Popular Culture Review Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter 2014 | Page 33

Techno-Orientalism in the A'-Afe/i Film Franchise 29 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