Resisting Revanchism—Comics and the Limits of the Archive of Civil Rights

As the nation retreats from the promise of November 2008, the sense of possibility authored by Black American sacrifices during the Civil Rights Movement has faded into an inert symbolism, with neo-Nazis now articulating the virtues of nonviolent protest and a color-blind society in service of their ideology. In the wake of this slippage, graphic novels like Ho Che Anderson’s King and John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell’s March, which strive to reanimate history by faithfully representing the violence and victories of that period, have become necessary correctives. By returning to us Ralph Abernathy, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Robert Moses and Stokely Carmichael, to say nothing of King and Lewis, these texts work against the sanitization of the Civil Rights movement. This talk seeks to complicate the post-structural critique of representation, which assumes that images resonate throughout a culture in part due to the work they do “constructing, maintaining, and disseminating [dominant] cultural values, social relations, and identity formations” (Reynolds, 1997). Rather, as the methodical reversal of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement demonstrates, the efficacy of narrative images that challenge dominant ideologies of inclusion and merit must be understood to be necessarily partial and provisional. It’s incumbent upon scholars to grasp the limitations of empathy in the face of a continued indifference to the cultural values expressed in the visual and textual archive of the Civil Rights Movement.