Fight the Power: Black (Super)Heroes and Meta-Humans In Film & On TV
Horsley, Nicole
ICSM 10500 - 34
CRN: 22182
ICSM: Black (Super)Heroes
MWF 11:00 AM - 11:50 AM, F 12:00 PM - 12:50 PM
“Why can we imagine the ending of the world, yet not the ending of colonialism?” --An ancestor. “Dear colonizer, your future is over” --An ancestor. What does it mean to be considered by the nation-state as less than human? As an ontological zero? Who has the power and privilege to be human? And who gets to be a superhero? When will Black subjects transcend concepts of nothingness? Fight the Power: Black (Super)Heroes and Meta-Humans In Film & On TV centers tropes of racialized heroes, super and meta-humans. This course is a mediation on afro-futurism and racial formations to interrogate how race, specifically the constructions of blackness inform non-white characterizations of superheroes and meta-humans. We will consider the laboring Black body foregrounded in the agency of pain and constant injury of anti-blackness. The creation of non-white superheroes and meta-humans as both embodiment and (dis)placement of past, present, and future legacies of race and racism. Films such as Cleopatra Jones (1973), Dolemite (1975), Black Panther (2018), to the most recent Netflix series: Black Lightning (2018), Luke Cage (2016) based on past comic characters demonstrate African diaspora cultural productions that disrupt our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human. These subjects defend and protect Black dystopian communities and futures. Engaging in imaginative practices of world-making, which acknowledges the violent imposition of colonialism, racism, gender and social inequalities.