Category: Uncategorized

By AAIHS Editors  October 1, 2017 “The World of the Black Panther” Guest Editors: Julian Chambliss and Walter Greason On June 9, 2017, the face of the Marvel Cinematic Universe changed as the trailer for Black Panther made its debut. The trailer quickly went viral. Within days, it became one of the most viewed trailers ever released by Marvel.…

By Julian Chambliss  October 14, 2017 This month, I had the opportunity to speak with John Jennings, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies and a Cooperating Faculty Member in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. Jennings is a scholar and artist whose artistic work is deeply influenced by the African American cultural…

By Alyssa Collins  January 9, 2017 This guest post is part of our new blog series on Comics, Race, and Society, edited by Julian Chambliss and Walter Greason. In a 1976 essay appearing in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, Alice Walker notes that an absence of models, or literary representations, is an “occupational hazard to the artist,…

By Joshua Plencner  January 15, 2017 This guest post is part of our new blog series on Comics, Race, and Society, edited by Julian Chambliss and Walter Greason. In superhero comics, nostalgia is often structural. Woven into the formal codes of serial storytelling, it both supports the production of fantastic visions and undergirds a culture of…

By Bryan Cooper Owens  February 6, 2017 This guest post is part of our blog series on Comics, Race, and Society, edited by Julian Chambliss and Walter Greason. Spider-Man is black. Or more precisely, Miles Morales, the son of an African American father and Puerto Rican mother is currently Spider-Man. Well, he’s one of the Spider-Men.…

By I. Augustus Durham  February 7, 2017 Depending on the context of its usage, the Spanish term género is definable as “gender” or “genre.” This conflation suggests that whenever deployed, the contextual gesture is never not haunted by the subtextual one. In this same manner, when one speaks about “race,” one could imagine that for…

By Matthew Teutsch  March 1, 2017 This month I interviewed Deborah E. Whaley about her book Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime (University of Washington Press, 2015). Whaley is an artist, curator, writer, and Associate Professor of American Studies and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. She received degrees in American Studies from…

By Yvonne Chireau  November 17, 2016 This guest post is part of our new blog series on Comics, Race, and Society, edited by Julian Chambliss and Walter Greason. Graphic literature, including comics, cartoons, and sequential art, reveal discursive practices that give meaning to race, religion, and national identity in different periods and contexts. In this post, I discuss…

By Sam Knowles  December 2, 2016 This guest post is part of our new blog series on Comics, Race, and Society, edited by Julian Chambliss and Walter Greason. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election, my immediate response was an incredibly depressed one. These feelings only deepened with such news as a sharp rise in racist attacks…

By André Carrington  December 6, 2016 This guest post is part of our new blog series on Comics, Race, and Society, edited by Julian Chambliss and Walter Greason. There has never been a better time to be a Black comics fan or a scholar immersed in Black nerd culture. This is a declaration: it aims to inaugurate a…