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kovacs, I'm afraid you've made a discussion out of the Guardian's ethnicity by asking if there will be a discussion made out of it.
I'm inclined to say that human beings are human beings, and wondering if a discussion should be made about the Manhattan Guardian being black is a bit like regarding black Americans as a form of life completley alien to you or Grennis Mheatley. That may be a tad reactionary on my part.
I highly doubt the new Guardian 4-issue will deal with the subject of the black experience in America, anymore than the Zatanna series will focus on being white in same. Nor do I think it should be an issue if it does or doesn't, unless it seems dishonest/lazy/disengenuous about its methods.
My observation was, really, that I don't expect any issue will be raised about how well Morrison conveys the African-American "experience", whether he draws on stereotypes from cinema, the extent to which he canvassed Black friends about their identity, family, community, dialect, whether the Guardian has an uninspired "African-American" name and so on.
Yet all these points were raised with regard to Vimanarama. Perhaps there is a clear difference, as Ganesh suggests, because there's not such obvious novelty in a superhero comic about a Black American as about a British Asian, and so there's more precedent and less pressure on Morrison to get it "right" and do something "positive" with the characters. There is far more of a cultural bank for a Scottish author to draw on with regard to African-American characters, so any issue of researching to get the culture "accurate" (I seem to be feeling the need for a lot of distancing quotations marks here) is also diluted.
No, I'm not asking for a discussion about the Guardian as a representation of an African-American. I was asking -- because the thought struck me, not because it's a huge deal to me -- why we might expect that nobody will discuss this comic in that way, in contrast to the focus on representation of ethnicity in Vimanarama. |
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