Every semester, especially when I teach asynchronous courses, I try to set up conversations with scholars and authors so that students don’t just hear and see me on the screen as they listen to the lecture. As I thought about Art Spiegelman’s Maus, I reached out to Michael Dando. I’ve spoken with Dando before about comics for his classes, specifically Luke Cage, and he … Read More Conversation with Michael Dando on “Maus”
+ comics, graphic memoir, graphic novels, jerry craft, jonathan flowers, new kid, ontological expansiveness, shannon sullivan
As I was thinking about texts for my Multicultural American Literature class this semester, parents in Katy ISD in Texas tried to ban Jerry Craft’s New Kid and other works from the schools. Last October, Craft was scheduled for a presentation in the district, and Bonnie Anderson, a white parent, started a petition to get the event cancelled. She told NBC News, “It is … Read More Ontological Expansiveness and Jerry Craft’s “New Kid”
+ comics, dispacement, graphic novels, japanese american internment, kiku hughes, supreme court, world war ii
In my Multicultural American Literature course this semester, I am teaching Kiku Hughes’ Displacement alongside John Okada’s No-No Boy and George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy. Each of these texts focuses on the incarceration of thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II, and each of these focuses on the intergenerational trauma of incarceration. The generational effects of trauma run through multiple … Read More Conversation with Kiku Hughes
+ benito mussolini, bill campbell, Bizhan Khobabandeh, comics, fascism, graphic novels, ku kluk klan, the day the klan came to town, world war i
As I reread Bill Campbell and Bizhan Khobabandeh’s The Day the Klan Came to Town (2021) recently, my mind kept coming back to another book I have been reading at the moment, Robert O. Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism (2005). Campbell and Khodabandeh’s graphic novel tells the story of individuals in Carnegie, PA, standing up against the Ku Klux Klan’s planned march through the borough of Pittsburgh where Jews … Read More Fascism and the Ku Klux Klan in Bill Campbell and Bizhan Khobabandeh’s “The Day the Klan Came to Town”
+ comics, dc comics, gene luen yang, Gurihiru, lillian e smith, martin luther king, jr, superman smashes the klan
Hate sells, and it’s profitable as hell. This isn’t anything new or revelatory, I know. Lillian Smith pointed it out in Killers of the Dream when she talked about wealthy whites, in order to maintain their power, enlisted poor whites in hate against African Americans and others following Reconstruction and into the Jim Crow era and beyond, flattening whiteness. Martin Luther King, Jr. pointed … Read More Hate, the Oldest Commodity, in “Superman Smashes the Klan”
Interminable Rambling 