Comics and Caricature

 We discussed this topic a bit in reference to Maus, but it's important to revisit as we read both Tomine's Shortcomings and Gene Yang's American Born Chinese. In radically different ways, both texts look directly at questions of race, racial stereotypes, and, in the case of Yang's work, caricature.  In Shortcomings, we see a number of characters who are anxious about the politics of interracial dating and the identification of Asian American men with a compromised masculinity (one insidious stereotype Tomine explores through his unsympathetic narrator).  How else does Tomine explore race and valences of race as they relate to gender and sexuality in Shortcomings?

Moreover, on a broader level, how do all comics artists have to contend with the history of caricature in their comics?  As we discussed early in the semester, cartoons function so effectively because they work through amplification, eg a character might have oversize or even grotesque features that don't conform to how real people look in order to encourage reader projection or identification.  What effect does this have on how comics artists draw race? 

In the U.S., as some of the images below attest, there has been a long and deeply troubling history of representing Asian Americans (and dealing with anxieties about immigration and ethnic difference) through caricature.

How do Tomine and, as we will see, Yang deal with this issue in their work, if they do so at all?  How does this question of racial (or other identity-based) caricature hang over a lot of the work we've read this semester? How does work like the Asian American superhero anthology attempt to subvert stereotypes associated with Asian American identity, particularly those related to gender?

As some of the exhibits below demonstrate, many groups, especially African Americans and new immigrants to the U.S. (including the Irish), were racialized and subject to caricature during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Trigger warning: These images can be very upsetting!

Check out this:

Exhibit on racist caricature and cartoons

Site on caricature of Asian Americans called "yellow-face"

Slideshow of racist caricature in commercials

Archive of Caricature of the Irish

Interesting article on the politics of caricature