The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

Rebecca Wanzo

Published by New York University Press 2020

The Content of Our Caricature

African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

Rebecca Wanzo

Volume 25 in the series Postmillennial Pop

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479813636.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

Winner, 2021 Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award, given by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies

Winner, 2021 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for Best Academic/Scholarly Work

Honorable Mention, 2021 Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, given by the Popular Culture Association

Winner, 2020 Charles Hatfield Book Prize, given by the Comic Studies Society

Traces the history of racial caricature and the ways that Black cartoonists have turned this visual grammar on its head

Revealing the long aesthetic tradition of African American cartoonists who have made use of racist caricature as a black diasporic art practice, Rebecca Wanzo demonstrates how these artists have resisted histories of visual imperialism and their legacies. Moving beyond binaries of positive and negative representation, many black cartoonists have used caricatures to criticize constructions of ideal citizenship in the United States, as well as the alienation of African Americans from such imaginaries. The Content of Our Caricature urges readers to recognize how the wide circulation of comic and cartoon art contributes to a common language of both national belonging and exclusion in the United States.

Historically, white artists have rendered white caricatures as virtuous representations of American identity, while their caricatures of African Americans are excluded from these kinds of idealized discourses. Employing a rich illustration program of color and black-and-white reproductions, Wanzo explores the works of artists such as Sam Milai, Larry Fuller, Richard “Grass” Green, Brumsic Brandon Jr., Jennifer Cruté, Aaron McGruder, Kyle Baker, Ollie Harrington, and George Herriman, all of whom negotiate and navigate this troublesome history of caricature. The Content of Our Caricature arrives at a gateway to understanding how a visual grammar of citizenship, and hence American identity itself, has been constructed.

Author / Editor information

Wanzo Rebecca :

Rebecca Wanzo is Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (2009).Rebecca Wanzo is Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling (2009).

Reviews

The book makes a compelling case for why we should, despite our initial intuitions to look away, engage with what seem like racist representations, stereotypes, and caricatures. Wanzo provides sophisticated textual and literary analyses to argue that African American cartoonists have been questioning, reconstructing, and using racist stereotypes to critique notions of the “ideal citizen” in the United States.

The Content of our Caricature is unique in its focus on Black cartoonists and their use of Black caricatures in comics, editorial cartoons, graphic biographies, and underground comix…This careful, incisive study describes and shows the range of surprising, amusing, entertaining, antagonistic, outrageous, and offensive ways Black cartoonists represent or consider the paradox of Black citizenship.

Wanzo’s contribution to this rising field is vital and unique, given her specific focus on the aesthetics of comics art using the artistic tradition of caricature as a way to engage with social and political issues. Wanzo rightly points out how ‘many of the works’ done to date in Black comic studies—several of which emphasize superhero comic books over other genres and formats— ‘focus on cultural histories or pay little attention to aesthetics’.

Wanzo, like the artists she investigates, reframes caricature so that we might see and read it differently. Because to not see caricature, as Wanzo powerfully concludes, 'will always be a sign of forgetting the monstrosity crafted by historical injuries, a weight carried by all black people perpetually in the wake—and on the brink—of real political change".

The text does a good job at connecting the historical cartoon archive and its stereotypical visual representations of Blacks to current events [...] The Content of Our Caricature invites the reader to a more complex reading of Black representations in caricature that transcends the tendency towards binary oppositions

Jared Gardner, author of Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century Storytelling:
From underground comix to Boondocks, Wanzo brilliantly treats moments in the history of caricature and demonstrates anew how popular culture has perpetuated and popularized generations of grotesque imagery. Wanzo’s gift is in the singular way she reads African American cartoonists who themselves redeployed and engaged the visual grammar of caricature while also interrogating American citizenship. An authoritative, nuanced book.

Qiana Whitted, co-editor of Comics and the U.S. South:
A singular achievement. Rebecca Wanzo gives shape to new and necessary ways of understanding the development of comic art in the United States that also resonate with broader conversations about blackness and visual narrative. Her study delves into the ambivalent expressions of citizenship, identity, and power that are central to how cartoonists picture race. Along the way, Wanzo bridges aesthetics and cultural theory through expert readings of editorial comics and newspaper strips, superhero serials, underground comix, historical graphic novels, and more.

[Wanzo] offers a brilliant, concisely written excursion into the fraught nature of African American comic art.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction: A Visual Grammar of Citizenship Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. “Impussanations,” Coons, and Civic Ideals: A Black Comics Aesthetic Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
2. The Revolutionary Body: Nat Turner, King, and Frozen Subjection Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	71
3. Wearing Hero- Face: Melancholic Patriotism in Truth: Red, White & Black Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
4. “The Only Thing Unamerican about Me Is the Treatment I Get!” Infantile Citizenship and the Situational Grotesque Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139
5. Rape and Race in the Gutter: Equal Opportunity Humor Aesthetics and Underground Comix Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
To Caricature, with Love: A Black Panther Coda Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	221
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	245