December 9, 2022, 2 pm, UA-141.
Issues of Black history and representation have been at the forefront of US literature for many decades, but in the realm of comic book production, they were largely ignored for the longest time. This began to change with the publication of Tom Feelings’ haunting series of silent images about the Atlantic slave trade, The Middle Passage: White Ships, Black Cargo (1995) and with the mainstream appeal of Kyle Baker’s biography of the slave revolutionary, Nat Turner (2008), and Jeremy Love’s exploration of the Southern gothic in Bayou (2009/2010). Based on these early attempts to visualize the Black past, this talk analyzes the graphic depiction of African American history in the contemporary series Bitter Root (Walker, Brown, and Greene, Image Comics, 2018-2021), where racist hatred manifests itself in the creation of monsters. I will argue that the series plays into comic book tropes of monstrous superhuman creatures and adapts elements from African American folklore to interrogate the traumatic legacies of anti-Black violence. In reshaping comic book graphics and discourse, Bitter Root is an important contribution to the creation of Afrodiasporic interventions into US popular culture.