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The second public symposium in our Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Racial Reckoning through Comics, is coming up fast and focuses on "Days of Future Past: Histories and Futures of Racial Representation in Comics".
Friday opens with Lara Saguisag, Professor and Chair in Children’s Literature at New York University, founder of the Children’s Literature Association’s social justice project Climate Lit, author of the award-winning book Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics, and author of children’s books. She’ll discuss "The Filipino Wave: Comics and Racial Capitalism.”
Friday afternoon will include a guided archival tour of rare comics artifacts from the University of Iowa Library’s Special Collections, emphasizing the crucial role of the archive as both a resource for and a witness to a troubling, often overlooked past as well as an invitation to necessary historical revision and ongoing reckoning.
On Saturday, we’ll hear from Julian Chambliss, Professor and curator at Michigan State University, home to one of the world’s largest comics archives. He explores Afrofuturism and comics in a recent exhibition, Beyond the Black Panther: Vision of Afrofuturism in American Comics, and in his many digital humanities and print projects, including the co-edited collection Assembling the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Essays on the Social, Cultural, and Geopolitical Domain. He’ll be “Rethinking the Critical Afrofuturist Framework: Comics, Futurity, and Black Counterpublics.”
That afternoon, Rachel Williams, Professor and Dean of the Division of Liberal Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, will reflect on “Comics and Historiography: The Process, Image, Text, Story, and Time.” In the past year, she has received national praise for her two recent graphic histories: Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching and Run Home If You Don’t Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943.
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