Literatura académica sobre el tema "Black Superheroes"

Through the neocybernetic concept sympoiesis, the comic book Black Orchid can be understood as a media ecology, where the feedback between the reader and the material environment of the comic book emerges as a distributed cognition. I will argue that the reader of the comic book participates in the production of aesthetic experience, and, more importantly, that this participation is not only a question of joining in on the hermeneutic circle, where the reader interprets the comic book and creates a storyworld. From a media-ecological perspective, aesthetic participation is also material and embodied; it is a question of participating in the emergence of an environment. In such a reading, Black Orchid tangibly stages an act of becoming, an event of ontogenesis.

This paper aims to present the study about the representation of female superhero characters and gender roles in Avenger: Endgame. This study is justified to be important as females usually have their stereotypical representation in mass media, including film. Thus, it is crucial to explore and analyze whether or not female superheroes are depicted similarly. There are three main characters analyzed in this movie, namely Gamora, Black Widow, and Nebula. This study applies the semiotics method with a qualitative approach whereby Roland Barthes Semiotics is employed as the theoretical foundation of the analysis and strategy in this study. The research has focused on the representation of gender roles and physical manifestations of the characters in the film. The study has shown that (i) each of the characters plays several roles based on the context of the story, (ii) the balance of power between male and female are not equally distributed, and lastly (iii) Gamora and Nebula being different species than Black Widow which is human, had their appearance interpreted to possess a human-like body, yet the pattern of body size among these three-female superheroes sends a message that this body shape is the “ideal and desirable” body type.

Exploring two case studies ‐ Thor and Black Panther ‐ the article reveals how the use of Science and Entertainment Exchange (SEEX) advisers can help inspire the next generation of STEM careerists and popularize a variety of formerly marginalized scientific concepts. Blending interviews with SEEX leaders, the science consultants who worked on the films and Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) producer, Jeremy Latcham, this article blends a production economy perspective with critical analysis to better understand how the ideology of science circulates within the MCU and how its films are working to disrupt outdated notions of science and scientists.

In the post-Civil Rights late 1960s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) artist Emory Douglas created visual messages mirroring the US Western genre and gun culture of the time. For black people still struggling against severe oppression, Douglas’s work metaphorically armed them to defend against daily injustices. The BPP’s intrepid and carefully constructed images were compelling, but conversely, they motivated lawmakers and law enforcement officers to disrupt the organization aggressively. Decades after mainstream media vilified Douglas’s work, new generations celebrate its prescient activism and bold aesthetics. Using empathetic strategies of reflecting black communities back to themselves, Douglas visualized everyday superheroes. The gun-carrying avenger/cowboy hero archetype prevalent in Westerns did not transcend deeply embedded US racial stereotypes branding black people as inherently dangerous. Douglas helped the Panthers create visual mythology that merged fluidly with the ideas of Afrofuturism, which would develop years later as an expression of imagined liberated black futures.

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2017
In November 2011 Marvel Comics introduced the re-imagined incarnation of one of their top tier superhero characters, Spider-Man. Marvel proposed the new identity of the hero as Miles Morales, a 13-year-old boy of African American descent. It represents the first significant alteration to the character in almost half a century. Further, Marvel suggested that Miles is evidence of both their commitment to diversity, transformation and the representation of a multicultural society that includes different identity propositions. This study explores the enunciation on of Miles’ identity counterpoised with that of the normative discursive enunciation of heroism in comics within the context of intersectional politics. A central focus is the manner in which Miles’ rendering can be interpreted as discursively disruptive and transformative, especially in the depiction of race and class. The study views Marvel’s representation of Miles as not only a proposition of black postcolonial heroism but also that of the scaffolding of power and knowledge. It is the contention of this study that UCSM exhibits the markings of colonial and imperial discourse pertaining to identity politics, manifesting in the discursive strategy of mimicry and the mimetics of popular culture, that reveal firmly entrenched power relations limiting Miles’ autonomy. The analysis delves into the articulation of race in the circumscription and demarcation of identity, when read comparatively with classical heroism, supporting characters and the subjectivity of Miles’ white counterparts, notably his predecessor as Spider-Man, Peter Parker. Miles is imprinted with the pattern of disenfranchisement and labours under the weight of racialised identity politics that invoke the spectre of colonialism. Through the use of critical discourse analysis, postcolonial and critical theory the study brings to light the maintenance and structure of inequality, tacit discrimination and stereotypical identity that surfaces in a 21st century popular cultural text.
XL2018

AbstractMost of Eriksen’s research over the years has somehow or other dealt with the local implications of globalization. He has looked at ethnic dynamics, the challenges of forging national identities, creolization and cosmopolitanism, the legacies of plantation societies and, more recently, climate change in the era of ‘accelerated acceleration’. Here we want to talk not just about cultural diversity and not just look at biological diversity, but both, because he believes that there are some important pattern resemblances between biological and cultural diversity. And many of the same forces militate against that and threaten to create a flattened world with less diversity, less difference. And, obviously, there is a concern for the future. We need to have an open ended future with different options, maximum flexibility and the current situation with more homogenization. We live in a time when there are important events taking place, too, from climate change to environmental destruction, and we need to do something about that. In order to show options and possibilities for the future, we have to focus on diversity because complex problems need diverse answers.Martina: I would like to start with a passion of mine to get into one of your main research themes: diversity. I’m a Marvel fan and, what is emerging, is a reduction of what Marvel has always been about: diversity in comics. There seems to be a standardization that reduces the specificity of each superhero and so it seems that everyone is the same in a kind of indifference of difference. So in this hyper-diversity, I think there is also a reduction of diversity. Do you see something similar in your studies as well?Thomas: It’s a great example, and it could be useful to look briefly at the history of thought about diversity and the way in which it’s suddenly come onto the agenda in a huge way. If you take a look at the number of journal articles about diversity and related concepts, the result is stunning. Before 1990, the concept was not much used. In the last 30 years or so, it’s positively exploded. You now find massive research on biodiversity, cultural diversity, agro-biodiversity, biocultural diversity, indigenous diversity and so on. You’ll also notice that the growth curve has this ‘overheating shape’ indicating exponential growth in the use of the terms. And why is this? Well, I think this has something to do with what Hegel described when he said that ‘the owl of Minerva flies at dusk,’ which is to say that it is only when a phenomenon is being threatened or even gone that it catches widespread attention. Regarding diversity, we may be witnessing this mechanism. The extreme interest in diversity talk since around 1990 is largely a result of its loss which became increasingly noticeable since the beginning of the overheating years in the early 1990s. So many things happened at the same time, more or less. I was just reminded yesterday of the fact that Nelson Mandela was released almost exactly a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There were many major events taking place, seemingly independently of each other, in different parts of the world. This has something to do with what you’re talking about, because yes, I think you’re right, there has been a reduction of many kinds of diversity.So when we speak of superdiversity, which we do sometimes in migration studies (Vertovec, 2023), we’re really mainly talking about people who are diverse in the same ways, or rather people who are diverse in compatible ways. They all fit into the template of modernity. So the big paradox here of identity politics is that it expresses similarity more than difference. It’s not really about cultural difference because they rely on a shared language for talking about cultural difference. So in other words, in order to show how different you are from everybody else, you first have to become quite similar. Otherwise, there is a real risk that we’d end up like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s lion. In Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1983), he remarks that if a lion could talk, we wouldn’t understand what it was saying. Lévi-Strauss actually says something similar in Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss, 1976) where he describes meeting an Amazonian people, I think it was the Nambikwara, who are so close that he could touch them, and yet it is as though there were a glass wall between them. That’s real diversity. It’s different in a way that makes translation difficult. And it’s another world. It’s a different ontology.These days, I’m reading a book by Leslie Bank and Nellie Sharpley about the Coronavirus pandemic in South Africa (Bank & Sharpley, 2022), and there are rural communities in the Eastern Cape which don’t trust biomedicine, so many refuse vaccinations. They resist it. They don’t trust it. Perhaps they trust traditional remedies slightly more. This was and is the situation with HIV-AIDS as well. This is a kind of diversity which is understandable and translateable, yet fundamental. You know, there are really different ways in which we see the Cosmos and the universe. So if you take the Marvel films, they’ve really sort of renovated and renewed the superhero phenomenon, which was almost dead when they began to revive it. As a kid around 1970, I was an avid reader of Superman and Batman. I also read a lot of Donald Duck and incidentally, a passion for i paperi and the Donald/Paperino universe is one curious commonality between Italy and Norway. Anyway, with the superheroes, everybody was very white. They represented a the white, conservative version of America. In the renewed Marvel universe, there are lots of literally very strong women, who are independent agents and not just pretty appendages to the men as they had often been in the past. You also had people with different cultural and racial identities. The Black Panther of Wakanda and all the mythology which went with it are very popular in many African countries. It’s huge in Nigeria, for example, and seems to add to the existing diversity. But then again, as we were saying and as you observed, these characters are diverse in comparable within a uniform framework, a pretty rigid cultural grammar which presupposes individualism: there are no very deep cultural differences in the way they see the world. So that’s the new kind of diversity, which really consists more of talking about diversity than being diverse. I should add that the superdiversity perspective is very useful, and I have often drawn on it myself in research on cultural complexity. But it remains framed within the language of modernity.Martina: What you just said makes me think of contradictory dimensions that are, however, held together by the same gaze. How is it that your approach helps hold together processes that nevertheless tell us the same thing about the concept of diversity?Thomas: When we talk about diversity, it may be fruitful to look at it from a different angle. We could look at traditional knowledge and bodily skills among indigenous peoples, for example, and ideas about nature and the afterlife. Typically, some would immediately object that this is wrong and we are right and they should learn science and should go to school, period. But that’s not the point when we approach them as scholars, because then we try to understand their worlds from within and you realize that this world is experienced and perceived in ways which are quite different from ours. One of the big debates in anthropology for a number of years now has concerned the relationship between culture and nature after Lévi-Strauss, the greatest anthropological theorist of the last century. His view was that all cultures have a clear distinction between culture and nature, which is allegedly a universal way of creating order. This view has been challenged by people who have done serious ethnographic work on the issue, from my Oslo colleague Signe Howell’s work in Malaysia to studies in Melanesia, but perhaps mainly in the Amazon, where anthropologists argue that there are many ways of conceptualising the relationship between humans and everything else. Many of these world-views are quite ecological in character. They see us as participants in the same universe as other animals, plants and even rocks and rivers, and might point out that ‘the land does not belong to us – we belong to the land’. That makes for a very different relationship to nature than the predatory, exploitative form typical of capitalist modernity. In other words, in these cultural worlds, there is no clear boundary between us humans and non-humans. If you go in that direction, you will discover that in fact, cultural diversity is about much more than giving rights to minorities and celebrating National Day in different ethnic costumes, or even establishing religious tolerance. That way of talking about diversity is useful, but it should not detract attention from deeper and older forms of diversity.

Chapter Ten offers that over the past several decades, American comic publishers Marvel and DC have presented black versions of traditional superheroes. The chapter argues that in most cases the white superheroes give up their power unwillingly and quickly try to take it back. These reskinning narratives demonstrate both the investment that the fictional white superheroes have in their powers as well as the investment in whiteness of the narratives’ authors, who ultimately refused to supplant their white superheroes in any meaningful way. The miniseries Truth represents an important departure from this earlier pattern of reskinning by positing a parallel history to Captain America embodied in the black Captain America Isaiah Bradley, who is presented as a very capable superhero, recontextualizing Captain America. Ms. Marvel: No Normal, featuring Kamala Khan, a Pakistani-American, displays the potential political power in reskinning narratives that operate beyond the pale of the original white superheroes.

This chapter analyzes and compares the diegetic and symbolic roles of cinema as a motif across both HBO’s Watchmen and DC’s Doomsday Clock. HBO’s Watchmen inserts cinema into the origins of the superhero genre; instead of dating the emergence of the American superhero to Superman’s first appearance in Action Comics #1 (1938), it stretches further back to silent films, both real and fictional. As such, the series identifies a historical association between the superhero genre and white supremacy, the downstream effects of which are still felt in superhero cinema today. As a contrast, Doomsday Clock draws an association between superheroes and the postwar film noir cycle. The postwar crisis of white American masculinity associated with noir results in a radically different articulation of racial politics compared to HBO’s Watchmen, and one that effectively reproduces the very issues of representation critiqued in the latter.