Days of Future Past: Histories and Futures of Racial Representation in Comics

To continue our year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar devoted to “Racial Reckoning Through Comics,” we turn to critical and creative approaches to representing historical as well as potential futures of racial trauma, testimony, possibility, and expanded narrative. How have comics neglected as well as addressed racialized histories or imagined racialized futures? In addition to presentations from our dynamic speakers, this event will include a guided archival tour of rare comics artifacts from the University of Iowa Library’s Special Collections, emphasizing the crucial role of the archive as both a resource for and witness to a troubling, often overlooked past as well as an invitation to necessary historical revision and ongoing reckoning.