“On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power is the first study of its kind, seamlessly traveling between comics scholarship, postcolonial/decolonial scholarship, ecocriticism, and African art history to fill a sizeable gap in postcolonial/decolonial francophone studies and comics studies.” —Jennifer Howell, author of The Algerian War in French-Language Comics: Postcolonial Memory, History, and Subjectivity
“This is a subtle and theoretically informed analysis of the work of a range of outstanding Black bande dessinée artists who challenge a dominant visual imaginary, creatively remix local and global popular culture, resist recuperation into universalizing respectability, politicize tragic migration stories, and engage in eco-activism. A groundbreaking book.” —Ann Miller, author of Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip
On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power is the first book-length study in English about Black francophone cartoonists and their work. Michelle Bumatay decenters Eurocentric conceptions of francophone comic art and foregrounds the ubiquity of Western racial stereotypes encoded in mainstream French and Belgian bandes dessinées as well as the imbalance of power between the Global North and the Global South carried over from the colonial era. By examining a diversity of Black cartoonists’ aesthetic and material responses to the colonially inherited medium of bandes dessinées, she argues that their innovations constitute important reparative work that combats racial stereotypes and challenges transcolonial power imbalances.
Bumatay demonstrates how Barly Baruti, Papa Mfumu’eto, Marguerite Abouet, Japhet Miagotar, and other Black cartoonists throughout the francophone world employ a range of tactics to tell their own stories. Through a balance of historical context and close readings, she shows how these artists represent and comment on their everyday lives in a postcolonial reality, expose and critique racial capitalism and exploitation, and provide new ways of seeing and understanding Black francophone peoples and cultures.
Michelle Bumatay is Assistant Professor of French at Florida State University. Her research has appeared in Francosphères, Research in African Literatures, and Alternative Francophone.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 A Tale of Two Kinshasas, or The Plurality of Everyday Postcolonialism
Chapter 2 The AYA Effect, or Marguerite Abouet’s Timely and Timeless Interventions
Chapter 3 Reframing Migration in the Twenty-First Century
Chapter 4 Black Bandes Dessinées and Decolonial Ecocriticism
Coda Black Bandes Dessinées and Beyond
Works Cited
Index
