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Black women are at the forefront of some of this century’s most important discussions about technology: trolling, online harassment, algorithmic bias, and influencer culture. But Black women’s relationship with technology began long before the advent of Twitter or Instagram. To truly “listen to Black women,”Steele points to the history of Black feminist technoculture in the U.S. to decenter white supremacy and patriarchy in the future of technology. Using the virtual beauty shop as a metaphor, Digital Black Feminism walks readers through the technical skill, communicative expertise, and entrepreneurial acumen of Black women’s labor—born of survival strategies and economic necessity—both on- and offline. Digital Black Feminism positions Black women at the center of our discourse about the past, present, and future of technology, offering a through line from the writing of early twentieth-century Black women to the bloggers and social media mavens of the twenty-first century. The blogosphere provided Black feminist writers a unique space to draft principles for a new generation of Black feminist thought, while other online communities offer practical lessons on the praxis of digital Black feminism. Steele makes connections between the letters, news articles, and essays of Black feminist writers of the past and a digital archive of blog posts, tweets, and Instagram stories of some of the most well-known Black feminist writers of our time. As Black feminist writers’ work now reaches its widest audience online, Steele offers hopefulness and caution on Black feminism becoming a product for sale in the digital marketplace.

Keeping It Unreal: Black Queer Fantasy and Superhero Comics explores how fantasy—especially superhero comics, which are usually derided as naïve and childish—is a catalyst for engaging the black radical imagination. Such engagements prompt “fantasy-acts” against antiblackness, a transgressive way of “reading” beyond the comic-book page to envision and to experience alternate, and potentially more just, realities. Fantasies about superhero characters are not just or even primarily forms of escape, Scott argues, but are active reshapings of readers and their worlds. Keeping It Unreal offers a rich meditation on the relationship between fantasy and reality and between the imagination and being, as it weaves Scott’s personal recollections of his encounters with superhero comics with interpretive readings of figures like the Black Panther, Luke Cage, Nubia, and Blade and theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Saidiya Hartman, and Gore Vidal. Keeping It Unreal represents an in-depth theoretical consideration of the intersections of superhero comics, blackness, and queerness, and draws on a variety of fields of inquiry, including African American and African diaspora studies, media studies, comics studies, queer theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and black feminism.