Keeping It Unreal

Explores Black representation in fantasy genres and comic booksCharacters like Black Panther, Storm, Luke Cage, Miles Morales, and Black Lightning are part of a growing cohort of black superheroes on TV and in film. Though comic books are often derided as naïve and childish, these larger-than-life superheroes demonstrate how this genre can serve as the catalyst for engaging the Black radical imagination.Keeping It Unreal: Comics and Black Queer Fantasy is an exploration of how fantasies of Black power and triumph fashion theoretical, political, and aesthetic challenges to—and respite from—white supremacy and anti-Blackness. It examines representations of Blackness in fantasy-infused genres: superhero comic books, erotic comics, fantasy and science-fiction genre literature, as well as contemporary literary “realist” fiction centering fantastic conceits.Darieck Scott offers a rich meditation on the relationship between fantasy and reality, and between the imagination and being, as he weaves his personal recollections of his encounters with superhero comics with interpretive readings of figures like the Black Panther and Blade, as well as theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Saidiya Hartman, and Gore Vidal. Keeping It Unreal represents an in-depth theoretical consideration of the intersections of superhero comics, Blackness, and queerness, and draws on a variety of fields of inquiry.Reading new life into Afrofuturist traditions and fantasy genres, Darieck Scott seeks to rescue the role of fantasy and the fantastic to challenge, revoke, and expand our assumptions about what is normal, real, and markedly human.

Scott reflects on the importance of fantasy in comic books in this brisk and insightful meditation ... this analysis is rich and rewarding., This fabulously written reconsideration of fantasy goes beyond readings of Black queer comics to reveal the value of becoming fantastical—of living in a ‘habitable imaginary’ where dreams are substantiated. I came looking for insights about Luke Cage and Black Panther . . . only to find liberation and Black queer life., A primer in counter-intuition and bold imagination that dares to embrace the radical possibility of black happiness. Writing with razor-sharp wit and blistering erudition, Scott rewrites the meaning of fantasy to reveal its power as an intellectual and political tool for reimagining blackness beyond an antiblack world. His captivating excavations of black fantasy in the comic genre provide not only a space of pleasure and possibility, but a tool for living a different kind of black futurity., Scott does an amazing job in the conclusion of providing some context as well as personal revelation, that allows the reader to feel like they too are part of this conversation and creation…Overall, Scott’s Keeping it Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics is a well-constructed engagement of various scholarly sources in the understanding and construction of ourselves, of others, and of life through the use of fantasy.

Darieck Scott is Professor of African American studies at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of the novels Hex and Traitor to the Race, and the editor of Best Black Gay Erotica.