Since the landmark
publication of Tom Feelings’s The Middle
Passage: White Ships, Black Cargo (1995), African American creators have
produced a substantial number of insightful and provocative graphic narratives
about a wide range of persons and events from United Stares history. Among the
most notable and influential works are Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner (2008), a biographical depiction of Nat Turner’s role in
one of the deadliest slave rebellions of the antebellum era; John Lewis, Andrew
Aydin, and Nate Powell’s March
trilogy (2013-2016), about Lewis’s role in the civil rights movement and the
March from Selma to Montgomery; and Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez’s Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave
Revolts (2021), a fantastic historical account of female revolutionary
slaves. In this course, we will read and analyze these graphic narratives as
significant contributions to what may be called Black Visual Culture. We will
familiarize ourselves with the basic instruments of comics analysis and will
also interrogate the visual culture that contextualizes the ways in which these
works interact with and intervene in standard depictions of US history.
- Dozent/in: Daniel Stein