SURVEILLANCE, MASCOTS, SUPERHEROES : Anti-carceral colourings of the world
MAY 6, 2020
5pm – 7pm
A Different Booklist
779 Bathurst St.
Artists Hiba Ali and Yasmeen Nematt Alla join scholar Joshua Plencner, in a talk about racist policing and surveillance.
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In the striking—and short-lived—2016 Marvel Comics superhero series Nighthawk, writer David F. Walker, artist Ramon Villalobos, and colorist Tamra Bonvillain explore themes familiar to recent constellations of social protest: racism, systemic corruption, police violence, religious zealotry, and the dislocations of capitalist economics, among others. Focusing their narrative on an African-American protagonist—Raymond Kane, a shadow-stalking, technologically advanced vigilante named Nighthawk—the politics of racial consciousness, and an explicit critique of whiteness, are foregrounded throughout. While Nighthawk shares tonal similarities with DC Comics’ Batman character, the racial distinction is crucial. As writer Walker explains, the series is essentially an examination of “what it means to be a black superhero in a country infected by the disease of racism.” Based in Chicago, Nighthawk draws readers into a story that both abstracts and roots real-world social ills, constructing a violent, aestheticized “war” against injustice that blurs political ideals and the material means of achieving them.
Plencner understands the play between abstract and materially-rooted social protest as “polychromatic violence” – a concept that links the resistant posture of the book as a critique of white supremacist political institutions like the Chicago Police Department and the racialized economic forces of gentrification with the specific visual-narrative representations of police brutality and African-American vigilantism tinged by colourist Bonvillain’s acid pink-and-green infused palette. I argue that polychromatic violence in Nighthawk is itself a form of political analysis, one that facilitates comics’ capacity to engage contemporary real-world struggle with acerbic fantasy.
