Monsters among Us: Using Lovecraft Country to Teach about Du Bois and Fanon

Effectiveness of Popular Media as a Pedagogical Tool

A wide body of literature suggests and demonstrates that popular-media devices, such as film, television clips, and photography, are invaluable pedagogical tools for articulating sociological concepts to students. Much of this literature targets undergraduate students, as the practitioners who utilize these devices speak to the effectiveness of media in helping these students “develop their sociological imagination” (Nefes 2014:115). Sociologists have spoken to the usefulness of television shows such as Shameless (Weber and Hunt 2020), The Real World (Misra 2000), and The Simpsons (Nefes 2014; Scanlan and Feinberg 2000) in reaching students on a broad range of societal issues while also encouraging them to think sociologically to apply classroom concepts to everyday life. Misra (2000), while using clips from the MTV show The Real World to teach an Introduction to Sociology course, adds that the device helped students to make connections with the clips and the material covered over the course of the semester; helped the instructor to gain some comfortability discussing sensitive topics, such as race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality; and engaged students with different ability levels while appealing to both traditional and nontraditional undergraduate students. While scholars have frequently found use for shows such as The Simpsons cartoon to convey sociologically concepts to students, Nefes (2014) specifically finds that using the show in the classroom not only helps to stimulate and make students comfortable but also succeeds in generating healthy discussion of social theory as it pertains to everyday life.

Using Media to Teach about Race/Ethnicity

Focusing on issues of race/ethnicity specifically, a considerable body of research suggests that popular media may be helpful for discussing complex issues such as slavery (Loewen 1991), racism and discrimination (Stout, Earnhart, and Nagi 2020), the unique experiences of particular populations (Valdez and Halley 1999), and the persistence of anti-Blackness in society (Wilderson 2010). Using films such as Monster’s Ball and Antoine Fisher, Wilderson (2010) discusses how anti-Blackness persists in popular representations of Black people and expresses itself differently along lines of gender, body type, and skin complexion. Stout and colleagues (2020) find that when viewing these concepts on screen, students can develop working definitions of concepts such as institutional racism and everyday racism. Moreover, students engaged discussions more in depth and with more sophistication than what they had exhibited in traditional lecture settings and also did not express any discomfort in speaking about these issues, which had previously been observed as an issue by the researchers (Stout et al. 2020).

Other scholars employing the use of popular media as a pedagogical tool stress the distinct ability of this device to highlight issues of representation by discussing with students what is not seen on the screen or what is distorted (Loewen 1991; Valdez and Halley 1999). Valdez and Halley (1999) showed students multiple films displaying the Mexican American experience and challenged them to identify perceived private issues as public problems. Doing so enabled students to identify the constraints filmmakers were faced with when attempting to present an accurate portrayal of ethnic populations that does not dismiss the effects of social structure and institutions on individual behaviors and outcomes (Valdez and Halley 1999). Likewise, Loewen (1991) shows students a range of videos covering the struggle for civil rights over the course of a semester to encourage students to think sociologically about the representation of Black people and the use of film itself as an institution to convey racial meaning. Students demonstrated a recognition of how the misrepresentation of Black people in film coincided with issues prevalent at the time of the film’s creation and thus, Black people’s portrayal in film were heavily influenced by a social structure and culture that mystify the impact of race on marginalized populations (Loewen 1991). Lovecraft Country can serve as a useful device for instructors to get students thinking about complex racial theory, such as that articulated by Frantz Fanon and W. E. B. Du Bois, which provides an analysis of the relationship between social structure, culture, and anti-Blackness. What follows is a discussion of how some of the basic concepts covered in Du Boisian and Fanonian thought appear in the show and how students recognized them when viewing the series alongside reading the text.

Introductory Du Boisian and Fanonian Thought

The works of W. E. B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon are linked by the attention paid to the subaltern Black subject and the impact of racialization and colonization on the subject’s self-consciousness and identity. Taken together, these works provide insight into the struggle of the Black individual to develop an identity of their own creation and how such a project is key in a confrontation with racial domination produced by Western capitalism and colonialism. They do so by first disentangling the concept of racialization (read negrification in Fanon’s terms) and its importance to European and Euro-American world building. This endeavor leads to these authors describing and analyzing both the reactionary responses by Black individuals that lead to failure and revolutionary responses that aim to remake to the world once the subject has unlocked the source of their creation and status as Negro. For Du Bois, Black people live behind a veil that not only hides these subjects’ true essence but also disguises them to be what the white world projects onto them. The veil distorts reality and causes a conflation of Black people with the problems they face (Du Bois 2009). During this process, the forces of capitalist domination and racist terror that produce wayward modes of being disappear from the consciousness while only the outcomes they foster remain perceptible.

Fanon grapples with similar questions, but his attention shifts more heavily to the outcomes that befall Blacks in failed attempts to address the problems of self-consciousness that anti-Blackness imposes upon them. Viewing ontogeny as incapable of speaking to the alienation of Blacks, he turns to sociogenesis. As Gordon (2015:22) explains, “The sociogenic pertains to what emerges from the social world, the intersubjective world of culture, history, language, and economics.” As such, self-consciousness is not simply the result of individual forces but also a product of the sociohistorical and sociocultural forces that the human brings into existence. A society fashioned by anti-Blackness and colonialism produces alienated beings. Negrification, a specific type of racialization, ruptures the connection of the Black subject between them and their African past, disconnecting them from their cultural identity and putting in its place the identification with what Fanon (2008:92) calls their “epidermal racial schema.” It is the reconnection with this past in the service of fashioning a new self during a trip into what Fanon (2004) terms as the “zone of non-being” that will serve as a vehicle for a revolutionary project that achieves disalienation for the Black individual and the establishment of a new national consciousness. The color of the skin defines Black subjects by pure exteriority or, as Gordon (2015:48) asserts, as “a being without an inner life and self-control.” The lived experience of Black people is discounted in this sort of society (Fanon 2008). In this type of society, if one is to take a note from Du Bois that “the one virtue is to be white (Du Bois 2009: 456),” Fanon diagnoses the mechanisms by which Black people put on white masks to disguise the social markers of inferiority that act as impediments to reciprocity and recognition in an anti-Black society. Fanon offers the descent into the zone of non-being as a space to perform erasure of the negative self that is identified by Du Boisian second sight. While in this zone, the Black individual can perform the sociohistorical and psychological work necessary to fashion a positive subjectivity if they ever emerge from the zone (Fanon 2008; Gordon 2015; Sawyer 2020).

The Black Perspective in Media

Lovecraft Country, while taking its title from the author Matt Ruff’s science fiction novel, is a series crafted from the perspective of Black creators. Some research has highlighted the subtle differences in nuance provided to Black characters by Black creators in comparison to that offered by white creators (Wyatt 2020). This research suggests that media produced by Black creators may attempt to present Black people on screen as three-dimensional figures as opposed to the stereotypical depictions that reinforce the kind of “epistemic closure” that Fanon militated against in his writing (Gordon 2015:49). Using horror as a backdrop, the creators can present to the viewer the atmosphere of white supremacy and anti-Blackness that figuratively and literally terrorizes people of color. When real-world events are juxtaposed alongside the supernatural, the viewer is given the second sight of Black people and forced to make a judgment on what Blacks should actually fear: demons, ghosts, and monsters, or the police and racist white citizens that fulfill roughly the same functions. Ironically, in the series, whites are responsible for the construction of both the monster and the Black, and at times it gets confused which one is which (i.e., Black as monster or monster as Black), or if neither is what it is projected to be. Here Lovecraft creators engage the problem Du Bois identified earlier but through the presentation of the monster alongside the race question. In the sections that follow, I demonstrate how Du Boisian and Fanonian thought emerges throughout the series and include some of my students’ insights on what they took from watching the series in class. ²

Double Consciousness: Ji-Ah and Tick Gaining Second Sight

The characters in the Lovecraft series constantly grapple with the question of “who or what am I” when attempting to locate themselves or others in a map of human ontogenesis. Characters struggle endlessly with the figure of the monster both externally and internally. Just as Du Bois observes how the problems of Black people are collapsed onto Black people themselves, the figure of the monster problematizes how characters understand the terror they have experienced or caused and their identification as terrors. The characters Ji-Ah and Atticus (from here on referred to as Tick) exemplify this thought in several exchanges of dialogue throughout the series. Both recognize the machinations of a double consciousness as they understand their identities as being shaped not only by the white world but by other subaltern figures reacting to the evils of that society. Upon noticing this theme, one of my students commented that the episode “demonstrated the idea that blackness is not just whites being racist towards blacks, but that blacks are also manipulated into being racist towards others in order to hold up the idea of whiteness.” Ji-Ah is a kumiho, a nine-tailed fox from Korea that takes the souls of men she beds as they climax. Ji-Ah’s human mother, whom she calls Umma, sought out a Mudang to summon Ji-Ah in the image of her daughter, who was molested and killed by Umma’s late husband, to enact revenge on men for the evils they commit. For Umma, her love for Ji-Ah is complicated by her extreme vitriol toward men. Tick is an African American soldier who enlisted in the army to fight in the Korean War to escape U.S. racism and his abusive father. While Ji-Ah is, in fact, a literal monster struggling to become human, Tick is a human being whose struggles bring him closer to becoming a metaphorical monster (Shaver 2020).

The two’s paths cross when Tick, on orders from his superior, executes a Korean nurse suspected of being a Communist and then places her only close friend, Young-Ja, in custody for questioning. Tick is later placed under Ji-Ah’s care after suffering an injury. Ji-Ah plans on bedding Tick so she can take his soul as revenge for Young-Ja. Doing so would give Ji-Ah the 100th soul she needs to become fully human. Ironically, Ji-Ah realizes that the closer she gets to becoming human, the closer she gets to becoming an actual monster, as individuals like Tick and others have displayed to her that humans are capable of treacherous acts. Surprisingly, the two develop a deep love for one another due to a mutual recognition of each other’s true potential for humanity. Attempting to understand the juxtaposition of the creation of the literal monster alongside the creation of a figurative monster via negrification, one of my students remarked, “[T]he reason I wanted these stated was because the nine tail fox really put a perspective that I hadn’t seen before” and that “with the nine tailed fox we see how people place the term or label Monster, the woman is expected to behave as such, she starts viewing herself as evil as a monster as does the solider she ends up falling in love with.” The student appears to be on the right track, as a heartfelt discussion between the two addresses this problem of not having a self-consciousness that they developed on their own, a problem that Du Bois of course identified much earlier:

Ji-Ah’s portrayal was especially instructive for students’ understanding of double consciousness. One student remarked,

Lovecraft Country helped me better understand the thoughts of Du Bois and Fanon in reference to whiteness, blackness, and double consciousness. The story of the woman [Ji-Ah] describes double consciousness quite clearly as she was fighting the structured view of herself created by others. The episode also represents the challenges that go with the societal or majority lens of who she is. This becomes a huge toll on her being. Fanon might say that both Ji-Ah and Tick have experienced their being for others.

As a kumiho, Ji-Ah is expected to collect the souls of men as retribution for the evil acts they have committed. As a Korean woman, she is constructed as exotic, and the gendered and sexual connotations of this racialized construction make it easier for her to fulfill her expectations as a kumiho for her mother. ³ Tick is a poor Black man, understood as aggressive, less than human, and a tool whose violence should be aimed by white supremacy at other people of color. Intersectionality provides a lens for understanding the external world’s impact on the identity formation of the two individuals. As this theory was something that most of my students failed to pick up on during the viewing of this episode as well as the others, it may behoove instructors to discuss how the effects of racialization differ among marginalized populations and to ask students if they can identify examples of this phenomenon in Lovecraft and in the writing of Du Bois and Fanon. “Intersectionality” is a theory and term originally coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to emphasize the qualitatively different experiences that marginalized populations endure due to existing in spaces that merge multiple historically disadvantaged identities—the intersection (Crenshaw 1989, 1991). Ji-Ah and Tick’s status as racialized individuals play a role in their marginalization, but the forms of oppression they face, and the mechanisms offered to escape, are different based on the genders of the two. For a Korean woman, the only avenue for escape offered Ji-Ah by a white supremacist patriarchal world is found through providing access to the pleasures of her body. For a Black man, constructed as hypermasculine and aggressive, the only way out is through reactionary violence. Their true love for each other, Fanon might observe, is a crucial first step at disalienation for each. However, there is still much psychoanalytic work that must be done before they can confront a society that constructs them as monsters.

Black Skin, White Masks: Ruby’s Failure

In an anti-Black society, becoming cognizant of the lack of a self-consciousness is only one stage in the potential revolutionary process for unsettling the contradictions in the world. It is possible for one to identify that “the black soul is a construction by white folk” without necessarily militating against that construction (Fanon 2008:xviii). It is this move that Fanon (2008) is interested in diagnosing in Black Skin, White Masks. The conflicted Black person, understanding that one faces epistemic closure for which they can offer no “ontological resistance” (Gordon 2015:15), moves to immerse oneself in whiteness hoping to absolve themselves of all traces of Blackness. They attempt to put on white masks to hide themselves in an anti-Black society. Two of the masks Fanon addresses are those of language and interracial love. Both lead to the Black succeeding only at being an imitation, which in itself is a failure to be original.

In the second chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (2008) explores the attempts of the alienated Black woman to attain whiteness through intimate relations with white male lovers. He does so through a critical analysis of the works of Mayotte Capecia. ⁴ Holding the view that “it is best to be white” (Gordon 1997:78), Fanon observes that women like Capecia attempt to whiten themselves through the eyes of their European lovers, only to find disappointment as those eyes act as mirrors to unveil the Blackness that they are unable to shed. Writing of Mayotte Capecia, Fanon (2008:25) states, “Mayotte loves a white man unconditionally. He is her lord. She asks for nothing, except for a little whiteness in her life.” Yet, if whiteness is, as Du Bois (1999:454) offers, “the ownership of the earth forever and ever,” then in asking for nothing except whiteness, Mayotte is indeed asking for everything. Fanon (2008:27) makes the point that Mayotte Capecia’s dilemma is far from an outlier, as he suggests that “[i]t is commonplace in Martinique to dream of whitening oneself magically as a way of salvation.” Yet, in the magical world of Lovecraft, the character Ruby does just that, or at least attempts to, as she receives a potion from her white male lover, William, that grants her to ability to transform into a white woman.

Ruby had, up to the point of her transformation, walked the Earth as a dark-skinned Black woman whose immense talent and résumé could not qualify her for opportunities that placed whiteness as the only requirement. Finally acquiring this possession, she attempts to kick down every door that had once been closed to her. Unlike Mayotte Capecia, whose Blackness is revealed in the eyes of white onlookers at the party she attends with her European lover, Ruby can hide her Blackness all too well in a white body. She escapes the epidermal schema that Fanon describes as entrapping Blacks amid the white gaze. So, while Fanon is exposed when he is met with “Look! A Negro!”, when Ruby is gazed upon in her white body, she is recognized. Describing the feeling, she explains,

. . .Scared the shit out of me to wake up white. Then . . . when I was stumbling down the street, crazed and disheveled and screaming at everybody around me, they weren’t scared of me. They were scared for me. They all treated me like . . . a human being. That wasn’t pain, that was something else, like being unmade. (Dunye 2020)

Ruby’s mention of “being unmade” is instructive because it is reflective of an insight of Fanon’s that the Black is a white construction or, rather, something that was made (Fanon 2008; Gordon 2015). So, her observation is not necessarily incorrect on its face. However, beneath the surface, the truth is that Ruby cannot stay this way as the potion has a time limit, forcing her to descend back into Blackness in painful fashion. Moreover, her success at imitation of a white person marks her failure of being a human being. In being a perfect white person, she is drawn to engaging in acts that fit her understanding of white reality, one that she understands to be monstrous. When explaining what the gift of whiteness offers to Ruby, Christina (who was masquerading as William all along through a magic potion) declares that it was “an invitation to do whatever the fuck you want.” She explains to Ruby that, as a white woman, she was gifted with “unmitigated freedom” and then proceeds to ask Ruby, “Who are you uninterrupted?” ⁵ This section of the show speaks to Fanon’s (2008:8) engagement with Nietzsche’s suggestion that “man’s misery is that he was once a child.” ⁶ In an anti-Black society, the Black individual is faced with extreme limitations that cause them to lament the time when they were unaware of such restrictions. As a white woman, Ruby can transcend these inhibitions, but doing so comes at a cost. When she acts on who she, as a white woman now, thinks she is “uninterrupted,” she uses a woman’s heel to violently sodomize her white male supervisor for an indiscretion he inflicted on another Black woman, whom Ruby, as Hilary Davenport, had previously treated less than humanely. Thus, in her time using whiteness as a passport to the opportunities that were kept from her as a Black woman, she travels to places within herself that she would have never attempted, or wanted, to venture had those opportunities come in a world where her Blackness was not used as a form of epistemic closure to her being. Conscious of the difficulties imposed on Blacks by an anti-Black society, ironically, putting on a white mask took Ruby both to places she wanted and did not wish to go to (Dunye 2020).

Of the three episodes shown to students, this particular one did not garner any specific reference in their reflections. Due to the concept of failure that was illustrated in the episode being a difficult one to grasp, students may benefit from specific prompts provided by instructors to focus their thinking. Such prompts might ask students questions such as “What might Fanon say about Ruby’s continued despondence even after gaining access to whiteness?” or “How does Ruby’s experience with Christina and Christina as William compare to Fanon’s analysis of Mayotte Capecia?” Instructors could also have students watch the episode and draw on the readings and Lovecraft to discuss why access to whiteness may or may not lead to racial equality and reprieve from the horrors of being racialized. Despite a lack of engagement from my students with this episode, episode 7 of Lovecraft drew a host of student reflections that will be expounded on in the next section.

Potentiated Double Consciousness: Hippolyta’s Journey through the Zone of Non-being

Viewers get to see with Ji-Ah, Tick, and Ruby that just being aware of the impact of white supremacy and anti-Blackness on one’s self-image is not enough to overturn the conditions that make this form of oppression possible. Becoming aware of the lack of self-consciousness and identity that one possesses must then necessitate a move to input something there. Michael Sawyer (2020) argues that Malcolm X’s biography and thought exemplify the move that is spelled out in the work of Du Bois and Fanon. Becoming aware of the psychological self-alienation that is imposed on the Black subject by the structures of white supremacy and anti-Blackness, X engages in a project to recover a Black identity that had been lost, establish a sustainable subjectivity, reestablish the Black as a human being deserving of civil and human rights, and develop a national project for revolution to unsettle the conditions that made displacement of Black identity necessary to begin with (Sawyer 2020). Sawyer argues that X does this by delving into what Fanon describes as a “zone of non-being.” Fanon (2008:6) explains,

There is a zone of non-being, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, a bare ramp from which a new emergence can arise. In the majority of cases, the Black is not able to benefit from this descent into a veritable hell.

Sawyer observes that this zone of non-being is “a space for the recreation of identity (Sawyer 2020: 39),” which X descends into when he engages in the Nation of Islam (NOI) practice of using an X in place of the last name people were ascribed at birth. The X is a temporary placeholder to be removed once the subaltern subject has reconnected with an African past and fashioned a new identity of their own creation that prepares them for attacking a society that seeks to dehumanize. Sawyer (2020:39–40) advances,

In addressing the political subject disallowed a positive position in this societal order and subsequently a persistent negative understanding of the self, Malcolm X, throughout his career, is invested in naming self-hatred as an exemplar of this phenomenon, while at the same time seeking to identify methodologies for breaking its grip on the subject. As a practical matter, the intra-subjective awakening that happened for Malcolm Little while in prison establishes the ontological foundation of a project of radical self-recreation in the face of coercive threat that is aimed at the establishment of positive political and economic project.

Likewise, in Lovecraft, the subject of naming phenomena comes up several times, and its importance here is just as essential as it is in Malcolm X’s, and by extension Du Bois’s and Fanon’s, projects.

The first interaction viewers get to observe that displays the importance of naming is that which occurs between Tick and Samuel Braithwhite, the leader of the magical lodge brotherhood of the Sons of Adam and the father of Christina. Samuel shows Tick a painting of the biblical Genesis. During the period of creation, God gives names to all nonliving things and instructs Adam, the first human, to name all living things. Samuel explains this moment to Tick, proclaiming, “This act of naming is more than a simple picking of labels. Adam is sharing in creation, assigning each creature its final form and its station in the hierarchy of nature.” Looking to Christina, he asks her to elaborate on what this process means, to which she replies, “He [Adam] put everything in its place.” Tick is then reasonably confused as he questions, “I’m guessing you’re God in this useful parable.” But he’s mistaken, and Samuel corrects him by offering, “I’m Adam. And I’ve worked a very long time to return to paradise.” ⁷ In this sense and in an anti-Black society, Samuel holds the power to assign a function to all living things, including Black people, and is taken to be supported by the Divine. Shortly after this discourse, he makes Tick aware of his role as a sacrifice for Samuel to achieve his aims of becoming immortal (Sackheim 2020).

Naming appears again as viewers delve into the story of Hippolyta, Tick’s aunt by marriage. Hippolyta’s story puts the significance of naming in an anti-Black society on full display. Hippolyta, while sitting at a museum with her daughter, Dee, gazes upon a simulation of a comet and explains what happened to Dee:

The intricacies of naming and race are revealed in this conversation. In an anti-Black society, it is not simply that only whites can name things and Blacks cannot. The names that Black people assign to different entities are taken to be illegitimate. Sawyer (2020) suggests that this point is what drives the frustration of Len O’Connor when Malcolm X wittingly refuses to succumb to O’Connor’s attempts to get him to disclose his birth name. ⁸ In both cases, the point is clear: To recognize the labels Black people assign either as their surname or to a comet would indicate that they are “sharing in creation” and assigning a function to phenomena. However, this privilege, even of naming oneself, is reserved for members of humanity, which Black people are not taken to be in a world ruled by anti-Blackness. One of my students suggested, “Whiteness’s superiority took away from what Blackness is and from the ability for a Black person to be more than what Whiteness labelled them as and to be able to name oneself based on their true desires, revolving around their self and not around anyone else.” To share in such a privilege is to grant a remarkable power. Sawyer (2020:48) explains,

This theological construct, “Adamic naming,” giving both name and function to an entity, is what is at stake here in the Nation of Islam’s understanding of the relationship between the names of Black people and the notion of the possession that is found in the enslaved condition. What the NoI argue, and Malcolm X promotes in the discourse examined here, is the notion of mastery over the bodies of Black people granted the slave-holder the same divine imprimatur granted Adam. . . . The ability to “rename” enslaved human beings, erasing their name and culture, during the process of slave-making, allowed for the coercive power to express itself in the total alienation of subjective identity while at the same time giving these beings their function. This function exists orders of magnitude beyond the simple notion of defining employment but includes the totalizing of the lack of even a possi-bility of subjective freedom through self-identification, what Du Bois would call “true self-consciousness.”

The name Hippolyta assigned to the comet is not recognized, but her statement to Dee, “We know the truth,” suggests that she is at a crucial stage in her journey to achieve a “true self-consciousness.” She understands that she has the power to name and that recognition from a society that despises her being is not the standard for “truth.”

Hippolyta later uses her genius in engineering and astronomy to operate a time machine that was retrieved from a deceased white doctor that experimented on Black people. The time machine brings Hippolyta to a void in space and time (a zone of non-being) that is controlled by a Black woman figure. When Hippolyta pleads with this figure for her release, the figure instructs her to “name yourself.” Confused, Hippolyta continues to struggle against the figure to no avail. The figure then asks Hippolyta, “Where do you want to be? Name it. Who do you want to be? Name it. Name it.” Finally, Hippolyta replies, “I want to be dancing on stage in Paris with Josephine Baker.” She is immediately transported in time to the place she named. Hippolyta gets the chance to perform with Josephine Baker and thoroughly enjoys her time. But the weight of anti-Blackness and the fetter it places on subjectivity remain in Hippolyta’s consciousness. She expresses her feelings to Baker:

Hippolyta’s Du Boisian “second sight” makes her cognizant of “the truth” of white supremacy’s role in the construction of her identity. However, at this stage, like what is seen with Ruby and to some extent with Ji-Ah and Tick, seeing oneself from this purview can lead to a sense of self-loathing. This disdain for self is felt when Hippolyta proclaims, “I hate me.” She has yet to form a sustainable positive subjectivity. A student recognized that “[t]his displayed double consciousness because, before this journey, she only saw herself through the lens of others. This also helped to understand blackness because it showed that blacks have to go through a process of unlearning what they see through the lens of others.” The student picked up on something that even the character Ruby missed earlier: that gifted second sight can also be cursed for Black people if one internalizes the external anti-Black view of the white world.

The erasure of African history in the creation of the Black individual makes the imposition of an identity fashioned by white supremacy on Black people possible. Both Fanon and Malcolm X attempt to reconnect with an African past to counter the negative mythology of white supremacy with a positive mythology of African splendor. For Fanon, negritude serves this purpose while the origin story of white people fashioned by the NOI acts as the counter-mythology for X. In Hippolyta’s search for a positive mythology, she is transported to Dahomey in precolonial Africa. ⁹ She is seen training to become a warrior of the renowned Dahomey Amazons. The lessons she gains from her instructor, Nawi, are both physically and psychologically instructive. Eventually, the training pays off and Hippolyta becomes proficient enough to lead troops in battle against European colonizing armies. She satisfies pieces of her rage with each swing of her sword. But this point in time, while a positive mythology, is still a mythology nonetheless, and for Hippolyta to be successful in making the complete journey out of the zone of non-being, she cannot stay here. Fanon painfully comes to a similar realization when he responds to Sartre’s critique of negritude, while X arrives at this epiphany when he leaves the NOI, and its myths of origin, and makes his pilgrimage to Mecca. Realizing this point, Fanon (2008:111) asserts,

I wanted to be typically black—that was out of the question. I wanted to be white—that was a joke. And when I tried to claim my negritude intellectually as a concept, they snatched it away from me. They proved to me that my reasoning was nothing but a phase in the dialectic.

Fanon (2008:112) acknowledges the necessity of getting lost in mythology when he explains, “[C]onsciousness needs to get lost in the night of the absolute, the only condition for attaining self-consciousness.” But again, it acts as the compass, not the destination of self-consciousness. Hippolyta time-travels to the last moment she spent with her husband, George, who had died earlier in the season of the series, but this time she shares her newfound social awareness with him.

Picking up on the intersectional nature of this reflection, a student remarked, “It was when she realized that no one was actually any ‘higher’ than her that she herself finally became a person. She rejected all that society (racism and gender norms) made her and wanted her to be, and when she did finally became human.” The student related humanity to the ability to assert one’s possibilities and do things of their own volition, stating, “Human in the form as not being a second class being capable of doing things that she actually wants to do.” The student is correct as from here, Hippolyta returns to the spatial Black woman figure and is told, “Now that you’ve named yourself, we can fully integrate you into our society.” Hippolyta politely declines, understanding that she must return to her time on Earth so she can use her newfound consciousness to overturn the conditions that necessitated her journey at the onset. Paget Henry (2005:100) describes this inevitable project as follows:

Important as the above inner struggles against negrification are, they cannot by themselves overthrow the institutionalized power of white racism. As we’ve seen, this racism was for Fanon both onto- and socio-genic in nature. It was not the truth of negrification that defeated this struggling subject but the social power that came with its institutionalization. This sociological dimension had to be defeated through revolutionary struggles of the type that Fanon described so powerfully in The Wretched of the Earth. Thus as in the case of DuBois, Fanon’s phenomenology is intricately linked to an ethical/practical project.

Hippolyta’s abilities later prove essential in the protagonists’ struggle against a white supremacist and anti-Black society powered by magic.