No abstract
This chapter examines the representation of black boys and black girls in comics, with a strong focus on early comics from the late nineteenth century. It combines the study of gender with the study of racist representations. Weaving connections with related cultural products such as animation and children's literature, the chapter shows how racist stereotypes permeate representations of black children regardless of gender. Performative and persistent racist stereotypes such as the pickaninny transcend genders and coalesce the bodies of both black boys and black girls. Although black boys outnumber black girls in comics, they channel stereotypes that can be traced back to the visualization of Topsy, the slave girl in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. This chapter proposes the concept of soft hate in order to explain how denigrating imagery persists and serves as a conduit of racist sentiment even in contexts that would otherwise condemn such feelings.We are only too painfully familiar with racialized imagery in comics, cartoons and other media, especially those relying on caricatural styles. We are also all too familiar with the argument that such representations were inevitable for their times: the artists didn't know better; the exaggerated idiom of caricature was the only way othered (non-white) people were recognizable; caricature spares no one and deforms in the service of humor; etc. In this chapter, I unpack stereotypes of black boys and black girls that traveled between popular imagery (especially advertisements and prints) and popular entertainment (minstrelsy and vaudeville), illustrated children's literature, dolls and comics to interrogate the rigidity of derogatory stereotypes of black children and their persistence in the face of more conciliatory representations. I begin with the rise of derogatory stereotypes of African Americans in mid to late nineteenth-century American culture (Bernstein, "Signposts" 99-100; Black), which was also a period
This chapter summarizes the findings of the analyses conducted in Part Two and explains how openness unfolds in aspects regarding both form and content. The means of generating openness in comics are grouped under four broad categories based on ambiguity, suggestiveness, and subversion which are elaborated by beginning with the technical aspects of the medium, in particular its disjointed essence, and moving on to the media references, which often function self-reflexively. The relevance of characters subverting comics conventions is also highlighted. The section then discusses the role of subversive and self-reflexive themes such as autofiction and metafiction. The final section in this part connects comics' increasing indulgence in more allusiveconnections between panels and references to other media to the current prevalence of multimedia and the digital age in general.
This article seeks to map a social history through examining children and 'childish' or childlike drawing styles, and hence the presence of children, in comics. Traced across different print formats, this history reflects the changing readership of different kinds of comics, ranging from the mixed, primarily adult readership of newspaper comics, the young readers of comics albums and magazines, and the mature readers of contemporary book-length comics or graphic novels. Unfolding through a changing matrix of affects incarnated by comics children, this social history shows how different kinds of power relationships between adults and children are articulated in the comics discussed. The carnivalesque liberty and laughter of early newspaper comics contrasts with the nostalgic gaze towards childhood imbuing many graphic novels that cater to a mature readership. Unfolding across a select corpus of key comics formats, this sociohistorical reading of comics children is channeled through affects and power struggles.
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