Rebecca Wanzo insists we reassess the way we read and condemn stereotypical representations

Rebecca Wanzo (https://www.rebeccawanzo.com/) is a Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an Affiliate Professor of American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She’s the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, a book that thinks through the kinds of storytelling conventions that African American women, and social beings in general, are compelled to use to make their suffering legible to specific institutions in the United States. Her most recent book, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, is a remarkable study of the many ways that Black cartoonists have used racialized caricatures to contest and rework constructions of ideal citizenship. Wanzo recalls being told that her subject in The Content of Our Caricature had basically been exhausted. Imagine being questioned about whether there was enough content for a scholarly book within the history of Black comics—it speaks to the ways that, as she points out, comics are still seen as somewhat juvenile, and also the ways in which Black comics, in particular, are not understood as having their own vital, varied history. It’s interesting to think that Wanzo struggled to get the cover image for the book approved by the publisher. This striking image from Jeremy Love’s Bayou perfectly captures the concerns of her text. As she puts it, one of the questions she’s asking, again and again, in this book is: “What is this Black creator trying to do” with this representation of a figure—in the case of Bayou, the figure of the gollywog—that has “a specific racist… representational history”? In the coda for The Content of Our Caricature, Wanzo talks about the Marvel film Black Panther and its foundations in the foundational story arc surrounding Killmonger from the comics. She explains how the “transformation” and “rehabilitation” of Black Panther shows us how the history of representation and appropriation really is complex, and stresses that there is never “a homogenous black audience response. Things are not transparently always good and always bad." She argues that we really need to slow the process of interpretation and critical conversation down, and resist the tendency toward immediate condemnation. “Cancel culture,” as we’ve now titled it, is, in her words, “subsuming” so many different things that it’s become a “useless analytic tool.” It’s also a dizzyingly ironic title, given that those that frequently decry so-called cancel culture—namely those on the Right—are at the vanguard of canceling huge parts of culture that they deem threatening. Wanzo explains that, in the contemporary context, what we are seeing is the Right, in the US especially, attacking not only critical race theory, but all of “history” and “any discussion of discrimination.” The dominant form that cancellation is taking today vilifies any media that, from Wanzo’s perspective, “might make white heterosexual children from heteronormative families uncomfortable.” She makes it clear that this push exposes the fact that these groups fundamentally “don’t care about people who are not this ideal child that they’ve decided is American.” We talk about the ways that the mere presence of people who are not cisgendered and white in superhero stories still provokes strong reactions. Wanzo says that this spontaneous reaction to difference is deeply troubling, but it also shows the degree to which “the space of representation is a big battleground, and it matters,” and reveals “all kinds of conflicts that we have culturally and it’s a space under which various politics around inclusion and the nation and political belonging play out.”