"Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics explores how fantasy-especially superhero comics, which are usually derided as naèive and childish-is a catalyst for engaging the black radical imagination. Such engagements prompt "fantasy-acts" against antiblackness, a transgressive way of "reading" beyond the comic-book page to envision and to experience alternate, and potentially more just, realities. Fantasies about superhero characters are not just or even primarily forms of escape, the author argues, but are active reshapings of readers and their worlds. This book offers a rich meditation on the relationship between fantasy and reality, and between the imagination and being, as it weaves Scott's personal recollections of his encounters with superhero comics with interpretive readings of figures like the Black Panther, Luke Cage, Nubia, and Blade, and theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Saidiya Hartman, and Gore Vidal"--

Darieck Scott is Professor of African American studies at the University of California-Berkeley. He is the author of the novels Hex and Traitor to the Race, and the editor of Best Black Gay Erotica.