Seeing Race in Comics
Seeing Race in Comics
Passing, Witness, and the Spectacle of Racial Violence in Johnson and Pleece’s Incognegro
This chapter discusses the power of the medium of comics to shed light on discussions of race, racism, and the act of passing. Glaser moves from a close reading of Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s recent neo-passing narrative, the graphic novel Incognegro (2008), to a wider look at the history of visual media in representing racial violence during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This chapter makes the argument that comics provide an arena for thinking both about how we see and interpret race and how visual depictions of racial violence—from photographs of lynchings to recordings of police shootings of unarmed African American men—force us to grapple with complex ethical questions.
Keywords: comics, Incognegro, Mat Johnson, Warren Pleece, passing, violence, photography, ethics, spectacle, witness
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