Getting Graphic: Resisting Anti-Blackness via the Visual Narratives of Black Boys

Abstract

Comics and graphic novels can disrupt traditional texts by challenging the “worship of the written word” (Torres, 2019), a feature of white supremacy that perpetuates textual hierarchies within educational spaces. Giving all of our students access to contemporary literature that centers Black youth perspectives is not only important in decolonizing literature education but also in presenting a holistic view of Black childhood. They can be used in the classroom as subjects to challenge stereotypical depictions by centering experiences, ideas, and concepts that are often marginalized in traditional curriculum. Within this chapter, we focus on comics and graphic novels as tools to enact students’ multiliteracies and to analyze visual stories depicting BlackBoy adolescence, using the frameworks of BlackBoy Crit Pedagogy (Bryan, 2022), an equity framework that interrogates the interdisciplinary ways that Black boy students' literacy learning can be formed through the teaching and learning of Blackness, maleness, and the schooling experiences of Black boys. We utilize this framework to analyze the use of diverse comics and graphic novels to facilitate critical conversations of bringing inclusive visual texts into the classroom. We invite practitioners to reimagine curricular ideas and content centered on empowerment and Black boy adolescence and how those ideas are presented to youth through a variety of visual narratives.

Citation

Hines, C.M. and Alexander, L.D. (2023), "Getting Graphic: Resisting Anti-Blackness via the Visual Narratives of Black Boys", Hines, E.M. and Fletcher, E.C. (Ed.) Black Males in Secondary and Postsecondary Education (Advances in Race and Ethnicity in Education, Vol. 9), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 3-23. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2051-231720230000009001