Alumni English & American Studies: Racial Stereotypes in Black Comics

Prof. Dr. Daniel Stein, North American Literary and Cultural Studies

The History of U.S. American comics is fraught with stereotypical images of black American. As such, comics are is not altogether different from radio, film, and other media that derived a substantial portion of their early content from comical depictions of the nation’s allegedly racially inferior folk. Part of this intense investment with racial stock figures and their powers as popular stereotypes can be traced back to blackface minstrelsy, which constituted one of the hallmarks of American popular culture in the nineteenth century. Yet despite frequent cross- and transmedia influences, each of these media has developed its own means of rendering race and ethnicity, with comics as a visual-verbal medium composed of sequential still images producing a very particular history of racialized images and narratives. This talk will offer a historical account of key forms and functions of racial stereotypes in black comics, focusing specifically on the medial affordances, limitations, and peculiarities of the comics medium from the late nineteenth-century until today.

Daniel Stein is Professor of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. Since 2010, he has also been a member of the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality—Aesthetics and Practice,” funded by the German Research Foundation. Publications include Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz (2012), the co-edited volumes Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads and From Comic Books to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative (both 2013), and the co-edited special issues American Comic Books and Graphic Novels (Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2011) und Musical Autobiographies (Popular Music and Society, 2015). He is the recipient of the 2013 Heinz Maier Leibnitz-Prize awarded by the German Research Foundation and the Ministry of Education and Research for outstanding academic achievements.