Dr. Strange is a character wholly of Ditko’s invention, which other writers later contributed to and altered. This chapter addresses the issue of Dr. Strange’s racial identity as well as the complicated politics of cosmic intraspace on display throughout Ditko’s tenure on the character. This chapter considers one of Ditko’s most knotty and sophisticated narrative arcs as it addresses the creation of the self, how occult and mystical ideas infiltrate (and are infiltrated) by individualist thought, and how the two operate together to create a mystic liberal imagination of self-creation through an internal excavation of the mind.
On June 27, 2015, ten days after the massacre at the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Claudia Rankine published an essay on black loss in the New York Times’ Sunday magazine: “the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering,” Rankine writes; yet “[w]e live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here.”...
6. Life, Self- Regulation, and the Liberal Imagination
