Abstract
Abstract: The 2013 graphic novel Watson and Holmes: A Study in Black rewrites Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887) as the story of two young Black men solving crimes in modern-day New York City. The adaptation challenges traditional Victorian national borders by highlighting the interimperial, white supremacist connections Doyle’s works promote between Britain and the United States. Furthermore, it crosses Victorian temporal boundaries by evoking Doyle’s racialized theorization of a mind-body hierarchy and the impact of this broader Victorian dogma on contemporary experiences of lived blackness. The formal complexity of comics facilitates Study in Black ’s restaging and rejection of blackness as abject materiality in the Sherlock Holmes stories and their original illustrations. This self-conscious and densely allusive redrawing of Doyle’s novel presses upon readers the burden and insights of Black double consciousness, theorized at the ostensible end of the Victorian period.
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