Appropriate(d) Cyborgs: Diasporic Identities in Dwayne McDuffie's Deathlok Comic Book Series

Colonized peoples of the Americas have already developed the cyborg skills required for survival under techno-human conditions as a requisite for survival under domination over the last three hundred years. --Chela Sandoval (408) In a discussion of comic books of the French colonial Antilles, Frantz Fanon observes that "the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the Savage are always symbolized by Negroes or Indians" (146). (1) Products of colonial hegemony, these comic books promoted readerly identification with the white hero--even the "Little Negro" reader identified with the white hero and rejected the racial savage--and thereby displaced colonial aggression onto the repudiated "savage" Antillean body. Mid-century comic books such as these epitomized the signifying practices of colonial discourse, deploying the power of images to produce what Fanon called colonialism's "morbid body" (10). Brought about by a process of "epidermalization," which Stuart Hall defines as the inscription of racism on the skin, this phantom body cultivates the psychological internalization of colonial racism ("After-life"14). Although they have "black skin," the colonized Antilleans don "white masks" as they increasingly come to internalize (and then project) the fantasies and anxieties of colonialism's white gaze. As Fanon himself insists, the problematic "fact of blackness" is that it is largely a white man's projection, a "solidly established" myth "woven" by others and "fastened" onto the Antillean's dark body from without (20). For Fanon the comic book medium exemplifies the "epidermalization" of blackness: "Willy-nilly, the Negro has to wear the livery that the white man has sewed for him. Look at children's picture books. [They] fasten him to the effigy of him, to snare him, to imprison him, the eternal victim of an essence, of an appearance for which he is not responsible" (35, emphasis added). No longer shackled in iron, the black body nonetheless finds itself "a slave" to the white man's "archetypes," which invariably fix, essentialize, and "imprison" black people in bodies not their own. The cover of a 1952 issue of Tarzan--one of the two western comics to which Fanon explicitly refers--powerfully illustrates colonial obsession with the artifacts of savagery (fig. 1, color inset). Published the same year as Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, the cover depicts Tarzan--Edgar Rice Burroughs' turn-of-the-century hero who brought the heart of darkness into the hearths of civilized nations everywhere--carefully dusting what appears to be a tribal relic, a mask no less. He holds the mask with delicacy and studies its exotic contours. The primitive archetype, now in the hands of a Tarzan-turned-archaeologist, is rendered a knowable object under the colonial gaze, which fixes and constructs (indeed, "paints") blackness as the repository of savagery. A later issue depicting Tarzan held captive by the alchemy of a tribal "witch doctor" dramatizes the epidermal scene to which Fanon refers (fig. 2, color inset). The scene starkly juxtaposes Tarzan's neutral whiteness with the witch doctor's tribal monstrosity. Just as the light reflecting from Tarzan's body throws his whiteness into relief, so too does the light emanating from the fiery cauldron throw the savagery of the witch-doctor into relief. This essay examines a pivotal moment in the comic book medium when African American artists and writers began to reclaim the colonized black body, not simply to replace it with an "authentic" or essential black self, nor to counter its negative stereotypes with positive images of blackness, but much more incisively to complicate and nuance the very notion of "blackness." Agreeing with Marc Singer's suggestion that the comic book's formal and thematic conventions "invite a more nuanced depiction of minority identity" (107), I trace the ways in which African American comics writer Dwayne McDuffie intervenes in a medium with a troubling hegemonic history by appropriating a white cyborg narrative to dramatize the diasporic dimensions of black subjectivity. …