<![CDATA[Qiana J. Whitted - Blog]]>Sun, 12 Jan 2025 23:05:19 -0500Weebly<![CDATA[ASAP/J Post on 'Angola Janga']]>Sat, 18 Jul 2020 04:00:00 GMThttps://www.qianawhitted.com/blog/asapj-post-on-angola-janga
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I was invited to contribute an essay for the summer 2020 cycle of the "Black One Shot" series for ASAP/Journal online. My post reflects on the different visual representations and shifting meanings of bodily scars in Marcelo D'Salete's incredible graphic novel, Angola Janga: Kingdom of Runaway Slaves. Check it out and all the other great posts in the series here: http://asapjournal.com/b-o-s-9-3-angola-janga-kingdom-of-runaway-slaves-qiana-whitted/
]]><![CDATA[Eisner Award Nomination]]>Fri, 12 Jun 2020 20:03:04 GMThttps://www.qianawhitted.com/blog/eisner-award-nomination
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My 2019 book, EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest has been nominated for a Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for Best Scholarly/Academic Work! Also nominated for Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism is Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, where I serve as editor. If you are a comics scholar, educator, librarian or a professional in the comics industry, you are eligible to vote for the recipients at http://eisnervote.com/. There are a lot of great nominees this year and I'm very proud to be one of them. 
]]><![CDATA[Invited Lectures & Events 2019]]>Fri, 15 Feb 2019 05:00:00 GMThttps://www.qianawhitted.com/blog/lectures-events-2019Picture
]]><![CDATA[MSU Comics Forum]]>Wed, 01 Aug 2018 04:00:00 GMThttps://www.qianawhitted.com/blog/msu-comics-forumI've been invited to give the academic keynote address at the Michigan State University Comics Forum, Feb. 23-25, 2019. Seth will be delivering the artist keynote and he designed this terrific poster (which even includes an illustration of me!). I'm really looking forward to it.
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]]><![CDATA[Wakanda Forever!]]>Wed, 07 Mar 2018 20:56:02 GMThttps://www.qianawhitted.com/blog/black-pantherI took part in several interviews during February 2018 to discuss Marvel's Black Panther film, including a short feature on WIS-10 and a panel on Cynthia Hardy's radio show, On Point. I also appeared with one of my students on the WIS show "Awareness" for two segments (see video below).
]]><![CDATA[The Emmett Till Project]]>Fri, 01 Sep 2017 15:49:12 GMThttps://www.qianawhitted.com/blog/the-emmett-till-project
I was invited to add my essay on "Comics and Emmett Till" to the archives of The Emmett Till Project, a digital platform commemorating the legacy of the murder of Emmett Louis Till by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. You can read a PDF of my essay and listen to a short podcast interview with me and project curator Myriah Towner. (There are a lot of other terrific resources on the site by scholars such as Courtney Baker and poet Akeema Zane.) I'm really honored to add my voice to the public memory surrounding Till's tragic death and I hope my essay can be of some benefit to others.
]]><![CDATA[Public Books: "Slavery Was No Opera"]]>Fri, 11 Aug 2017 00:30:31 GMThttps://www.qianawhitted.com/blog/public-books-slavery-was-no-operaPicture
I've published a short article on Alyssa Cole's historical romance fiction for the online journal, Public Books. The piece focuses mostly on Cole's recent novel, An Extraordinary Union, which I really enjoyed. I had initially planned to discuss her work as part of these two collections: Daughters of a Nation: A Black Suffragette Historical Romance Anthology and The Brightest Day: A Juneteenth Historical Romance Anthology. I often teach the novels of Beverly Jenkins in my course on slavery, literature, and popular culture, so it was thrilling to come across two anthologies with such well-crafted, historically-informed stories within the romance genre. Daughters of a Nation is my favorite of the two and while I'm a big admirer of Cole's style, I was also impressed by Piper Huguley's story called "The Washerwoman's War" (featuring poet Francis Ellen Watkins Harper's daughter as the main character!) along with the contributions by Lena Hart and Kianna Alexander. If you are interested in fiction about black women's history - even if you've never picked up a romance novel - I would strongly encourage you to give Cole's books and these two anthologies a try. Check out my article here! 
]]><![CDATA[Interview with The Middle Spaces]]>Wed, 01 Mar 2017 05:00:00 GMThttps://www.qianawhitted.com/blog/interview-with-the-middle-spaces
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I'm honored to have been interviewed by Osvaldo Oyola at the comics and culture blog, The Middle Spaces, for his second installment of "The (re)Collection Agency." The feature is described as "informal talks with comics scholars about their comics reading and collecting practices and how that intersects with their work." Osvaldo and I had a terrific conversation about my interest in comics about the South and my historical research on race and early 1950s comic books. Check it out! 
]]><![CDATA[How Do Comics Represent Ferguson?]]>Thu, 04 Dec 2014 16:40:39 GMThttps://www.qianawhitted.com/blog/how-do-comics-represent-fergusonOriginally posted at The Hooded Utilitarian. 
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Public outrage over the killing of 18-year-old Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri continues to amass its own tragic iconography. Handprints transform the so-called universal sign of surrender into a stronghold of dissent: “Hands up, Don’t shoot.” Hashtag memorials shape the interconnectivity of social media into a pictorial chorus of text: #BlackLivesMatter #JusticeforMikeBrown #ShutItDown. I think about my own son at two years old and already curling his brown fingers into Spider-Man web shooters, and vainly I hope that the right counter-visual will fix what’s wrong, or at least begin to impair what Matthew Pratt Guterl, refers to as “the familiar grammar of racial sight, through which a wallet becomes a gun or a Harvard professor becomes a burglar.”

I also had the chance to consider how the call for racial justice registers through image when I toured the exhibit on “The Long March: Civil Rights in Cartoons and Comics” at OSU’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum last month. Among the stately commemoration of landmark firsts – including incredible pages of original art from Pogo, Wee Pals, and Green Lantern/Green Arrow – the corner of the room displaying the editorial cartoons seemed louder and more demanding in their effort to picture the raucous discord of the moment. We can learn a great deal from the way Pittsburgh Courier cartoonist Sam Milai uses the Junior Astronaut Helmet as a visual metonym for the aspirations of a middle-class African American family (below), only months after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon:
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In another image, Bill Crawford speaks to fears over militant Black Nationalism in a cartoon that invokes the Ku Klu Klan to set the boundaries of acceptable (and respectable) protest in 1968: 
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Patrick Chappatte’s “Race in America” (above) is much more compelling.  President Obama is depicted in the center of the sepia-colored cartoon silently watching the Ferguson protests on TV. I’m struck by juxtapositions here, beginning with the President’s quiet reflection in an empty room against the noise and chaos of the live feed. While the Oval Office seal and desk mark his distance from the populace, he is seated on the edge of the chair, close to the screen. And finally, the fact the President is a black man watching racial injustice play out before him brings the title of the cartoon into conversation with multiple registers of power and powerlessness. There is contemplation, sadness, or is that disappointment? I like the understated complexity of this piece.

Several of the comics adapt iconography commonly associated with the racism and state-sanctioned bigotry of the American South. Among these, I appreciated Matt Wuerker’s efforts to complicate the way we think about privilege by replicating the familiar “White” and “Colored” entrances of Jim Crow alongside a new door marked “Blue” with an escalator accessible only to law enforcement.

Particularly problematic, however, are the comics that lean on images of the Ku Klux Klan like a visual crutch to characterize the nature of the treatment Mike Brown and his family have received. What role does region play in such a national epidemic of injustice? When I raised this concern among friends, I was reminded of the Klan’s national reach, especially in Midwest states like Indiana in the earlier 20th century. St. Louis, in particular, seems to defy geographic labels and has been called “the most northern Southern city and the most western Eastern city.” Cartoons such as Milt Priggee’s “Ferguson hood” or Rainer Hachfeld’s “Ferguson 24/11” may therefore have a point in placing the Klan hood over Uncle Sam and Lady Justice to condemn white supremacist rule beyond the Mason-Dixon line. But I don’t think the same can be said for a cartoon like “Southern Justice” by Jeff Danzinger (below). He appears to draw a more direct line between racial violence in the South and the circumstances under which an unarmed black youth could be murdered in 2014 without repercussion. It is perhaps because the Klan iconography is so highly charged that the kind of analogy attempted in Danzinger’s piece (or in Bill Crawford’s earlier cartoon) can be too easily muddled.
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Finally, I want to call attention to cartoonist Keith Knight who, along with Matt Bors, is producing some of the sharpest satire about race and police brutality today.  (Many of their comics are collected at Daily Kos.) Knight’s work on Mike Brown so far includes “Blacker Friday”, “Sign of Progress?” and “White Riot.” He has been chronicling enough of these incidents that his comics about the shooting death of other black men such as Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner are specific to each case and yet, virtually interchangeable. The cartoon at the top of my post titled “Police Application” first appeared in 2011, while the comic below was published in 2003. 
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Knight never takes his eye off the “familiar grammar of racial sight” and the disservice that this way of seeing does to our nation. In the comic called “41 Shots,” the way he places the famous Tootsie Pop commercial against the relentless visual BLAM of every bullet fired into Amadou Diallo’s body grows more chilling with each panel. Likewise, the hand in the parody of the “Police Application” cartoon is faced with what should be an easy question, but instead makes a devastating choice in refusing to see the humanity of people with black skin. Knight has turned all of these cartoons into a traveling exhibit – “They Shoot Black People, Don’t They?” – to call attention to the need to hold state and local law enforcement accountable, as he explains in this strip. He begins by saying, “every time I do a cartoon about police brutality, I hope and pray that it’ll be the last one I’m compelled to draw…”

So do I.
]]><![CDATA[When is a Grid Not Just a Grid?]]>Thu, 21 Aug 2014 15:32:12 GMThttps://www.qianawhitted.com/blog/when-is-a-grid-not-just-a-gridOriginally posted as part of the Groensteen and Page Layout Roundtable at Hooded Utilitarian. Picture
The previous contributions to our roundtable have raised important questions about Thierry Groensteen’s approach to page layout in Comics and Narration. While a rich array of images in Adrielle Mitchell’s post encouraged us to consider how frame irregularities produce meaning, Roy Cook set the stage for an important conversation about the values comics readers attribute to different panel arrangements. Roy’s post really got me thinking about the way Groensteen privileges the layout pattern of the “waffle-iron” by identifying stability, simplicity, and transparency as fundamental attributes of the orthogonal shapes. Groensteen further conceptualizes the grid in the narrative rhythm of comics as the “basic beat” against which the visual and verbal elements of comics can improvise.

From this perspective, it’s not difficult to see how one might characterize the grid as “regular” or “neutral” or “invisible,” but I remain troubled by the relative nature of these terms, who defines them and in what context. To complicate the issue, my first instinct was to seek out comics that delight in the wildly experimental layouts that Groensteen might find “more sophisticated (or more hysterical),” but Adrielle’s post provides several excellent examples already. So I thought I would ask instead about comics that use the grid, but in unexpected ways: how do comics adapt the basic panel layout in order to stray from what Roy described as Groensteen’s “waffle-iron way of truth”? When is a grid not just a grid?

I wonder, for example, how a comic like “The Harvey Pekar Name Story” fits into our understanding of frame regularity and rhythm. Though we may be inclined to make assumptions about its uniformity at first glance, R. Crumb has not simply drawn 48 identical copies of the same man in the squares of this four-page comic about the different Harvey Pekars listed in the phonebook.
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The text varies and so too do the hand-drawn panels that reveal each frame’s scratchy imperfections. The careful reader’s eye becomes attune to the nuances of Harvey’s expression and posture. It is a “basic layout pattern” and yet it has “irregularity as a common feature” (43) — a fitting contradiction for a story about Harvey Pekar’s search for his own unique identity. It seems to me that a comic like this one actually exposes the illusion of neutrality by calling attention to the grid’s own constructedness.

Another example that comes to mind for me is a two-page spread from Percy Carey’s graphic novel memoir Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm with art by Ron Wimberly. During Carey’s time in prison on a drug conviction, Wimberly uses the bars of the jail cell to structure the layout of the page, building barriers between us and the detained bodies, the narrative boxes, and the armed guards.
Groensteen describes the thick borders that Chris Ware uses in Jimmy Corrigan as having “an almost carceral appearance” (48) and given the emotional constrictions of multiple generations of the Corrigan family, Ware’s panel choices aid in the production of that meaning. Alternatively, Sentences is a comic that has an unpredictably fluid design with layered panels and splash pages to convey the early days of hip-hop and Carey’s experience with music, drugs, and violence during the 1990s. The waffle-iron pattern is not the norm by any means; when the grid above appears, it actually disrupts a narrative rhythm that the writer and artist have already established. The uniformity of the panels might also be said to reflect the carceral lens that would continue to follow Carey after being released from prison.

Is this frame neutral or invisible? How might the perspectives of these two comics help us to reconsider the notion of the “basic panel layout” in other comics?

- See more at: http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2014/08/when-is-a-grid-not-just-a-grid-groensteen-and-page-layout-roundtable/#sthash.Qpa4xJyW.dpuf
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