Cyborg and Double-Consciousness
In a paper on the design of black superheroes, scholar Blair Davis compares the duality of Victor’s Cyborg/Human existence to W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous 1903 examination of the African-American condition, The Souls of Black Folk: #TeenTitans #cyborg 1/5
DuBois writes: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that look on in amused contempt and pity.” 2/5
“One ever feels his twoness, – an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” 3/5
“The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.” 4/5
For Davis, “The awkwardness and unease that Cyborg’s artificial body inspires therefore becomes a metaphor for the ‘contempt and pity’ that Du Bois describes.” It’s a fascinating read in an Eisner-winning volume (“The Blacker the Ink”) 5/5