Keeping It Unreal

These are parlous times. As they ever were.

And to be honest, I want out.

When I began thinking about this book some years ago, I supposed that it would be an extension of my previous book Extravagant Abjection. There I had been drawn to delve literary representations (in both literature proper and in theory) of how blackness is born out of abjection—how, in other words, dark-skinned bodies and the minds that live them are tortured and all-but-destroyed to create “black people,” which/who then become available to “white people” as cheap, disposable economic, political, cultural, and psychic resources. My interest was in showing that these literary representations of black abjection provide universal accounts of existential, historical, psychological—and, by implication, political—qualities or truths: that we are all at base always abject, abject to histories that we cannot unmake or ever fully know, abject to our dependence on the frailties of language and on our brains’ fear-drenched perceptions of our environments; yet that, precisely in this always-already abjection, precisely in its formless, frightening unshapeliness, we can discover capacities to make and to shape, to flee and to create. And blackness is one mode, perhaps one of the modern world’s primary modes, to access both the abjection of Homo sapiens and abjection’s unexpected power.

For this book, I thought I would investigate the flipside. Keeping It Unreal was to examine representations of blackness in fantasy-infused genres such as superhero comic books, erotic comics, and fantasy and science-fiction genre literature, and to theorize therefrom how fantasies of black power and triumph fashion theoretical, political, and aesthetic challenges to—and respite from—white supremacy and antiblackness. This is still my general aim. But, as should be no surprise (though it was a surprise to me), my initial motivation was shaped, not altogether consciously on my part, by the context of its times, which like any present moment appears to be eternal rather than the decidedly historical relic it swiftly becomes. It made a certain fundamental sense to think about fantasies of black power during the presidency of Barack Obama: yes, it’s true that the image and fact of a black man holding the office created to administer a slaveholding republic did not, of course, realize at last dreams deferred, as pessimists and the many events that never fail to give comfort to pessimism proved every single day of Obama’s eight years in office. But the Obama phenomenon did reveal that there were indeed things largely undreamt of in many of our philosophies, and it showed to some of us how strangely cautious we might have been in imagining the possibilities of black folks and the possible ways blackness can signify. The various phenomena for which Obama is a synecdoche gave to some of us the not-unpleasant defamiliarizing feeling that we had been cramped and defensive and afraid even in our black interiors.

Suddenly in sites where we gather to play pretend, such as the two-dimensional plains of superhero comics (a place you’ll often find my mind tarrying), you could glimpse black supermen never before seen. Riding tall and powerful like the figures whose role and stature in the dominant culture’s stories might lead them to be described as “white knights,” you could see all-powerful black men in Marvel Comics’ Adam: The Legend of Blue Marvel (2008–9) and DC Comics’ Final Crisis (2008–9). Their nigh-heretical—and sadly evanescent—appearance revealed that the whiteness of the white knight was not without a crucial racial dimension and that we never really conceived of a superhero without imagining his imaginary whiteness (figures I.1–I.4).

The shift between then and the time of writing this book in 2019 and 2020 seemed epochal. From the first black president to an all-but-openly white supremacist one who surrounds himself with advisers who are latter-day Nazis, accomplished in one traumatic step in November 2016—thus revealing, as we scarcely needed reminding (though evidently this understanding is so fragile that they needed a very dramatic reminder), that, as Ralph Ellison fictively demonstrated, the whiteness of the White House is not only or even mostly a description of the color of its paint.

Of course, like many such apparently radical breaks, this shift was in truth both more gradual and more predictable than it felt. The vicious attitudes and venal interests taking the guise of political forces that have decreed we will all have to live with the damage Trump has done did not and could not spring fully grown from the soil as though they were the soldiers of Cadmus. Those interests were visibly gathering adherents and actively plotting Trump’s or some other avatar’s rise in 2012 and indeed in 2009 during the apogee of national Obama-love. (Probably they are grooming his successor or plotting his resurrection at the time of this writing.) And as Ibram X. Kendi warned, “Everyone who has witnessed the historic presidency of Barack Obama—and the historic opposition to him—should now know full well that the more Black people uplift themselves, the more they will find themselves on the receiving end of a racist backlash.”1 We might then understand that we are in fact living the changing same and that it’s not so much a matter of things outside our doors making an ominous change but of us having to shift what we pay attention to when we go out there.

But though the world probably hasn’t really changed that much since I first began thinking of this book, and its changes such as they are might readily have been foreseen, it has nonetheless changed enough to make my interest in fantasies of black power and triumph look very different than it did circa 2011. Now such fantasies look as though they’re debris of a ship exploded at sea, or like a door or a window to another realm in spacetime I’d much much rather be in. They begin to look like a survival guide or a survival device in parlous times, like they provide an answer to a newly urgent question (which probably should have been just as urgent without the necessity of referring to Satan du jour by its proper name): “How and where do I find some happiness and justice in an age of mass idiocy, willful destructiveness, and wanton injustice whose avatar is the odious 2016 Electoral College winner Donald Trump?”

***

One of my favorite comments by one of my favorite artists in the world provides a pleasing example of what compels me about the subject of fantasy. I’ve had it in mind during all the thinking and writing of Keeping It Unreal. This favorite artist is the Spanish cinema auteur Pedro Almodóvar. What I love about Almodóvar is of course his films. But not only that. I love something he’s said, a certain savage sentiment he’s articulated, which I both share and to which I aspire. This sentiment resonates because Almodóvar may be the most globally recognized artist and public figure associated with la movida, the cultural efflorescence that took place in Spain after the fascist dictator Francisco Franco’s death in 1975.2 Critic Pauline Kael quotes Almodóvar in 1987 saying, “My rebellion is to deny Franco. . . . I refuse even his memory. I start everything I write with the idea ‘What if Franco had never existed?’”3 This lovely bit of bravura is not a quip but seems to have served as a kind of artistic orientation for Almodóvar during the creation of his early films, as he has articulated the same point in similar terms several times. In an interview with Frédéric Strauss about his film Live Flesh (1997), Almodóvar discusses the differences between his later and earlier films thus: “Things change over time. . . . Twenty years ago, my revenge against Franco was to not even recognize his existence, his memory; to make my films as though he had never existed.”4

The project of this book, written at last in parlous times, is a project close to my heart—revenge, of the early-Almodóvarian sort: revenge against the 2016 Electoral College-winner (and 2020 election denier) Satan and all he represents and embodies and furthers; the revenge of artistic or art-imitative refusal of memory; or the revenge of the artistic creation of memories for which there is as yet no historical correlate.

What if there were no racism or antiblackness 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? What does that world look like? Even just a slice of it—say, a day in someone’s life, a biography of one person? What if we imagined a history in which racism ended? Or in which, à la Almodóvar, Trump never existed, or if he did exist, he is as distant and forgotten as the once-great Helvius Pertinax? (Yes, I’ve deliberately chosen a Roman emperor whose tenure in that august office was about four months and of whom only classical historians know anything at all and of whose name I had zero knowledge until I picked up my classical dictionary as I wrote.)

As a novelist, I like to follow early Almodóvar: my current projects involve writing a fantasy-genre series of novels about just such a world, one where there’s such a thing as race but some key pieces of how we think about it and live it somehow went happily missing—and, hence, where the Trump phenomenon could never have existed at all.

But as a scholar, I want to think about and to elaborate such an artistic mission, to theorize it and give some account of it. Is there really (as it were) anything significant to note about the activity of fantasy—specifically fantasizing against the powers that be, fantasizing against antiblackness? About not just wishing but concertedly thinking and creating the likes of Franco away? And if so (naturally my answer to the previous question, having bothered to write this book, must be yes), what is significant about it?

We rarely call anyone a fantasist, and if we do, usually the label is not applied in praise, or even with neutrality, except as a description of authors of genre fiction. In the same 1987 review of Almodóvar’s Law of Desire in which Kael quotes him, Kael declares, “Law of Desire is a homosexual fantasy—AIDS doesn’t exist. But Almodóvar is no dope; he’s a conscious fantasist . . .”5 Kael’s review is in very high praise of Almodóvar’s film. But her implicit definition of “fantasist” via the apparently necessary evocation of its opposites—Almodóvar is not a dope, Almodóvar is conscious—suggests that garden-variety fantasists and whatever silliness they get up to have little to recommend them, and in any case are not worthy of critical attention.

We have already seen that Kael is right and that Almodóvar was indeed quite conscious of the project of his fantasy: the erasure of Franco. But my mind is drawn to different judgments from those implicit in Kael’s understanding of fantasists and to other questions.

When is any elaborated fantasy not conscious, and when is such a fantasy not responsive to and not somehow working with the material consequences of the political and historical events and conditions we understand to be “real” and that we understand to be the object of serious, meaningful inquiry? Might conscious, responsive working be what fantasy is and does? And does not, or might not, a fantastic gesture like refusing the memory of Franco operate suggestively, even in something so apparently trivial as filmic entertainment, in ways that exceed the specific dream-world content of the elaborated fantasy? (For one thing, a world without AIDS isn’t just a “homosexual” fantasy alone, as it may have appeared to Kael in 1987; it is a fantastic goal and desire of millions on the globe who are not remotely identified with gay European and North American worlds.)

Almodóvar meticulously, laboriously chose not to remember Spain’s recently (at the time) entombed fascist history and not to acknowledge AIDS’s deaths and illness, in the world-construction represented in his art. These are the foundational moves of an imperious act of creation. They may seem specious and unsustainable—rather as if he were building a house on top of a hole he’d dug into the earth. But such gestures mimic—with far different purposes and presumably less consequential effects—the world-building moves of political hegemonies: erasing through the tricks of naturalization whole swathes of history or intentionally failing to render historical events lived in the past; not acknowledging the deaths and suffering of any whom it deems its enemy or its instrument. In this light, Almodóvar’s fantasy is work with what we call reality and an assault on the injustices and tragedies of the reality that always abuses us.

What is fantasy? Or to be more precise, what do I mean when I write “fantasy” and describe it as revenge? In this book, I plan to keep my attention on artistic work—primarily textual and visual, and/or literary—that bears hallmarks that categorize it in genres of fantasy or the fantastic: thus, primarily, comic books, with references to one unavoidable movie and a scattering of mentions of sci-fi and fantasy genre fiction or speculative fiction. These artistic works are bound to fantasies in our minds—what we might call psychic fantasy or psychological fantasy—via a heavily congested but fast-moving two-way highway. Artistic works are the products of psychic fantasies of the artist, distributed and shared, entered into and contributed to, and in immeasurable, countless ways changed by, the audiences of the works. These works stimulate, influence, shape all the various individual minds and psyches that encounter them.

In theorizing about what-fantasy-is, I will be shuttling rapidly back and forth between arts and minds, oft times hovering over one end of the traffic only to need to jet as quickly as possible to the other. This means, I think, that what I am calling “fantasy” describes both the process and its product: fantasizing and fantasies themselves. I’m generally less interested in the origins of fantasies or the whys of fantasy. I’m beginning with the premise that fantasy—especially where fantasy has the kind of political valence I’m interested in, and especially as such fantasy impinges on how we view or how we imagine or how we live with blackness—arises from somebody’s interest in a better world, with variable meanings attached to what counts as better and what is the compass and content of the world that the fantasy seeks to escape from, improve, or obliterate.

What do I mean by “fantasy”? To extend the highway metaphor, there are other important locations—often they pose as one singular location, though this apparent coherence is a ruse—that fantasy crisscrosses and traverses, where fantasy exits to arrive and from which fantasies summon us to depart. And, to mix the metaphor and perhaps shatter it altogether, this location casts its shadow over fantasy, and yet fantasy is also a powerful device by which we perceive or map it. This metaphorical location is reality. In the case of Almodóvar’s fantasy, this would be a person and a period and a catalogue of terrible acts: the real General Franco under whose grim aegis so many dead bodies and lost freedoms entered the necropolis of time.

Simple semiotics tells us that all terms are at least partly defined by what they do not signify. Indeed every term charged with meaning elicits the ghost of its supposed opposite, which haunts it with double and contradictory meaning (this is one reason why the coherence of reality, at least as linguistically described, is always something of a ruse). But “fantasy” is a more directly comparative term than many, and its ghost is quite tangible. The core meaning of “fantasy” is drawn from its contrast with what it, precisely by such contrast, helps constitute: reality. So puissant is this particular not-so-ghostlike ghost that “fantasy” is a term that I think I can say is implicitly disparaging in the English language: its supposed opposite is the noble standard, fantasy the shunned and ridiculed deviation.

Hence the outrage here of a seminal thinker in literary criticism about fantasy, Rosemary Jackson, writing about fantastic literature. Composed deep in the bowels of time that was 1981, Jackson’s screed hardly seems less relevant now than it would have been fifty years before she wrote the words:

An implicit association of the fantastic with the barbaric and non-human has exiled it to the edges of literary cultures. Novelists redeploying some fantastic elements, such as Dickens, Gogol, or Dostoevsky, have been placed differently from Jane Austen, George Eliot, or Henry James, in the establishment of a canon of “great” literature, whilst Gothic novelists, Sade, M. G. Lewis, Mary Shelley, James Hogg, R. I. Stevenson, Calvino, have been relatively neglected. . . . In so far as it is possible to reconstruct a “history” of literary fantasy, it is one of repeated neutralization of its images of impossibility and of desire—both in the trajectories of the literary texts themselves and in the criticism which has mediated them to an intellectual audience.6

“Fantasy” is still more pejorative when its odor is detected infiltrating realms beyond literature and art. Here is my favorite thinker, Frantz Fanon, in the famous “On Violence” chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, cataloguing the necessary elements of transition from colonized stupor to revolutionary awakening that he observed in anticolonial struggles in Algeria and throughout Africa in the 1950s:

After years of unreality, after wallowing in the most extraordinary phantasms, the colonized subject, machine gun at the ready, finally confronts the only force which challenges his very being: colonialism. And the young colonized subject who grows up in an atmosphere of fire and brimstone has no scruples mocking zombie ancestors, two-headed horses, corpses woken from the dead, and djinns who, taking advantage of a yawn, slip inside the body. The colonized subject discovers reality and transforms it through his praxis.7

This epistemic scaffold disparaging fantasy is especially persuasive when it helps build an antiracist political argument like Fanon’s. In such arguments—powerful, enthroned by the lessons of bitter experience, by the horrifying testimonies of injustices both brutal and subtle, and given a crown of thorns by common sense—the “fantastic” is marked and defined by what we know to be its immense distance from relentless material realities, such as the pervasive endangerment and devastation of black people’s lives and the abyssal disparities between black and nonblack (especially white) populations in wealth and the exercise of political power.

Indeed a central component of what makes fantasy fantastic is that fantasies actively occlude the perception of these very material realities. Blackness as a racial, existential, social, and political category is often analytically understood in critical race scholarship to be a project underwritten and sustained by pernicious fantasy: by these lights, the notion that the human species can be intelligently apprehended as belonging to different “races” is a cunning deception (accreted over time) enabling the divide-and-conquer operations of enslavers and colonizers. Thus blackness, as an invention of the fantasy that there are races, acquires meaning primarily through cruelly tendentious misreadings of histories and bodies. No one makes this argument better than Fanon: blackness as an imposition of fantasy on social reality facilitated the creation of a class of readily identifiable slave labor; and blackness was historically crucial in establishing a boundary definition and status marker for the emerging “human” post-1492, thus strengthening the (nonblack) human’s claim to political citizenship in a global world structured by the nation-state, capitalism, colonialism, and modernity.

Racial fantasy in these senses secures material practices of economic exploitation and anchors psychic processes of differentiation and identification: it is a political tool of subjugation par excellence, efficiently organizing economies and social groupings and seductively demanding that all individuals and collectives take up—and believe—racialized terms of self-definition as the price of social belonging and of economic as well as psychic well-being.

This fundamental understanding naturally leads critical race scholarship mostly to condemn or to dismiss fantasy, especially in relationship to blackness, as useless at best or at worst as sinister and harmful. “Fantasy” then is a term discrediting ideas or political programs or narratives, a way of saying that something fails to meet the need to establish a just social world; or it is a way of describing how injustices are perpetuated in false or duped perceptions of the world. The implication is that if our perceptions were purged of the distorted shapes into which fantasies of race and blackness skew them, we would have a more accurate and very possibly more just social world.

What is fantasy? Or to be more precise, what meanings of fantasy—especially as it appears in the struggles against antiblackness and racism, in the advocacy of queerness and the fight against homophobia—am I trying to rescue “fantasy” from or to complicate?

Fantasy is misperception. Fantasy is not knowing or failing miserably to know whatever we are trying to know: it is a retreat from or a refusal of knowledge. Fantasy is inaccurate in relationship to the real. “Fantasy” is a word for what is not happening, what we are not doing, or what is at best merely the precarious inchoate precursor of a doing. Fantasy as an object of intellectual analysis names the antithesis or serves as the antonym of authentic relations to the temporal past (history) and the temporal present (reality) and has meager, if not dangerously opiate-like, purchase on the temporal future.

The most trivializing common notion of fantasy entails the idea that it’s about childish or naive wish fulfillment. Lauren Berlant says in Cruel Optimism, “fantasy recalibrates what we encounter so that we can imagine that something or someone can fulfill our desire.”8 I quote this definition almost at random (the sentence leapt to my attention as it was quoted by one of my former dissertation students) to indicate the pervasiveness of an understanding of fantasy as suspect deception, as diversion from reality.

Hence, again, Rosemary Jackson:

When fantasy has been allowed to surface within culture, it has been in a manner close to Freud’s notion of art as compensation, as an activity which sustains cultural order by making up for a society’s lacks. Gothic fiction, for example, tended to buttress a dominant, bourgeois, ideology, by vicarious wish fulfillment through fantasies of incest, rape, murder, parricide, social disorder. Like pornography, it functioned to supply an object of desire, to imagine social and sexual transgression.9

Jackson is talking about the fantastic in literature rather than identifying fantasy in politics and social life as Berlant is, but her grievance is with the logic of a critical approach to fantasy that obtains—and reigns—over both domains. The lubricious fit between the critique of literary genre fantasy and the critique of political fantasy suggests that these otherwise-disparate kinds of fantasy are not unconnected—if not quite sisters, then cousins at least. The literary fantastic and political fantasy both answer desire (fulfilling desire, supplying its object), but sadly in a kind of pathetic, stupid way, such that under the bright light of critique, these desires appear more like spasms than motives, the products of infantile consciousness rather than maturity.

I align in sympathy with Jackson, at least as far as the direction of her grievance. But Jackson doesn’t disagree that “vicarious wish fulfillment” is at best of little use and at worst pernicious. For her, fantasy is indeed worthy of mockery if it’s like pornography, engaging in what is implied to be the de minimis activity of “imagin[ing] social and sexual transgression.” Of course, as someone who engages with porn studies, I have learned to apply pressure to this kind of easy dismissal of “low” culture and believe that it is precisely such formulations that cry out to be leveraged. Is “vicarious wish fulfillment” and merely imagining social and sexual transgression so fully compatible with or assimilated into sinister projects of sustaining of cultural order or pacification of resistance to that order? Do these phrases describe all that such activities entail? Is fantasy “compensation” only or even primarily a stabilizing, pacifying force?

To ask these questions as though Jackson in her ventriloquy of her opposition or Berlant in her offhand disdain would answer resoundingly in the affirmative is disingenuous, I admit. It’s clear enough that the opposition being set up between resisting and sustaining is too easy and simply can’t hold up in any absolute way: a work of art or of imagination is almost always too incoherent and variegated within itself to either only resist or sustain the cultural order, and in any case, nothing that resists is without a fundamental relation to that which it challenges, since the very hegemony it opposes supplies its terms and its content. And this is to hold at bay whether or to what extent the cultural order is ever successfully an order at all, much less an abiding one. The critical positions I’m using Jackson to identify and Berlant to represent would agree that our discursive universe and the reality it interacts with and in part constitutes is layered, contradictory, and complex. As Jackson acknowledges while she argues that no, fantasy is worth our attention and does do something serious, “To attempt to defend fantasy as inherently transgressive would be a vast, over-simplifying and mistaken gesture.”10

Yet dependent though these questions may be on a bit of caricature and straw-man legerdemain, they do serve to focus my interest. Even apart from these simple provisos, I want to locate, track, and/or theorize the incoherences and perhaps not-altogether-assimilable effects of wish fulfillment and imagination as they are manifested in fantasy literature and comics, in their relation to black and queer politics. If fantasy doesn’t as a logical matter only sustain the unjust status quo that decrees blackness and queerness must occupy lower rungs on its hierarchy, and if therefore we can surmise that fantasy as an experiential matter seems to do something that asks for an account, what might we say that fantasy “does,” or what might we say that fantasies “are”?

***

What is fantasy? The understanding that fantasy is about stabilizing and pacifying is an understanding that supposes fantasy functions like a fetish. The general use of the term “fetish” in criticism of art/literature and in politics is borrowed largely from its coining within psychoanalytic theory and within Marxist theorizations. To say “fetish” is, again, to describe a logic. To make brief work of a subject that is ridiculously vast—but that I have every intention of corralling and holding in tight constraints throughout Keeping It Unreal—we might say that a fetish is a substitute that does the work that synecdoche does in rhetoric and poetics. The fetish substitutes for something experienced as missing, covering over a perceived lack by reference to some ostentatious figure that serves to re-create the whole, and yet that never ceases to remind us that it is makeshift and that thus the whole is lost. The fetish is the part that doesn’t fully fit and that shows us we can never have the whole, but paradoxically by calling attention to its substitutive properties, it summons into nigh-tangible experiential reality the ideal of wholeness.

Fantasy as fetish describes what fantasy is, or how it plays a part in modes of living or structures of power when we talk about “national fantasy” (the fantasy that we are part of a nation) or “racial fantasy” (the fantasy that we belong to a race or races).

Additionally we know, or we suppose we know, what a sexual fetish is and that, whatever we suppose a sexual fetish to be—chiefly it’s some sort of sexual interest very unlike your own—a sexual fetish is invested with, permeated by, made up of “sexual fantasy”: an erotic attachment to various “parts,” which in the emphasis that erotic investment confers on them evoke and subsume the “whole” of the attachment itself—leather, an ankle, a comic-book superhero costume, streams of piss, copious body hair.

At the same time, “sexual fantasy” itself is yet another instance of fetishism’s logic, since the function of the fetish in sexual fantasy is to confer on the fantasizer a kind of “control” and “fulfillment” that are (false) mental and bodily experiences of “wholeness.” Indeed, “sexual fantasy” might be a term related to sexual fetish in at least bidirectional synecdochical ways, just as in common usage a sexual fetish is the exemplar of fetishism. Concomitantly, we can see “sexual fantasy” at the root of, and as an exemplar of, how fetishism functions in national and racial fantasy—thus naming the sexual or psychosexual dimensions of both national and racial fantasies.

Here I wish to submit the formulation of fantasy as fetishistic to somewhat hostile pressure. Though I am sure that fetishistic logic informs and perhaps governs how we tend to critically approach fantasy, especially when we think about fantasy politically or in its social(izing) operations, I am not sure fetishism is the correct identification of the logic of fantasy.

Over the course of the next several groups of paragraphs, I want to try a thought experiment to help me think about fantasy.

(1) Here is a list of familiar fantasy plots. Let us think of them as fantasy propositions. These are descriptions of literary or paraliterary genre fantasies, innovated by particular creators, reproduced and distributed in media of mass entertainment, primarily books and comics, but also movies. Following the caricatures I’ve been using, we can imagine that these are the sorts of fantasies that Rosemary Jackson is talking about (she isn’t, actually, but never mind that). I’ll call this Set A:

A kind-hearted, slightly cowardly, well-to-do bachelor in a rural and suburban country finds a powerful magical ring; this ring was long ago forged by a devious and evil semidivinity, and now the semidivinity wages a war to recapture his ring and to subjugate the world with its powers; but the bachelor discovers reserves of indomitable courage within him as he embarks on an incident-filled, terrifying quest to destroy the evil ring and thwart its master’s plans of world domination, accompanied and assisted by his dear friends—a great wizard, an elf, a dwarf, and an exiled king aiming to regain his rightful throne. . . .

A child from a planet far away populated by a species exactly like northern Europeans on Earth escapes his home planet’s fiery destruction in a tiny spaceship ark built by his genius father. The spaceship ark lands in Kansas, where a kindly childless couple adopt him. As he grows into an adult, the alien discovers that on Earth he can fly, has great powers of strength and speed and magnificently heightened senses, is invulnerable to harm, and can burn through the hardest substances with mere sight; possessed of these powers and more, the alien fights for the values that his adoptive parents taught him: truth, justice, and the American Way. . . .

A bespectacled, bullied high school nerd gets bitten by a radioactive spider and gains superhuman strength, agility, reflexes, and senses to combine with his scientific genius; he sets out to make money as an entertainer, but when a thief whom he refused to aid the police in apprehending murders his beloved uncle, he learns that with great power comes great responsibility, and dedicates himself to fighting crime. . . .

A bespectacled boy with a scar on his forehead grows up in suburban England, under the neglectful and sometimes brutal care of his aunt and uncle, who despise him; a mysterious stampless letter arrives at his house, and soon he learns that he is a wizard, the child of two wizards murdered by a powerful, evil wizard who also tried to kill the boy, but failed; the boy is brought to a school for wizards and witches, makes lifelong friends, learns magic and more about his heritage, and engages in a protracted battle with the homicidal evil wizard, who pursues the boy with relentless enmity and activates a plan for world domination. . . .

A rich boy’s parents are murdered before his eyes by a mugger; with his wealth and his rage as unlimited resources, the boy as he matures into a man, trains his body and mind to the pinnacle of human perfection, and, adopting the guise of a frightening creature of the night, wages a personal war against the mentally disturbed criminals that regularly terrorize his city, aided by a succession of young apprentice crime-fighters. . . .

A young woman blessed by the Greek gods with gifts of superhuman strength, speed, and intelligence comes of age on an isolated island populated by immortal warrior women; when an American pilot crash-lands on the island where no man has walked before, the young woman wins a contest of skills to return with the pilot to the United States, aiming to heal the wrongs of a violent, unjust world as the champion of her people’s complex philosophy of peace and equality achieved via martial skill, warrior courage, and coded BDSM practices.11

(2) Next, following is a list of fantasies of an altogether different sort—the kinds of fantasies my caricature of Lauren Berlant refers to: political fantasies, national fantasies, social fantasies, the fantasies that thread their way through and sometimes frame our daily lives. These, being descriptions of collective fantasies without singular or clear narrative focus, appear more in the form of statements of fact than as fictive plots; but this does not make them any less—or any more, for that matter—fantasies. (Or at least I’ll say so provisionally.) I’ll call this set of fantasy propositions Set B:

The United States is an example of a democracy and a republic. A republic is a form of democracy. In republican representative democracy—or to use a somewhat out-of-fashion but more accurate term, in indirect democracy—groups of actual people’s interests are represented by delegates whom these actual groups of people carefully vet and approve and send to the capitals of their towns, cities, regions, and nations to govern them on their behalf—which makes it then a form of self-government. . . .

There is a deity of definable attributes, with a name or set of names by which the deity can be addressed, and this deity is much like a member of the human species but infinitely wiser and more powerful. This deity created the entire universe with all its galaxies and quasars and black holes and white dwarf stars and gas-cloud planets, and yet the deity is also simultaneously deeply interested in prescribing various, sometimes all, aspects of human existence and behavior here on Earth, such as what kind of sex we have and with whom and what we eat and on what days and at which times. Moreover, it is possible to fully comprehend exactly what this deity desires of us regarding our eating and sexual habits, because the deity has revealed itself to select human beings, and these select intermediaries have written down the deity’s instructions. This universal deity rewards good people and punishes bad people; sometimes this deity sends droughts, floods, earthquakes, diseases, plagues, and so on as forms of punishment for wicked people, as a reminder of the deity’s power and as a nudge to wicked people to change their ways. A public, repeated statement of one’s submission to this deity or one’s dedicated involvement in the practices prescribed by this deity is both expected and demanded. And concomitantly it is expected and understandable, if not required, that people who assert their allegiance to one such deity should torture, murder, or otherwise castigate and subjugate those people who assert their allegiance to another such deity (even if the competing deities are very similar); or should so treat those people who are loyal to the same deity but according to some markedly different interpretation of the deity’s or the deity’s prophet’s instructions; or should so treat those few who believe in no deity at all. . . .

It is not really possible (nor is it desirable) to live too closely with people who are too different; compatibility indicated by sameness is most desirable in social life. Sameness makes us safe. Difference makes us uncomfortable and threatens us. The languages people speak are significant measures of the differences between us. What set of genitals and/or body types each individual is born with is a very significant measure of the differences between each of us and everyone who is or was not born with a similar set of genitals and/or body types. The continuum of skin “colors” manifested in the human species is significant: thus, a very, very significant measure of difference between groups of people—and the key to all kinds of distribution of social goods—is “race.” We all know exactly which race is which and who belongs to which, and in the rare instances that we don’t know, it is because something unsettling or freaky has occurred or we have been deceived or there has been some unwonted “mixture” between our otherwise clearly distinct races. . . .

It is reasonable to inquire into the sexual habits and experiences of other people, even if—perhaps especially if—we are not having and never will have sex with any of these other people. This is because sexual habits and experiences are very, very important measures of difference and of sameness, and much depends on assessments of the sexual lives of other people. When we assess people’s morality, their goodness or badness as human beings, we can and should be mostly concerned with their sexual habits and experiences—or, as is often the more accurate description, with what we think we know about their sexual habits and experiences, since we have not and probably never will have sex with the vast majority of the people whose morality we judge, ever. . . .

Adults naturally partner with each other as two-person couples, and coupledom intrinsically involves a mutual promise not to use one’s genitals or other body parts in any kind of sexual, romantic, or pleasure-generating way with someone not part of the two-person couple. Thus, the most important part of other people’s sexual habits and experiences that we want and need to know has to do with whether these other people are somehow using their genitals or bodies with someone who is not their spouse or publicly recognized partner: this is called cheating, and the very worst, most hurtful and destructive thing you can do in your two-person couple is to fail to submit to your spouse’s or partner’s de facto ownership of your genitals and/or pleasure-producing body parts. . . .

There exist entities called nations, which consist of hundreds of thousands, if not tens of millions or billions, of persons. These nations, or nation-states, have histories, cultures, geographies, and people(s) with putatively similar characteristics that set them apart from all other nations, including the nations with which they share borders (borders being the natural demarcation lines between nations). However, not all of the members of a given nation, sadly, are the same, which is a source of vexation and a cause of intranational violence for all the reasons stated earlier. As in the case of our declared allegiances to deities with different names, it is expected and understandable, if not required, that persons who are members of one nation should torture, murder, and otherwise castigate and subjugate persons who are members of other nations—or should so treat members of their “own” nation whose difference from the nation’s image of itself is self-evident. . . .

It is expected and understandable that for each of us, the people whom we most care about and who most care about us are those most closely genetically related to us, whom we call our “family”; it is also expected and understandable that we mistrust, or dislike, those who are not most closely genetically related to us. Moreover, determining who is genetically “close” as opposed to “not close” to us requires no skill in genetics; figuring out who’s family is very easy. . . .

(3) I admit that rage underwrites my list of the fantasies of Set B. But even allowing for having let the list get away from me, my point is that although Set A lists different kinds of fantasies than Set B, both sets enumerate fantasies. While we can’t say that the relation between the sets is strictly causal one way or the other, we can certainly say that they do nevertheless relate to each other; and it isn’t unreasonable to suppose that the propositions of A, being initially the products of individual minds engaged in creative imagination, refer and/or respond to the propositions of B, which are collectively imagined and thus provide significant elements of the social and political contexts in which the initial producers of A are ensconced and from which those producers and their products therefore cannot be extricated.

It is moreover precisely by positing the items on each list as propositions that they are revealed as having in common the character of fantasy. According to The Oxford Dictionary of American English, among the meanings of the noun form of “proposition” are,

1. The action or an act of propounding or proposing something for consideration; something proposed for consideration. . . . A question proposed for solution, a problem, a riddle. . . . 2. The action or an act of representing or displaying something. . . . 3. a. A statement, an assertion; the making of a statement about something; spec. in Logic, a statement expressed in a form requiring consideration of its truth rather than its validity. . . . b. Logic. Either of the premises of a syllogism, esp. the major premiss. . . . 4. A scheme or plan of action put forward, a proposal. . . . 5. Math. A formal statement of a truth to be demonstrated (a theorem) or of an operation to be performed (a problem) (freq. including also the demonstration).

A proposition has yet to be demonstrated to be true, in logic or math; a proposition is to be considered. A proposition is not as yet, and may not ever be, proven to be true, actual, real. A description of a—perhaps the—fundamental character of fantasy, when we can see fantasy as proposition, is its provisional unreality, its demonstrable failure to be demonstrated. We cannot demonstrate satisfactorily the concerns God has with our eating habits, let alone the deity’s existence; nor can we show that there is a person who has been bitten by a radioactive spider who is currently swinging, or has ever swung, from Manhattan rooftops. Fantasy as proposition, or propositions in the aspects they share with fantasies, describe a relation to, an orientation in thought and/or action toward, something for which no sense physical or psychic provides consistent evidence of its existence: you cannot see it, you cannot hear it or taste it or touch it or smell it, nor does it impinge in any direct way on your emotions, but you’re sure it’s there. This describes what exists “in”—which is really to say what exists as the substance of—our minds.

The unkind synonym for “fantasy,” then, might be “lie,” for the substance of fantasy is its insubstantial untruth.

A warning that we’re about to get a little dizzy: this is a good place, maybe, to experience the effect of fantasy, which disturbs our perception of what’s real but is probably not so great for thinking productively about fantasy’s definitions. With this caveat, onward: What is the real that fantasy defines itself in contradistinction to? The conundrum is that fantasy can be said to have no existence at all, because fantasies are not real—though immediately things get tricky: fantasy does not exist, though it is the opposite of and therefore a guarantor of reality (by, according to simple Aristotelian logic, providing the exemplar of what reality is not). Everything that exists can only be accounted as existent by virtue of its being real—which is of course a tautology.

If that which guarantees reality does not exist, does this not weaken reality’s claim to exist? Hegel, in his fable of the rise of consciousness in a social relation, supposed that the social relationship between two consciousnesses, each vying to establish its existence for itself, would via a life-or-death struggle become a hierarchical relationship: the lord and bondsman, or master and slave. The lord/master “is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other [the bondsman/slave] is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another.”12 This resolution is, however, inherently unstable. The master could not forever maintain its precedence over the slave, since it was the slave’s acknowledgment, after being subjugated by the master, of the master as master that secured mastery. Since the slave’s subjugation rendered him instrumental to the master, his existence inessential, he could not ultimately serve as the master’s guarantor. “The unessential consciousness is for the lord the object, which constitutes the truth of his certainty of himself. But it is clear that . . . the object in which the lord has achieved his lordship has in reality turned out to be something quite different from an independent consciousness. What now really confronts him is not an independent consciousness, but a dependent one. He is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself. On the contrary, his truth is in reality the unessential consciousness and its unessential action.”13

As we know all too well, in the series of binary analyses endemic and arguably foundational to the epistemologies of the modern world’s European colonizers, the binaries continually recur to hierarchies of master-slave rather than to equalities: white-black, man-woman, no less than reality-fantasy. But the central fulcrum cannot hold, and rough beasts ever slouch back to the site of the apotheosis that was supposed to have banished them. Substitute “reality” for “lord” in the previous quotations, “fantasy” for “bondsman.” How real is the real if fantasy is its opposite?

We can be further distracted here, in that the attempt to render a more accurately descriptive account of fantasy—what fantasy does, how it operates, in lived experience—must also shed some light on those imaginary aspects of various real facts: of blackness, of race, of gender, of sexuality, of ability, and beyond. In finding ways to use fantasy, we also take great note of how fantasies use us to build the prisons of our reality. For an incisive instruction on how this works with regard to blackness, look back for a moment to Fanon. Here in Black Skin, White Masks, we find Fanon companionably mocking ostensibly liberatory iterations of blackness in the Negritude movement and also in Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”:

The Negro, alerting the prolific antennae of the world, standing in the spotlight of the world, spraying the world with his poetical power . . . I embrace the world! I am the world! The white man has never understood this magical substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself. He discovers he is the predestined master of the world. He enslaves it. His relationship with the world is one of appropriation. But there are values that can be served only with my sauce. As a magician I stole from the white man a “certain world,” lost to him and his kind. When that happened the white man must have felt an aftershock he was unable to identify, being unused to such reactions. The reason was that above the objective world of plantations and bananas and rubber trees, I had subtly established the real world. The essence of the world was my property. Between the world and me there was a relation of coexistence.14

That is, the false image, the fantasy, of “the Negro” produced out of histories of enslavement and colonization in part makes the modern world; thus the world is in part that false image, is a fantasy, produced out of those true histories. This sinister sleight of discourse and reality may be backed up by countless acts of violence and intimidation, countless bullets and links of chain. But the fundamental tool of fantasy is thought, and a different thought—perhaps a 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 (and probably some bullets, too). Reality—certainly the reality we interface through our social relations, through our cultures, through our languages—is unfinished and ever will be. In fantasy, we may detect reality’s future shapes as well as its present habitability.

Obviously, realness as the antithesis of fantasy has no necessary connection with materiality, nor is the real limited to its being available to the physical senses: we can testify that consciousness is real without being material—even if Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher of existentialism, points out that consciousness is “nothing” and that it “annihilates” the world in which it is enmeshed by positing itself as separate from that world and removing itself from the immediate immersion in the world, he says that consciousness “exists” a body. Consciousness is real because our embodied selves experience it, and the same can be said of love and pain. 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 be made up, as it were, of fantasy.

We need only notice this labyrinth’s twists and snares, though; we don’t have to go inside. The general functionality and unknowable layout of the ideal labyrinth—its character—is itself a guide to understanding that the relationship between fantasy/propositions/lies and reality/actuality/truth/the world is not unlike the relationship we have seen between Set A and Set B:

Both former and latter define themselves in opposition to one another; and the terms of Set A are set by Set B even as the former contradicts the latter; and Set B is fundamentally informed by Set A in that human perception and experience of Set B do not happen without the significant contribution of Set A as an organizing structuring of Set B—such that all these contradictory assertions are right, and such that while fantasy ≠ reality and Set A ≠ Set B, the sum, measure, and content of neither can be fully distinguished from the other.

(4) Set A lists lies we pay money to read or to see performed and let play in our minds. Set B lists lies we live by. If both Sets A and B are a list of lies, it follows that there should be no restraint on making up other lies, as there should be no restraint, logically speaking, on the range or kinds of fantasies that any of us might entertain.

Next, then, are some counters—or, strictly speaking, counterparts—to the recognized fantasies listed earlier. We can think of these as another list of propositions, which could be either individual or works of art—fantasy art, which individuals or groups of individuals “propose” as an act of creation, and which audiences, readers, revisers (such as fan fiction) communities engage with and engage in:

A bespectacled, bullied high school nerd gets bitten by a radioactive spider and gains superhuman strength, agility, reflexes, and senses to combine with his scientific genius; he sets out to make money as an entertainer, but when his unarmed half brother is killed by police in an incident in which he fails to intervene, he learns that with great power comes great responsibility and dedicates himself to protecting people of color in his city from dirty cops and a corrupt system of justice. . . .

A child from a planet far away populated by a species exactly like southern Africans on Earth escapes his home planet’s fiery destruction in a tiny spaceship ark built by his genius father. The spaceship ark lands in Mississippi, where a kindly childless couple adopt him. As he grows into an adult, the alien discovers that on Earth he has great powers of strength, speed, flight, invulnerability, and sense perception; possessed of these powers and more, the alien fights for the values that his adoptive parents taught him: justice for the poor and downtrodden, societal healing from the fatal wounds of slavery and Jim Crow, establishing the American Dream for all. . . .

A kind-hearted, slightly cowardly, well-to-do bachelor from the suburbs finds a powerful superscience device called a Cosmic Cube, created by an evil-genius Nazi war criminal who intended to use it to establish the world domination of an eternal Fourth Reich. The Nazi genius wages a war to recapture the Cube, but the bachelor discovers reserves of courage and indomitable willpower within him as he embarks on an incident-filled, terrifying quest to master the Cube’s powers and, with the guidance of a wizardly immortal warrior woman from an island of Amazons, learns to use the Cube to eliminate poverty, bigotry, exploitation, and war from all human societies and to heal the damage that humans have done to the biosphere, aided by his dear friends, a diverse group of freedom fighters and activists. This I’ll call Set A(x).

Set B(x): Racial, gender, and sexual difference are insignificant differences, so much so that “race,” “gender,” and “sexuality” have no meaning beyond neutral descriptions, of admittedly loose accuracy, of a person’s genetic heritage or aggregation of physiognomic traits. Or there is racial, gender, and sexual difference and they are significant, but such differences have no bearing on or even statistical correlation with differences or hierarchical distributions of political power, economic wealth, and mental and physical health and life chances. Or, perhaps best yet, there was such a thing as racism and sexism and homophobia, and so on, and these differences once upon a time had meaning, but now they are historical circumstances having no greater bearing on daily life or even what we study in history than the facts that the Khazars once dominated Silk Road trade or that Vikings raided Paris off and on for a couple of hundred years more than a millennium ago or that probably there was once an ancestral species to which the organisms that would later evolve into humans and cephalopods both belonged. . . .

Sexual, romantic, familial relationships between humans imply no necessary hierarchy of power between the partners or members: they have no necessary or preordained choice of partner(s) designated by such partner(s)’ gender, race, and so on, and such relationships do not have any necessary preordained number of partners or members. Nothing in such wholly voluntary partnerships or families entails anyone’s ownership or control of liaisons of any kind outside the partnership or family. The two necessary aspects of these partnerships or family-memberships are that all involved have agreed to enter them and to renegotiate them as desired and that all bear significant responsibility for the care of any children that may result from, or have been adopted into, the family-partnership collective.

(5) For me, there’s a certain zesty excitement in the simple act of committing to laptop-screen and paper the fantasies in the x sets. Partly the excitement arises from combining of fantasy typologies, something akin to a genre crossing that violates conventions. Chiefly my excitement arises from the recognition, in embarking on this crossing, that these genre markers are conventions governing what it is possible even to imagine: recognizing in the act of surpassing them that somehow the logics of these typologies have loomed larger than mere fences of convention and its habits-cum-rules. Somehow they have felt like walls, walls almost as tangible as the structures of the “built environment,” walls I’m in the process of hurdling.

Even positing the x sets is no simple endeavor, not nearly as easy as we presume that creating with no greater tool than our neuronal activity ought to be and usually is (or is it?). The counterpropositions themselves are endangered by failures of imagination or by the difficulties of sustaining imaginative sparks.

Frankfurt School philosopher Ernst Bloch trumpets the indelibility of the utopian imagination during a public talk with Theodor Adorno in 1964. There Bloch insists that even when mired in the most intractable materialist perspective, where to call something “utopian” is an insult (like calling something a “fantasy” is to ridicule its content), an “it-should-be” desire for other than the unjust present troubles the seemingly all-conquering capitalist monolith.

“If we had not already gone beyond the barriers, we could not even perceive them as barriers,” Bloch avers (and gets Adorno’s assent). “The fact that there is such a sensitivity about an ‘it-should-be’ demonstrates that there is also utopia in this area where it has the most difficulty,” and, “I believe utopia cannot be removed from the world in spite of everything.”15

Here I think of utopia as the kind of fantasy I want to nurture; and I am convinced, or wish to be convinced, of Bloch’s insight. But the fact that it isn’t as easy to imagine the counterpropositions I’ve listed or to sustain them once imagined, even with no necessity of transforming them into consensus reality, is worrying. Maybe utopia cannot be removed, but it can be and is constantly harried to the threshold of vanishing. (Bloch himself teaches us this.)16 For example, it is significant to me that my revision of the comic-book Superman fantasy (apart from my alien visitor’s demographics) is actually pretty close to what Superman’s creators, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, committed to paper. Their Superman leapt tall buildings in the late 1930s in order to defeat the likes of corrupt politicians, manipulative war-profiteer capitalists, and a mine owner who put profit before the safe working conditions of his miners, and to save an impoverished juvenile offender from the harsh penalties of a criminal justice system that was indifferent to his social circumstances. Why did this Superman give way to the icon of an Eisenhower-ish “American Way”? And how do we produce an account for the effects or importance, if any, that flow if we recover the spirit of the original or, alternatively, if we consider the factors that produced this putatively childish and literally paper-thin imaginary character’s strangely political evolution? How might typology-combining fantasies such as those in x effect both the production and dissemination of fantasy genre art and entertainment and the lived realities of our ever-unhappy politics?

I am interested, too, in why within the “privacy” of my own fantasies, I can’t or I don’t imagine myself having privileges that accrue to white bodies. That is, why can’t I on the imaginary plane both “be” black and imagine myself replete with the powers of whiteness?

Such a fantasy might well involve imagining myself as colorless—as in the famous, and curious, clinical anecdote reported by Fanon: “For the Antillean the mirror hallucination is always neutral. When Antilleans tell me that they have experienced it [the encounter with the mirror-image described by Jacques Lacan as the Mirror Stage], I always ask the same question: ‘What color were you?’ Invariably they reply: ‘I had no color.’ . . . It is not I as a Negro who acts, thinks, and is praised to the skies.”17

Or I could fantasize that I’ve been chemically transformed, as in George Schuyler’s bitterly funny 1931 Black No More.

Yes, I shouldn’t have to follow either dubious example. But I don’t do either, nor do I seek any third avenue. It should be possible to fantasize the privileges of whiteness within my own mind—we are, after all, each the protagonist of a drama playing out for the sole audience of ourselves (and sadly, even while we interact with a host of others, that’s too often all we’re doing). But I can’t seem to accrue them to my own self-imagined avatar once I acknowledge race—and apparently I never fail to acknowledge it—as an explicit factor.

These observations are an indication that even if utopia cannot be removed and if barriers are already bowled over by our capacity to imagine barriers as barriers, the power of these barriers is in large part preemptive. Barriers to imagination are powerful because they tilt against our ability to notice that they are barriers and our ability to count as worthwhile an investment in possibilities of living unconstrained by those barriers. These barriers are not merely mistakes of mind, but structures of epistemology and hermeneutics bearing down on and constraining our existence. Thus pushing past them requires heavy counterweights.

Fanon in the final flourish of Black Skin, White Masks describes a measure of that weight, and he intimates to us that the distinctions we might assume between the merely psychic/psychological and the materially hefty body, between imagination and reality, are the very substance of what disables us. “I find myself one day in a world where things are hurtful; a world where I am required to fight,” Fanon writes. “If the white man challenges my humanity I will show him by weighing down on his life with all my weight of a man that I am not this grinning Y a bon Banania figure that he persists in imagining I am. . . . I must constantly remind myself that the real leap consists of introducing invention into life.”18

It may be objected that Fanon is here, as he often is in Black Skin, deeply rhetorical. But Fanon’s point is that the object of his critique—the blackness (read: inhumanity, abjection, etc.) of his body—is itself made up of rhetoric wedded to image, is figural, is fantastical, in such a way that merges nigh imperceptibly into the “weight” of bodies and existence (life).19 Blackness is “lived experience” but fundamentally an occulted experience, where by “occulted” I refer metaphorically to astronomical occultation and more literally to the word’s meaning as “hidden.”

So why might it be difficult, effortful, vexed, for creators of fantasies (including me) to envision rich fantasies of, say, black privilege? Or, à la Siegel and Shuster, are such fantasies in fact not difficult to imagine? Are they rather laboriously censored by the fine machinations of systems of exploitation and oppression-for-the-benefit-of-a-few that constitute and control the distribution of ideas, narratives, and images in human communications defined by commerce?

Following the breadcrumb trails to the dead ends of collective-cum-personal imagination—and making the effort to vault over them—is what interests me here. Perhaps a consideration of these difficulties tells us something about how we get to living happier politics, making these fantasies = reality. In envisioning such combinations, how better might we understand the relationship (assuming there is any) between the two types of fantasy?

Such questions, with admitted tendentiousness, lead to my reframing of fantasy into what I want to call, provisionally, fantasy-acts. This reframing pulls us away from thinking of fantasy as essentially passive and pacifying, from damning it because it is not strongly material or demonstrably powerful. Fantasy-acts allows that fantasy is without the weight or carry or power of “reality,” but it also reminds us that fantasy has some accountable weight or carry or power, so that we have to call fantasy an existent or an act of some kind.

And if this is true, what can we say is the “weight” of these fantasy-acts?

An important part of the answers to these particular questions lies with Lacan’s vital observations of the inextricability of self from language, that vast collective impersonal Other that speaks us into being and authors our (delusions of) self-authorship. But we need not only find this wisdom in Lacan (since I’ve already once announced the avoidance of labyrinths). In the phenomenology of Zen Buddhist thinking, we might find a plainer pathway:

Where does the person we take ourselves to be come from in the first place? Apart from our parents’ genes and their support and care, and society and all it produces for us, there’s the whole network of conditions and circumstances that intimately makes us what we are. How about our thought and feeling? Where does it come from? Without words to think in, we don’t think, we don’t have the emotions and feelings that are shaped and defined by our words. Did we invent this language that constitutes ourselves? No, it is the product of untold numbers of speakers over untold numbers of generations. . . . Literally every thought in our minds, every emotion that we feel, every word that comes out of our mouth, every material sustenance that we need to get through the day, comes through . . . the interaction with others.20

So every fantasy is the product of untold numbers of fantasizers over untold numbers of generations and our interactions with those untold numbers in their myriad forms. For reasons we have yet to fully examine—or to take a stab at greater accuracy, for reasons I’ve not myself explored to my satisfaction—these generations of fantasizers (whose number probably can be told, dating from circa 1492) have not sustained an imaginary of blackness triumphant, blackness redeemed, blackness powerful.

One reason, to be sure, we can understand by again following Fanon: blackness is a category of subhumanity created to subject its bearers to the control and desire of others thus created as white. Hence we can see that blackness highlights and arguably exaggerates the abject universal of the human condition (again, we are always already abject to language, abject to the histories that precede us and determine us). Or we might pose the relation in this way, that blackness does the cultural (as well as the economic, social, political, psychological, and psychic) work of signing, of bearing the abjection that the human—ascending to that position by dint of creating blackness—pretends—lies—fantasizes—that it can slough off. If this is so, the historical conditions giving rise to blackness place an inherent—and severe—limit on the degree to which blackness can be imagined in relation to triumph or power. Blackness as abjection is obviously blackness as antithetical to fantasies of power; one needs a subjected blackness, or something else doing blackness’s work, to fantasize power at all. (We can of course complicate this a great deal if we reconsider what “power” is—which is the subject of Extravagant Abjection.)

Does, then, enjoying fantasy, utilizing its powers—the ability to render fantasy as an act—require privilege? It seems not unreasonable given all I’ve discussed to suppose that a fantasy-act requires first the privilege that comes with insulating oneself from “harsh realities,” the luxury available only to those living in the relative comfort of economic security, those graced to pass their days physically unmenaced. My call for the uses of fantasy might easily appear to be counterproductive or diversionary in the case of blackness, indeed in any situation where survival of the body is at stake. By analogy, it seems nearly axiomatic to dismiss as frivolous, say, an interest in beauty or aesthetic concerns when you are faced with the immediate physical need to abolish conditions of structural impoverishment or to counter state terror and slow genocide by police action. These of course are primary conditions of black communities in many, if not most, places in the world. So is it the case, looking along the axis of relations between fantasy and reality as they graph with racial positioning (as we might in a graph with gender positioning, etc.), that blackness marks you as the one fantasized about, the object of fantasy, subjected to and by fantasy, thus never empowered to fantasize?

Two replies to these questions—related to each other and yet pushing in opposite ways, both concordant and discordant—suggest that fantasy is not solely the province of dominance and hegemony, even though it’s also true that fantasy cannot wholly escape dominant sectors of societies or the hegemonies that rule them:

On the one hand, fantasy defines reality by serving as the limit of the real; and the same processes that make fantasy also underwrite the real—that is, the processes of human consciousness that make a meal out of the worlds that flood our human senses. The latter, as I’ve noted, tells us that what is real and actual is also—and to an extent that is so great that we cannot disentangle this process from reality—realism: which is to say that the real is comprised of constructs produced and repeated by our ancestors’ (both genetic and cultural) perceptions of their environments, as well as our accession to (our abjection to) repetitions and revisions of those perceptions.

Our chief access to reality is through the sense-data-distorting mechanisms of our brains; we are immersed in reality through this primary mediation. Only in extreme cases, when factors in our environment act with the greatest force and violence, are we directly subject to reality: a tornado or a hurricane wind is strong enough to pick us up and move us, but otherwise we are not directly subject to the wind—rather, nerve endings in our skin, in our noses, our ears, transmit the data of the wind’s presence to our brains. Reality is never without this perceptual realism.

Perceptual realism is rarely (perhaps never?) without its cultural component. Thus we can say that there is a history, a catalogue of ancestral and present action, for what we deem to be real—and too, for what in light of what we deem real, what we deem to be possible. By extension, we can surmise that since the unreality of fantasy serves to establish the limit of the real and the possible, the contents of fantasies serve to reinforce foregone conclusions about the range of possibility: one great weapon in the arsenal of epistemology-as-power is then being able to dismiss as impossible a wide range—perhaps an infinite range—of “possibles” under the denigrated term “fantasy.” Perceptual realism is political realism (and it is no coincidence that both realisms become most “real” when they impress themselves on us most violently: when the wind flings you against the rocks, when the lion’s fang sinks into your flesh, when the bullet enters your brain or the chain attached to the bracelets at your ankles tugs).

This is why Bloch and Adorno in their 1964 conversation can agree that there is a clear interest that has prevented the world from being changed into the possible: we are each of us born into a world already enslaved by its realisms, by its versions of the real.

It follows, however, that fantasy functioning as reality’s antonym also potentially unmasks the politics of reality-which-is-really-realism. Here is Adorno rejoining Bloch:

My thesis . . . would be that all humans deep down, whether they admit this or not, know that . . . it could be different. Not only could they live without hunger and probably without anxiety, but they could also live as free human beings. At the same time, the social apparatus has hardened itself against people, and thus, whatever appears before their eyes all over the world as attainable possibility, as the evident possibility of fulfillment, presents itself to them as radically impossible. . . . I would say that this is due to the evident possibility of fulfillment and the just as evident impossibility of fulfillment only in this way, compelling them to identify themselves with this impossibility and make this impossibility into their own affair. In other words, to use Freud, they “identify themselves with the aggressor” and say that this should not be, whereby they feel that it is precisely this that should be, but they are prevented from attaining it by a wicked spell cast over the world.21

In this sense, fantasy’s activity is partly the recovery of the possible, the action—even if not remotely on par with the range of violence available to reality’s actions—of forging some kind of realization of the possible; it is a push back against the tyranny of history.

Here, then, fantasy is not solely a property of, say, whiteness. Says Bloch, “It is impossible to be at the outer margins of the status quo without the ‘dream of a thing’ being irregularly glimpsed.”22 This “dream of a thing” refers to Marx railing against mysticism yet being evocatively gnomic in an 1843 letter. Marx writes, “Our program must be: the reform of consciousness not through dogmas but by analyzing mystical consciousness obscure to itself, whether it appear in religious or political form. It will then become plain that the world has long since dreamed of something of which it needs only to become conscious for it to possess it in reality.”23

We might begin a consideration of fantasy-acts with observations concerning the fantasy of one consciousness, one person. Here are premises: the sole inalienable possession I “have” is my self, if by “self” we mean my thoughts and feelings, both those that are recognized and those that go unrecognized, and if by “thoughts” and “feelings,” we maintain an awareness of their existence in and as an amalgam of all the physical cells of the organism that is called the body. Only I am the locus of my particular thoughts and feelings; and so far as we can tell, only I in the whole history and unhistoried two-hundred-thousand-year past of human beings has experienced the particular combination of my thoughts and feelings. I have no instrument whereby I experience or encounter the world beyond myself but my self (my thoughts and feelings); therefore, the world is not the world to me but is the world as filtered through my self, this one self that no other being has ever “had” or, so far as we know now, will ever have in the future—and nothing will escape this or change it. If this is true, then whatever you or anyone else thinks or feels about what I think and feel cannot be known or experienced and must then be of negligible consequence.

But these thoughts and feelings, it should be objected, do not really “come from” me but from discourse, from the Lacanian Other, as I noted earlier. We cocreate each other’s world; you create mine as I create yours. Our forebears, who never have to answer for their crimes nor will ever be given adequate witness to their suffering, cocreated the worlds we live.

Yet even so, we are not telepaths. As a consequence of this limitation, you will never know with any certainty what I think or feel, and I will never know what you think or feel. You can, if you like, tell me what you want me to think or feel, but you can’t ascertain the success of your command. This is an incontrovertible fact of human existence, of human species-being, an artifact of consciousnesses embedded in and as our separate bodies. Whatever we do or intend in the vast web of our various communications and relations, we must always fail to achieve telepathy (so far); and put differently, as the Temptations once sagely reminded us, any aspiration to be someone else (better, richer, more beautiful), or to overtake someone else to render them into slavish reflections of our masterful ideal selves or solely as instruments of our will, is doomed to failure.24

In this, which is where fantasy lies and what it is—the perhaps-predetermined-but-anyway-inaccessible-to-others play of the mind—we can discern a fundamental resistance to domination. I’m taking the leap to say that in fantasy lies, inherently, resistance: it may well be resistance to things that politically or spiritually we would prefer there be no resistance to—a resistance to recognizing the degree to which our lives are mangled by exploitative forces, a resistance to living in the moment. In these lights, fantasy appears in its typical guise as agent of domination and tool of deception. But I want to turn this mask inside out: fantasy might be under any number of circumstances an agent of domination and deception, but a priori, it is the stuff of resistance. “But nothing can’t stop you from wishin’. You can’t beat nobody down so low” that they can’t wish. Surely, yes, such resistance fails when the body/mind that enacts it is killed or beaten or tortured or starved into a cognizance of nothing other than bare survival—and these are common hallmarks of those of us embodied under the sign of blackness. But it is resistance nonetheless.

What, then, compels me about thinking blackness in relation to fantasy? A possibly paradoxical or counterintuitive move in consideration of what fantasy is, or how fantasy works or what fantasy does, is to give way to the assumption that, on the one hand, fantasy does nothing.

On the other hand, positing fantasy as fantasy-acts breaks down “does nothing” in the following way: fantasy’s admittedly largely immaterial “doing” is the creation of the nonactual—such that “doing” is the mining of the possible latent in the actual, or the denomination and use of what does not exist as a resource; and the “nothing” is the nonactual. The “does nothing” of fantasy-acts is the apparently insubstantial process of creating a nonactual world.

This description of negligible action borrows from the (annoying) ubiquity of current critical and commercial coinage of “world-building” when assessments are made of the strength of any given fantasy-genre literary work. It’s worth noting that such world-creation is modeled on, or surely provides the model for, what we imagine or believe is the divine act par excellence. Surely some element of what fantasy is, is not waiting for our compatriots or our species to come to their senses and discard the lies we currently live by (and frequently kill for) in favor of a better set of lies we might prefer. A fantasy-act is, again, comparative in content: it is not waiting. The fantasizer, which we can think of either as an individual or as works of fantasy art that individuals or groups of individuals “propose” as an act of creation and that audiences, readers, and revisers (fan fiction) communities engage with and engage in, recognizes that the achievement of a just real world is exceedingly complicated and hard. More to the point, the fantasizer recognizes that the wait will be exceedingly long and probably futile, since even if the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, (1) none now living will live to see it get there and (2) the greater likelihood based on history and current trends is that our species will render the environment we depend on for life inhospitable to our continued existence and, like some compulsive serial killer stranded on a desert isle, our species will slowly strangle itself to death.

In response, the fantasizer/fantasy, not-waiting, decrees in Jehovian fashion, “Let it be” to some world not our own.

We might think then of “fantasy” as a kind of placeholder term for the disavowed anxieties of authorship concerning the ineffectual nature of writing or creating art, the unavoidable and perhaps necessary distance between the written (or published) word or the artwork and the social and material relations that it describes: the lag, or lack of cause-effect temporal relationship, between discourse and discursive effects: the failure of the writer or artist to effectually traverse that paradox of doing and being that is described in the lines from Genesis, “in the beginning the word was with God.” In this sense, then, fantasy recuperated takes us into both the dreams of and the frustrations of dreams unrealized of godhood.

The project of this book is to identify some examples of these fantasy-acts, these counterpropositions—Bloch would describe them as imaginative anticipatory illuminations of utopian humanity—and yet also explore the pitfalls and difficulties of sustaining the imagination of them, to strengthen the unreal power of fantasies not by assessing the imminence of their realization in the material and political, but by examining and theorizing them as the acts that I believe they are.

Thus we can begin to feel the weight of the fantasy-act and to see where fantasy might align with the antiracist or anti-antiblackness projects of cultural and political blackness. Black fantasy as I’m interested in it here realizes the possible(s) of blackness that reality declares should not be, transforming “irregular glimpses” of a radical impossible that we know should be—and yet that, for the apparently exigent sake of “keeping it real,” we refuse to know.

What the shape or the content of such a realization of the unreal is I’ll endeavor to theorize in the following chapters. For the moment, I want to think about the shape and content of this unreal black possible:

An unreal, antireal fantasy blackness is freed from the shackles of perceptual and political realism—or at least it’s able to anticipate shaking off those shackles. An unreal fantasy blackness signifies, is lived, feels different from real blackness. We may suppose that this unreal blackness strays far from the narrow monoliths of the blackness we know too well, in number—the range of possible unreal blacknesses is far wider than we can readily guess—as well as content. A “real nigga” under the terms of unreal blackness will probably be difficult to recognize. Perhaps Lennon and McCartney’s line will describe this personage: “Got to be good looking ’cause he’s so hard to see.” Perhaps the primary work of black fantasy will be finding the brushstrokes, the words, the media in which to portray its possibility.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s provocative story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973) 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 on 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 the story’s conceit is 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 Le Guin cleverly begins to expose.

But what gets me excited about the story is the challenge it throws down to our imagination (a challenge that the story deliberately fails to live up to). Describing Omelas, Le Guin’s narrator says,

As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without 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 ’em, join ’em. 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.25

This claim about the treason of art is too harsh, I admit, if I take it up and make it into a critique of African Americanist scholarship and intellectual endeavor. But it is not wholly inapt. Certainly regarding what we canonize and teach under the rubric “African American literature” and even “Afro-diasporic literature,” the description has a ring. For a literature defined by the near unanimity of its voices agitating, analyzing, narrating, and narrativizing political projects of emancipation and antiracism, too great an attention to delight and joy and happiness seems a political betrayal. It isn’t a matter of needing to claim interest or to stave off boredom: for us, only the description of injustice, of torture, murder, intimidation, enslavement, rape, dispossession, is political, is exigent, is real. 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 has 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 missed 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. The happiness that Le Guin’s treasonous artist (must that artist be white even to ask the question?) cannot summon the intellect or interest to engage is for the black writer a foolishness we can’t afford to indulge.

Black fantasy, then, might be aimed at snatching luxury where, as best we can see at any rate, there is none. It is indulgent, foolish, frivolous, merely escapist, naively utopian, in some way wrong—inattentive to the real, defiant of the realist. As I’ve noted, thinking of fantasy as operating like a fetish is in keeping with thinking of fantasy as the poor phantom doppelganger of what’s real. The fetish, even with its generative instabilities and its revelations of the structures of signification and so on, is understood on balance to be above all a misperception straying from accurate perception (i.e., an accurate perception of a problem, a wrong, an injustice), and also therefore a misstep on the pathway to the correction of the problem (which obviously has to be accurately perceived in order to be “solved”). Along these lines, I’m interested 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, how it offers a solution for a problem that isn’t the accurately perceived problem really but is the answer to another query altogether: This must be a query that the fantasy itself, or the fantastic itself, brings about by deciding on an answer to it: the question/problem addressed does not precede the fantasy-as-solution-and-answer, but the fantasy creates or fashions the question out of its sidestepped engagement with the “real,” out of its fiat-like shattering of the real into pieces, as it were, that the fantasy recasts into other uses.

Viewed properly, my investigation is not of fantasy as critique of the real, though fantasy does offer such critiques. My investigation—my fantasy about fantasy?—is of fantasy as a mode of living and fantasy as the transformation of living and being.

***

The argument here is for fantasy as world-making. 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, etc., and the networks of participants in cosplay, in video games, and the universes of ancillary text production in the myriad kinds of fan fiction and slash-fiction.

From time to time, I may cast an eye over these areas, but my interest is in thinking of my chain of overlapping coconstitutive objects (fantasy, black fantasy, queer fantasy, black queer fantasy, and beyond) chiefly as philosophical enterprises. In this, I depend on a definition of philosophy that I like, that of novelist Charles Johnson, whose novels Faith and the Good Thing (1974) and Oxherding Tale (1982) are at least in part assays of black philosophical fiction—black fiction that not only engages with canonical philosophies but concerns itself with what Johnson identifies as the central questions of philosophical traditions “East” and “West”: 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. And black philosophical fiction would then be a mode of teaching or representing a happier or freer way of living.

Likewise, I look to black fantasy as a guide of sorts, one best understood for me by recurrence to spatial metaphors. Black-queer-beyond fantasy for me charts the road to, and/or the sites in, a habitable imaginary. This habitable imaginary is, of course, a parallel to the oft-cited “usable past.” I hate the world as it is, and I’m always looking-wishing for other worlds to go to.

I like following the thought experiment of Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” before the story gets to the beaten child: she thinks about which elements make for a happy urban life, and decides no tradition of monarchy, no slavery, no stock market, no clergy (but there is religion), no soldiers; she thinks at first that there are no drugs, but, deciding that’s puritanical, invents a drug that grants languor and ecstasy and visions and great sex but that isn’t habit-forming.

For my world, I start with the things I’d like to keep from this one—I like the love between beings, the sex, the beautiful varieties of clothes, the cuisines, the jokes and laughter, the entertainments, reading books, learning about things I didn’t know about, and the beauty of nature and the beauty of architecture. I think the vast majority of the rest I can do without. Maybe the cliché rule in this habitation is that not only should you bring a knife to a gunfight, but you should bring a velvet camisole as well; and in this habitation, doing so makes perfect sense . . .

Reaching this habitable imaginary will not require exploding the whole world and starting again from scratch; nor does it require the inevitably and necessarily slow, torturous, Sisyphean struggle of eternal revolution that no one describes as convincingly (or as depressingly) for me as Fanon. It doesn’t require or even encourage you not to follow those pathways, either. This will have to be a habitation that coexists with many others, shared and unshared, that fundamentally contradict it, others that often and perhaps most times are more demanding of my attention (and sometimes—some very few times, I’m sure—are actually more pleasurable or happier) than my habitation. The paving stones of the road there will likely have to be indulgence, foolishness, frivolousness, mere escapism, naive utopianism, just plain wrongness; these will also be how we describe its skyline as we approach, its tourist sites when we get there.

***

You might wonder if what I’m talking about under the term “fantasy-acts” could, at least in the realm of literature, also be described under the genre description “magical realism.” No. The realism of magical realism is where I depart. In magical realism, the realistic always subordinates the magical, rendering it marginal and/or disavowed, such that the various predicates of “real” life remain at last undisturbed. In few, perhaps no, canonical magical realist text—let’s choose three at random: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1982), Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980)—are various fundamentals of our social reality undone: fundamentals such as that men are widely considered more important than women, white people are more powerful than black people, heterosexuality and heterosexual reproduction are more natural than / preferred to / thinkable than homosexuality and homosexual reproduction. In these texts, the laws of physics may be on occasion flouted. But not these laws. This is in no way to criticize those novels or their various political projects, as I love them all: it is to say that if this were not true, these works would qualify neither for the “realist” in magical realism nor for the canons in which they deservedly appear. And moreover, as I believe each of these authors has at least once complained, appending “magical” to “realism” is precisely a way to belittle and scorn the works’ political projects.

You might also wonder if fantasy-acts could be described in the sociocultural and political realm as “resignification.” No. To be sure, resignification is related to the processes I want to find and theorize as fantasy-acts. However, my object is distinguished from resignification in that resignification is a process of cultural evolution—which, precisely, fantasy-acts are far too impatient to wait for. Hence, another way to speak of this book’s project is “how to find some happiness and justice in the age of mass idiocy, willful misery, and wanton injustice whose personal exemplar is 2016 Electoral College winner Donald Trump”—or, rather, the book provides not a guide to how but an assessment, portrait, and theorization of “ways we can already find some happiness and justice, etc.”

You might wonder, too, if I am advocating for fantasy-acts instead of what we tend to think of as “action.” Not at all. Fantasy-acts do not require secession from other kinds of acts. Though it is worth pausing to wonder about 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 (1) someone injuring or killing someone else or depriving them of liberty or (2) someone stealing from someone else resources for living or prospering or (3) rescuing someone—or yourself—from a particular instance of being killed or maimed or deprived of liberty or stolen from or (4) dispensing resources to someone or (5) building something that can be seen, touched, and/or entered, like a domicile, then how do we measure the consequences of the action? How do we become assured of its existence as distinct from the existence of other mental constructs like fantasies? If a million people 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 meetings and dreams of coalition, digital photographs online and on so many smartphone hard drives?

Finally, you might 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, desperate, desperate. Yes. 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 coparenting—is radical imagination.

The ultimate project of Keeping It Unreal—which must reach beyond the book’s end, for its achievement cannot be encompassed in this book, or any single book, alone—is to sight 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.

I don’t expect to find this vision or these how-to instructions fully formed. Bloch again provides a statement of guidance. In a classless society that he is determined to maintain hope for, Bloch envisages a different sort of culture and a different function for the criticism that engages with it. This new criticism “would be, like all fruitful criticism, the mortification of the works, which means to view them as if one were viewing ruins and fragments instead of finished products, glistening works that had been given the final touch. It would be, like all fruitful rebirth, the taking seriously of that anticipatory illumination, which would no longer make the great works useful for precipitous harmony in the service of ideology; rather, it would make them useful information of justice that would arise.”26 This describes how I wish to read my fantasy-acts. Rather than looking to the various works to provide models or finished products representing or imagining new worlds and fully finished habitable imaginaries, I’ll look to them instead as ruins or fragments of such representations, ruins and fragments that entrance us with their gaps—gaps where useful information is transmitted for a justice that will arise. As we’ll see, the media of representation favored in this book is structurally built around, and of, gaps: the gutters between panels of comic books, the necessary incompletion of fictional worlds.

What follows in the partial fulfillment of my announced aims and speculative questions is a description of and a plea for the potential, pleasures, and the efficacy of writing, drawing, and above all of reading—and of reading comic books, at that. Keeping It Unreal entails a phenomenological account of reading superhero comics, especially—though not only—reading superhero comics with attention to the explicit and implicit presence in them of blackness and queerness and of black queerness. In this, I’ve chosen arguably one of the most trivial genres (superheroes) of a medium or expressive form that is least likely to be effective against antiblackness (comics). It is, however, a form that it is probably clear by now that I know well and love, and however quixotic the effort may be, I intend to carefully and attentively describe both my love for it and—which is probably the same thing—the genre’s and medium’s anti-antiblack uses.

***

Gayle Salamon’s recent definition of phenomenological method is apposite: “Phenomenology is a philosophical tradition concerned with how the world gives itself to appearances, and the structures of consciousness through which we apprehend that givenness. . . . Phenomenology is also a method, committed to perceptual beginning as a way of apprehending the world and our place in it. . . . Phenomenological methods endeavor to approach our surroundings anew, shedding our sedimented interpretations so that we might apprehend the world and the things in it with greater clarity.”27

I will always try to walk a difficult line between what is “real” and what is fantasy in producing this account: drawing our attention again and again to the two-dimensional, drawn-by-ink (or other means) effect of reality in comics, while at the same time also tracking this achieved-by-artifice reality-effect’s play with and on perceptions of reality, such that we perceive the distinction between them as, at times and in inspiring ways, delible.

Chapter 1, “I Am Nubia,” theorizes fantasy-acts through a close reading of the cover image of a single comic, issue #206 of Wonder Woman, published in 1973. I describe the history of my fascination with the character Nubia, the famous Wonder Woman’s largely unknown and mostly unstoried black twin sister: my first encounter with her, the fantasies her image ignited, and DC Comics’ relationship with its creation, which until very recently has been ambivalent at best. An analysis of Nubia provides the platform for theorizing a number of elements vital to this phenomenological account of reading superhero comics: the entangled significations attending the figuration of a black female character in superhero comics; and the queerness of comics’ form, as well as the form’s invitations—perhaps requirements—to read queerly; and how superhero comics show that fantasy is a form of being. My guides for reading in this chapter are the unlikely pair of Frantz Fanon and Ramzi Fawaz, both as theorists of comics; along with Frederic Wertham, the author of Seduction of the Innocent and the moving force behind the establishment of the Comics Code Authority, as prosecutor of comics; Eve Sedgwick, as queer fantasist; and Leo Bersani, as queer theorist of fantasy. Comics’ requirement that readers enact “closure”—the imaginative supplement and invention that gives sense and flow to otherwise unconnected, static visual tableaux—is the key matter in chapter 1.

While in chapter 1, I engage in a reparative reading of Nubia’s unpromising cover image, in chapter 2, “Can the Black Superhero Be?,” I let well-earned paranoia take the forefront, as I identify the antiblack elements at the core of the superhero genre. The pairing of “black” and “superhero,” I argue, is conceptually difficult, especially because of blackness’s association with criminality, monstrosity, and abjection, whereas the superhero is conceived as the innocent, all-good, usually beautiful victor. I examine these pitfalls of conceptualizing a black superhero through analyses of the origin stories and depictions of the characters Blade and Luke Cage. I end the chapter with an extended consideration of the first black superhero, the Black Panther, and of what one of the Black Panther character’s creators calls “the strange gripping legend of Wakanda.” My analysis of the Panther, the history of the character’s creation, the cultural phenomenon of the 2017 movie adaptation of the comic, and of the Nigerian American speculative fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s treatment of the Black Panther, returns the chapter to a deeper dive into a formal element of comics briefly noted in chapter 1: comics’ disarrangement of linear temporality and “layering of time,” as the comics scholar Hillary Chute describes it. This formal fundamental of comics—something that makes comics queer—enables black superhero stories and their readers to use their paranoia to navigate the dangerous waters of antiblack and racist modern discourse, as that discourse is reflected in the concept of the superhero. The Black Panther, I argue, is an example of how superhero comics may queer the history that produces blackness.

Chapter 3, “Erotic Fantasy-Acts,” takes up a specter that haunts the previous analyses and that also haunts the history of superhero comics. This specter is the suspicion, the feeling, or the hope, and the conviction, that superhero comics are actually queer sexual fantasies. In these suspicious, or hopeful, readings, the genre’s visual conventions—especially, of course, centralized representations of the hypertrophic male body, which become especially charged when the body is represented as black—serve as subornation, recruitments, as it were, teaching readers, as David Halperin puts it, “how to be gay.”28 Having identified queer formal qualities in superhero comics and queer modes of reading/viewing superhero comics in the foregoing chapters, in chapter 3, I look at queer content in superhero comics. And, having touched on this matter in chapter 2, I look more closely at the intersection between representations of blackness and representations of queerness in superhero storytelling. I begin by examining an influential, if largely forgotten, essay by Gershon Legman that was published in the late 1940s. Legman was an associate of Frederic Wertham (again, the moving force behind the establishment of the Comics Code Authority). Legman was also quoted by Frantz Fanon. I consider Legman’s wildly homophobic claims about the supposed queer content of Golden Age comics, claims that, I argue, are unconvincing with regard to what we actually find on the Golden Age superhero comics page, but point us usefully toward what we as readers can find in the gutters of the page, in our acts of imaginative closure. I then pivot to closely read stories that feature black male superhero or superhero-esque characters in pornographic comics—a site where we do see queer sexual content explicitly represented. I consider comic strips by two black creators, Belasco and David Barnes, both creations from the 1990s, and work by a white gay cartoonist in the twenty-first century, Patrick Fillion. I conclude chapter 3 with a meditation on how porn comics with black male superhero figures, by directly engaging the attribution of nonnormative sexuality to black bodies, find ways to represent the blackness of their protagonists not as a contradiction of the superhero concept (a problem we see wrestled with in the stories of Blade, Luke Cage, and the Black Panther) but as the source of their superpower. The representational strategies engaged by these porn comic strips is not of course free, however, of pitfalls in a world that so values whiteness that we are all, as Isaac Julien argues, snow queens.