Days of Future Past: Why Race Matters in Metadata

Feminist Media Histories , 2018

Set in the fictitious African nation of Wakanda, the six volumes of the Black Panther comic book weave plots that are faithful to superhero tropes and aware of Black nationalist discourses. The storylines focus on deterring white dominance, tribal warfare, and mineral exploitation. Creating characters conscious of the threats to their autonomy is an opportunity to reframe the "Black power" trope. This photo essay explores how iterations of raced and gen-dered figures in mainstream and independent comics are used to mediate and meditate on certain social anxieties. The images and their associated captions explore how Afrofuturism in "Black" comics not only provides illustrative cases of actual Black social life and political crossings engaged with cultural Black archives, but stimulates complex engagements with Black feminist thought in order to advance the liberation struggles of mutant, racialized, and gendered bodies seeking empowerment and social justice.

2011

This dissertation analyzes issues of race, ethnicity, and identity in American comics and visual culture, and identifies important areas for alternative means to cultural authority located at the intersections of verbal and visual representation. The symbolic qualities that communicate ethnicity and give ethnicity meaning in American culture are illuminated in new ways when studied within the context of the highly symbolic medium of comics. Creators of comics are able to utilize iconic qualities, among other unique formal qualities of the medium, to construct new visual narratives around ethnicity and identity, which require new and multidisciplinary perspectives for comprehending their communicative complexity. This dissertation synthesizes cultural and critical analysis in combination with formal analysis in an effort to further advance the understanding of comics and their social implications in regard to race and ethnic identity. Much like film scholars in the 1960s, comics scholars in the United States currently are in the process of establishing a core of methodological and theoretical approaches, including Lacanian theories of the image, the comic mapping of symbolic order, the recognition of self in undetailed faces, comics closure, and the implications of the comics gutter. Drawing upon these ideas and additional perspectives offered by v scholars of film and literary studies, such as the relationship between ethnicity and the symbolic, the scopophilic gaze, and filmic suture, I analyze the following visual texts: Henry Kiyama's The Four Immigrants Manga, Gene Yang's American Born Chinese, and Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles. The dissertation also performs a multimedia analysis of the current ascendency of geek culture, its relationship to the comics medium, and the geek protagonist as an expression of simulated ethnicity. Ultimately, the unique insights offered by the study of comics concerning principles of ethnic iconicity and identity have far reaching implications for scholars of visual and verbal culture in other mediums as well.

2016

Carter's published draft of a column in _The ALAN Review_ Winter 2015 issue details how presumed whiteness among comics readers may be misleading when we think globally, and even locally, as several online fan bases with strong internet presences suggest. If teachers and teacher educators have avoided comics because they consider them the domain of American English-speaking white males, they may want to think again -- and consider how reconceptualizations based on growing trends and realities affords space for comics in classrooms because both classrooms and comics -- even superhero comics -- offer diversities of diversities.

The prevalent use of stereotypes for Black people in the comics medium has left little room for character and situational diversity. Many attempts to correct this have been made, and yet the problem still persists, with new obstacles being created along the way. This thesis focuses on improving representation of Black people in comics through the increase of Black characters in the created worlds of comics. It also identifies and analyzes the effects of ethnic recasting, cultural dilution, biracialism, and racial ambiguity on the progress in this area. The implementation of these concepts serves as a hindrance to Black representation. Therefore, only through an increase in the number of recognizably Black characters and stories with predominately Black casts will Black stereotypes fade and no longer be the prevailing representation of Black people in comics.

We conducted a content-analysis on Modern Age American comic books recording the gender, race, and class of the main and background comic book characters. Our data shows that white males are the majority of overall characters, main characters, and aggressors in altercations. With regard to class, black characters were more likely to be represented as having lower socioeconomic status compared to white characters. Black background characters were significantly underrepresented overall compared to white comic book readers. The implications of the under-representation of women, people of color, and women of color in comic books are discussed for perpetuating stereotypes in those who read them.

Cinema Journal, 2017

MOZAIK HUMANIORA, 2020

For centuries, racial discrimination and injustice have resulted in the struggle of African Americans to resist racial inequality. Nevertheless, their struggle has never been easy since racism against African Americans has long been institutionalized. In other words, any kinds of white oppression that marginalized, discriminated, and alienated African Americans have embedded in formal institutions, such as legal, educational, as well as social and political institutions. Accordingly, this study dealt with institutional racism and black resistance in the United States as portrayed through images and narratives in two American graphic novels, Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation and John Lewis’ March: Book Three, which depicted different ways African Americans were oppressed by and resisted against institutionalized racism. This study applied African American criticism to reveal the racism and black resistance portrayed in both graphic novels based on Feagin’s and B...

Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2019

Feminist scholars have provided important analyses of the gendered and racialised discourses used to justify the Global War on Terror. They show how post-9/11 policies were made possible through particular binary constructions of race, gender, and national identity in official discourse. Turning to popular culture, this article uses a Queer feminist poststructuralist approach to look at the ways that Ms. Marvel comics destabilise and contest those racialised and gendered discourses. Specifically, it explores how Ms. Marvel provides a reading of race, gender, and national identity in post-9/11 USA that challenges gendered-racialised stereotypes. Providing a Queer reading of Ms. Marvel that undermines the coherence of Self/Other binaries, the article concludes that to write, draw, and circulate comics and the politics they depict is a way of intervening in international relations that imbues comics with the power to engage in dialogue with and (re)shape systems of racialised-gendered ...