The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging by Rebecca Wanzo (review)

Abstract

leaders in the nation during the FDR presidential era that situates her distinctly within the annals of African American and American history. In particular, Bethune’s relationship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt positions her as an intermediary between nation and community, slavery’s imprint, and the Jim Crow era, and makes legible countervailing representations of Black women during the 1920s and ’30s. These racialized social scripts cause Richardson to say of Bethune and of Rosa Parks that there is efficacy in considering the fascinating interconnectedness of their noted legacies. This connection is particularly significant when considering the Black maternal motif and its interrelatedness to the pivotal public journeys of Beyoncé Knowles Carter and Michelle Obama. That Carter engages her complex positionalities as wife, mother, businesswoman, and strategic collaborative partner with Black queer and trans women foregrounds the tensions Richardson notes in the performativity of blackness (here, she frames her discussion around Beyoncé’s “formation” during the halftime show at Super Bowl L and her singing of Etta James’s classic At Last as a backdrop to the inaugural dance of the Obamas, among other noteworthy public moments), and the reflexiveness of a supposedly colorblind and postracial moment ushered in by the Obamas’ White House. As Richardson delineates with acute clarity, however, Michelle Obama’s very presence as First Lady of this country—and indeed of the world, given the global importance of the US—disrupts the interpretative frameworks of national and global feminism, motherhood, and beauty as inherently white. Michelle Obama’s very body became a canvas for racist and stereotypical caricature (as did her husband’s). Such primitive musings make legible the caustic and vile underbelly of a national imagery intent on activating and reengaging the symbols of hatred and white supremacy whose roots lead back to a nostalgic longing for days of old. Michelle Obama’s references to her daughters playing on the lawn of a White House built with the labor of enslaved people—and her ability to trace her ancestral background to a great-great-grandfather enslaved on the Friendfield Plantation in Georgetown, South Carolina) allow her to control this American script in ways that reinstitute her personhood along the very rift that is meant to disempower her. The phrase “when and where I enter” takes on renewed meaning in Richardson’s work as Bethune, Parks, Obama, and Carter become emblems of change— unapologetically Black, unabashedly human, unmistakably complex.