Rebecca Wanzo - The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

Postmillennial Pop

General Editors: Karen Tongson and Henry Jenkins

Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire

Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns

Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green

Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries

Derek Johnson

Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing

Michael Serazio

Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities

Mark Anthony Neal

From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry

Aswin Punathambekar

A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America

Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson

Surveillance Cinema

Catherine Zimmer

Modernitys Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music

Roshanak Kheshti

The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics

Ramzi Fawaz

Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation

Elizabeth Ellcessor

The Sonic Color-line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening

Jennifer Lynn Stoever

Diversin: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America

Albert Sergio Laguna

Antisocial Media: Anxious Labor in the Digital Economy

Greg Goldberg

Open TV: Innovation beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television

Aymar Jean Christian

Missing More Than Meets the Eye: Special Effects and the Fantastic Transmedia Franchise

Bob Rehak

Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection

Nancy K. Baym

Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility

Alexis Lothian

Anti-Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Digital Age

Edited by Melissa A. Click

Social Media Entertainment: The New Industry at the Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley

Stuart Cunningham and David Craig

Video Games Have Always Been Queer

Bonnie Ruberg

The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture

Michael Serazio

The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities

Tara Fickle

Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games

Christopher B. Patterson

The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging

Rebecca Wanzo

Rebecca Wanzo

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2020 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Half title page image: Kyle Baker, Nat Turner (detail), Harry N. Abrams, 2006

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wanzo, Rebecca Ann, 1975 author.

Title: The content of our caricature : African American comic art and political belonging / Rebecca Wanzo.

Description: New York : New York University Press, 2020. | Series: Postmillennial pop | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019030821 | ISBN 9781479840083 (cloth) | ISBN 9781479889587 (paperback) | ISBN 9781479813636 (ebook) | ISBN 9781479822195 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: African AmericansCaricatures and cartoons. | Racism in cartoonsUnited States. | Belonging (Social psychology)United States. | Belonging (Social psychology) in art.

Classification: LCC E185 .W27 2020 | DDC 305.800973022/2dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030821

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Also available as an ebook

Colored people and Germans form no small part of the population of Caricature Country. The negroes spend much of their time getting kicked by mules, while the Germans, all of whom have large spectacles and big pipes, fall down a good deal, and may be identified by the words, Vass iss, coming out of their mouths. There is also a sprinkling of Chinamen, who are always having their pigtails tied to things, and a few Italians, mostly women, who have wonderful adventures while carrying enormous bundles on their heads. The Hebrew residents of Caricature Country, formerly numerous and amusing, have thinned out of late yearsit is hard to say why. This is also true of the Irish dwellers, who at one time formed a large percentage of the population... in Caricature Country you can always smile, and often laugh, and it is only the natives who have trouble and never the visitors.

Frederick Burr Opper, Caricature Country: Independent

But in order to influence public opinion, caricature must contain a certain element of prophecy.

Frederic Taber Cooper and Arthur Bartlett Maurice, A History of the Nineteenth Century in Caricature

Figure I.1. Kyle Baker, Happy Independence Day!, July 2, 2007. Copyright Kyle Baker.

US citizens are accustomed to the ironic Fourth of July cartoon that calls attention to tensions between what the nation ostensibly stands for and contradictions in its practices. In his 2007 contribution to the Independence Day cartoon tradition, African American cartoonist Kyle Baker depicts a man dressed in eighteenth-century wig and garb writing in his study, immediately recognizable as a caricature of Thomas Jefferson through his speech (Figure I.1). A small figure peers in through the panes behind him, a black inkblot-shaped character with white dots for eyes, white lips, and hair often used on the pickaninny figure in racist caricatures. While this grotesque representation has no relationship to real phenotype, readers knowledge of whom the child references doubly emphasizes the phantasmagoric nature of stereotype. Jefferson had multiple children with enslaved woman Sally Hemings, the half sister of his deceased wife, and this black figure nonetheless evokes their very light-skinned children. The child says, Daddy, Im cold, with a silhouetted backdrop of what appears to be an overseer riding a horse and casting his whip toward a slave woman with her arms in the air (the gender signified by the faint hint of the scarf on her head). Black people are outsiders of the Framers frame, literally and figuratively.

I posted this cartoon on Facebook, and a brilliant African American scholar asked me why I was circulating such an ugly, racist image. She understood why I shared the cartoon after I explained who the creator was and my interpretation. But an image needing explanation even for discerning readers demonstrates the perils of using such representations. Nevertheless it is the grotesque caricature that makes the joke of the editorial cartoon work. The dark humor of the cartoon (pun intended) depends on the black child in the window. Andrew Kunka sees the paneled windows as structuring the cartoons meaning, leading the reader, regardless of race, to be positioned inside the house with Jefferson, looking out, thus aligning the reader with the beneficiaries of the freedoms associated with the Declaration of Independence. Nevertheless, the racist caricature upsets identification with the idealized caricature of Jefferson. Because the caricature is the most visceral representation in the image, it