Visual Legacy
I often make the case that comics are an archive of the American experience. Still, the complexities around that reality are sometimes to fully understand. The new documentary from the American Experience on William Randolph Hearst does a great job of leading us through the impact of newspaper comics in the 1890s. The term yellow journalism we know is connected to Hogan’s Alley and the Yellow Kid comic strip. This segment really captures the impact of visual storytelling on an emerging consumer urban culture in the United States.
I think they could have said more about the constructed nature of race at this time. Of course, one of the elements that make Afrofuturism so dynamic is it emphasis on decolonization around knowledge. One of the core elements of this deconstruction is the idea that “race” is fiction, a set of beliefs created to uphold imperialistic power structure. As the video above suggests, the consideration of the future must be very different if you are a person of color.
Images by Intergalactic Soul (Marcus Kiser and Jason Woodberry)
Why does this matter in the context of the history of race, media, and William Randolph Hearst? Hearst used visual narrative rooted in white supremacy at the heart of western culture to manipulate public opinion. He used visual narratives about urban immigrants to sell papers.
In the run-up to the Spanish-American War, many Americans rallied to the message of war not realizing the Cuban population was black. Even today, despite the long African roots linked to Cuba (and the rest of Latin America), we tend to imagine these spaces as light-skinned terms. The vision of a “white” Cuba victimized by Spain was a central part of the visual narrative that made Americans want to go to war to liberate Cuba in the 1890s, but racial coding in the visual narrative lingers to this very day.
Afrofuturism looks for ways to disrupt these assumptions today but also seeks to recover those counterpublic efforts by people of color attempting to tell their story in the past and present. Those visions help us understand the liberation at the heart of future vision rooted in safety, health, and prosperity for everyone.
