
Earlier this week, in a review of African American Classics, the latest volume from the Graphic Classics series, I made this claim about comics adaptations of African American literature:
These “graphic” adaptations elevate the visual field of representation in ways that should remind us that literary expressions of African American experience have always been deeply entrenched in the realm of social perception, spectacle, and visibility. The works were originally written to counter claims that the entire character of a people could be arbitrarily determined by what is seen, from skin color to physiognomy to a so-called drop of Negro-stained blood. African American Classics, then, returns the counter-argument of its featured stories to their visual origins and exposes the absurdity of race prejudice in a way that only a comic can.
This assertion about the fundamentally visual nature of black literary and cultural production is one that I think deserves more attention in the field of comics studies. But lately I’ve been thinking about ways to experiment with this claim, and about how the profound explorations of racial constructs by a writer like Toni Morrison may offering a thrilling exception to the rule.
“They shoot the white girl first,” is the opening line of Morrison’s 1998 novel, Paradise. The first chapter details the murder of five female outcasts living on the outskirts of a small town in Oklahoma during the 1970s and the remainder of the novel details why. What we are never told, however, is which one of the women is white; the group is made up primarily of black women and it is clear that race matters in their relationships, but this aspect of their identity is subsumed in a collective alienation that is based on all sorts of conflicting assumptions about their gender and sexuality, their political commitments and morals.