12 - African American New History-Writing in Graphic Narratives

Summary

Many Black intellectuals and artists have called for a counter-historiography that would redress the silencing of Black voices and the inadequate representation of Black experiences in earlier comics. This chapter identifies three categories of graphic historiographies, each with thematic and formal recurrences: those that propose a frontal look at the context of enslavement, from the horrors of the Middle Passage to the violence of the plantation world; those focusing on the political and social struggles of Black communities after the Civil War, from the Jim Crow era and the courageous actions of Civil Rights leaders to twenty-first-century police brutality; and, finally, those that imagine new Black futures in the mode of speculative fiction, while metaphorically referencing past forms of exploitation and repression. The chapter studies the specific devices of several of these works, including the use of temporal shifts in the graphic adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the reliance on oral history and photo-based illustrations in John Lewis’s Run, Book One, the depiction of Black women’s subordination in Shirlene Obuobi’s ShirlyWhirlMD webcomic, and the futuristic metaphors of slavery and capitalism in Roxane Gay’s The Sacrifice of Darkness.