On March 10 we hosted OBI faculty scholar Darieck Scott and colleagues from across the country for an online conversation about his new book, Keeping It Unreal: Comics and Black Queer Fantasy. The panelists explored the Black radical imagination, superhero comics, Black power and triumph, respite from white supremacy and much more.
Transcript
Ramzi Fawaz:
Hello everybody, and thank you for joining us today. I am thrilled to be meeting up with some of my favorite luminary minds to talk to you about this extraordinary book by Darieck Scott. I want to just start by thanking Robin Pearce and Marc Abizeid of the Othering & Belonging Institute for helping us organize this event. Everybody who's organized a Zoom event knows it's far more complicated than you could ever imagine, so we're grateful for this space and this technology. Just to give people a little picture of what's going to happen today. I'm going to give an introduction to everybody that's on the panel and I'm going to celebrate and lift up Darieck Scott and his contributions. Darieck is going to do a short reading from the book. We'll have a panel discussion between all of us, and then we'll open it out into Q&A.
Ramzi Fawaz:
I want to encourage the audience since we can't see you to feel free to drop comments and questions throughout the discussion, and there will be a moment when we'll start to try to collect some of those questions and answer them for you as best as we can. So thank you again for joining us. To give you a little introduction of myself, and then I'll speak about each of our amazing panelists. I'm a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I'm the author of two books, The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics, and more recently, Queer Forms, which is forthcoming from NYU Press this fall. And I had the great pleasure of working with Darieck on co-editing a special issue of American Literature titled Queer About Comics, which we were very fortunate to have win the Best Special Issue of the Year award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals in 2019.
Ramzi Fawaz:
Rebecca Wanzo is Professor and Chair of the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She's the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling. And more recently, The Content Of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, which examines how black cartoonists have used racialized caricatures to criticize constructions of ideal citizenship, as well as the alienation of African Americans from such imaginaries, a beautiful award-winning book. She has published in numerous academic venues such as American Literature, Camera Obscura and Signs, and also writes essays for media outlets like CNN, the LA Review of Books, and Huffington Post.
Ramzi Fawaz:
Jonathan Gray is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College CUNY and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination, and is currently working on the book project, Illustrating the Race: Representing Blackness in American Comics, which traces depictions of African Americans in comics from 1966 to the present, by investigating how the twin notions of illustration, the creative act of depiction on the one hand and the political act of bringing forth for public consideration on the other, function in these texts. Professor Gray co-edited the essay collection, Disability in Graphic Novels from Palgrave MacMillan and formerly served as the founding editor of the Journal of Comics and Culture.
Ramzi Fawaz:
Michael Mark Cohen is Associate Teaching Professor in the American Studies and African American Studies programs at UC Berkeley. He is the author of The Conspiracy of Capital: Law, Violence, and American Popular Radicalism in the Age of Monopoly, which is a cultural history of popular anti-capitalist movements, conspiracy laws, and political violence in the United States during the age of monopoly. He is also the creator of the website Cartooning Capitalism, which hosts the work of Arthur Henry Young, the most widely recognized and beloved cartoonist of the golden age of American Radicalism. So I think it's fair to say that we have an incredible brain trust here of comics, scholars and cultural studies scholars.
Ramzi Fawaz:
And now to our main event. Darieck Scott is Professor in the Department of African American Studies at UC Berkeley and the author of the newly published, Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics, which we're really excited to celebrate with you today, and in a moment I'm going to say a few words about this brilliant book. Professor Scott is also the author of Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination, which examines representations and theorizations of the relation between blackness, abjection and queer masculinity. A book that is so counterintuitive, innovative and shocking in its arguments, it totally transforms my graduate students.
Ramzi Fawaz:
Alongside his highly original scholarship, he is also the author of the novels Hex and Traitor to the Race, and the editor of Best Black Gay Erotica. His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Freedom In This Village, Black Like Us, Giant Steps, among others, as well as in the Erotica collection, Flesh and the Word, and Inside Him. He has published essays in Callaloo, GLQ, and the collection Gay Travels among many other venues. So, before we get started, I want to say a couple of words about Keeping It Unreal. Keeping It Unreal is many things. It is a loving journey through black radical imagination, an invitation into the creative life world of the author and his complex and rich attachments to the superhero genre, and the study of the formal affordances of the comics media for articulating black presence and agency.
Ramzi Fawaz:
But perhaps most of all, it is an impassioned plea for the value of fantasizing, not as an escape from our shared world, but as a deep commitment to its transformation into something better, a place where human difference is no longer a source of suffering, but a wellspring of creative possibility. In the past decades scholarship on black speculation and utopia has exploded, most notably with the expansive study of Afrofuturism. Keeping It Unreal honors this tradition, but it breaks new ground by conceding fantasy not merely as a genre, an object of study, but a state of being or cognitive practice grounded in the human capacity for imagination. So it takes the study of black fantasy into the realm of existential experience, which is Darieck's great skill for thinking about black fantasy as a mode of living.
Ramzi Fawaz:
In keeping with his magisterial and innovative oeuvre, these are counterintuitive claims that he makes in the book that can only come from a generous mind, one open to the possibilities others shut out, one demanding we rethink what it means to be free, one that requires an unflinching look at forms of abjection as lived experiences that can vitalize complex responses and unexpected avenues of survival. So ultimately Keeping It Unreal gives us meaningful hope for a different future, neither by merely recuperating a genealogy of black speculative fictions, nor adding to the interminable and painful list of black historical trauma, but by reminding us that we still have the power of invention in our grasp in the present. So, thank you all for joining us. I'm really excited to get this conversation going, but first, Darieck is going to read for us from the book.
Darieck Scott:
Thank you, Ramzi. I loved hearing your reading of my book and I appreciate that gloss on it. Also, I'm going to give warm thanks to Rebecca, Jonathan and Michael for participating in this panel with me and celebrating my book today. Talking with you guys and reading your work over the years about comic books has enriched my understanding and contributed to my getting this book done, so thank you. Thanks also to Robin Pearce and the Othering & Belonging Institute for putting this event together, and thank you all for attending. So I'm going to read a short excerpt from the introduction to the book, and this is just a little piece of what I'm discussing in the beginning.
Darieck Scott:
Ursula K. Le Guin's provocative story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, is probably most often read as a discomfiting riddle about the morality of utilitarianism. Omelas is a fantasy city or country where everyone lives happily. Unfortunately, this universal happiness depends upon the lifelong misery of one child. The causal relationship between the child's unhappiness and everyone else's commonplace ecstasy is never explained in the story, but arguably it's all the more convincingly realistic for its lack of explanation. Surely we expect happiness to be bought by someone's misery. No explanation needed, an assumption that Guin cleverly begins to expose.
Darieck Scott:
But what gets me excited about the story is the challenge it throws down to our imagination. Describing Omelas, Le Guin's narrator says, "As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on about the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, no dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit encouraged by pedants and sophisticates of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual. Only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist, a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick them, join them. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold. We can no longer describe a happy man nor make any celebration of joy."
Darieck Scott:
Le Guin's narrator's claim about the treason of art is too harsh if I take it up and make it into a critique of African Americanists' scholarship and intellectual endeavor. But it's not wholly an act. Certainly regarding what we canonize and teach under the rubric African American literature the description has a ring of truth, for literature defined by the near unanimity of its voices agitating, analyzing, narrating and narrativizing political projects of emancipation and anti-racism, too great an attention to delight and joy and happiness seems a political betrayal. For us, only the description of the grave injustices of anti-blackness, of torture, murder, intimidation, enslavement rape, dispossession, is political, is exigent, and is real.
Darieck Scott:
Yes, of course, we can recognize and take seriously representational and analytical strategies of humor and satire, descriptions of resistant cultural practices, locations of temporary marronage, but who is described without irony or shame, a black happy person? In the light of harsh realities, who has the time? Who has the right? I'm so accustomed to investigating, if not exactly praising, despair, pain and evil, that if a description of black happiness appeared somewhere, I probably missed it or didn't pay attention to it. And if it appeared somewhere, it was a challenge to the very conception of black literature. What it is, how it must be structured to be recognized as black literature, its justification and use, its distinction from mere luxury. And so it didn't count.
Darieck Scott:
The happiness Le Guin's treasonous artist cannot summon the intellect or interest to engage is, for the black writer, a foolishness we often can't afford to indulge. Black fantasy, as I'm thinking about it then, might be aimed at snatching luxury where, as best as we can see at any rate, there is none. It might be indulgent, foolish, frivolous, merely escapist, naively utopian, in some way wrong, inattentive to the real, defiant of the realist. Fantasy is generally understood on balance to be above all a misperception straying from accurate perception and also therefore a misstep on the pathway to the correction of a problem, which obviously has to be accurately perceived in order to be solved.
Darieck Scott:
I'm interested in this book in a reconstruction of the account of fantasy in its relationship to blackness. I want to think of how fantasy engages and yet sidesteps the real problem that we think it poorly addresses. Viewed properly, my investigation is not a fantasy as critique of the real, though fantasy does offer such critiques. My investigation, my fantasy about fantasy, is a fantasy as a mode of living and fantasy as a transformation of living and being. The argument here is for fantasy as world-making. Now, it would be more than reasonable to consider this proposition by looking at it from a sociological slant, by surveying the vast, intricate and complex virtual worlds of fan communities organized around particular works of fantasy in literature, film, comic books, et cetera, and the networks of participants in cost play and video games and the universes of ancillary text production in the myriad kinds of fan fiction and slash fiction.
Darieck Scott:
But my interest is in thinking of my chain of overlapping co-constitutive objects, which are fantasy, black fantasy, queer fantasy, black queer fantasy. I want to think about these chiefly as philosophical enterprises. In this I depend upon a definition of philosophy that I like, that of novelist Charles Johnson, whose novels Faith and the Good Thing and Oxherding Tale, are at least in part essays of black philosophical fiction, black fiction that concerns itself with what Johnson identifies as the central questions of philosophical traditions. These questions are, what does freedom or happiness really mean? What does it look like to be free/happy? How does one become free/happy? For Johnson, philosophy is a guide to living. Likewise, I look to black fantasy as a guide of sorts, one best understood for me by recurrence to spatial metaphors.
Darieck Scott:
Black queer fantasy, for me, charts the road to and/or sites in a habitable imaginary. I hate the world as it is and I'm always looking and wishing for other worlds to go to. You might wonder if I'm advocating for what I'm going to call "fantasy acts" instead of what we tend to think of as action. Not at all. Fantasy acts do not require cessation from other kinds of acts, though it is worth pausing to consider the differences between the results of fantasy acts and the results of other kinds of action. If an action does not result with sufficient proximity to count as an effect following a cause, in one, someone injuring or killing someone else or depriving them of liberty, or two, someone stealing from someone else's resources for living or prospering, or three, rescuing someone or yourself from a particular instance of being killed or maimed or deprived of liberty or stolen from, then how do we measure the consequences of an action?
Darieck Scott:
How do we become assured of its existence as distinct from the existence of other mental constructs like fantasies? If a million march on Washington is the result or the activity measurable as distinct from fantasy once it becomes, as it must, a memory, write-ups in a dozen newspapers, plans for later meanings and dreams of coalition, digital photographs on so many smartphone hard drives. You might also wonder if this elaborate attempt to take fantasy seriously as an intellectual and political tool is like clinging to a plank of driftwood in the middle of a storm at sea. Desperate.
Darieck Scott:
Yes, it is desperate, but desperation is not disqualifying. It's the other name of necessity, and the alias of invention, or perhaps invention's twin, with necessity and desperation co-parenting, is radical imagination. The ultimate project of Keeping It Unreal, which must reach beyond the book's end for its achievement can't be encompassed in this book or any single book alone, is to cite whether and how black fantasy can begin to undertake a description of ludicrous, unreal things like black happiness. How black fantasy might retwist the twisted significations of blackness such that black and happy is at least not a clearly oxymoronic conjunction. Thank you.
Ramzi Fawaz:
Thank you. And it's exciting to see people already responding so beautifully in the comments about how inspiring it is to think about black happiness and joy. So, I have a handful of questions for the panel, but I'm not ultimately hitched to any of these things, so I'm happy for the conversation to move in any direction. And I want to start with something really broad. I think one of the most immediate features to me about Keeping It Unreal is that it is a surprising text. Every time I've taught it, every time I've reread in the last year, I'm continually surprised by the moves and the turns of thought and argumentation.
Ramzi Fawaz:
I think everybody in this room, we've all studied some of the most ideological, conservative and painful parts of the use of comics as a medium, and we've also studied some of its most imaginative and surprising parts. And I wanted to throw it to the panelists. What were elements of the argument that surprised you the most, or that forced you to rethink things that you had held onto in your own thought and writing?
Jonathan Gray:
I mean, I have to say that one of the things that struck me was the extent to which our social realities are consensual, and I think that the idea of consent matched nicely, Darieck, onto your political use of fantasy, right? I mean, because in this country, what we have now is, half the country consents, for example, that queer people should be full citizens like everyone else, and black people and women should all have the same rights as everyone else, but the other half of the country does not consent to this, right?
Jonathan Gray:
And that it's the lack of consent that begins to structure how we must imagine our way out of... It structures our fantasies, our fantasies of justice and of abundance and of more, simply because we cannot come to a lasting consensus about who we are. And so your argument, this is not directly in the book, but this is where your book led me to think more critically about notions of consent and the role that fiction has in sort of authoring new ways of being together and being with.
Rebecca Wanzo:
So I'll say, I mean, one thing that I continue to be interested in is what happens when you place black people at the center of any kind of philosophical, conceptual framework, and here it's black people but also not, black queer subjects but not exclusively so. To think about how that then reorients what we understand about genre and medium. And I found your intro just so breathtakingly beautiful and one of my favorite moves is how you recast our canonical, superhero narratives, or, not all superhero narratives, but some that we cast as superheroes like Harry Potter and things.
Rebecca Wanzo:
And this other kind of version that has a sort of cultural specificity, and I was struck with, how do we deal with this question of fantasy in relationship to the radical or not? I was really struck by what you said, Ramzi, about this in terms of thinking about the black radical imagination. And one of the things I was wondering about is, does fantasy always have to be radical to do something wholly otherwise, right? Can we imagine something like, does it have to be radical politics? Can it be actually something wholly otherwise, even if it is not something that you understand as radical.
Rebecca Wanzo:
What is it that we are trying to get with this idea of the radical? And sometimes the pleasure of fantasy is not something that's progressive or conventional or inhabiting spaces that are not necessarily made for one, but just something other that maybe this idea of the radical political can't capture. And I do think that your book gets at this. There is some kind of affective space in the fantastic and a black fantastic that's trying to inhabit something wholly other that is not constrained by the ideological configurations or binaries around progressive or not.
Darieck Scott:
Yeah, that [crosstalk 00:21:54] Rebecca's... I'm sorry, Mark.
Michael Cohen:
No, no, please, Darieck.
Darieck Scott:
So, that actually was such an important part of the book for me, was to think about fantasy as not having to be vouchsafed by its connection to some sort of utopian imagination, as much as I love that about fantasy, and that is one of the key ways in which it can act in the world. But I was interested in that kind of engagement you have with say a superhero comic that is by no means radical in its conception or depiction, or really pretty much anything that's happening in it, by the way that you can be engaged with it that, as you say, has a kind of affective space that does something. And it does something that I think we can grant, or we can recognize, having political valence of some kind, and it does something in terms of a transformation, just even in the moment, quite ephemeral though it may be, of yourself through imagination, which then also can have some, again, ephemeral, perhaps not very traceable effects in the way that you live, or how you think about things and what you do. Or on what kinds of things, as Jonathan was saying, you consent to or don't consent to.
Darieck Scott:
Michael, I interrupted you.
Michael Cohen:
No, no. This is your show. But I just would want to build on the two previous statements. I mean, one, I do want to stick to the, or think about the radical possibilities of fantasy. I think it is necessary. I think left wing comics as they are, are entirely to dour and explicitly educational in their purpose, and resist the temptation to fantasize about what possible futures might be. And in this left wing comics really do ... And in this I'm thinking socialist, communist, anarchist comics, do really adhere to Marx's prohibition against what he describes as writing recipes for the cook-shops of the future. But in reading your book, that's exactly what I would like to find. I would love to see people openly fantasizing about what the fully luxury automated communism might in fact look like.
Michael Cohen:
At the same time, I take Rebecca's point very seriously about what possibilities are opened by putting Black subjects at the center of any critical analysis. And I think that that transforms our understanding in deeply meaningful ways that your book is hugely suggestive of. And to just leap from what is present in the book to off the page, I think of, especially the passage you just read, Darieck, about the possibility and necessity and impossibility of Black happiness.
Michael Cohen:
And to think about what has happened recently in Oakland, where the first Karen attack or what we knew of it as BBQ Becky, of a White woman who called the cops on a bunch of African-American men and women trying to have a barbecue at Lake Merritt, which not only created a online sensation, but has since then moved on to what we now know of as a East Bay institution of the Black Joy Parade. In which Black folks show up without any kind of larger political project, but to simply express pleasure and joy in public.
Michael Cohen:
And there's really not much of a way in which such an event could be seen as anything other than radical, is inherently political in these kinds of ways. I think it need not be contained by a political expression, but it yet is at the same time, a kind of utopian fantasy of what if Black bodies could occupy space in public, in freedom. And in that I see expressions, both in the comics that you write about and in the world around us, the ways in which we think of history as a necessity and the need then to build a space or a realm of freedom within that realm of necessity. And in that I think your book really offers us a way of exhorting all of us to fantasize, to indulge that, not just desire, but indeed radical political necessity.
Ramzi Fawaz:
I want to actually draw some of those threads together, because part of what I love about this book is that I actually think that you reinvent the meaning of radicalism, and you separate it from the question of a specific politics, left, right, progressive, et cetera. And radicalism becomes the practice of invention. Like to be radical is to break with what is happening.
Ramzi Fawaz:
So you say, on 24, "But the fundamental tool of fantasy is thought, a different thought, perhaps thought freed from what it has been constrained to know as real, may find some leverage for conducting the magic trick for a different set of results if it is accompanied by the transformative powers of repetition. In fantasy we may detect reality's future shapes, as well as its present habitability." And then you have this line that my students were just so taken with the other day. "In this sense then fantasy is real and exists in the same manner as consciousness and love are and do. Indeed both consciousness and love might easily be said to made up as it were a fantasy."
Ramzi Fawaz:
And I think part of what I love about the way you always think, I think of you as a Black existentialist in some ways, is that you're saying at some level, separate from any ideological matrix, the literal brain matters capacity to invent, to recombine all of these things that already exist in the world into new formations, creates the possibility for some kind of resistance that we do not know in advance what it will turn out. One version of it might be that left communism and one version might be something else. And I think that you commit yourself to that kind of uncertainty to the idea that what is really radical is not always knowing in advance what the fantasy will bring, even if you have motives behind it.
Ramzi Fawaz:
And I find that to be an amazing rejoinder to certain contemporary social justice oriented politics, that want a more progressive, more open-ended, more anti-racist world, but are also obsessed with knowing in advance what anti-racism looks like or what anti-sexism looks like. And is very keen on telling everybody what the rules are. And my thing is, but part of radical fantasizing is about the breaking of the rules and the invention of new ones.
Ramzi Fawaz:
And that's something that I always find really exciting. I mean, what Rebecca was referring to, of course in the book, is how you have this set of lists of stories from fantasies that are inventions. And then you're like, but also religion is an invention. And also the state is an invention, and they're just different kinds of invention. And what if we just decided that we would take charge and invent something else? And I find that so compelling.
Rebecca Wanzo:
So I want to push back just a little bit.
Ramzi Fawaz:
Yeah.
Rebecca Wanzo:
Just to say, and this reminds me, Ramsey has this really beautiful, beautiful moment in the New Mutants where he talks about this moment, this famous moment in Fantastic Four where they lead to T'Challa, to this new future. And it's a really beautiful utopian reading, but I resist it in all kinds of conceptual ways, despite ...
Rebecca Wanzo:
Because I do think, one of the things I guess I did take from this book and I guess I want to just have a conversation about, is that the shift ... And Jonathan and I were having an exchange briefly in thinking about this book, it was in conversation with Michael Gillespie's Film Blackness. There is this tendency, understandably because it is a lot of what Black art does, an art that is not Black but is referring to Black people, which is also an interesting question, to think about this. But where it must be seen in relationship to the radical, it must be seen in relation to the revolutionary. It must be seen in relationship to a kind of politics that can bring us somewhere else. And so I'm always interested in what is foreclosed sometimes by that reading in terms of what kinds of effective spaces people inhabit.
Rebecca Wanzo:
In terms of the passage you read, what if the move towards this is the real, is about an articulation of a quotidian, that to call radical capitulates to the idea that the kinds of spaces people effectively conceptually inhabit has to be so excessively other that it's a radical political imagination. You know what I'm saying? And I was thinking about, know if you've seen the Netflix film, See You Yesterday. It was this Black time travel film with this young Black girl, that came out a few years ago. And I remember talking about with Kenitra Gello, who has really thoughtful things to say about the idea of Black horror and Black fantasy. And a number of other people who felt like what was interesting about it is you get this ... Initially you think it's this conventional Black girl genius gets her time travel story, like Back to the Future.
Rebecca Wanzo:
And then they have all these references, like Michael J. Fox is the teacher at the beginning, and she's reading Kindred and all these things. But the nature of the real, the nature of Black death to Black teenage boys and all these things, there's a disruption to the possibility of generic pleasures of the film. So what forecloses the way in which it's working with the real, forecloses pleasure I think in certain ways that we expected. I guess I'm always interested in what happens when we're trying to have a vocabulary that doesn't always go towards this idea of radical politics. And I feel like this book helps me think about that.
Ramzi Fawaz:
Well, this actually speaks to the question I wanted to ask next. The question I had written down is, what do you make of the ways in which Darieck sidesteps or pushes back, just in the way that, Rebecca, that you're pushing back against the tendency to always have to read the positive good of fantasy as its radicalism, as opposed to any number of other effects that it can have. I think that Darieck also pushes back against the tendency to see fantasy as a site of identification. That the reason we love fantasy is because I get to see myself as Black Panther, I get to see myself as Storm.
Ramzi Fawaz:
And Darieck says, actually the power of these fantasies is their disruption often of identification, the shattering outward of all these possibilities. And I think it speaks to what you were saying, Rebecca, that in some ways, doing something other than identification, also opens up all these other pleasures that are quotidian for different viewers, that may have nothing to do with seeing themselves in these texts.
Ramzi Fawaz:
And so I would be interested to hear people think through a little bit what you thought of Darieck's approach to identification. Or what you think of in terms of just fantasy broadly on that concept.
Jonathan Gray:
I mean, I guess I have a similar moment to Darieck's moment where my deep and abiding affection for the X-Men is precisely because of the presence, the sustained presence importantly, of Storm. And then it's just, so here is this Black person, Black woman, that I don't necessarily identify with, but her presence suggests that I am safe or welcome in this space.
Jonathan Gray:
And actually you that's one of the places that identification is tricky because, and you make a note of it, Darieck, and you move on rather quickly, from the idea that Marvel in DC, these superhero publishers, were trying to bring in this new Black middle-class and trying to attract this broader audience. And so including Nubia, including Storm, including the Falcon, et cetera, et cetera, is a way to signal to a certain audience, "And I am one of them and so are you," that you have a place in this narrative.
Jonathan Gray:
But Ramsey, to your point, I'm always struck by Nicholas Coppola and the choice he makes when he wants to take on a stage name so that nepotism is not quite so obvious. He identifies very strongly with Luke Cage, and here's this wealthy child of a dynastic family, who is identifying with Luke Cage, the ex-con. And so he becomes Nick Cage. And so there are always these sorts of moments where that kind of identification is surprising or contrapuntal.
Darieck Scott:
I think there's some ... Respond to a few things that we've been talking about just now. I think I wanted in this book to try to give an account of forms of response and engagement with reality that actually are quotidian, bu that we put under the label of fantasy. Now there's a way where, of course, especially when you talk about fantasy in a academic context, we can often shade over into talking about the radical aspects of it or reading it radically.
Darieck Scott:
But when I was trying to think about even how I engage with the character Nubia, especially engage with the character Nubia from the first time I saw with the ... Oh, actually, maybe, Marc, if you could show that picture of Wonder Woman and ... Yes, exactly that one. Where she's wearing the leopard skin outfit that she never wears any place else, luckily, because it's so ridiculously offensive, and yet also fabulous in its own weird way.
Darieck Scott:
The response to that I had to that was, one, not really identification, although partly some kind of identification, some sort of sense of aspiration of being like her. But more probably thinking about her as being some protector of mine, when I was seven or eight-years-old and I saw that. But also that there's nothing particular radical about the figure, even placing a Black woman in the center of the frame as Wonder Woman's Black trans sister, who has all the powers of Wonder Woman, who essentially is the Black Wonder Woman.
Darieck Scott:
It's not especially ... I don't really even know what kind of radical politics you really get out of that, but what I wanted to get to was it sparks something in my imagination, which makes me attentive to something that isn't really present in the world as it is. And makes me do something within myself, that is that I wanted to give an account of. That probably has very quotidian effects, that is it effects in so far as they have, there are effects that are in the world. Or something that would just be happening that nobody would be able to know that that somehow results from my absolute undying and continual love of Nubia.
Darieck Scott:
But I was really interested in trying to look at that. And for me, one of the best lines is not my line, but a line from The Wiz where Evillene says, "Don't nobody bring me no bad news." And I like that because that's about ... We have our horribly anti-black world, we have all the things happening we have happening, and they demand our attention. But if I'm inhabiting Evillene there, what I'm thinking is, "But I'm going to pay attention to something else that I'm choosing here." And that is quotidian, but I think extremely important to claim that attention to something quite invented perhaps, or something, whatever it is, that is not necessarily fully engulfed by the narratives of and the continual wily reinventions of anti-blackness.
Ramzi Fawaz:
Actually, with that in mind, I'm happy to tell more about identification, if people wanted to say something. But maybe we can roll it into ... The other question I wanted to ask, I think it's usually, it's easy to start with comics with, well, why comics? But I want to flip it and say, what does this book do for Black studies? I think that this book has a really, really interesting relationship that is oblique to Black studies, that is both deeply within that tradition and also lovingly moving to the side of some of its most powerful contemporary currents.
Ramzi Fawaz:
And I've often said to you in conversation, your work reminds me so much of the work of Steven Best, your own colleague, and of Jennifer Nash, people who are both working within and against certain movements within the field. And I'd really be interested, because almost everybody in this room, I'm kind of the exception actually, works either in Black studies or very much related to the history of race and racialization. I'd be interested to see how people thought of this book's place in that tradition and its engagement with that thought. Which is so prominent and important right now in our conversations.
Michael Cohen:
I think Rebecca named it to begin with, I mean, this question of it deploys a Black studies methodology or Black study methodology, of simply putting Black subjects, Black readers, Black identifications at the center of the narrative. And particularly in a comic, a genre, an industry that has, as Darieck also chronicles throughout the book, that has historically marginalized both Black characters and Black creators. And so it recenters them in a necessary way. And I think that's a fundamental element of any kind of Black studies methodology.
Michael Cohen:
At the same time, reasserting the role of fantasy in that regard I think is ... I prefer to see it as a necessary dramatic innovation that is being presented to us, rather than something that is oblique or marginal within Black studies. I think it is drawing something, taking upon itself to innovate in a way that I think Darieck is uniquely capable of doing. Of both drawing the queer Black comic book depictions and representations to the center of the story, but also to build off of this larger question of fantasy.
Michael Cohen:
I mean, I take the phrase, the passage that really moved me about how, where Darieck writes about, "In finding ways to use fantasy we also take notice of how fantasies use us to build the prisons of our reality." And to build off of I think in another really moving paragraph for me from the very beginning, he writes, "What if there were no racism or anti-blackness or sexism or misogyny or homophobia or classism or ableism or transphobia, or any of the horribly effective ways the modern world has found to create disposable people."
Michael Cohen:
And I think that that phrase, incredibly moving as it is, is the power of what Black study is capable of doing. Is saying that we can take this previously marginalized understanding, move it into the center of our consciousness, our awareness, our politics, our scholarship, and allow Black study to actually do what it is meant to do, which is to figure out how to free everyone. To think about what freedom looks like for all of us.
Rebecca Wanzo:
Yeah. And in some ways it goes back to the identification question I think at the heart of it. And I was thinking about this in terms of comics, that one thing I think with McCloud is, as much as I admire understanding comics, his idea of what prompts identification as this of neutral figure is just not right. It doesn't help us think about how a whole bunch of rest of us engage with comics.
Rebecca Wanzo:
But I think that foundational to Black studies is often the question of what happens when we see ourselves, which is ... And all the ways in which we have to think about that question. We can go back from early African American photography, to data portraits, to Du Bois and all these other contexts, and that there are a whole bunch of scripts about what seeing ourselves mean. Both in academic discourse and now popular discourse, about people saying, "I feel seen."
Rebecca Wanzo:
And then I think that there's a pressing urgency in both recognizing the very genealogies of that in ways that sometimes are just not historicized the way that they could, but also the simplified versions of what it means to, for black people, to be present. And that our body present don't always mean what people think it means, that it can mean a whole bunch of different things. And there's actually more possibility than what sometimes feels like an increasingly essentialist framing about Black aesthetic possibility in the present, even with all this really extraordinary creative production. And as well as people imagining various kinds of political possibilities or ways of being and relating to each other in the world.
Rebecca Wanzo:
So I think that the book helps us, again, push, and as a mode philosophy and ontology, thinking about fantasy as helping us understand the question of Black ontology and what it means to be and be present. Both in representation in the world, and habitus is essential.
Jonathan Gray:
Yeah. And just to come back to something that maybe I wasn't as clear on as I'll try to be now, your evocation of Fanon is what led me to then think about Moten. And so when I was referencing before consent, I was thinking especially about the trilogy consent, not to be a single being. Because you do such a good job of talking about the ways that Blackness is pushed to the margin, but Moten does such a good job of demonstrating how Black people are always flipping that script and are always wind up repositioned at the center or by the very act of trying to move us to the margins.
Jonathan Gray:
And so I thought that you gave a different point of view ordifferent valence on that, through your presentation throughout a fantasy as this kind of mode of resistance, but this quotidian mode of resistance. And so, yeah, and so this willingness to consent to be many things at the same time. To be Black and queer and a geek and a nerd and radical and all of these things. And how your apprehension, you Darieck, your apprehension of Nubia, shifts and shifts and shifts and shifts as you access all of the yous that you are. And so I think that, so there is this sort of an interesting thing that you open up through your approach.
Darieck Scott:
Thank you. I mean, I think that describes really nicely exactly what my attachment to Nubia has been, that kind of morphing thing as I look at it differently ... As I move through my life, it just is a different way that it lands or becomes or facilitates something, some sort of transformation for me.
Darieck Scott:
I wanted to go back to what Rebecca was saying about the desire to or the push for representation that allows you to say, "I feel seen," which I both applaud. On the other hand, I also recognize that isn't necessarily the way that I approach art. And maybe I don't approach art of any kind. That is to say comic books, to literature, to film, all these things. Maybe I don't approach with the desire to be seen, because I became inculcated in a way of reading and of approaching where I wasn't seen.
Darieck Scott:
So Nubia wasn't seeing me. Luke Cage wasn't seeing me. Storm wasn't seeing me. I loved them, but they weren't seeing me, that wasn't me being represented in those unreal worlds of comic books. But they were, I always think of it for me as like springboards. They were some kind of presence, and in a particular and interesting way, that because it was comic books and it was unreal, allowed me to think about all kinds of ways of the world being different, of the world not being what the real world is, but also, of myself being different.
Darieck Scott:
That's why, I mean, I think I spent a lot of time in the book kind of talking about how there's been a long discourse about the way the comics are about identification. That I'm looking at it to... If I'm going to, I want to see a black Spider-Man because it's going to make me feel, as a black child, that I'll have the powers of Spider-Man and I'll be able to have a power fantasy the same way as a white boy could because he sees Peter Parker.
Darieck Scott:
And that's all fine, it's not what my experience was and it's also not necessarily, for me, what is most interesting about what superhero comics, for example, can do. And I think there's something about it that... There's a strain of the response from outside of comics to comics that always is about identification. So that when Fredric Wertham is saying, "These things are dangerous. These kids are looking at these things and they're modeling delinquency, and then they're modeling homosexuality and they're identifying with these characters."
Darieck Scott:
I think all of that, it's a strange way of actually thinking about how comics are really operating for people, are you really identifying with the characters? They're so unreal. Is it really the process of identification, or is there something more nuanced than identification itself going on? And I was trying to track that more nuanced process whereby the character and whatever they're doing in the story becomes a springboard to imagination rather than a point of fixation of possibilities.
Rebecca Wanzo:
I mean, maybe one way of thinking about I was thinking is, what you're talking is to try to rework a kind of black common sense of reception or consumption, right? There's a kind of black common sense that goes on right now, I think, about what representation means that I think we have to just continually push back against.
Ramzi Fawaz:
I want to cosign that, because I think Darieck knows all too well that's basically all of my work has now been about unraveling that idea, that that's what we're really looking for is identification. Tell me Darieck if I'm off, but I actually think what your work does is it shifts us from the question of identification to the question of effective impact, right?
Ramzi Fawaz:
You were talking about the aesthetic. What does it mean to encounter a character, a work of art and to be moved deeply, right? To be actually impacted by this thing, which is a very old question, right, in the history of literary and cultural analysis. This takes us back to the beginning, the origins and the roots of the question of beauty, and aesthetic impact and feeling states.
Ramzi Fawaz:
And I think part of what you're saying is that the way we feel, the way we are impacted is deeply, deeply shaped, of course, by racialization, by gender and sexuality, but not only, and not always and maybe not even primarily, right? And there a way in which sometimes, I love the way Jonathan was talking about your reading, you kind of do this kaleidoscopic vertiginous thing where you'll take Nubia and you'll say, "And then this image of this character kept impacting me in one way, and then another, and then another, and then another and infolding itself into my experience."
Ramzi Fawaz:
And I do find, to speak to Rebecca's point, when I teach students today and I say like, "Well, what else is happening to you when you're looking at this thing?" They actually feel quite freed when they don't have to just look for representations of themselves. Something opens out for them and they're like, "Oh, I'm a sensate body that is capable of feeling many things about the cultural objects I'm encountering."
Ramzi Fawaz:
So the reason I have this long comment is because I actually think that that is how your writing works. You write as a scholar and a cultural critic. And your writing is sensuous and it invokes in the reader, the feeling of being moved, your sentences are very moving. So that's kind of another question I would ask is, what is the aesthetic experience for people of actually reading Darieck's way of writing about fantasy? Which I think is very distinct and unique.
Michael Cohen:
Yeah, I agree with that completely, Ramzi. It's extraordinarily well written. It's a beautiful book. The sentences have this kind of circular rhythm to them that always move forward while circling back and circling back. There's something really quite distinctly beautiful about it.
Michael Cohen:
I think there's a tremendous amount of autobiography in all of this. I have to imagine that many of us who are here, those of you who are out in Zoom land or here watching this because you know Darieck as a friend or as a scholar. But for those of you who don't, in reading this book, you genuinely get to know the author. We get a heroic origin story of this seven year old Darieck Scott on a US Army base in Germany buying his first comic book, and we get these really quite intense stories about you engaging with your father about his fascination with comic books and the like.
Michael Cohen:
But I also think that we get in here, what to my mind is just both very deeply personal distinctly Darieck, but also quite transformative methodology, of writing as an act of revenge. The methodology presented in this book is an act of revenge against Trump and his rising tide of fatuous stupidity. And I found that to be both present in each and every sentence, but also transformatively illuminating.
Darieck Scott:
Yeah, I thought you would appreciate that, Michael.
Michael Cohen:
Yeah, that was... I loved it.
Rebecca Wanzo:
I mean, it's funny there's a convention with comic studies writing that we all have to have an apology about why we're writing something about comics, right? What's interesting here is that you're giving this long sort of origin story, which we almost all... Sometimes we were called to feel... I had a version of it and I just took it out. It's like, "I refuse. I refuse to do it." But maybe the rules should be now, it's like if you can't write this as beautifully as Darieck Scott, let's skip the origin story of comics and just get right to it.
Darieck Scott:
I actually wanted to ping back a little bit to, we were talking about identification also. I just wanted to say that my sort of approach to that question of identification and responses to art and Richard asking Ramzi about, "Am I looking at effective responses as opposed to identification?"
Darieck Scott:
It really goes back to when I was a graduate student and reading the work of Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien, they wrote this long essay where they, one of the things that just stuck out for me, and this is probably, I don't know, 1990 or something like that or '89 even, where they said, "We're often looking at black representation as though it was political representation, as though it's like you're electing a member to the house of representatives or of parliament. That kind of representation isn't the representation that art can do or even should do."
Darieck Scott:
And that's the way I've always kind of looked at it. I mean, that kind of named what I was already doing in some ways as a responder to art that involves black people or that is black art, and it certainly guided me in terms of my own critical methodology going forward.
Michael Cohen:
Yeah, just briefly, I think we do see in this work, an example, I think, has come up and a few comments already, of a kind of writing about the engagement with art that has to go on without guarantees, as Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy would say. That just because you are this kind of body seeing a similar kind of body in a comic book page that that should structure or guarantee the ways in which you engage that or receive that.
Michael Cohen:
And that this, what Darieck offers us, is a kind of writing that it goes on without guarantees, right? And one that is, in this case, explicitly queer. That we can queer our readings, because that is a way of both escaping certain predetermined set of guarantees that structure, in particular, the marketplace of serialized literature, right? That we often think about these kind of identities are presented in a top-down way saying, "Well, how many comic books can we sell to black people? How many comic books can we sell to this audience or that audience?" And I think that in evading all of that, you give us an example of what it is to write, to think, to feel without guarantees.
Ramzi Fawaz:
That's so beautifully said. That feels very true to me. I'm going to ask. We still have a little bit more time for us to talk, but I actually really want to take the questions of the audience. So I'm going to ask the one question I'm supposed to ask, why comics? Right? That's the other thing we always have to do is, why are comics such a privileged site for doing this kind of work? Why do any of us in this room or in this chat, right, why do we care about comics? Question far too vast to answer fully in this kind of forum. But I think for our audience members who may not be comics people, I always think it's kind of good to rehash that set of questions.
Rebecca Wanzo:
Can I just say why not and move on?
Michael Cohen:
Because we love them.
Ramzi Fawaz:
Wait, I guess the way I want to ask this is not, I'm not asking it in the sense of, why the value of comics? Right? Which I take as a given, but what it is that you find so incredibly compelling about the medium as a place for doing the kind of work that you do.
Darieck Scott:
Well, my answer to that is, I think what I probably try to spend the entire book doing or tracing, which is that it's compelling for me because it requires me just to read the comic, requires me to engage in an active process of imagination. Which is then not only useful for me in the real world, but also pleasurable, and important and vital for me as part of my own inner life, is to have that kind of imagination.
Darieck Scott:
And for those who are not in the comic studies world, it's just a kind of fundamental thing. You're looking at a page, whether it's on the digital or paper, and there are panels and there are static drawings, and then you've got to go to the next panel. So you got to imagine movement between them. You've got to imagine connection between them. It's just a very basic aspect of comics, whether they're superhero or anything else. And that that active imagination that's partly textual, partly visual, partly all these other things that it's sort of bringing together, that's what's compelling about. It's the form and the content somehow that both seem to latch onto my imagination and brought about my writing of this book.
Jonathan Gray:
I'm going to borrow from Darieck and say as an act of revenge, right? The things that I did growing up, play basketball, read comic books, listen to hip hop music. And my aching knees mean that I can't play basketball anymore, but I still am able to find profound amounts of political meaning, but also to find profound amounts of joy in listening to music and reading comics, right?
Jonathan Gray:
And so this transcendence that people want to associate with like Oprah and all other things, I mean, I never experienced that, but I did experience that listening to Illmatic. I did experience that reading Chris Claremont's X-Men or some version of that. And so I never really understood. Or Darieck talking about to graduate school. I was always translating experiences or mediating them through hiphop and through comics as a way to make sense of the kind of artistic claims or epistemological claims that people were making.
Jonathan Gray:
And so it's like, "Well, wait a minute, then why am I writing about Ralph Ellison? Why not just write about Kyle Baker?" Right? If I'm making those sort of conceptual moves in my head anyway, then let's just spend the time doing that.
Rebecca Wanzo:
I'll say, I mean, I'm probably a little more promiscuous with the number of genres can give me pleasure in all kinds of ways. But what I would say is that, all these points, the form and content issue I think is really important. And I think I'll just also double down in a disciplinary way about how the lack of attentiveness to comics means there are a whole bunch of things that conceptually we're not understanding, right?
Rebecca Wanzo:
So right now I'm working on something where I'm thinking about African American artists whose early work was as cartoonists, and the ways in which the connection between the art world and comics and cartoon art is just, we're losing history in terms of what's not archived, but also just really understanding these links. I think, obviously in terms of literary studies, to conceptually understand what it means to position African American comics and cartoon art in relationship to African American literature, but also in relationship to broader histories of black visual culture is really important.
Rebecca Wanzo:
There are various contexts, obviously in history, where how important comics and cartoon art, specifically, and editorial cartoons and various things are often just used as illustrations in ways that don't take editorial cartoonists seriously as thinkers and theorizers of the state, right? And how important that has been historically, and particularly the number of black cartoonists for whom that has been true from comic strip creators to editorial cartoonists is really important.
Rebecca Wanzo:
So there're variety of different disciplines that I think really need to engage with the form. I mean, I think there's an interesting slippage in your book between saying all of comics when you're very much talking about superhero comics and cartoon. It is interesting about the different genre makes, which I do think there's a deep difference in terms of what the generic forms do. But that's my reason. I think that, there are things we don't know and understand unless we really take the medium seriously.
Michael Cohen:
Yeah, I agree with that entirely. Rebecca's research in the field of early 20th century black cartoonists is hugely important. I would also just add, I think it's probably obvious, but it's worth stating is that superheroes are ubiquitous now. Mass culture is just completely saturated with them. I mean, there's far more comic book movies out there than I have the time to watch in TV series. I mean, they just have completely taken over our popular culture and there's this very lengthy genealogy of these characters that needs to be excavated, that needs to be dug up and worked through quite critically.
Michael Cohen:
I mean, I think Darieck points the way in his writing about Luke Cage, and Blade and Black Panther in general. It's one of those realities that the ubiquity of superhero movies belies their kinds of origins. I mean, to me, I think it's always worth remembering the ways in which Superman, and Green Lantern and others in their origins, the Golden Age era, were the products of working class writers for working class audiences in the midst of the great depression. And Superman began his career fighting weapons manufacturers and unscrupulous advertisers. And the Green Lantern actually intervenes in a taxi cab strike in the late 1930s.
Michael Cohen:
And today, the Cold War deformed all of that. And neoliberalism continues to twist it even more so that our preferred superheroes now are not the kind of altruistic visionaries, but the neoliberal douche bags like Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne. There has to be a pushback or at least a critical examination of that which has gone from admittedly a kind of marginal cultural expression to completely dominating the arch capitalist center of our popular culture.
Ramzi Fawaz:
I want to actually respond to that and both agree and disagree, because I think that is right up to a point. But I mean, Darieck and I talk about this all the time, what I'm about to say. What I think is interesting is that the resurgence of the superhero as a fetish of American popular culture, initially was very much a reaction to 9/11, and to the rise of the security state and the desire to circulate these images of national protectors, which is why all of the...
Ramzi Fawaz:
The first movies are really like Captain America, Iron Man, et cetera. Now, I think what happened by sheer historical accident is that as these mass social movements around racial social justice, gender social justice, resurged in the US, people began to remember that the superhero is fundamentally about distinction. Superheros are all different from one another. They're this endless proliferation of different kinds of bodies with different powers.
Ramzi Fawaz:
So now what's happened is a shift where the neoliberal, as you were putting it, douchebag model is being replaced by the multiverse model, which is all about the endless proliferation of differentiation. That's also still wrapped up deeply in capitalism, right? Because it's about producing as much TV content and movie content as you can to sell. But one of its great virtues is that it is addressing the problem of human plurality, that people are fundamentally different from one another.
Ramzi Fawaz:
So Darieck and I had been talking the other night. I'm obsessed with Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse and I'm writing about it now. And when I teach that to my students, they're like, "This is the most amazing commentary on the problem of diversity, because it's not about representational diversity, it's about plurality," right? It is about the fundamental fact that human beings are already diverse, you don't need to simply insert marginal identities. If you look at the fact that human beings are incredibly complex and heterogeneous, what have you started there?
Ramzi Fawaz:
And so I do think there is the tweak. The best parts of the superhero are also being brought into this new wave. And I say all of this to just say, for me, the reason I love comics is because they're so multiplicious. Most mediums, novels, movies, can do some of what comics do, of course, mediums borrow from each other, but comics kind of concatenate so many different elements. They heighten the idea that media are about multiplying kind of different variables. And I find that really, really compelling. So I feel more sympathetic to the contemporary shift in superhero storytelling than the earlier part.
Jonathan Gray:
Ramzi, what's interesting about that too is that, I guess evidence for your claim is all the online complaining about the diversity/plurality, right? Which is like, "Oh my God, they've gone too far." And so, yes, I think that speaks precisely to the kind of plurality that you're celebrating.
Ramzi Fawaz:
Actually, it's interesting, somebody in the chat said, "But one of the taglines of Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse is 'you're like me.'" To bring us back to how identification does and doesn't work. And one thing I would say is, I think actually part of the genius of the movie is it's always about you're like me, but not exactly me. It's all about anyone could inhabit the figure of Spider-Man and every person would do it in a distinct way that is never fully commensurate with anybody else.
Ramzi Fawaz:
There's a mutual recognition moment. Whenever the spider people need each other in the movie, there's a brief moment of coming together, we're the same, and then there's splitting again. And I love that. That to me is what politics is about, right? It's about the coming together and the splitting apart. And that's kind of what is compelling to me about that movie, among many other things.
Ramzi Fawaz:
So I think this is a great time to shift to questions for the audience that I already have a list of them. And I can keep... Jonathan was reminding us that another tagline is anyone can wear the mask, which is so beautiful. So I'm just going to go through some of the ones that we have listed already. And I love Juana Maria Rodriguez, sending my heart to you. And she asked at the beginning, she said, "I love the turn to fantasy, and I hope he might say more about the connection to sexual fantasy and the exploration of other modes of erotic and social relations." And of course, the last chapter of Darieck's book is very much about this. So I would throw this out to everyone, but I'd love to hear Darieck start on that question.
Darieck Scott:
Well, I'm wondering what Juana is asking about specifically, in terms of whether comics provide, again, springboards for imaginations of different forms of sexual practice or being or not. I'm not sure exactly what she's thinking about in that question. I guess when I was thinking about the significance of sexual fantasy in superhero comics, which is a genre of comics that of course is not really about sex in an explicit way, but always has a kind of implicit sexualization of the body in the things they depicted, all kinds of elements to it, which lend themselves to some sort of sexualization. I was really interested in taking that element, which remains actively suppressed. So that it's not even just that, oh, the comic is for kids and we're not going to talk about sex.
Darieck Scott:
I guess what I mentioned before, Frederick Wertham and the advent of the Comics Code Authority, the comics, which were not margin at all, actually, which were being read by everybody, which had sales of millions upon millions per month during World War II and immediately after. That those comics were, according to Wertham and those who went along with him, were some sort of covert initiation of readers into BDSM practices and to being gay and everything else. And I was interested in that, because I think there is something about even these comics that really aren't particularly depicting these things in any explicit way that can allow for a springboard of imagination of sexual difference. And that people read them that way. That queer readers have been doing that before. There was a way where Wertham was right about some aspect of it and wrong in other ways. Wrong in terms of the homophobia. Right perhaps in actually identifying that there is a sort of queer reading you are allowed or facilitated to have of superhero comics. And then in the book, I talk about erotic cartoonists to actually just take that up and take it to its logical conclusion where it's just all about the sex actually. So that's my response.
Rebecca Wanzo:
With Wertham, Wonder Woman, it's hard to go through an issue where she's not tied up or someone else, in the early Wonder Woman. It's bondage everywhere. And once you show it to my students, they can't unsee it really. So not wrong about polyamory and bondage in Wonder Woman. But I do think there is something interesting, because again, I was thinking about the genre difference and I just happened to be teaching... My favorite thing is Monsters This Week. And I also brought in a whole bunch of women's comics from the 1970s and early eighties and other early comics like Tits & Clits. And how my students read them. And also some French comics like, Ah! Nana, they had only nine issues before.
Rebecca Wanzo:
I think it was the incest issue that did it in and then they forbid it. That's much more radical. This idea that what we see in terms of representation inevitably becomes more radical or more explicit as time goes on. And they're looking at these comics and they're going, "This was like, what year? What year was this?"
Rebecca Wanzo:
Even as these were comics that are very concerned about Americana and every day. So they're comics that are explicitly about being as part of the underground comics movement as being transgressive. But at the same time, they're very much concerned about the Americana that is every day. So these things are working together at the same time in the feminists and gay comics of the period. And I think it's interesting to go through...
Rebecca Wanzo:
You go to like what Spike Troutman is doing, or some other erotic comics that you might see right now. I've been trying to work through, how do we understand this genealogy? Is there one? Do people see such connections?
Rebecca Wanzo:
My favorite thing is Monsters to identification point. The points of identification is everything from high art to the Wolf Man to horror films.
Rebecca Wanzo:
It's a graphic novel that deeply complicates your common sense ideas of identification and sexual fantasy. So there's just such a long genealogy of that in comics. That I think plays out in such really intriguing ways.
Ramzi Fawaz:
And I would just quickly add, I think, to draw Juana's question specifically to the chapter that you write about Darieck. That you have this amazing moment where you just say, oh, the simple ability... Excuse me, if I'm scandalizing anybody... Of being able to draw internal ejaculation in gay male sex, is this incredibly fantastical moment, something that cinematic apparatus cannot do. You can't have a camera small enough to like go in and show you that. And it wouldn't visually make sense. And I think there is a way in which, because of that conceit, Darieck and I always talk about, that anything that can be drawn could be believed in comics. There is a way in which comics really lend themselves to the exploration of sexual fantasy because of the expansive possibilities that being able to draw out every different imagine scenario that you can conceive of.
Ramzi Fawaz:
So we have another question from earlier, John Martin made a comment that I think is actually really interesting and unusual. Said, "Victor LaValle has suggested that horror, for him, isn't just about defeating the 'monster,' but about defeating real life, which is often worse than the monster. Is this also a form of joy?"
Ramzi Fawaz:
Which feels very much like what the whole book is about.
Darieck Scott:
I would totally agree with that. Yeah. And I didn't know Victor LaValle had said that, but that to me is... It pertains to what's come up a couple times. Revenge is also a form of joy in a certain way. So yeah, I would agree with that.
Jonathan Gray:
Yeah. I would just say that the ending of Get Out where you have the police cruiser pull up with the, with the lights on and that feeling in the pit of your stomach that, "Oh my God, he's gone through all of this. And now this redneck cop is going to..." And it's his best friend. That's a profound moment of joy, which is precisely like the Monster's been defeated, but you've also defeated this carsceral reality because the person in the police cruiser is actually your ally. So that's another clear example of that evocation of joy past defeating the monster.
Michael Cohen:
Yeah. Quickly, it just makes me think of something like Lovecraft Country too, where it's like, there may be monsters in the woods, but there's no monster bigger than the Southern sheriff.
Ramzi Fawaz:
I was actually going to say, I've taught Lovecraft Country a couple times now and it's so mind boggling to my students. And one thing I'm just amazed by is the revenge fantasy. It has extraordinary images of black violence towards white bodies. It has a huge amount of violence towards black bodies as well, because it's trying to like, it's realism is to set you in the history of segregation. But it's also like, it is this amazing fantasy of black people literally beating white people to death with bats in certain scenes. It's quite extraordinary. And I think it gives you all different kinds of joy. Like the joy of that revenge. And then for me, one of the most incredible things I've ever seen on TV is the Hippolyta episode, episode seven, in which there is the joy of this black woman being able to travel back and forth through every time period to become anything and everything.
Ramzi Fawaz:
I'm just a pontificating. I love the example of Lovecraft Country.
Rebecca Wanzo:
But I might turn it back to Victor. And Victor, you were teaching the show, I guess, not the novel. But Victor's fantastic take on Lovecraft, the Ballad of Black Tom. I was thinking of this as I'm saying this because between that and Destroyer, which his take on black Frankenstein or change
Rebecca Wanzo:
He can do the revenge fantasy, but then there's this undercutting. You were joyous about something that happens, but then it's mournful. So it's very complicated, this sort of affective.. I think he sort of redefines what joy looks like in the real. Honestly, it's a kind of complicated black joy, I would say, at the end of his text. And Ballad of Black Tom, because there was this set of things and there was this good podcast with him and John Jennings and Kinitra Brooks talking about Lovecraft Country and attachments to Lovecraft and what it means for black people to want to rework it. And I guess Spike Lee is still getting ready to do a Lovecraft film. Is that right? I think he is.
Rebecca Wanzo:
So even things that you're not supposed to be attached to, people will take it and that they rework it and there's still a pleasure attachment people have of a black reworking of these things that can be horrible, racist imaginaries.
Ramzi Fawaz:
And just quickly to respond to that, that's the thing I find fascinating about the TV show, is that it is so deeply ambivalent and split. It's like in order to have a lot of the black fantasy that happens in that show, other things have to be shut out. Like the alliance between black women and white women, like the lesbian alliance has to disappear. The possibility that queer men might be central to the story, their entire history has to disappear. So I think that the show is actually quite ambivalent. It says, to have one kind of black fantasy, other are possible connections have to be lost. And I think you're right. I think it's very ambivalent. So-
Darieck Scott:
Ramzi, for some reason you're muted.
Ramzi Fawaz:
It never fails. Right? Let's take one last question and then maybe we could just do a quick wrap up if people have final comments on the panel. Earlier, when we were talking about when Rebecca was really pushing us to think about why it is that we always have to attach the label of radical to fantasy in order for it to be meaningful.
Ramzi Fawaz:
Tigers Eye said, "What if the habitable imaginary is the more mundane one, could this make other realities more possible through such fantasy?" And I think that's kind of a broad question. I think we were already addressing it earlier, but maybe we could just comment one more time on the question of the mundane, the quotidian.
Darieck Scott:
I guess, for me, there are a number of different inflections to answering that question. So one of them for me is that I was trying to in the book propose that the necessity of there being a line that one could draw between a fantasy and the appearance of what we call the real beyond one's own mind or beyond the collective minds of those who are fantasizing it together about say a particular comic book or a film or whatever. That I was feeling like I didn't want to need to make sure that's the kind of transformation I'm looking at in order to say that fantasy's important. That I was trying to think about some other kind of work that's being done that's harder to track. But I try to put it under that term of it's a transformation of being, because I was using Leo Bersani's way of thinking about fantasy as being like memory in the brain and that the memory is derealized being, and fantasy is unrealized being.
Darieck Scott:
And so there's something that happens in being is what I was trying to think of as what fantasy does. And that in and of itself is going to be, it's mundane and it's quotidian because it actually isn't a transformation of the world and like that... Or not a transformation of the world, even by a long sort of process of building a revolution the way that Varnon says that's sort of internal revolution. But it's something that I thought was important to give an account of. So I guess that's one way I would think about answering that question.
Ramzi Fawaz:
Well, maybe towards wrapping up to a conclusion, I would love to just ask everybody just generally. What does fantasy mean to you now? At the end of this conversation, at the end of looking at Darieck's book, where does fantasy sit for you in your thought process as a scholar, as a reader of these texts? What does the term now mean?
Rebecca Wanzo:
I guess just to follow up maybe in thinking about that question, I'm teaching a class in feminist and queer media studies this semester. And one thing is we go through various forms of genres and media that have been dismissed because of largely identity specific responses, like romance novels and comics and melodrama and all these like bad affective forms. But then people say, oh, but here are the ways in which they're political. And this divide between the fantasy and the real.
Rebecca Wanzo:
I feel that I am often trying to push people to think about the ways... about what fantasy is not. This idea of fantasy as always escapism is problematic, obviously. Even though I often think of this line with Octavia Butler and I think it was Parable Towns, the sort of, what's wrong with the scape or if it has you, it has you, and you have no choice but to go there.
Rebecca Wanzo:
People in a variety of things that we consume or just inhabit the every day, we think about things that are not tactile and real in certain ways. And yet, we may be watching things that have been made or reading things that have been made. So these things are real, but not real in the ways in which people are conceptualizing them.
Rebecca Wanzo:
And yet black people also, there's all this fantasy attached, all these things that are unreal attached to blackness. So we're just constantly negotiating a realm of the fantasy that shapes our every day. And so I think that's what I try to get people to think about in terms of how we conceptualize what fantasy actually is in our lives. It's not something that's just sort of out there and that people go to and should need to come back. But we're constantly negotiating it, the good and the bad and the ambivalent and the everything.
Jonathan Gray:
When I'm teaching, I'm always trying to communicate to people that fantasy is closer than we want to admit. And to make a reference to our former President, it's incredible that people are living this consensual fantasy that, that person was a great statesman and had answers.
Jonathan Gray:
And I feel like, oh God, I don't have to ever make that argument again. The argument that fantasy is just over there. It's like, no, fantasy is right here. And that if you want to understand how to change the world, in part, you have to understand how to change fantasy.
Jonathan Gray:
So I used to talk about the persistence in fantasy. Fantasy like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and such, of white male protagonists. It's like, why do these forms always have to reinscribe a sort of white masculinity when that's not necessarily reality. But now it's like, oh no, the fantasy is the Republican party. So for me, we're living alongside an interesting consensual fantasy. So it's just right there. And if we want to like make a more just world, we have to be able to recognize and address what's going on with that fantasy.
Michael Cohen:
Yeah. I think that's really quite beautifully put. In a certain sense, I think reading Darieck's book is led me to think in many ways about the relationship between thinking about fantasy in the terms set out in this text and the older models of what we would've called, for lack of a better term, or explicitly call, ideology. And the traditional Marxist understanding of ideology is it's an imaginary relationship to reality or an imaginary relationship to real contradictions. And one of the things that I think Jonathan points out quite well is that increasingly that imaginary relationship is not to a kind of set of real contradictions, but distill other fantasies and other delusions. That QAnon or just what it is to be a Trump member of the Republican party is not to have an imaginary relationship to reality, but an imaginary relationship to a set, a whole other regime of fantasies.
Michael Cohen:
So in a certain sense, ideology has lost its mooring to anything meaningfully understood as reality or political consensus or anything of the kind. And this is I think what we have to understand as the coming of fascism, of a world in which the reality as we know it is being smashed by the profound power of fantasy to just obscure, deny and deflect anything that the rest of us might recognize as reality. And I'm putting these are the really negative terms of it. And I think Darieck offers us something that is far more hopeful, far more possible.
Michael Cohen:
And so in that sense, I not only come away with it with a critique of the kind of fascist ideology or fascist fantasy that swims around us, but the need for us to fantasize on our own terms. That fantasy for all of us becomes increasingly a necessity. And that a future, any vision of social change has to be animated by a vision of the future society. And while that might have previously been best understood is having the right ideology or good politics, I think increasingly, thanks to Darieck, we can think of it as an imperative or a call to fantasize.
Ramzi Fawaz:
That's so beautifully said, all of those comments. We are at time. But Darieck, I wanted to be able to give you the last word before we wrap up. It's been so wonderful to meet with everybody here in this space.
Darieck Scott:
I just want to thank all of you as panelists. I loved your comments. They're all so incisive and beautiful and thought provoking for me. So thank you for engaging with my work and for having such thoughtful responses to it.
Ramzi Fawaz:
Thank you everybody for joining us. This was wonderful. And we'll see you in all other venues.
