Winner, 2021 Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award, given by the Society
for Cinema and Media Studies
**Winner, 2021 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for Best
Academic/Scholarly Work
**
Honorable Mention, 2021 Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award
for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, given
by the Popular Culture Association
*Winner, 2020 Charles Hatfield Book Prize, given by the Comic Studies
Society
*
Traces the history of racial caricature and the ways that Black
cartoonists have turned this visual grammar on its head
Revealing the long aesthetic tradition of African American cartoonists
who have made use of racist caricature as a black diasporic art
practice, Rebecca Wanzo demonstrates how these artists have resisted
histories of visual imperialism and their legacies. Moving beyond
binaries of positive and negative representation, many black cartoonists
have used caricatures to criticize constructions of ideal citizenship in
the United States, as well as the alienation of African Americans from
such imaginaries. The Content of Our Caricature urges readers to
recognize how the wide circulation of comic and cartoon art contributes
to a common language of both national belonging and exclusion in the
United States.
Historically, white artists have rendered white caricatures as virtuous
representations of American identity, while their caricatures of African
Americans are excluded from these kinds of idealized discourses.
Employing a rich illustration program of color and black-and-white
reproductions, Wanzo explores the works of artists such as Sam Milai,
Larry Fuller, Richard "Grass" Green, Brumsic Brandon Jr., Jennifer
Cruté, Aaron McGruder, Kyle Baker, Ollie Harrington, and George
Herriman, all of whom negotiate and navigate this troublesome history of
caricature. The Content of Our Caricature arrives at a gateway to
understanding how a visual grammar of citizenship, and hence American
identity itself, has been constructed.
