, 14–17, 65–67, 69, 78, 122–123, 216; superior qualities purportedly resulting from, 77, 110, 121–122; Superman and, 159–173; Supreme Court case on, 13; as symbol of postracialism, 10; Thor: Ragnarok and, 48–50, 56; in U.S. population, 230, 243; Vasconcelos’s

theory of, 107–108, 110–116; Venom and, 122, 124–126; warring blood discourses about, 18, 120–122, 124–126, 128, 132, 134, 136; whiteness in relation to, 208–209, 211, 214–215. See also Afro-­Latinidad; color-­blind ideologies; interracial romance and marriage; miscegenation; postracialism; tragic mulatto/a trope racial purity: critiques of, 16; historical promotion of, 90; incest and, 92; one-­drop rule of, 148; seen as villainous, 14; superheroes linked to discourse of, 10–13, 78, 123; Superman associated with, 10–12; Thor franchise and, 56 Raheja, Michelle H., 204 Raimon, Eve, 6 Ramsey, Peter, 226–227, 235 Rand, Danny (a.k.a. Iron Fist, character). See Iron Fist Rank, Otto, 93, 96 Reisman, Abraham, 229 repression, 18, 82–83, 86, 88, 89 Reverend Stryker (character), 72 Reverse Flash (a.k.a. Eobard Thawne, a.k.a. Professor Zoom, character), 83, 84, 87, 96 Revolori, Tony, 28 Reynolds, Richard, 67 Rhodes, James (a.k.a. War Machine, character). See War Machine Rivera, Raquel Z., 190 Robin (a.k.a. Dick Grayson, character), 123. See also Wayne, Damian Robinson, Amy, 212 Robinson, Lillian S., 138–139 Rockquemore, Kerry Ann, 165, 168–170 Rogers, Steve (a.k.a. Captain Amer­i­ca, character). See Captain Amer­i­ca Román, Miriam Jiménez, 190 Romano, Renee, 3 Romanoff, Natasha (a.k.a. Black ­Widow, character). See Black ­Widow Root, Maria P. O., 20n8 Rorschach (a.k.a. Walter Joseph Kovacs, character), 13 Rothman, Rodney, 231 Rude, Mey, 113 Ruffalo, Mark, 134, 135 Rushdie, Salman, 74, 155

276  •  Index

Said, Edward, Orientalism, 150, 251, 254 Saks, Eva, 32 Saldaña, Zoë, 230 Saunders, Robert, 229 Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth, 139 Scott, Anna Beatrice, 139 Secret Wars (comic). See Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars (comic) Semuels, Alana, 41 Senna, Danzy, 37 Sexton, Jared, 112 sexuality: queer, 112–113, 116; ­women’s sexualization in superhero genre, 47, 56, 59, 68, 69, 109. See also interracial romance and marriage; queerness Shadow (a.k.a. Lamont Cranston, character), 66, 76 Sharpe, Christina, 213 Sheffer, Jolie, 96 Showcase (comic), 1 Shuster, Joe, 159 Shyminsky, Neil, 108 Siegel, Jerry, 159 Silver Age of superhero comics, 82, 84, 99 Simpson, Audra, 200, 203, 209 Singer, Bryan, Superman Returns, 162–163 Singer, Marc, 67 Sisi, Abdel Fattah el-­, 245 slavery, 48–50, 53–54, 90–91, 151–152 Slotkin, Richard, 66 Snyder, Zack, and David S. Goyer: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, 159, 171–172; Man of Steel, 11, 159, 170 Sollors, Werner, 90–93, 96, 120–121 Somerville, Siobhan, Queering the Color Line, 115 Song, Miri, 247–248, 251, 257; Multiracial Parents, 154 Sony, 222–223, 228–229 sovereignty, as identity issue, 200–205, 209, 211 Spawn (a.k.a. Albert Francis Simmons, character), 68 Spencer, Rainier, 110 Spider-­Man (a.k.a. Miles Morales, character), casting of, 225–226, 228; cultural significance of, 221, 232–238; double consciousness of, 186; and life

chances of racial minorities, 180–185, 191, 195; as mixed-­race superhero, 14, 19, 55, 84, 179, 188–193, 220–223, 228–238, 231–236; racial consciousness evoked/ suppressed by character of, 180, 187–195, 226, 228–231, 234–238 Spider-­Man (a.k.a. Peter Parker, character): animal-­human nature of, 15; death of, 181; and home, 27–36; in Jackson’s poetry, 71; and race, 17–18, 27–40, 42n4, 220, 223; Spider-­Man/Miles Morales compared to, 181, 183, 186, 188–189, 220; and Venom, 27–28, 125, 128–129 Spider-­Man: Homecoming (film), 17–18, 27–31, 37–41 Spider-­Man: Into the Spider-­Verse (ISV) (film), 2, 10, 19, 188, 220–238 Spider-­Woman (a.k.a. Jessica Drew, character), 16, 223 Spider-­Woman (comic), 16 Spiegelman, Art, Maus, 147 Stacy, Gwen (character), 82 Steel (a.k.a. John Henry Irons, character), 68 ste­reo­t ypes: of African Americans/ blackness, 27–31, 38, 85–88, 94, 125, 130–131, 187, 193; of Asians, 150; Doctor Fate and, 19; of ethnic and racial ­Others, 237–238; The Flash and, 87; of racial mixedness, 3, 6, 17, 19, 29, 112, 159–160, 170, 172; Spider-­Man: Homecoming and, 28. See also tragic mulatto/a trope Stevenson, Robert Louis, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 66, 126 Steven Universe (TV series), 18, 105–116 Stonequist, Everett, 160, 164–165 Storm (a.k.a. Ororo Munroe, character), 55, 68, 69, 70, 72–73 ­ oman, a.k.a. Storm, Sue (a.k.a. Invisible W Invisible Girl, character), 57 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 77 Stuller, Jennifer K., 138, 142 Sugar, Rebecca, 114 Supergirl (TV series), 163 superheroes: African American, 68–69, 184, 187; antisuperhero approach to, 73–74; Arab-­A merican, 243, 245–246, 257; and double consciousness, 186; masculinity associated with, 107–110,

Index • 277

139; mixed natures of, 14–17, 65–67, 69, 78, 122–123, 216; mixed-­race, 13–14, 228–229, 231–234, 249, 258; white purity/supremacy associated with, 10–13, 66–67, 78, 123, 151, 155 Superman (a.k.a. Kal-­El, a.k.a. Clark Kent, character): debut of, 72, 185; as God, 165, 166, 171; KKK as target of, 14; as a marginal man, 159–173; mixed nature of, 15, 19, 158–173; Obama likened to, 2; origin story of, 2, 11, 158, 172, 250; and passing, 161; psychological turmoil experienced by, 159, 161, 163, 168–172; white purity/supremacy associated with, 10–12, 19, 159–160, 165 Superman: The Wedding ­Album (comic), 71 Superman / Won­der ­Woman (comic), 170 Suvin, Darko, 76 Swinton, Tilda, 58 Takeda, Sana, 149; Monstress (with Marjorie Liu), 18, 138–155 Talented Tenth, 19, 183–185, 190–191, 195 Tarzan (a.k.a. John Clayton II, a.k.a. Viscount Greystoke, character), 12 Taylor, Leanne, 163 Taylor, Tom, 163 terrorism, 255 Tesler, Michael, 3 THEME Report (Motion Picture Association of Amer­i­ca), 223–224 ­Thing with Two Heads, The (film), 124 Thomas, Deborah, 226 Thompson, Tessa, 46–60 Thor: Dark World (film), 59 Thor: Ragnarok (film), 18, 46–60, 133–134 Thor (a.k.a. Jane Foster, character), 55 Thor (character), 46–52, 55–56, 58–60 Thor (film), 47, 56–57, 59 Till, Emmett, 70, 72, 74 Tillet, Salamishah, 31 Tino Rangatiratanga, 54 Toomer, Jean, 121 tragic mulatto/a trope: in Ant-­Man and the Wasp, 3, 5, 15–16, 20n2; conflicts and crises characteristic of, 16, 40, 68, 126, 170–171; cyborgs compared to, 15; Hulk and Venom compared to, 125, 128;

marginal man concept and, 161; mixed Black ­women portrayed via, 48; mixed-­race c­ hildren compared to, 71; in nineteenth-­century lit­er­a­ture, 4; Obama on, 3; Peter Parker and, 41; warring blood theory and, 120–121; white sympathy for, 48, 120, 126 Truffaut-­Wong, Olivia, 37 Trump, Donald, 3, 9, 82, 98, 192, 194, 256 übermensch, 11 Ultimate Comics: Spider-­Man (comic) 179, 188, 191 Ultimate Spider-­Man (character). See Spider-­Man (a.k.a. Miles Morales, character), U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, 123 Valkyrie (a.k.a. Brunnhilde, character), 18, 46–60 Van Sciver, Ethan, 99 Vasconcelos, José, 107–108, 110–112, 114–116 Velasquez-­Manoff, Moises, 9 Velez, Lauren, 225 Venom (a.k.a. Eddie Brock, character), 18, 27–28, 122, 124–126, 128–132, 142 Venom (comic), 122, 125–126, 129–130 Venom (film), 129–132, 135–136 Vertigo, 67 Vest, Jennifer Lisa, 8 Vulture (a.k.a. Adrian Toomes, character), 28, 37–38 Waid, Mark, 169 Waititi, Taika, 50–52, 54, 56, 58 Wall, Evans, The No-­Nation Girl, 121 Ware, Lawrence, 236 War Machine (a.k.a. James Rhodes, character), 225 War on Drugs, 130 Warren, Alex, 245, 246 warring blood theory, 18, 120–122, 124–126, 128, 132, 134 Watchmen (comic), 13 Watson-­Parker, Mary Jane (a.k.a. Mary Jane Watson, character), 76, 220–221

278  •  Index

Way, Daniel, and Marjorie Liu, Dark Wolverine, 141–142 Wayne, Damian (a.k.a. Robin V, character), 124 Wells, H. G., 77; The Island of Dr. Moreau, 66 Wertham, Fredric, Seduction of the Innocent, 99n1, 123 West, Iris (character), 81–84, 86–90, 92–94, 96–97 West, Wally/Wallace (a.k.a. Kid Flash, character). See Kid Flash whiteness: Arabs/Arab-­A mericans and, 243–244, 246–249, 253–255, 257; of audience for superhero genre, 37, 47, 52, 56–59, 67, 180, 188, 189; colonialism and, 201–202; DC Universe and, 81–84; mixed-­race individuals in relation to, 208–209, 211, 214–215; Native ­peoples and, 201–202, 205–211, 214; postracial repression of, 82–83, 86, 89, 99; salvific capacities imputed to, 209; of superheroes, as audience assumption/expectation, 37, 47, 56–57, 83, 151, 155, 186–187, 232; Thor franchise and, 56–57; Thor: Ragnarok and, 49–50, 54, 56–59; warring blood theory and, 120 white supremacy: critiques of, 18; The Flash and, 82, 98–99; historical promotion of, 90; incest and miscegenation in, 91; Monstress and, 151; seen as villainous, 14; Steven Universe and, 108–109, 112–115; in supercession of other cultures, 21n10; superheroes linked to discourse of, 10–13,

66–67, 78, 123; Superman associated with, 10–12, 19, 159–160, 165; Thor franchise and, 56–57; Trump administration and, 98. See also nativism Williams, Riri (a.k.a. Ironheart, character). See Ironheart Williams, Teresa Kay, 151, 153, 213–214 Williamson, Joel, New ­People, 154 Wilson, Sam (a.k.a. Falcon, character). See Falcon Winant, Harold, 214, 244, 248–249 Wired (magazine), 1 Wolverine (a.k.a. Logan, character), 70, 139, 141, 142 ­women: of color, 47–49; conventional repre­sen­ta­tions of, 48, 56; Muslim, in Western repre­sen­ta­tions, 254; sexualization of, 47, 56, 59, 68, 69, 109; as superheroes, 138–139 Won­der ­Woman (a.k.a. Princess Diana, a.k.a. Diana Prince, character), 14–15, 69, 70–71, 123, 169 Won­der ­Woman (film), 1, 54 Word Girl (a.k.a. Becky Botsford, character), 1–2 Worlds, Mario, 187 Xero (a.k.a. Coltrane Walker, character), 69 X-­Men (characters), 13, 15, 70, 72, 139, 212 X-­Men (comic), 70 X-23 (a.k.a. Laura Kinney, character), 139, 140 Zack, Naomi, 110 Zendaya, 28, 29, 38