Presented by Kimberly Nichele Brown, Ph.D.,
Virginia Commonwealth University
Moderated by Dr. Finnie Coleman,
University of New Mexico
This talk explores Regina King’s performance as Angela Abar in the HBO’s series Watchmen (Oct. 20—Dec. 15, 2019). Brown coins the phrase “subversive masking” in order to analyze the complexity of Abar’s alter-ego, Sister Night. Subversive masking is a derivative of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s depiction of the “mask” as a strategy of subterfuge employed by blacks to combat or circumvent racism as articulated in his 1896 poem, “We Wear the Mask.” Brown addresses the show’s use of masks (i.e. those worn by the Watchmen, the Rorschach organization, Hooded Justice, etc.) as a way to demonstrate the easy slippage between police and vigilante justice and to explore the dynamics of race and power in regards to issues of surveillance and policing. Sister Night functions to illuminate the interstitial paradox of the black cop: is her allegiance to the state or her race? Brown argues that Abar’s Sister Night persona is born out of the Tulsa, Oklahoma Massacre in 1921 in which white terrorist violence against blacks and the subsequent inability of blacks to receive proper recompense through the courts displays two very different and racially coded ideas and rationales of vigilante justice. Ultimately, Brown contends that this new version of the Watchmen aligns with sentiments of Black Lives Matter as it makes a case for generational racial trauma and the need for reparations.