Darieck Scott on Keeping it Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics

Conversations in Atlantic Theory

Today’s discussion is with Dr. Darieck Scott, a professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His book Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (NYU Press 2010), was the winner of the 2011 Alan Bray Memorial Prize for Queer Studies of the Modern Language Association. Scott is also the author of the novels Hex ( published in 2007) and Traitor to the Race (published in 1995), and the editor of Best Black Gay Erotica (published in 2004). His fiction has appeared in the anthologies Freedom in This Village (2005), Black Like Us (2002), Giant Steps (2000), Shade (1996) and Ancestral House (1995), as well as in the erotica collections Flesh and the Word 4 (1997) and Inside Him (2006). He has published essays in Callaloo, GLQ, The Americas Review, and American Literary History, and is co-editor with Ramzi Fawaz of the American Literature special issue, “Queer About Comics,” winner of the 2018 Best Special Issue from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. He is also the author of Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics, published by NYU Press in 2022, which is the occasion for our conversation today. In this discussion, we explore representations of Blackness in fantasy-infused genres: superhero comic books, erotic comics, fantasy and science-fiction genre literature, as well as contemporary literary “realist” fiction centering fantastic conceits.