On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power: Studies in Comics and Cartoons
Autor Michelle Bumatayen Limba Engleză Paperback – 13 feb 2025
On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power is the first book-length study in English about Black francophone cartoonists and their work. Michelle Bumatay decenters Eurocentric conceptions of francophone comic art and foregrounds the ubiquity of Western racial stereotypes encoded in mainstream French and Belgian bandes dessinées as well as the imbalance of power between the Global North and the Global South carried over from the colonial era. By examining a diversity of Black cartoonists’ aesthetic and material responses to the colonially inherited medium of bandes dessinées, she argues that their innovations constitute important reparative work that combats racial stereotypes and challenges transcolonial power imbalances. Bumatay demonstrates how Barly Baruti, Papa Mfumu’eto, Marguerite Abouet, Japhet Miagotar, and other Black cartoonists throughout the francophone world employ a range of tactics to tell their own stories. Through a balance of historical context and close readings, she shows how these artists represent and comment on their everyday lives in a postcolonial reality, expose and critique racial capitalism and exploitation, and provide new ways of seeing and understanding Black francophone peoples and cultures.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814259375
ISBN-10: 0814259375
Pagini: 168
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Studies in Comics and Cartoons
ISBN-10: 0814259375
Pagini: 168
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Studies in Comics and Cartoons
Recenzii
“On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power is the first study of its kind, seamlessly traveling between comics scholarship, postcolonial/decolonial scholarship, ecocriticism, and African art history to fill a sizeable gap in postcolonial/decolonial francophone studies and comics studies.” —Jennifer Howell, author of The Algerian War in French-Language Comics: Postcolonial Memory, History, and Subjectivity
“This is a subtle and theoretically informed analysis of the work of a range of outstanding Black bande dessinée artists who challenge a dominant visual imaginary, creatively remix local and global popular culture, resist recuperation into universalizing respectability, politicize tragic migration stories, and engage in eco-activism. A groundbreaking book.” —Ann Miller, author of Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip
Notă biografică
Michelle Bumatay is Assistant Professor of French at Florida State University. Her research has appeared in Francosphères,Research in African Literatures, and Alternative Francophone.
Extras
Rather than generate a set of criteria for work by Black Francophone artists and authors, the notion of Black bandes dessinées sheds light on their practices, taking into account the specific contexts within which they produce, which subsequently allows us to understand the sociopolitical and cultural stakes of their work as well as its reception. The title’s juxtaposition of the English word “Black” and the French term “bandes dessinées” announces both the central topic, Black artists’ work challenging the status quo, and the deep history of their works’ materiality. Like Ann Miller’s Reading Bandes Dessinées, this book insists on the sociocultural specificity of Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées, though here, the term, when brought together with the qualifier “Black,” foregrounds the postcolonial dimension of work by Black artists working in French. Indeed, the English word “Black” eschews a national or geographically delineated approach to the production and reception of bandes dessinées by Black artists to expose both the ubiquity of colonial-era visual culture and the ongoing influence of colonially established infrastructures that perpetuate drastic imbalances between the Global North and the Global South. When we privilege the mechanism of racialization rather than geography, we see Black artists throughout the Francophone world advancing a range of narratives and countervisualities, to use Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept, that not only challenge Western visual imperialism but also critique the necropolitics of the postcolony and of neocolonialism, advance correctives to Western epistemologies, and offer decolonial ways of seeing and being in the world.
Currently, there are no books in English exclusively dedicated to the work of Black Francophone artists in a comprehensive manner. Africa Comics (2006), edited by Samir Patel and published by the Studio Museum in Harlem as the catalog for the museum’s exhibition of the same title, offers an impressive multilingual survey of work by cartoonists in Africa and provides a general description of comics production on the continent at the time, through short essays by cultural anthropologists and African art historians. While the curators and contributing authors highlight the increasing vibrancy of comics throughout Africa, not just in Francophone regions, much has changed since then thanks to the zeitgeist of production captured by the exhibition and the catalog, what contributor Massimo Repetti has referred to as an “African wave.” With the sole exception of this catalog, books in English about comics from Africa focus on political and editorial cartoons and typically dedicate only a small fraction of their content to work in Francophone countries. Nor is there a directly competing title in French. Although foundational for this book and further research on Black bandes dessinées, scholarly publications, primarily the work of Christophe Cassiau-Haurie, Hilaire Mbiye Lumbala, Alain Brezault, and Sandra Federici, have employed national or continental frameworks and have been oriented toward cataloging publications and interviewing artists rather than analyzing the range of their restorative aesthetic, narrative, and material practices.
Foregoing geographic delineations as an organizing principle for analyzing the work of Black Francophone artists and authors actually expands both our cartography and chronology of Black bandes dessinées. For example, though other scholars point to the international trajectories and collaborative networks of many artists, their overemphasis on movement from Africa to Europe runs the risk of obscuring other important trajectories and hubs of activity. A good example is that of Willy Zekid, penname of Willy Mouélé. Though he eventually moved to France, he initially left the Republic of Congo for the Ivory Coast, where he was a key contributor to the magazine Gbich!, working on star characters including his own Papou, and Lassane Zohoré’s iconic Cauphy Gombo. Another important example is Serge Diantantu. Originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Diantantu also emigrated to France, but his work and where it is published contribute to a global notion of Blackness beyond the continent of Africa. In particular, his historical series on slavery (the five volumes of Mémoire de l’esclavage) and his album-sized volumes on important Black men and women throughout history are all published by Caraïbéditions, based in the French Antilles (Guadeloupe and Martinique) and focused on the French overseas departments. In fact, Diantantu’s project on international Black figures echoes the work of former professional French footballer Lilian Thuram, who has become an important anti-racist activist in France. As part of his endeavor to combat racism through education, Thuram, originally from the French overseas department of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, cowrote a two-volume autobiographical bande dessinée entitled Notre Histoire that drew from his cowritten book Mes étoiles noires: De Lucy à Barack Obama and wove in stories about important Black Francophone figures who fought for equality in their respective historical periods. Because Thuram is French, he is absent from work on so-called African bandes dessinées even though artists working in Réunion, a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean, are included.
Currently, there are no books in English exclusively dedicated to the work of Black Francophone artists in a comprehensive manner. Africa Comics (2006), edited by Samir Patel and published by the Studio Museum in Harlem as the catalog for the museum’s exhibition of the same title, offers an impressive multilingual survey of work by cartoonists in Africa and provides a general description of comics production on the continent at the time, through short essays by cultural anthropologists and African art historians. While the curators and contributing authors highlight the increasing vibrancy of comics throughout Africa, not just in Francophone regions, much has changed since then thanks to the zeitgeist of production captured by the exhibition and the catalog, what contributor Massimo Repetti has referred to as an “African wave.” With the sole exception of this catalog, books in English about comics from Africa focus on political and editorial cartoons and typically dedicate only a small fraction of their content to work in Francophone countries. Nor is there a directly competing title in French. Although foundational for this book and further research on Black bandes dessinées, scholarly publications, primarily the work of Christophe Cassiau-Haurie, Hilaire Mbiye Lumbala, Alain Brezault, and Sandra Federici, have employed national or continental frameworks and have been oriented toward cataloging publications and interviewing artists rather than analyzing the range of their restorative aesthetic, narrative, and material practices.
Foregoing geographic delineations as an organizing principle for analyzing the work of Black Francophone artists and authors actually expands both our cartography and chronology of Black bandes dessinées. For example, though other scholars point to the international trajectories and collaborative networks of many artists, their overemphasis on movement from Africa to Europe runs the risk of obscuring other important trajectories and hubs of activity. A good example is that of Willy Zekid, penname of Willy Mouélé. Though he eventually moved to France, he initially left the Republic of Congo for the Ivory Coast, where he was a key contributor to the magazine Gbich!, working on star characters including his own Papou, and Lassane Zohoré’s iconic Cauphy Gombo. Another important example is Serge Diantantu. Originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Diantantu also emigrated to France, but his work and where it is published contribute to a global notion of Blackness beyond the continent of Africa. In particular, his historical series on slavery (the five volumes of Mémoire de l’esclavage) and his album-sized volumes on important Black men and women throughout history are all published by Caraïbéditions, based in the French Antilles (Guadeloupe and Martinique) and focused on the French overseas departments. In fact, Diantantu’s project on international Black figures echoes the work of former professional French footballer Lilian Thuram, who has become an important anti-racist activist in France. As part of his endeavor to combat racism through education, Thuram, originally from the French overseas department of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, cowrote a two-volume autobiographical bande dessinée entitled Notre Histoire that drew from his cowritten book Mes étoiles noires: De Lucy à Barack Obama and wove in stories about important Black Francophone figures who fought for equality in their respective historical periods. Because Thuram is French, he is absent from work on so-called African bandes dessinées even though artists working in Réunion, a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean, are included.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1 A Tale of Two Kinshasas, or The Plurality of Everyday Postcolonialism Chapter 2 The AYA Effect, or Marguerite Abouet’s Timely and Timeless Interventions Chapter 3 Reframing Migration in the Twenty-First Century Chapter 4 Black Bandes Dessinées and Decolonial Ecocriticism Coda Black Bandes Dessinées and Beyond Works Cited Index
Descriere
Centers the diversity of Black francophone cartoonists while demonstrating the reparative nature of their work in combatting stereotypes and challenging transcolonial power imbalances.