Black nationalism, bunraku, and beyond: Articulating black heroism through cultural fusion and comics

One of my colleagues was out one day with her niece when they saw some Spider-Man decorations. Asked if she would be interested in decorating her room with Spider-Man paraphernalia, the litt le girl exclaimed, "Spider- Man is for boys!" A proper feminist, my friend was perturbed by this assertion, and she tried to tease out the logic behind the claim, only to become more alarmed when her niece said, "Girls aren't interested in Spider-Man unless he saves them!" By the time we talked, my friend had recovered from the heart att ack induced by her niece's retro-wilting-flower subjectivity. We agreed nostalgically that the problem is that contemporary girls do not have what infl uenced us in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We have a generation of girls who are inundated with the pleasures of Princess accoutrements, and models of strength such as the superpowered kindergartners the Powerpuff Girls still frame power within the pleasures of girly-girl accessories and tiny, unimposing bodies. However, I must acknowledge that my role model as a child was problematic in her own ways. She was also a princess an Amazon princess but she left the world of the princesses to fi ght evil created by the "man's world." I clearly remember singing in the universal, atonal way of vocally ungift ed children: "Wonder WOH-MAAAN! WON-der WOH-MAAAAAN!" Humming the bass beats of the television show theme song, I would begin my daily twirling exercises spinning my body until I felt the giddy combination of light-headed energy and nausea. I was a wild-haired brown child, with a crown of aluminum foil in my hair, mumbling under my breath, twirling with a slightly off-center momentum, ripping something off to reveal the shirt and short ensemble of Wonder Woman underoos. I was oft en alone except for the unseen and voiceless victims and villains who peppered my imaginary world: Wait you Nazis, I am Wonder Woman and I will stop you! My valiant claims were only interrupted by the change in wardrobe from T-shirt to underoos. I begin my contribution to this volume with a personal narrative because of how important the aff ective dimension of revision has been to a number of cultural productions that make racial or ethnic minorities the center of creation. Creators like artist Kerry James Marshall, whom I will discuss in this essay, oft en mine beloved texts for inspiration. Th is inspiration is not only shaped by the pleasure they received from the consumption but the unfulfilled desire to see stories or representations that feature people like themselves. Multicultural superhero comics are oft en quite explicitly marked by this reflexivity. Multicultural superhero comic revisions entail the rich texturing of locale and the cultural context within which the superhero narrative unfolds; an aesthetic attention to the rendering of the racial or ethnic minority body; and a self-consciousness about the process of identification with cultural icons. Th e superhero comics that may have most systematically demonstrated a revision aesthetic were produced by Milestone, a short-lived comics imprint run by African American creators. Their Superman-like hero, Icon, was a black conservative from outer space whose sidekick was a teenage single mother who inspired him to help the community. The superhero group, Blood Syndicate, was an amalgamation of street gangs who became superheroes in the wake of an industrial "accident" in a predominantly black neighborhood. The scientist-turned-superhero, Hardware, was cheated out of his intellectual property by a white businessman. These three models flip the script of archetypal kinds of superhero stories, placing the narratives in the context of black history and the challenges facing the black inner city. These thoughtful representations were not available to me when I was young. And I was not a comic book reader until adulthood; thus I was unfamiliar wiThearly black superheroes such as Luke Cage, Black Panther, or even Nubia, the black Wonder Woman who appeared in a few issues in the 1970s. Wonder Woman was nonetheless both productive and challenging for my selfimage. I was no Lynda Carter, with alabaster skin and long, flowing hair, but the romance of power and agency remained with me. In putting on the underoos, I could imagine a validated outlet for my strong personality. While heroes represent to adults what they stand for, researchers have suggested that heroes help children define their place in society and construct ideal roles for themselves to play.1 However, even as Wonder Woman represented a particular ideal of women being able to have and demonstrate their power, I was also quite physically dissimilar from my hero. Adopting Wonder Woman was one of my first clearly remembered acts of seeing myself in a cultural representation that was clearly not meant to address anyone who looked like me or had my history. However, identifi cation is a complex process that cannot be easily described as a function of people's att achment to those most like them, and superheroes may illustrate the vagaries of identifi catory practices better than many cultural productions. No real person can have the att ributes of the superhero, and they offer the fantasy that with a cape, mask, or pair of underoos, the wearer can transform herself into another person. Comic book superheroes have traditionally off ered the fantasy of outsiders transforming into ideal citizens, making them ideal Rorschachs for people of color. People can identify with those like themselves and with idealized versions of themselves. Superheroes have given the world both representations. Nevertheless, for many people of color in the United States, the experience of consuming comic book heroism in print, television, and film has involved reconciling themselves to representing the antithesis of heroic ideals. Even in a twenty-first-century casting of a new Wonder Woman, would anyone imagine that Hollywood producers would cast a black or Asian actress in that role? Comic creators have imagined people of color in these roles, but their presence is always short-lived. While identifi cation with fictions involves imaginative leaps and textual poaching for all consumers, people of color often must negotiate a string of representations (hypermasculine men and emasculated women) that set them apart from heroism. Hence, a truly radical departure from traditional representations of superheroes requires sidestepping the exaggerated stereotypes of blacks in mainstream comics. Another means of revision is the creating of the self-conscious comic book that foregrounds the hybrid nature of black identifi catory practices that draw from multiple cultures. For example, African American cartoonist Aaron McGruder's popular comic strip The Boondocks (1996-2006) mixed black nationalist rhetoric with a Japanese manga and anime aesthetic. In providing radically different models of the body in black comics, artists began to create an iconography contrasting with the damaging history of the visual representation of black bodies. In this essay I discuss an unusual comic book text that provides a wholly other comic book aesthetic an exhibit by artist Kerry James Marshall and the performance piece derived from it, Every Beat of My Heart. Marshall first began this project with Rythm Mastr, an exhibit, blending African, African American, and traditional superhero narratives, for the Carnegie Museum International show in 1999. In 2008, he blended the comic book project with a community performance piece using the Japanese form of Bunraku puppetry at the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. He makes an intervention into the absence of black bodies in superhero texts by presenting alternative body models for superhero narratives. His work illustrates the kind of cultural fusion informing some black comic artists' productions: a fusion that illustrates how the future of black comics is one that moves away from purely black nationalist, Afrocentric, or traditional superhero narratives and instead embraces the hybrid subjectivity of blacks in the African diaspora. His project is instructive, not only through what it offers as an alternative model, but by the absences in his vision of black heroic narratives.