*Taught with Maite Urcaregui*

Comics—with connections to political pamphlets, cartooning, and zines—have a long history of lampooning critique. Alongside issues of form and aesthetics, this course investigates 20th- and 21st- century American graphic narratives as a form positioned to ask questions about the politics and poetics of representing race, gender, and sexuality in their intersections. How does the simultaneity of word and image invite new reading practices, ways of knowing, and ecphrastic possibilities? What are the ethics and politics of visual representation amid the violent realities of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, imperialism and (neo)colonialism? What is queer about comics as a form that disrupts boundaries of discipline and canon? What possibilities for activism (or artivism) exist within comics, popular culture, and literary studies? By engaging graphic novels such as Maus, Fun Home, My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Julio’s Day, and I am Alfonso Jones; alternative shorts and strips such as Dykes to Watch Out For and The Boondocks; and popular mass comics such as World of Wakanda, Bitch Planet, and Ms. Marvel, this course will analyze the ways comics and graphic narratives picture identity, community, resistance, and conceptions of worlds otherwise.