Comic Books and Collective Memory: Social Movements, Politics, and Diversity in Comic Books 1935-Present

• In Event: 322 - Regular Session. Identity, Diversity, and Inequality: The Work and Politics of Popular Culture

Abstract

After conducting ethnographies of two political movements, I became curious about representations of social justice and social stratification outside of social movement or political contexts. Specifically, I asked how popular culture represents social movement messages and political discourse concerning inequality. Cultural objects are democratized through the diffusion of previously limited content or messages and provide an arena for the challenge or legitimization of dominant representations of social life. These democratized cultural objects constitute popular culture, the arena we consider mainstream and are thus battlegrounds for reifying and challenging dominant frames about inequality, social justice, politics, and the intersections of race, class, and gender. Cultural objects such as comic books, television, film, art, literature, and music tend to be highly sensitive to social reality. The specific cultural objects in which I explore political discourse and social movement messages are comic books from 1935 to the present.

Author

• Jesse Klein, Florida State University