In the midst of Russia invading Ukraine, I planned a study travel trip to Poland focused on the intersections between Jim Crow and the Holocaust. The trip, for various reasons, didn’t materialize because we did not have enough students sign up. We started seeking students before the invasion, and we had trouble getting students interested. Part of this, I think, came from the heaviness of the subject and the places we intended to visit, notably Auschwitz and Treblinka. I understand that trepidation, and I knew that even I would have to prepare myself for being in those spaces.

While the course failed to make, one student wanted to still take the course, even though we couldn’t go to Poland. So, we did a directed study which led to the Jim Crow and the Holocaust syllabus. For this course, I wanted us to use historical texts as we looked at graphic novels about Jim Crow and the Holocaust. Only one of those texts, Robert Morales and Kyle Baker’s Truth: Red, White, and Black, present direct correlations between Jim Crow and the Holocaust. Others, such as Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro of Art Spiegelman’s Maus focus on one of the other, but through primary texts such as the We Charge Genocide or works by Lillian Smith, Robert Paxton, and others, the connections emerged and the graphic novels provided a lens to dive deeper into our understanding of these intersections. That course led to a co-authored essay entitled “‘You would make little Nazis of them’: Lillian Smith, Jim Crow, and Nazi Germany.”

Since then, I have dug deeper into these intersections, reading novels such as John A. Williams’ Clifford’s Blues, first-hand accounts of Auschwitz such as Miklos Nyiszli’s Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, historical works such as Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, and much more. Along with all of these, I also read graphic narratives by Miriam Katin’s work, Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, Jason Lutes’ Berlin series, and others, adding to my catalogue of graphic texts specifically focused on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. As I read these texts, my mind kept coming back to the intersections between Jim Crow and the Holocaust and how we can explore those intersections through graphic narratives.

While I want to do a much larger work on these intersections, I started to think about ways to get the conversation going, and I decided to seek essays for an edited collection on Jim Crow and the Holocaust in comics. So, I typed up a call for papers (cfp) and started circulating it. I want to share that cfp here as well. Below is the cfp.

Jim Crow and The Holocaust in Comics (Tentative Title)

Over the past few years, scholars and filmmakers have highlighted the intersections between the Jim Crow South and Nazi Germany through works such as Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Srah Botstein’s The U.S. and the Holocaust, James Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, Matthew Delmont’s Half American: The Heroic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad, Peter Yost’s Nazi Town, USA: The Untold Story of Nazi Sympathizers on American Soil, and countless others. From the outset of the Nazi’s ascent to power in 1933, individuals, specifically African Americans, saw the connections between the Jim Crow South and Nazi positions, specifically the boycott of Jewish businesses in April 1933. Henry Banks, a student at Morehouse, wrote in the student newspaper, “We do well, therefore, to condemn the racial policies of Hitler and oppose injustice wherever it is found, but it seems to me it would be far better if we would dedicate ourselves to the serious task of setting our own houses in order first”

Graphic novels serve as fertile ground for discussion of the connections between the Jim Crow South and Nazi Germany. As such, we seek works for an edited collection that use graphic narratives as a focal point to explore these intersections. These essays will add to the growing scholarship mentioned above and to works such as Ola Frahm, Hans-Joachim Hahn, and Markus Streb’s Beyond Maus: The Legacy of Holocaust Comics; Brannon Costello and Qiana Whitted’s Comics and the U.S. South; and Frances Gateward and John Jennings’ The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics & Sequential Art.

As such, we seek 6,000–8,000 word essays on how graphic narratives provide a lens to examine the interactions between the Jim Crow South and Nazi Germany. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

· The ways that works address personal history and the struggling with the sins of the past. An example would be Nora Krug’s Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home.

· How superhero comics use superheroes to explore the intersections between Jim Crow and the Holocaust. Examples could be works such as Kyle Baker and Robert Morales’ Truth: Red, White, and Black or Reginald Hudlin and Denys Cowan’s Black Panther: Flags of Our Fathers.

· How works call upon us to acknowledge and confront these linkages and how these linkages impact the present. An example would be Nate Powell’s Save It For Later.

· How works such as Jason Lutes’ Berlin address African American’s experiences in Germany during the Weimar Republic before the rise of the Nazis in 1933.

· The ways that biographies address or don’t address the intersections, and how the works relate to the subject’s positions. One example would be Ken Kremstein’s The Three Escapes of Hannah Ardent.

The proposed timeline for Jim Crow and the Holocaust in Comics is as follows.

• October 4, 2024, 300–500 word proposals with 2–3 page CV
• October 25, 2024, we will email decisions about proposals
• January 13, 2025, first drafts of essays due
• March 31, 2025, comments on drafts returned to authors
• June 2, 2025, revisions of drafts due

If interested, send a private message on this post or comment below.