Art, History, and Memory

 

Florida-Flag_By Julian Chambliss

Florida Burial created by Julian C. Chambliss


 
I recently participated in a public arts project that focused on the burial of the Confederate Flag. Predictably, this event generated controversy as the media reduced it to “black guy burns a confederate flag.” However, the goal was to engage the public about the Confederate Flag’s contested history. Conceived by artist John Sims, The Confederate Flag – 13 Flag Funerals grew from over a decade of artistic work. However, while art inspired this event, there is an argument to be made that the Confederate Flag is a “history” problem. This is a problem created by a “southern version” of history that ignores historical fact in favor of regional myths.
 

13 Flags Confederate Flags Flyer

13 Flag Funerals by John Sims


 
The 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the contemporary race debates in the United States provided the backdrop for this coordinated multi-state public art event. A burial inverts the assumptions of memorial and reverence linked to the southern experience defined exclusively by rebel fighting against the union; the project emphasized coming to terms with the Confederacy’s end. It suggests we can seek closure by recognizing the repressive and regressive ideas that defined that slave society and look to put southern experience on a different path. I agreed to organize a funeral because recent and past events in Florida highlight the disputed legacy of southern history. If Americans interrogate the flag’s meaning, they might reassess its role in an illusory public memory constructed to steal African-American liberty and stifle dissent after the Civil War.
 

The-CFlABB_5965

Julian Chambliss, Associate Professor of History at Rollins College (left), Jeff Grzelak, Civil War historian (center) debate the burning and burial of the Confederate flag. Photo by Lance Turner

 
A union victory and Reconstruction could not stop the rise of a powerful “Lost Cause” mythology that distorted meaning and actions connected to the Civil War.1 Historian David Blight wrote of Frederick Douglass’ understanding of historical memory that Douglass realized that memory “was not merely an entity altered by the passage of time; it was the prize in a struggle between rival versions of the past, a question of will, power, and persuasion. The historical memory of any transforming or controversial event emerges from cultural and political competition, from the choice to confront the past and to debate and manipulate its meaning.”<.2 Douglass saw the years after Reconstruction dominated by false memories that bonded whites in the North and South to the detriment of African Americans.

It was a deliberate process. As one southern veteran explained, if southerners could not justify the war they would, “go down in History solely as brave, impulsive but rash people who attempted in an illegal manner to overthrow the Union of our Country.”.3 The result of their efforts coalesced around broad themes we know well today. You can “hear” them whenever we see the Confederate Flag. When people say, “The Civil War isn’t about slavery” or when they venerate the Confederate soldier, that is part of a broad cultural resistance rooted in a specific way of remembering the past. This imagined history shaped facts and marshaled emotion to support southern efforts to reassert control through force. The obvious targets of this persecution were African Americans, but in truth this unequal social landscape injured the poor of every color. Journalist T. Thomas Fortune explained in his 1884 book, Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South, the oppression of blacks was just one part of a broader “pauperization” of the southern labor class that benefitted southern elites..4
 

Eatonville_1

Winter Park Scrapbook, Olin Library Archive and Special Collection, Rollins College.

 
These actions continued an established pattern in the South. Before the war southerners altered their rhetoric about slavery as required to bolster perceptions of the slave system. With slavery gone, white southerners created a new story to support their control over African Americans. Through archival research projects, my students and I have seen how both white and black southerners fought against this mythology.

Eatonville, the first incorporated black town in the U.S., came into existence as a way to repudiate the white assertions that “the colored people had no executive ability about them, and would ruin rather than build up.”.5 African Americans in Florida were threatened or killed for attempting to be fully engaged citizens. If they joined unions, voted, owned property, and failed to show deference they faced punishment..6 Whites that dared to speak against this treatment faced stigmatization, threats, and violence. By the turn of the century, a “separate but equal” segregation rooted in African American social, political, and economic subjugation was firmly established.
 

Flags Confederacy

Flags Confederacy by Julian C. Chambliss


 
This legacy of race conflict is the public narrative we must understand when we judge the flag. An online search for the “Confederate Flag” in most contemporary search engines will return one image above all others. Designed by William Porcher Miles, this flag is not the national flag of the Confederacy. Indeed, it was rejected in 1861 in favor of a “Stars and Bars” design that was ultimately unpopular. .7 The flag we know was incorporated into the battle flag for the Army of Northern Virginia. Robert E. Lee’s army was so successful on the battlefield this flag was integrated into subsequent national flags..8 As the southern narrative of the “Lost Cause” shaped southern views, the flag was infused with meaning beyond historical fact..9

While the initial “Lost Cause” narrative had elements of mutual valor as a focal point of public discourse, such sentiments shifted after the turn of the century as a new generation of southerners rejected the “criminal” effect of northern actions after the war..10 Historian William A. Dunning inflammatory condemnation of Reconstruction gave southern actions and perspectives a justification rooted in a twisted history. As Alan D. Harper explained, “It was ‘Dunning thesis’ above everything else, that produced for us the popular stereotype of Reconstruction, a stereotype whose central figure are in the words of Horace Mann Bond, ‘the shiftless poor white scalawags; the greedy carpetbaggers; the ignorant, deluded, sometimes vicious Negroes; and the noble, courageous and chivalrous Southerners who fought and won the battle for White Supremacy’.”.11
 

Popular South

The Popular South by Julian C. Chambliss

 
Popular culture embellished myths and justified violence in the first decades of the twentieth century. The success of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) based on Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) sparked a resurgence of the secret society created to resist Reconstruction. While the original KKK was effectively neutralized in the 1870s, the success of Griffith’s film inspired William J. Simmons, an Atlanta based recruiter for fraternal societies, to establish a new organization..12

The resurgent KKK’s slogan was 100% Americanism and it appealed to white Protestant men (and their families). This organization expanded throughout the 1920s bundling white supremacy, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism feelings into a potent mix that attracted a national membership. The group’s success allowed KKK members to be elected to political office in southern states. Perhaps more astonishingly, states such as Indiana and Colorado also elected KKK members to municipal and state offices..13 Internal conflicts, scandals, and public opposition led to the KKK’s decline in the 1930s, but the public’s romance with southern culture reached new levels with the release of Gone with the Wind in 1939. Based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell, the southern experience presented in this film encapsulated the tropes of the Lost Cause for broad consumption.

The myth and reality of southern life clashed after WWII with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The Supreme Court’s Oliver Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) decision ended the separate and unequal doctrine created by southerners in the 1890s. In response, segregationist groups resisted calls for civil rights reform and adopted the Confederate Flag as a symbol of their commitment to preventing integration. While contemporary defenders of the flag are quick to accuse segregationists of “stealing” the flag and assigning it racist meaning, the reality is that this approbation aligned with southern cultural practice of refuting reform that began decades before. Protesters turned to the flag because they understood it to embody the imagined South conceived and championed after the war. This was a South where whites were supreme and African Americans (and their supporters) were second-class citizens.

After the 1960s’ rights revolutions, the practices associated with segregation were scrubbed from public life. Yet, southerners continue to resist. According to Bruce Schulman a “commercialized” southern whiteness rooted in “driving pickup trucks, listening to country music, watching stock car races and flying Confederate Flag” emerged in the 1970s..14  Detached from any overt racial framing, this cultural narrative was another version of pushback and corresponded with a powerful political transformation. The dissatisfaction and resentment that led southerners to abandon the Democratic Party in the 1960s made them the backbone of conservative Republican political aspirations in the 1970s. By the 1980s the Republican Party relied on southern and suburban voters to support its call for “smaller government” and “traditional” values that critics argued undermined hard fought civil rights gains.
 

The_CFABB-Water for Ashes

Water burial of the ashes, “The Confederate Flag: A Belated Burial in Florida” Photo by Lance Turner

 
Since the 1990s we have periodically argued about the Confederate Flag. Yet, because we remain mired in distorted history, the injurious nature of this symbol resting easily in the public sphere is never fully explored. Beyond the heritage excuses, the flag is a signifier of a broader pattern of southern resistance to social reform that started after the Civil War and never stopped. For those shaped by the “Lost Cause” version of history, the flag burial was a challenge to bedrock beliefs.
 
The threats online and the emails demanding I be fired are nothing compared to the violence faced by previous generations. Indeed, for many people this project will quickly fade. The burial will not matter to people that equate the Confederate Flag to the Quran or the Bible and call the project blasphemous. It will not spark a reflection in those that question my citizenship or education as a black man. However, it might spur others to consider the dissonance of the flag as a defining symbol. For these people, it could inspire new thoughts and perhaps the search for a different marker of their regional identity. If that happens, the effect of the fractured history represented by the flag may start to heal.
__________________

1. Caroline Janney, “The Lost Cause,” Encyclopedia of Virginia, July 9, 2009, http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Lost_Cause_The#start_entry.

1. David W. Blight, “‘For Something beyond the Battlefield’: Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War,” The Journal of American History 75, no. 4 (March 1, 1989): 1159, doi:10.2307/1908634.

3. David S. Williams, “Lost Cause Religion,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, May 15, 2005, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/lost-cause-religion.

4. T. Thomas Fortune, “Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South,” Internet Archive, accessed May 23, 2015, https://archive.org/details/blackandwhitela00fortgoog.

5. Loring Augustus Chase, “‘Eatonville’–Winter Park Scrapbook, 1881-1906.,” Central Florida Memory, April 4, 1891,http://digital.library.ucf.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/CFM/id/27434/rec/22.

6. Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920, 1st ed. (University of California Press, 2006).

7. Southern Lithograph Co., “Our Heroes and Our Flag,” still image, www.loc.gov, (1896), http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2006677653/.

1. Thomas G. Clemens, “Confederate Battle Flag,” Encyclopedia of Virginia, July 18, 2014, http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Confederate_Battle_Flag#start_entry.

9. Caroline E. Janney, “War over a Shrine of Peace: The Appomattox Peace Monument and Retreat from Reconciliation,” Journal of Southern History 77, no. 1 (February 2011): 93.

10. Ibid., 99.

11. Alan D. Harper, “William A. Dunning: The Historian as Nemesis,” Civil War History 10, no. 1 (1964): 54–55, doi:10.1353/cwh.1964.0042.

13. Shawn Lay, “Ku Klux Klan in the Twentieth Century,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, July 7, 2005, http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/ku-klux-klan-twentieth-century.

14. “When The KKK Ruled Colorado: Not So Long Ago,” Denver Library, June 19, 2013, https://history.denverlibrary.org/news/when-kkk-ruled-colorado-not-so-long-ago.

15. Bruce J Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, MA.: Da Capo Press, 2002), 106.

World’s Best Cinecomic

World's Best Cinecomic

 
The return of Arrow and The Flash from their midseason break continues the love-fest each program has enjoyed with fans.  The CW’s dynamic duo (sorry) has sparked hopes of a DC cinematic universe by bridging the gap between diehard fans and casual viewers. Nothing illustrates this point more than this season’s semi-crossover event. Skillfully executed and action packed, each character visited the other’s show. Oliver Queen’s darker persona coming into contact with the “brighter” world inhabited by Barry Allen (and vice versa) reminded fans of World Best Comics #1 (Later World Finest Comics) that featured Batman and Superman in 1941. This comic hinted that Batman and Superman lived in the same world. Ironically, it was only the covers that placed the heroes together; they did not actually appear in the same story until 1952. Embellishing episodes that are already deeply informed by decades of stories and developed and produced by the same creative team, Arrow and The Flash deliver a better experience.
 

Worlds_Best Comic_v.1_01

World Best Comics Vol. 1 #1 (March 1941)

 
The shared universe idea that developed from the 1940s onward grew more complex drawing in fans and accommodating new characters and worlds. Creators hope this legacy means fan engagement with these cinematic adaptations will impact engagement on other platforms. Yet, as recent research about the transmedia idea explains whatever the technological tools and industrial alignments shaping storytelling, these products cannot escape the sociocultural context informing the audience experience.[1] While Arrow and The Flash are satisfying action adventure serials, this season’s crossover also highlight the historical burden linked to the superhero genre.

DC Comics characters inform the popular imagination about the superhero. For years adaptations of DC characters have served as vehicles for generational discourses. Batman’s 1960s television series and Superman’s 1970s film highlight this tradition. The Batman television series leveraged the Pop Art Movement to create an “exaggerated cliché” that delighted children and amused adults.[2] At the same moment, Roy Lichtenstein blurred the boundary between high culture and commercialism using comic book panels in his images.[3] Derided at the time, his work, like TV series, resonated with the public reflecting societal tension with the postwar conformist message in America. By the time Richard Donner’s Superman graced the silver screen in 1978 the United States had been disabused of its global preeminence by failures abroad and domestic politics splintered by protests from the left and the right. Americans were uncertain and as Jimmy Carter famously explained, a crisis of confidence casted a “…growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives” and the “unity of purpose for our nation.”[4] Donner’s Superman offered an affirmation of American ideas. Not surprisingly, Carter lost his re-election campaign and adjusted for inflation Superman remains the highest gross adaptation of the Man of Steel on film.[5]
 

Showcase_4

Showcase Vol 1. #4

 
The circumstances that shaped the pro-social mission in the original Superman and Batman reflected depression struggles and wartime triumphs. In a similar manner, the superhero comic book revival associated with Barry Allen’s debut as The Flash reflected the postwar experience. Created by Robert Kanigher, John Broome, and Carmine Infantino in 1956, Allen was the second Flash and sparked a superhero renaissance that re-imagined 1940s characters for the atomic age. Allen’s earnest commitment to family and community along with his civilian identity as a “police scientist” affirmed the moral standard established by The Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA). The CMAA’s regulatory arm, the Comic Code Authority worked to eliminate corrupting images and ideas critics linked to comic books. Famously articulated by Dr. Fredric Wertham, comic books became seen as central cause of juvenile delinquency in the early 1950s. The resulting hysteria led to Congressional hearings investigating comic publishers in 1954.[6] Recent work by Amy Kiste Nyberg does an excellent job of demonstrating how Wertham was as much a symptom as a cause of Americans’ suspicions. The confluence of Cold War tension, postwar affluence, and youth culture provided ample opportunities for parents to worry and children to rebel. Those kids endangered by comics would embrace the disruptive rhythm of rock ‘n’ roll music and go off to college and protest…everything.
 

Hello My name is Green Arrow

 
As comic book publishers strove to keep this dynamic youth engaged, they continued to revamp their characters to reflect changing time. Green Arrow, created in 1941, was more “Batman-lite” than an iconic character until Neal Adams and Dennis “Denny” O’Neil re-designed him in 1969. Oliver Queen had been a rich man with a teenage sidekick who employed trick arrows and worked from secret headquarters called the Arrow Cave (with an Arrow Car of course). The “new” Green Arrow lost his fortune, discovered his ward was a drug addict, and in the classic series paired with Green Lantern travelled the country in the early 1970s confronting crimes rooted in “real world” concerns like racism and environmental damage.[7] The link to ‘relevance’ in superhero comics has never left Green Arrow, but arguably his frustration with authority has shifted in recent years from the ardent liberalism of the 1960s to a disillusioned libertarianism today.
 

Arrow & Flash

 
In Arrow and The Flash this history informs the narrative world we see on the screen and shapes the shared universe they inhabit. Allen’s Flash and Queen’s Arrow approach their mission differently, a point made clear when each hero applies their methods in the other’s city. Allen retains the expectations and aspiration associated with postwar America, but slightly modernized. Despite the tragic circumstances he has faced, he is committed to making his world better. Arrow has taken Green Arrow’s social justice narrative and re-oriented it with a criminal justice lens. Like the country as a whole, his grievance with “the system” has grown at once more and less complex. He struggles with morally questionable actions in his past as he pursues a heroic future. Informed by contemporary culture, both adaptations are a prism on values inscribed in each character. As Arrow and The Flash continue to create a richer world, the evolution of their narrative legacy provides a roadmap of how the contemporary audience’s concerns about security and community contend with changing millennial realities. The popularity of the shows makes sense as a catharsis exercise. That the superheroes will triumph is not the question. Instead, how they win and remain heroic becomes the key. Queen’s Arrow doesn’t want to be a killer that relies on torture to protect those things he loves and Allen’s Flash doesn’t want to be so afraid he is unable to act. For all the fantastic excesses linked to superheroes, the broader questions they are in dialogue with matter to us all.
______________________

[1] Carlos Scolari, Paolo Bertetti, and Matthew Freeman, Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), viii–viii, http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/transmedia-archaeology-carlos-scolari.

[2] Judy Stone, “Caped Crusader of Camp,” New York Times, January 9, 1966.

[3] Peter Sanderson, “Spiegelman Goes to College,” PublishersWeekly.com, April 23, 2007, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/1-legacy/24-comic-book-reviews/article/14675-spiegelman-goes-to-college.html.

[4] “WGBH American Experience. Jimmy Carter | PBS,” American Experience, accessed December 26, 2014, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-crisis/.

[5] “Superman Moviesat the Box Office – Box Office Mojo,” accessed December 26, 2014, http://boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=superman.htm.

[6] “1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books),” accessed October 26, 2013, http://www.thecomicbooks.com/1954senatetranscripts.html.

[7] Jesse T. Moore, “The Education of Green Lantern: Culture and Ideology,” The Journal of American Culture 26, no. 2 (2003): 263–78.

The Body Envisioned: Octavia Butler

This is part of a roundtable on the work of Octavia Butler. The index to the roundtable is here.
__________

The MacArthur Foundation concisely explained Octavia Butler’s impact on science fiction in 1995. Popularly referred to as “Genius Grants,” the program “awards unrestricted fellowships to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.” In describing Butler, the foundation said simply, “Octavia Butler, a writer of science fiction, brought elements of African and African-American spiritualism, mysticism, and mythology to her novels and stories.”[1] The direct and simple description is both accurate and jarring. Butler’s identity as a woman of color in a genre long dominated by white men made her a unique figure, but more importantly her identity informed her work. Talented by any measure Butler’s career placed her at the center of ongoing debates about the U.S. experience linked to questions of identity and power.

To think about Butler’s contribution and status, I complied a list of scholarly articles based on search queries on Butler. From that body of material I utilized Paper Machine, a plug-in for Zotero, the bibliographic and research software created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media to get a snapshot of how researchers approach Butler.[2] This approach does not take the place of the critical assessments of Butler work that we have seen in the roundtable. There are limitations to this approach based on the tool and my use of it. A more compelling analysis would be gained by exploring patterns in Butler’s published works or perhaps an examination of African-American authors writing speculative fiction in the twentieth century.

What Paper Machine facilitates for me is to understand how a select body of material shifts over time and visualize those changes quickly. I added about 340 articles to my Zotero library from academic databases using Butler and related search terms. Most people who know what they are doing will point out that I need a bigger corpus. My goal is more exploratory (weak defense) and frankly I had time constraints (weaker defense). Using Paper Machine, I was able to take this collective material to create several visualizations. The first figure is a DBpedia visualization of the corpus. DBpedia is a crowd-sourced effort to create systematized information from Wikipedia and make it available on the web. Paper Machine uses the name entities mentioned in the corpus and scaled those entries according to the frequency of their occurrence to create this visualization. Naturally, the author’s name is featured prominently along with terms such as parasitism, race, and utopia.

Figure 1: Butler Scholar DBpedia

Butler Scholar DBpedia

Perhaps more interestingly, Paper Machine can pull text from PDFs and use bibliographic metadata to create visualizations. This allows the program to create topic models via text mining. Paper Machine finds and clusters the words in the corpus based on the pattern of occurrence. The result is a steam graph of topics determined by the corpus. I sorted the output by the 20 “most coherent ” and “most common” topics. While Butler is the author of several noteworthy works, this modeling demonstrates that research has greater focus on Kindred (1979)and ideas such as reproduction and slavery.

Figure 2: Butler Scholar 20 Topic Most Coherent

Butler Scholar 20 Topics Most Coherent

Figure 3: Butler Scholar 20 Topic Most Common

Butler Scholar 20 Topics Most Common

In addition to topic models, Paper Machine can generate a phrase net that gives a sense of the order within the entire corpus. The images below are phase nets for ‘x of the y’ and ‘x and y’ in the corpus. The direction of the arrow tells us how to read the connection, and the thickness indicates the relative frequency of the phase within the corpus.

Figure 4: Butler Scholar-Phase Net x of the y

Butler Scholar-Phase Net x of the y

Figure 5: Butler Scholar-Phase Net x and y

Butler Scholar Phase Net x and y

&nsp;
The trends within the corpus display a pattern of analysis that parallels the topic. Phrases such as anxieties of the society or slavery and reproduction are to be expected in the corpus based on Butler’s work. Ultimately, this exercise in visualization highlights Butler’s status has grown over time as scholars discuss Butler work with greater emphasis on race, gender, and society.

This result is no surprise. As a historian, my fascination with Butler has always been rooted in this collective recognition of her as signifier. As the corpus indicates, she is often mentioned, along with Samuel R. Delany as an African-American literary pioneer. The historical reality is more complex. Authors of African descent have imagined circumstances that challenged the reality of the dominant culture for decades. Martin Robinson Delany (1812-1885), abolitionist and the first African-American field officer in the U.S. Army wrote the serial adventure of Henry Blake, an escaped slave who travels throughout the southern United States and Cuba to plan a large slave insurrection. Published in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859 and the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861-62, the story was a response to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott v. Sanford decision. Delany’s story offered a militant protagonist that challenged southern and northern expectations.[3] In a similar vein, Edward A. Johnson’s utopian novel Light Ahead for the Negro (1904) imagined a protagonist transported to a future socialist United States free from racial strife.[4] Surprisingly, W.E.B. Dubois’ 1920 short story, “The Comet,” featured a black bank messenger and the white daughter of a wealthy businessman as the only survivors in a city ravaged by the toxic effects of a passing comet.[5]

Science-fictional approaches to race continued into the mid-century. As society became more mediated, science fiction was an integral part of speculating on the implication of a rapidly changing world.[6] For creators committed to challenging stereotypes, memorable efforts on television such as Twilight Zone (1959-1964) and Star Trek (1966-1969) reflected the broader societal dialogue connected to racial equality. Imaginative and provocative, what these stories share is the author’s use of speculative fiction to explore their world and challenge limiting expectations. Each narrative is reacting to contemporary debates and offering ideas and actions that point to new social and political circumstances.

First published in 1971, Butler emerged as the United States struggled to reconcile the promise of the postwar liberalism with reality of a functional society that balances individual agency against communal upset. As historian Bruce Schulman explained, “In race relations, religion, family life, politics, and popular culture, the 1970s marked the most significant watershed of modern U.S. History, the beginning of our own time.”[7] An African-American female in a field associated with white men, Butler’s emergence gave voice to the challenging intersectionality linked to race and gender. For all the possibilities associated with science fiction, Butler’s work and our collective recognition of it emphasizes this struggle is ongoing and unresolved. Butler recognized the clash between ideas and actions and made her writing about, “… when you are aware of what it means to be an adult and what choices you have to make, the fact that maybe you’re afraid, but you still have to act.”[8] Working through the lens of her identity within two marginalized groups, her vision has grown in importance as the wider society moves these questions to the center of our public discourse. No longer in an era of pioneering firsts, debates about equity and representation in science fiction have grown in importance as imagined and real landscapes converge. It is too much to suggest understanding Butler means unraveling this problem, but her advice to aspiring writers highlights why the effort bears worthwhile fruit–“I’ve talked to high school kids who are thinking about trying to become a writer and asking ‘What should I major in?’, and I tell them, ‘History. Anthropology. Something where you get to know the human species a little better, as opposed to something where you learn to arrange words.”[9]
__________________
[1] “Octavia Butler,” www.macfound.org, (July 1, 1995), http://www.macfound.org/fellows/505/.

[2] “Zotero | About,” www.zotero.org, accessed July 5, 2014, https://www.zotero.org/about/.

[3] Katy L. Chiles, “Blake; or the Huts of America (1859–1861),” Encyclopedia of Virginia, (September 24, 2012), http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Blake_or_the_Huts_of_America_1859-1861.

[4] Maryemma Graham, The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 42–43.

[5] W.E.B. Dubois, “Darkwater: Voice From Within The Veil,” Archive, www.gutenberg.org, (1920), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15210/15210-h/15210-h.htm.

[6] J. P. Telotte, The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 3.

[7] Bruce J Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, MA.: Da Capo Press, 2002), xii.

[8] “Octavia E. Butler Interview (excerpts),” Magazine, Locus Online, (June 2000), http://www.locusmag.com/2000/Issues/06/Butler.html.

[9] Ibid.

What about Amanda Waller?

 

Arrow

Figure 1:Suicide Squad from the CW’s Arrow

The superhero has emerged as the trending symbol of our mediated world.  Musings over Marvel’s and DC Comics’ relative successes adapting characters to the big and small screen opens the door to some interesting moments of cultural contemplation.  As Peter Coogan suggests in a recent essay entitled, “The Hero Defines the Genre, the Genre Define the Hero,” the link between the superhero and the genre are not incidental.[1] The selfless nature of the superhero and its genre reflect pro-social values Americans feared threaten by a rising urban industrial order.  Changing the superhero then, echoes wider fears of disruption stemming from the loss of tradition. In this framework, the superhero becomes a measure of communal stability in some minds.  As the superhero evolves enough to maintain its relevance, these characters offer context for cherished values placed in a modern world. As these characters are recreated for film and television audiences, they provide a window on the pace and scope of our collective evolution.

Over the last two seasons, the CW’s Arrow has emerged as an effective vehicle for adapting DC Comics characters to a broad audience. Like the Marvel Cinematic Universe before it, the creative minds behind Arrow built their world by mixing decades of comic book adventure. Free to pick and choose, they adapted with an eye toward creating easy entry for new consumers and maintaining the loyalty of established fans. The recent appearance of Amanda “The Wall” Waller, on Arrow highlights the fact the current comic book culture is filled with questions linked to identity and gender. In deciding to adapt this character, the producers have entered into that dialogue.  Taking their cue from the 2011 reboot called the New 52, Arrow’s Amanda Waller is a marker of larger identity concerns.

suicide-squad1

Figure 2: Suicide Squad #1 (2011)

The New 52 restarted DC comic publications from the beginning. Complaints about this reboot have focused on missed opportunities.  Critics point to uneven characterization, failed opportunity linked to diversity and the reorientation towards new (hopefully younger) readers by abandoning continuity.  These complaints are understandable, but perhaps unfair.  In 1985, the company revamped the publication line with its Crisis on Infinite Earths mini series. Often lauded by fans, it was greeted with complaints as well.  History has proven that story a milestone.  With this in mind, we may see “The New 52” lauded for the push toward genre variety and the integration of formerly sacrosanct characters from Vertigo, the publisher’s mature reader line, back into the mainstream comic universe.  Whatever history’s judgment, the immediate media spotlight has and will likely continue to question the depiction of female characters.

Concerns about gender and representation in comics are not new.  However, in the context of the 2011 reboot, the re-imagined overtly sexualized look and actions of female characters such as Starfire and Catwoman triggered protest. Adding to these concerns, products, drawn from comic book source material, reflect a dynamic of gender objectification long cited by critics. In particular, the outcry over the failure to produce a Wonder Woman film and criticism about Rocksteady Studios’ depiction of Harley Quinn and Catwoman in its Arkham game franchise has troubled fans.[2]

Arguably the transformation of Amanda Waller is a crucial part of this dialogue.  Introduced in 1986, the comic book Amanda Waller is an African-American middle-aged woman with a heavy build working as a government bureaucrat.  She is a unique example of a black female authority figure in mainstream superhero comics.  Her serious demeanor and steely determination managing a government-sanctioned task force called the Suicide Squad made her a fan favorite. Effective and dedicated, Waller commands the respect of villains and heroes alike. Animated television and film appearances have further embellished Waller’s status among fandom.
 

Suicide_Squad_Vol_1_10

Figure 3: Suicide Squad Vol. 1. #10 (1988)

In revamping the publication line, DC editors made decisions designed to make character more accessible to a broader (less expert) reading public. Clark Kent/Superman is no longer married to Lois Lane (quasi-damsel in distress). Instead, he is dating Wonder Woman/Diana Prince, creating the ultimate “power” couple (Couldn’t help myself).  Abandoning the Superman /Lois Lane relationship highlighted an edict that marriage is prohibited in this new status quo.  This stance was perhaps made more frustrating because it was only fully articulated in the midst of a public furor over the editor’s decision to derail the same-sex marriage of Batwoman (Kathy Kane), the publisher’s most prominent lesbian character.  The tumult surrounding that decision and the continued concern over female character placement and representation prompts me to ask, “What about Amanda Waller?”

Waller transition in the New 52 has received comparably minor protest. Arguably, while heroes and villains deserve the main scrutiny on a comic page, Waller’s transformation has a greater impact because of her unique status as a woman of color in a position of authority. The lack of concern about Amanda Waller’s presentation highlights gender and race intersectionality.[3]  Articulated by black feminist intellectuals such as Frances M. Beal and Alice Walker, the interlocking nature of gender and racial bias creates overlapping barriers linked to race and sexism for women of color.[4]

Arguably, Amanda Waller has been affected by gender and racial expectations since her introduction.  The original characterization could be seen as leveraging the nineteenth century mammy stereotype to great effect.  Waller was a sexless maternal figure who valued her superior’s goals, but showed disdain for the team that acted as her quasi-family. Unconscious and unspoken, Waller’s placement as a “strong” and “principled” bureaucrat loyally working for the government confirmed some assumptions. Yet, with depictions of African-American women in the 1970s caught between a normalizing figure such as Diahann Carroll’s single mother professional in Julia (1968-1973) and Blaxploitation inspired icons such as Pam Grier’s tough vigilante Coffey (1973) Waller’s debut in the 1980s struck a more balanced note in a social and political landscape shaped by warring conservative and liberal views of African-American life and culture.

Neither objectified nor objectionable, there has been a consistency to creator’s attachment to Waller as a supporting character. Always in the background, always working for the “greater” good, her experience compounds the critical assessment that minority characters in comics are only allowed to function within a limited assimilative framework. Now, younger and more traditionally beautiful, Waller does not have the same gravitas. Waller’s function remains the same, but her appearance now creates a radically different context to understand her.  Like other female characters in the New 52, her physical beauty brings her more in line with male expectations, but in her case those expectations have an added layer of racial exoticism.  Now seductive as well as powerful, the new Amanda Waller hovers between a “predatory” Jezebel and a  “malicious” Sapphire stereotype.  At once desirable (Jezebel) and cruel (Sapphire), the new Amanda Waller carries the full weight of gendered racial expectations in a manner that does little to differentiate and everything to limit her character. The fact that this Waller has made the jump to Arrow reinforces the transformation in the pop culture landscape. Still, Amanda Waller’s transformation is a marker of a conversation we are not having gender and diversity in comics.


[1] Robin S Rosenberg and Peter M. Coogan, What Is a Superhero? (Oxford University Press, 2013).

[2] It worth noting the recent Arkham Knight (http://www.ign.com/videos/2014/03/04/batman-arkham-knight-father-to-son-announcement-trailer) game trailer featured a redesigned Harley Quinn that is arguably less problematic.

[3] “Race/Gender/Class ‘Intersectionality’,” accessed March 16, 2014, http://www.uccnrs.ucsb.edu/intersectionality.

[4]Frances Beal, interview by Loretta Ross, video recording, March 18, 2005, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, tape 2.

Julian Chambliss is Associate Professor History at Rollins College and co-editor of Ages of Heroes, Eras of Men: Superheroes and the American Experience.