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Depictive Harm in Little Black Sambo? The Communicative Role of Comic Caricature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 May 2024
Abstract
In Helen Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo, the text describes its main character as witty, brave, and resourceful. The drawings of the story’s main character which accompany this text, however, present a unique kind of harm that only becomes clear when the work is read as a collection of single-panel comics rather than an illustrated book. In this chapter, I show what happens when we read drawings in books as textless comics, and, based on how things turn out from this reading, motivate why we have some substantive reason to read both Little Black Sambo and other books with drawings-as-comics.
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- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Inc
Footnotes
This article will discuss images of minstrelsy and Helen Bannerman’s illustrations. This article also mentions racist stereotypes that refer to anti-black racist caricatures stemming from blackface minstrelsy, both in reference to the title of Helen Bannerman’s story and in reference to the proper name of the fictional character the textual story is about. I have tried to minimize the use of these terms as much as possible without sacrificing clarity, but I warmly welcome recommendations for further minimization of the use of these and related words and descriptions.
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