Aisha Jackson on the Broadway Musical Stage: An Afro-Fabulative Embodiment of Princess Anna in Frozen: The Broadway Musical

In this article, we argue that the humanity and mattering of Black people have always lived in Black girlhood, but the potentiality of Black girlhood as a creative space for designing Black approaches in educational research has yet to be fully realized. Therefore, we (re)turn to Black girlhood frameworks and theories in our contribution to Black approaches in educational research. Looking to where Black girls live and be (re)defines notions of human, humanity, humanness, and living for it begins at Black girl epistemes. Following Wynter’s call for a new humanness, one that promises liberatory futures, we offer Project-Praxes of Black Girl Otherworld-Making to scholars and researchers occupying educational space, considering their/our responsibility and answerability firstly to Black people, and secondly, to the fields of Black Studies, Black Girlhood Studies, and education in a transdisciplinary sense. Project-Praxes of Black Girl Otherworld-Making includes the following seven pursuits: (1) humanness outside the white gaze and after Man; (2) remembering where Black girlhoods lived; (3) ethical engagements with Black girl(s)/hoods; (4) Black girlhood approaches in educational research; (5) reflexivity in doing freedom work in unfree places/spaces; (6) transdisciplinary intellectual rendezvouses that seriously read and cite Black women; and (7) writing with regard for the spectrum of legibility. Through Project-Praxes of Otherworld-Making, Black girls can show up as their most authentic selves and fully expect the same of us as researchers. This framework is not invested in projects of changing, fixing, or colonizing young Black girls. We instead acknowledge that they already have the language to express how they feel and what they know. We hold their descriptions as truth and learn from them to honor their/our lives in the work. Project-Praxes of Otherworld-Making makes possible Black girls’ humanity and freedom dreaming.

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Tomboys, 1850–1915

Research Article| September 01 2017 10 Years of Black Girlhood Celebration: A Pedagogy of Doing Chamara Jewel Kwakye, Chamara Jewel Kwakye Chamara Jewel Kwakye is a womanist scholar–educator with interdisciplinary interests at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnography, performance, and pedagogy. She has published works on qualitative methods, hip-hop feminist pedagogy, and is currently working on a monograph that examines Black women's pedagogy and praxis of love and labor. Correspondence to: Chamara Jewel Kwakye, c/o The Galloway School, 215 W. Wieuca Road NW, Atlanta, GA 30342, USA. Email: ckwakye@gallowayschool.org. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Dominique C. Hill, Dominique C. Hill Dominique C. Hill is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Black Studies at Amherst College. She is a body-lyricist, disrupter, and ethnographer committed to socially just and artistic practices. Her teaching and scholarship situates the body as a pivotal vessel and she incites questions that foreground voices, bodies, and knowledges of often disappeared and/or silenced populations. Her current project examines Black girlhood, education, and the body as entanglements. Her interdisciplinary scholarship emerges from her life work, which is dedicated to documenting and reimagining Black life with a focus on Black girls and women. Correspondence to: Dominique C. Hill, Department of Black Studies, Amherst College, 108 Cooper House, 86 College Street, Amherst, MA 01002, USA. Email: dhill@amherst.edu. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Durell M. Callier Durell M. Callier Durell M. Callier is Assistant Professor of critical youth studies and cultural studies of education in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University. His current research documents, analyzes, and interrogates Black youth lived experiences as it intersects with constructions of race and queerness. In his research and creative projects, he employs feminist and queer methodologies to research how Black and queer communities broadly defined make use of art and narrative towards knowledge creation, staging critical resistance, and actualizing freedom. Correspondence to: Durell M. Callier, Department of Educational Leadership, Miami University, 304 McGuffey Hall, Oxford, OH 45056, USA. Email: calliedm@miamioh.edu.The guest editors would like to begin by expressing their gratitude for girls, women, moments, and visions passed through and circulated in SOLHOT. Thank you to the OG Homegirls, Aisha, Candy, Grenita, Chamara, Jasmine, Christina, and Camille for your courage and commitment. To Ruth Nicole Brown, thank you for insisting Black girlhood studies be a celebration. Generations of Black girlhood celebration exist because of each of you. To the current homegirls/homeboys/homebois and to those to come, this is for you and for future Black girlhood turn-ups in all of their forms—ratchet, bougie, oldskool, analog, digital, and out of this world. Lastly, the guest editors would like to thank Stacy Holman Jones and Sohinee Roy for making such a timely issue on the importance of Black girls, their lives, and survival a possibility. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (2017) 6 (3): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2017.6.3.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Chamara Jewel Kwakye, Dominique C. Hill, Durell M. Callier; 10 Years of Black Girlhood Celebration: A Pedagogy of Doing. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 1 September 2017; 6 (3): 1–10. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2017.6.3.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentDepartures in Critical Qualitative Research Search People often ask, “What is Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT)?” Sometimes the answer is it's a poem, sometimes it's a dance, sometimes it's an art installation in a local gallery, sometimes it's a song, sometimes it's a rhyme, sometimes it's a book, sometimes it's a lesson on theory and praxis, sometimes it's an article, sometimes it's an editorial, sometimes it's a performance, and sometimes it's a one-word answer. The answer however, no matter the form, is never simple. It's nuanced, layered, multifaceted, and ever changing. If we had to give a succinct and clear answer to the question: “SOLHOT is a space to envision Black girlhood critically among and with Black girls, who… are often the people least guaranteed to be centered as valuable in collective work and social movements.”1 Black girlhood studies, though burgeoning, continues to center the lives of Black girls in various disciplines. The... You do not currently have access to this content.

Journal Article Maria W. Stewart’s “The First Stage of Life”: Black Girlhood in the Repository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art Get access Nazera Sadiq Wright Nazera Sadiq Wright University of Kentucky Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 40, Issue 3, Fall 2015, Pages 150–175, https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlv034 Published: 07 August 2015

Nazera Sadiq Wright. 2016. Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century. Urbana, University of Illinois Press.Black girls have a history of resilience. Nazera Sadiq Wright, in Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century (2016), analyzes accounts of the experiences of black girls from what she refers to as “youthful” girlhood to the conscious or “prematurely knowing” (44) age of 18. Setting out to recover overlooked accounts of black girlhood during the nineteenth century, a tumultuous epoch of transition for the black community, Wright uses contemporaneous literary and visual texts such as black newspapers, novels, poetry, and journals to reconstruct this lost narrative. By engaging in a close reading of these texts, in which black people, emerging from slavery, communicated with each other about personal and community goals, Wright examines the ways in which the instruction of black girls operated in between the lines of literature to convey codes of conduct to the black community. She argues that with the emergence of literature written by and for black women, the role of the black girl morphed from docile homemaker to resilient heroine for herself and her people. In discussing this more complex role, Wright does not deny that black girls were vulnerable to multiple forms of violence and hurt, but does point to a more nuanced experience. Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century is an intervention into the African American literary canon, filling in many of the gaps in the lost history of black girlhood, making it an essential text for those “who care” (22) about black girls as they engage in the process of rewriting and redeeming the narratives of an often-forgotten population.

Black Girls' Feistiness as Everyday Resistance in Toni Cade Bambara'sGorilla, My Love Aria S. Halliday (bio) Black women's literature positions resistance as one of the most important aspects of a Blacka woman's experience.1 Writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Audre Lorde illuminate the connections between identity formation and resistance, especially in relation to patriarchal and heteronormative attitudes towards relationships and gender norms. For Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, resistance within mother/daughter relationships, as well as resistance to ancestral and community expectations, are at the center of Black female characters' experiences. Although included in Black literary constellations alongside Morrison and Walker, Toni Cade Bambara's shorter works have been anthologized without much criticism dedicated to her depictions of young Black women and resistance within the Black community. This article, then, focuses on Toni Cade Bambara's use of young Black girl protagonists as resistive characters who critique societal and intraracial issues in her short stories. Primarily, I feature Scout and Squeaky, two Black girl protagonists in Toni Cade Bambara's short stories "Gorilla, My Love" and "Raymond's Run." As girls who are assertive, willing to fight, and outspoken, Scout and Squeaky illustrate how communities and families infuse their girls with strategies to resist. Utilizing a Black feminist interpretation of James Scott's "everyday forms of resistance," I argue that Scout and Squeaky's feistiness is rooted in resistive [End Page 50] families and communities who reject normative aged, gendered, and racialized performances of girlhood.2 In doing so, I highlight how Bambara resituates feistiness as a necessary attribute created and secured in communities in the civil rights cultural moment of the 1960s and 1970s.3 This article contextualizes Black girls against traditional tropes of girls, challenging how Black girls have been made invisible because of their particular racialized experiences. I then turn to Bambara's characterizations of Squeaky and Scout to illustrate how "bad" Black girls cultivate feistiness as a survival skill. Lastly, I explore how feistiness could underlie "strong Black woman" stereotypes proliferated in popular culture that Black women confront daily. Despite their mischaracterizations, strength for Black girls is rooted in resistive communities and is necessary to promote the creativity, self-determination, and feistiness required of a world that constantly criminalizes and demonizes Black women and girls. Is She Really Bad? Racializing Bad Girl Tropes Previous scholarly work on Toni Cade Bambara has focused on her longer works, such as The Salt Eaters or three stories featured in the 1970 collection Gorilla, My Love: "The Lesson," "The Hammer Man," and "My Man Bovanne."4 Although Bambara has been anthologized as an author who centers African American culture and vernacular expression in her narratives, Nancy Hargrove implies that she is less often recognized as a young adult fiction writer like Twain, Joyce, and Salinger.5 Likewise, I have found that Bambara's writing has rarely been explored for her attention to Black girlhood. I contend, however, that Bambara positions girls as prominent actors in their communities. Set in the urban North, Gorilla, My Love contains fifteen short stories that explore Black families and love relationships. Many of Bambara's stories use a young girl protagonist or a representative character named Hazel. Although different in each narrative, Hazel, as a recurring character throughout the collection, provides literary continuity to feistiness as an important motif for Bambara. Moreover, Bambara's depictions of Black girlhood feistiness restructure normative conceptions of childhood because she resists simple characterizations of children as innocent or invisible. In traditional girlhood studies scholarship, the bad girl trope positions a girl who is angry, aggressive, and sexually active at the outskirts of society and community.6 Her isolation further fuels her anger, which incites her bad behavior. Marion Brown explains that white girls in literature who are considered aggressive or nonconformist are representatives of the bad girl trope—in addition to the sad girl who has low self-esteem and [End Page 51] strained relationships with women and the mad girl who adopts punk rock aesthetics and performativity to rebel—and are demonized for their "masculine" behaviors.7 However, these characterizations privilege narrow...

The Princess and the Frog (2009) offered Disney audiences a story unlike any other the animation pioneer had ever told: the tale of its first Black princess. Engaging scripting theory and critical whiteness studies, I analyze the portrayal of the Black character Tiana and her relationship with White character Charlotte to explain how they are framed in the context of other mediated portrayals of blackness. By attending to how Tiana’s character is primarily presented to viewers in the form of a frog, I argue that her Black body is scripted as simultaneously absent yet present, enabling audiences to accept this “new” twist to the Disney princess motif. In addition, I explain how the film gives value to its first Black princess by positioning her against a flawed White character. This reduced Tiana’s blackness. Thus, via The Princess and the Frog, Disney continued to feature whiteness as the central framework upon which Black characters may be understood and appreciated. While Disney made a paltry gesture to demonstrate that representation matters, the film also indicates that Disney’s movement toward creating a more diverse animated world has been stunted in ways that continue to influence the portrayals offered by the industry giant.

As a note, the Black on Black on Black on Black Exhibition at the Krannert Art Museum (KAM) on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was open from September 24, 2022, through December 10, 2022. This interview is with one of the four artist-curators, Blair Smith.(Both paragraphs of background information are taken directly from https://kam.illinois.edu/exhibition/Black-Black-Black-Black.)laura hetrick [lh]: So first, thank you for your time. To start, tell me about the larger idea behind the exhibit experience Black on Black on Black on Black.blair ebony smith [bes]: So this particular fall, Fall 2022, myself, along with three other colleagues, Nekita Thomas, Patrick Hammie, and Stacey Robinson, who are all faculty in the School of Art & Design, came together to curate and program the first ever Black faculty show in the School of Art & Design.We wanted us to come together and curate a show that not only speaks somewhat to identity and representation, but also things and themes that we are engaged in across our work. In particular, we're thinking about Black Quantum Futurism, which is a theory and practice form by Camae Ayewa (also known as Moor Mother) and Rasheedah Phillips. They are together a collective called Black Quantum Futurism. But the theory and practice around that is thinking about how Black people engage different theories of time and space. So we're all also doing that in our different ways and coming together to share our work around art, design, and space-making with the faculty show in the Krannert Art Museum.lh: How did you all meet and negotiate this? How much time was this—months of planning? Was this years of planning?bes: Yes, it was a year of planning. We've been meeting since last fall to really come together to make sure it was something that we wanted to do, that made sense. So it wasn't like it was like a mandatory thing; it was something that was brought forth by the School of Art & Design and the Dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts. But also, this is something that could be exciting to do, and could give us opportunity to make art that we wanted to make, to have conversations we wanted to have, and so we decided and committed to do this together a year ago.lh: What did you want to do that was unique about this exhibition? Because there's programming involved, not just people visiting a show; there was much more.bes: You know, there are so many silos between departments. This was the opportunity for all of us across departments to get together and come together across the common theme and programs, learning more about each other and our work. And so that was one of the goals for me, and I think for everyone else. I think one of the things that came up during the opening was really seeing students who are looking for space and ways to show their art. So also thinking about that, thinking through ways we could do that and work with students, to be in conversation with them. So working with other colleagues in the school, I've gotten amazing e-mails from students who have responded to the work. We just wanna be able to continue to have a good conversation with the art, not just put it up.lh: So to switch gears, can you tell me the story behind your work specifically?bes: Absolutely, yeah, I guess I can start with the Ruth Nicole Brown quote on the wall (see Figure 3) because I think it's very much in conversation with what all the installation is thinking and talking about. But also I think it's how I'm really making sense of my work in relation to Black girlhood studies at the moment.What kind of conversations do I want to have? And so one of the things that comes from working with Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown and the collective, Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths [SOLHOT], is we make spaces for Black girlhood celebration for Black girls.And my particular role in SOLHOT has been as a DJ and an artist, as a music maker with Black girls and women. And so one of the things that comes up in that work a lot is how we remember each other and remember in a way that's through ritual and practice. I really have been thinking about and sitting with that, meditating on that, but also even thinking about how I started DJing. I came to it in a particular way with SOLHOT, but I also had to realize that it had always been there. It's always been in me, even before I got there. The space of celebrating Black girlhood with homegirls gives me permission to celebrate myself.And one of the things about doing SOLHOT and working with Black girls is that you also really have to interrogate your own girlhood, make sense of yourself as a young girl. And so I really wanted to do that, but I wanted to do that in conversation, particularly with my own musical and family archives.And so I wanted to sit with CDs; a lot of the things that my parents, who are deceased, had left with me, is music. So I wanted to really sit with those objects and think about what they were saying, how I could remember with them, create a new ritual of remembering that really thought about what the music was teaching me as a young girl. But even in this moment, how that continues on, and how that's in conversation with SOLHOT, with Black girlhood, and how I come to that work.lh: Where did you start? How did this installation come together?bes: Hmm, that's a great question because this is also not my first installation. I guess how I started is very much connected to SOLHOT, but had an opportunity as a postdoc to work in art education, but through the current Art Museum as a curator.A lot of me thinks about space in new ways. So, I'm sitting with objects, but I'm also knowing that whatever I'm remembering and making is also gonna be within a museum gallery within this installation. So I'm also making sense of that using my experiences with curating Homemade, with Love and thinking about gallery space as home space as living space. Also it's very much in conversation with how I've learned to make space and think about sound, and how that could take up space in the museum. So I'm sitting with objects, but I'm also very much thinking about sound and visual art, visual aesthetics, and that in conversation with the sound, and a series of mix CDs curated by my father that featured his best of jazz and funk music as objects. So it started with those CDs, but it's sort of evolved into so much more.lh: What influenced your choice of materials?bes: I think that it's sort of partly what's around me, and also just letting myself figure that out throughout the process. When I'm imagining coming up with the idea, I wanted to really sit with the CDs. I knew I wanted to have sounds. I wanted audio to be a major part of that installation, and then I really wanted to build living space around that. So a lot of the objects and materials that are in the installation are thinking about music equipment and stereo systems, like what you would see in someone's home. This is also very much in conversation with what I was seeing in my own archives and pictures of my family. And so I really wanted to re-create that in new ways with the sound.lh: For example, the ceiling tile was just around you; it was available. But then you had to figure out how to actually affix the writings from your mother, and some photos. You had to learn how to work with it. But then the metaphor actually became even deeper, when we were talking about how a lot of people do lie in bed and kind of gaze at the ceiling; they're remembering and thinking. Whether or not there's an actual image up there, because there could be posters in young kids’ rooms, but sometimes there's not, and we produce our own thoughts on that ceiling panel. Again, that really spoke to the depth and complexity in that particular choice, which just happened to be around you.bes: At first I was thinking about it as just this acoustic material, but then it just had so many other layers to it. Especially with thinking about home space and walls, and the things that we put on those walls, on those ceilings.It was photo transfers on packing tape, which was a process to sort of get to. So I know I wanted to use the ceiling tile as a surface for the collages that I wanted to create from my own personal archives. This was a mix of family photographs; some of the handwritings you see are from cards that my mother gave to me. I even scanned some of the CDs that were a part of the archives to make these collages, so I know I wanted to somehow get those images on the ceiling tiles.Once I figured out I didn't want to use the Mod Podge, just sort of doing more research, I came across someone who was using packing tape, just printing images onto regular paper, and using packing tape and water to transfer. And so what I did was use the packing tape over the printed image. I soaked it in water for a few minutes and rubbed the excess paper off. And once I did that, the image was on the packing tape. So then I'm being able to layer images.lh: What has been the overall response to this installation?bes: There's definitely been a lot of responses. I think one of the responses that I hear a lot is a great appreciation for vulnerability. And really sharing where I come from, who makes me who I am in a way that is relatable to people.Whether that's people hearing from the music things that sound familiar to them, or through the images, or the actual materials. Folks have really been able to connect in that way, which is really, really special. Tears. Some tears, which I'm really thankful for. People being able to remember folks that they want to remember. You know I had one person during an opening come to me and say “seeing this record made me remember my grandfather. We just had a conversation about this artist last week.” Just sharing how special that is for them to be able to have those moments with people that they love. Those are all the overwhelming majority of responses. Just a really big appreciation for us.lh: The last question relates to that, so how might those responses to this particular work influence your future work?bes: Wow! It definitely continues to give me permission to trust myself and what it is that I have to share. And being open enough to share that with people. This is really scary. I think on top of me sharing myself personally, a lot of the work that I've done in the past has been with collectives—has been with other people in very particular ways. And I think it's just allowing me to trust myself moving forward with what it is that I create. That it's important—that it's worth sharing.lh: Thank you so much for your time and for sharing this very personal installation with us.

“Does Anybody Have A Map?”: The Impact of “Virtual Broadway” on Musical Theater Composition

This paper aims to contextualize Black women authors’ work inside the Speculative Fiction genre and to argue on how Tomi Adeyemi’s Legacy of Orïsha (2018, 2019) is a liberatory piece of art concerning Black girls’ representation. Our scope considered Ebony Elizabeth Thomas' (2018, 2019a, 2019b) affirmation that Black girls in imaginative settings are limited and stereotyped as much as in any other literary genre. Correspondingly, we are based on the Dark Fantastic theory established by Thomas, especially focusing on the stage of emancipation where we defend that Adeyemi’s books are grounded in Black feminist storytelling. Therefore, first, we address the ways in which qualities of innocence, goodness, beauty, and intimacy relationships are racialized as White in our society — consequently, having effects on the media and literature for the masses. Later, we analyze how the Black girl characters from Legacy of Orïsha, mainly the protagonists — Zélie and Amari —, subvert mass media and literature limitations since they are portrayed as having the qualities previously discussed alongside with their role as heroines. Finally, we assert Legacy of Orïsha can contribute to helping us rethink our collective imagination regarding Black girlhood in Speculative Fiction.

Identity formation is a critical process shaping the lives of adolescents and can present distinct challenges for Black adolescent girls who are positioned in society to negotiate ideals of self when presented with false and incomplete images representing Black girlhood. Researchers have found distorted images of Black femininity derived from history, including the mammy, jezebel, and Sapphire, are still pervasive in contemporary media outlets that are often viewed by adolescent girls. The current qualitative interview study examined literate interpretations of current media representations depicting Black girlhood from eight adolescent girls. Findings show that participants believed that Black girlhood is portrayed as being judged by their hair; is seen as angry, loud, and violent; and is sexualized. Following the interview, the girls used their pens to write against each of these portrayals and also to write toward social change. The ways the girls desired to be represented were in opposition to the ways they felt society and media viewed them. Their responses and literary writings suggest that Black adolescent girls need spaces to negotiate depictions of self and identity.

This article analyzes two projects by Sadie Barnette, “Dear 1968 …” (2017) and Black Sky (2018), that draw from the 500+-page surveillance file the Federal Bureau of Investigation collected on her father Rodney Barnette, who was a member of the Black Panther Party’s chapter in Los Angeles. Barnette modifies the surveillance file with glitter paper and pink markings and situates them in immersive installations that include bedazzled family photographs and icons, such as Hello Kitty, that reference her girlhood in the 1980s. I discuss how the feminine semiotics in these projects simultaneously redact information in the FBI file to thwart the spectacularization of Black suffering, while annotating it with her decorative gestures as a form of intimate recognition for her father and Black people, as well as a Black feminist critique of white oppression and hetero-patriarchal ethno-nationalisms. I pay particular attention to how the feminine aesthetics in these works articulate Black girlhood as a site of visionary potential.

To illustrate Black youth's perceptions of police violence in West Louisville, Kentucky, how they make sense of it, and their responses to it. The study used qualitative interviews with youth ages 10 to 24 residing in West Louisville. The interviews did not specifically inquire about experiences with police, but the theme emerged so strongly from the overall analysis that the current study was warranted. The research team employed a constructivist analytic approach. The analysis yielded two overarching themes, each with several subthemes. The first theme was Black youth experience profiling and harassment by police, with subthemes focused on youth feeling targeted, youth recognizing policing as a tactic to remove them from their community, and youth being acutely aware of police-involved violence. The second theme was Black youth's experiences with the police cultivates mistrust and unsafety, with subthemes including police seen as more likely to harm than help, police not resolving injustices against Black people, and police presence escalating conflict in Black communities. Youth's narratives regarding their experiences with police highlight the physical and psychological violence enacted by police who come into their community, supported by the law enforcement and criminal justice systems. Youth recognize systemic racism in these systems and how it affects officers' perceptions of them. The long-term implications of persistent structural violence these youth endure has implications on their physical and mental health and wellbeing. Solutions must focus on transforming structures and systems.

Book Review| December 01 2022 Review: The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, by Rebecca Wanzo The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging by Rebecca Wanzo. New York University Press, 2020. 245 pp./$89.00 (hb) ISBN 9781479840083, $29.00 (sb) ISBN 9781479889587. Eszter Szép Eszter Szép Eszter Szép is an associate lecturer at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, Budapest, Hungary, where she teaches comics and art/visual culture theory. Her first monograph, Comics and the Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability, was published by the Ohio State University Press in 2020. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2022) 49 (4): 70–75. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2022.49.4.70 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Eszter Szép; Review: The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, by Rebecca Wanzo. Afterimage 1 December 2022; 49 (4): 70–75. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2022.49.4.70 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search Comics scholars have been talking about Rebecca Wanzo’s latest book, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, in the highest of terms ever since its publication. The book has won the Charles Hatfield Book Prize from the Comics Studies Society and the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for the Best Academic/Scholarly Work. In addition, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies awarded The Content of Our Caricature its Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award. Indeed, this book has already become a cornerstone of Comics Studies in the twenty-first century as it successfully establishes a connection between two areas that have rarely been connected before: cartooning and political belonging. The book is a milestone because it shows that cartoons take part in a visual political discourse by representing the dreams, desires, values, and fears of communities, and Wanzo provides nuanced and captivating readings of how works... You do not currently have access to this content.

The widespread critical attention August Wilson's work has enjoyed has helped establish his stature as the African American playwright of the late twentieth century. In particular, scholars have focused almost exclusively on Wilson's black portraits, concurring with the dramatist who, both in his plays and in his interviews, accentuates the struggles of his black characters. Consequently, whites have only been regarded as secondary actors in Wilson's drama, despite Wilson's observation that white society is the main antagonist in his plays (Grant 114). Wilson's white characters have appeared time and again in Wilson scholarship; however, they have been treated as peripheral, rather than central, to his plays. (1) Because the lives of Wilson's black characters are inseparable from those of white Americans, we need to pay more deliberate attention to images of whiteness in Wilson's work. For these reasons, in this essay I would like to reconsider his plays through the lens of whiteness. My goal in doing so is not to further privilege the already-prevalent concept of whiteness in American society and literature but to disclose its focal position in African American art and to initiate a better understanding of its connotations in Wilson's drama. Admittedly, there are few on-stage white characters in Wilson's plays: Irvin, Sturdyvant, and the policeman in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom; Rutherford Selig in Joe Turner's Came and Gone; and the unseen yet present ghost of James Sutter in The Piano Lesson. (2) Wilson's fictive black world, however, is peopled with many whites; if they do not appear on stage, they materialize in the lives, stories, and conversations of his black characters. As early as in Ma Rainey, the playwright began reflecting on the external white world bearing down upon African Americans by employing off-stage characters. Wilson's tendency seemingly to marginalize whiteness by restricting it, for the most part, to an off-stage presence serves an important purpose: The dramatic focus can thus remain on the black characters while also implying that whites, even in their absence, are very much present, since they clearly circumscribe and govern the lives and potentialities of the black characters. Thus, Wilson's dramatic work, whose emotional center lies with his African American characters, also consistently draws attention to the pervasive and negative impact of Euro-Americans in the black community. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., makes the same point: ... one of Wilson's accomplishments is to register the ambiguous presence of white folks in a segregated black world--the way you see them nowhere and feel them everywhere (55). Considered as a whole, Wilson's twentieth-century cycle of plays underscores the economic, social, and judicial dominance of white Americans. (3) In this essay, I will address the first and foremost part of this equation: Wilson's emphasis on how property or capital bestows power on whites in American society so that they can make decisions which determine the course of other people's lives and, in so doing, often disrupt and destroy those lives for their own economic survival. (4) Although Wilson's cycle of plays proposes to rewrite the white version of American history in the twentieth century (with a play dedicated to each decade), it also looks back in time to slavery, the era when whiteness became associated with the most abominable ownership imaginable: that of human flesh. Wilson first began to inspect the nature and source of Euro-Americans' economic power in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984). Set in Chicago in 1927, the play exposes the exploitation of blues musicians by the white moguls of the recording industry. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom opens with Sturdyvant and Irvin, white characters modeled after these businessmen. Preoccupied with money, according to Wilson's character notes, Sturdyvantis insensitive to black performers and prefers to deal with them at ann's length (17). …