Techno-Orientalism in the A'-Afe/i Film Franchise
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the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.
Professor X serves as an ersatz Martin Luther King, Jr. as he advocates a
policy and sentiment of integration, whereas Magneto is a stand-in for
Malcolm X who was a proponent of a separatist mentality for African
Americans. According to Ramzi Fawaz,
Circulating in the mid-1970s at the zenith of post-Civil Rights
left social movements including liberal and radical feminisms,
environmentalism, black nationalism, and gay liberation, the
comic book’s transnational cast and visual and narrative
articulation of “mutation” to social and cultural difference more
broadly underscored the tie between expressions of popular
fantasy and the ideals of radical politics in the postwar period.
(357)
During this period, the mutants in the X-Men comics allied various
minorities and were utilized and situated as a collective through which
they could vicariously fight oppression and stand together on a united
front and by cultivating the “capacious category of ‘mutation’ as a
biological marker and a category of otherness akin to race and gender,
the X-Men deployed popular fantasy to describe the generative alliances
across difference being by radical feminists, gay liberation activists, and
the counterculture in the 1970s” (Fawaz 361). At its best, the X-Men
provided minoritarian figures with a common ground to formulate their
own identificatory apparatuses to combat and counterattack all forms of
oppression:
The X-Men developed the popular fantasy of the mutant
superhero not only to resist a variety of repressive social
norms—including racial segregation, sexism, and xenophobia—
but also to facilitate the ground from which new kinds of choices
about political affiliation and personal identification could be
pursued. (Fawaz 361)
While Fawaz analyzes the X-Men in comic-book form, my interest lies
in their filmic representations and, as a result, this article focuses on how
the X-Men have been adapted and translated to the screen. Despite the
counter-hegemonic undertones of the X-Men, the majority of the actors
cast in the film versions of the comic books are white with the few
minorities in the cast serving as villains. While Halle Berry plays Storm