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Comics and the U.S. South (University Press of Mississippi, 2012) offers a wide-ranging and long overdue assessment of how life and culture in the United States South is represented in serial comics, graphic novels, newspaper comic strips, and webcomics. Diverting the lens of comics studies from the skyscrapers of Superman’s Metropolis or Chris Ware’s Chicago to the swamps, back roads, small towns, and cities of the U.S. South, this collection critically examines the pulp genres associated with mainstream comic books alongside independent and alternative comics.
Essays consider whatCaptain America can reveal about southern regionalism and how slave narratives can help us reread Swamp Thing; others examine how creators such as Walt Kelly (Pogo), Howard Cruse (Stuck Rubber Baby), Kyle Baker (Nat Turner), and Josh Neufeld (A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge) draw upon the unique formal properties of the comics to question and revise familiar narratives of race, class, and sexuality; and another considers how southern writer Randall Kenan adapted elements of comics form to prose fiction. With essays from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, Comics and the U.S. South contributes to and also productively reorients the most significant and compelling conversations in both comics scholarship and in southern studies. |
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"A God of Justice?" The Problem of Evil in 20th Century Black Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2009) closely examines representations of spiritual crisis and critique in twentieth-century black American writing. My analysis considers how the most distinguished writers of this literary tradition wrestle with the inexplicable nature of God and struggle to reconcile the experience of racial oppression and other forms of unmerited suffering with classic Christian concepts of God’s justice, power, and goodness.
I explore writers such as Countée Cullen, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison who offer paradigmatic examples of the spiritual and existential dilemma known as “the problem of evil” after World War I. In their fiction and autobiographical writings, sufferers seek redemption and retribution for their misery, boldly defying charges of blasphemy and the comforts of inherited tradition to demand ultimate explanations for the persistence of moral and natural evil. I identify concepts that formulate questions about the meaning of suffering in relation to black experience, including: the crucified black Christ, the mourner’s bench trope, and “spiritual infidelity” in black women’s writing. By questioning what is at stake for African Americans who issue the call for divine justice, my work endeavors to broaden the horizons of critical religious inquiry in black literary and cultural studies. |
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“Comics and Emmett Till,” Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics. University of Texas Press, 2017: 70-91.
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"Black Culture, Speculative Fiction, and the Past as Text in Jeremy Love's Bayou." Class, Please Open Your Comics: Essays on Teaching with Graphic Narratives. McFarland, 2015: 195-216.
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"The Blues Tragicomic: Constructing the Black Folk Subject in McCulloch and Hendrix's Stagger Lee." The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. Rutgers University Press, 2015.
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“'And the Negro thinks in hieroglyphics': Comics, Visual Metonymy, and the Spectacle of Blackness." Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Vol. 5. No. 1 (2013): 1-22.
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“Using My Grandmother’s Life as a Model: Richard Wright and the Gendered Politics of Religious Representation.” Southern Literary Journal 36.2 (2004): 13-30.
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“In My Flesh Shall I See God: Ritual Violence, Racial Redemption, and Countee Cullen’s ‘The Black Christ’.” African American Review, 38.3 (2004): 379-393.
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