Qiana J. Whitted
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Books and Edited Collections

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EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest 
Rutgers University Press, 2019


​2020 Eisner Award for Best Academic/Scholarly Work
Entertaining Comics Group is perhaps best-known today for lurid horror comics like Tales from the Crypt and for a publication that long outlived the company’s other titles, Mad magazine. But during its heyday in the early 1950s, EC was also an early innovator in another genre of comics: the so-called “preachies,” socially conscious stories that boldly challenged the conservatism and conformity of Eisenhower-era America. EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest examines a selection of these works - sensationally-titled comics such as “Hate!”, “The Guilty!” and “Judgment Day!" - and explores how they grappled with civil rights struggle, antisemitism, and other forms of prejudice in America. Putting these socially aware stories into conversation with EC’s better-known horror stories, Qiana Whitted discovers surprising similarities between their narrative, aesthetic, and marketing strategies. She also recounts the controversy that these stories inspired and the central role they played in congressional hearings about offensive content in comics. 

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Comics and the U.S. South 
​Edited with Brannon Costello
University Press of Mississippi, 2012


This collection 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 what Captain America can reveal about southern regionalism and how slave narratives can help us reread Swamp Thing; others examine how creators such as Walt Kelly, Howard Cruse, Kyle Baker, Josh Neufeld, and Randall Kenan draw upon the unique formal properties of the comics to question and revise familiar narratives of race, class, and sexuality.

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"A God of Justice?"
​The Problem of Evil in 20th Century Black Literature

University of Virginia Press, 2009


This study 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. My research explores the work of 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. Chapters 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.

Refereed Articles & Essays

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​​"A Short History of Comics and Civil Rights." Lowndes County Freedom Organization Comics by Courtland Cox and Jennifer Lawson, Good Trouble Productions, 2021.
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"Blues Fallin’ Down Like Hail: Reading ‘The Sky is Gray’ as a Blues Narrative." Approaches to Teaching Gaines’ The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Other Works. MLA Series, 2019.

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“Comics and Emmett Till,” Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics. University of Texas Press, 2017: 70-91. Finalist for Farrar Award in Media & Civil Rights History.
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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.

Additional Writings

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​Introduction to Black Panther, Penguin Classics Marvel Collection, 2022
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​​Foreword to Bootsie's War Years by Ollie Harrington, 2022
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​Foreword to Robert Smalls: Tales of the Talented Tenth by Joel Christian Gill, 2021
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​“Skin, Skin, Don’t You Know Me?” back matter essay for Bitter Root #4 (2019)
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