Feb 17
Convocation: Jonathan Gayles
Jonathan Gayles is Associate Professor of African-American Studies at Georgia State University. As a young boy, Gayles loved comic books and the escape that they provided. However, as a young Black boy, his ability to truly escape was limited by the fact that many of the heroes were White. In 2012, Gayles produced an independent documentary that critically examines the earliest representations of Black masculinity in comic books and the troubling influence of race on these representations. Within the last several years, many scholars have critically engaged comic books as a legitimate source of scholarly interest and critique. Indeed, comic books represent a genre within popular culture that is older than the television. Thinking critically about the manner in which Black men were first portrayed in hero serials provides insight into broader societal conceptions of the Black man as character, archetype and symbol. The title of his presentation is “White Scripts and Black Supermen: Black Masculinities in Comic Books.”