Surrendering to Care: Black Canary and a mother/daughter pedagogy of loss

• In Event: Margins, Gutters, and Futures: Comics as Sites of Critical Literacy and Speculative Cultural Resistance

Abstract

In the 6-issue miniseries Black Canary: Best of the Best (King & Sook, 2025), the titular hero -one of the best hand-to-hand fighters in the DC Universe- goes six rounds with her rival, Lady Shiva, to determine who is the best of all. The story is split between the match and flashbacks to the time that led to it. In the latter, we learn that Black Canary’s mother -the previous Black Canary- is dying of cancer, and as she relentlessly trains her daughter, it becomes clear that her dying wish is to see her child triumph and become the daughter she always wanted but was never satisfied with. But of course, there is a catch: the immortal villain Vandal Savage offers the young Black Canary a magical cure for her mother in exchange for her surrendering towards the end of the match.

The story is layered with pedagogies of care and excellence at any cost, parental pedagogies of unmet expectations and transferred desires, and necropedagogies (Lewis, 2009; Tumarkin, 2011) of death and surrender. The match is not only between Black Canary and Shiva, but between fulfilling impossible desires and gaining the time to ask for forgiveness, and what we would be willing to sacrifice to fix the unfixable.

In this presentation, I will use this comic to consider the complex relationships between the search for excellence in schools, the impossible desires of parents, teachers, and students (for a perfect community, for a better future, for success in all its forms, for making the others happy), and the pull of surrendering in times of neofascism. Seeing the world around us collapse, with the US government disappearing people left and right, an ongoing genocide and planned starvation taking place in Gaza and funded by our government on both sides of the aisle, and American institutions (including those we work in) bending to the will of an autocrat, many (all?) of us feel the desire, and perhaps the need, to surrender in order to gain some semblance of temporary peace. Yet we are told by colleagues and thought leaders, by ethicists and warriors, never to surrender, to always hold on to hope in the power of education, to show we are better than that. But what if, as was the case with Black Canary, after honing our skills to the limit -writing all the papers, engaging in community work with schools and other institutions, participating in every event and protest, doing whatever we can to fight this-, surrendering seemed like at least a less futile way of moving forward? What would surrender (for now, at this specific juncture) teach us and others, allow us to do, think, and feel? What curricular possibilities are opened up by a pedagogy of surrender and loss, one that gives up on the push for an eternal pedagogical optimism?

Author

• Dani Friedrich, Teachers College, Columbia University