Notes of a Native Son of Krypton

[samedietc]

For a break from my reading on Sunday I went to a library or bookstore, and there read an Elseworlds from DC Comics (that's their imprint for "what if" or sometimes "what about" books): Red Son asks the question, what if Superman fell on Russia instead of Kansas. I don't want to ruin it for anyone who wants to read it, but the ending does bear

Comments

[tragic_ohara]

An idea we talked about in an economics class at Bard was how entwined all the American social-rights struggles are (race, class, gender), and how disingenuous it is for them to distance themselves from one another. All three are part of our national fabric, and each affects the others: the essential class-conflict takes women and minorities as casualties if they all aren't considered as part of a troublesome whole. So I guess the question is more: is a story containing a black man wrong not to bring up racism? Does it fail somehow (put another way, can we assert that black American literature is by its nature a literature of struggle, if it is to be adequate to its time)? Imagine a black Superman who's unconcerned with passing as white, or who takes a defeatist/nihlistic view of America's institutional prejudices and just goes about throwing cars at people, if that's how they're going to be. (That last is a little ridiculous, but I'd enjoy reading it as a one-off issue.)

As you just broadened the question: can we assert that American literature should be a literature of race/class/gender struggle? And who's to say either way? Chinua Achebe said 'all writing is political', but of course there's politics in everything.

-R.