by Rebecca Wanzo
about Rebecca Wanzo
Rebecca Wanzo is Professor and Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Sentimental Storytelling and The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging. Her work can also be found in journals such as American Literature, Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, and Women & Performance.
Futurity
“Futurity” connotes not just what will happen or a time that is not yet. It is laden with affective attachments such as hope and fear. But it is best understood in relationship to the other words that are often proximate to it, such as “time,” “horizon,” “utopia,” and “dystopia.” Throughout North America, futurity is consistently associated with identity, linking ideas of what the future will look like with the belief that various groups can build a new space or, in our worst imaginings, be injured by an impending world that disavows or has no place for them. Futurities are simultaneous and sometimes competing, with the idea of the future always contained within another project related to nation or identity. Theorists of the future in American studies and cultural studies have thus focused on this nexus of identity and imagined world-building. One of the earliest deployments of futurity in the Americas was related to what Indigenous scholars frame as _settler futurity_, most famously exemplified in the United States by the concept of "manifest destiny." Six years before he coined this phrase, John L. O’Sullivan argued _in The United States Democratic Review_ that the United States was _destined_ to be “the great...
Popular
The term “popular” is a tendentious term defined by both audience and content. A popular cultural production is generally understood as appealing to a large group of people or as designed to do so, with the mass appeal suggesting—to some people—that the popular is of lesser quality or inferior. Part of what can make the popular “lesser” is its association with identity-based entertainment. “High” culture is problematically but frequently associated with the universal, while the popular is often seen as targeting groups such as women, children, or the working class. Ironically, the association with an identity group has also made popular texts interesting to many scholars, who see the texts as offering a possibility for subjected or minority groups to voice perspectives not found in mainstream culture. But whether these representations actually speak to the experiences and identities of these groups is a constant source of debate. In the influential 1992 essay “What Is the ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” Stuart Hall calls attention to the fact that black popular culture is a profoundly contradictory and contested category. Given the heterogeneous and hybrid cultures of black people in the diaspora, no singular and essential blackness exists, and yet people still...
Caricature
The term _caricature_ emerged in Italy in the sixteenth century and was a form of exaggerated portrait drawing. The distortion or exaggerated representation of people’s features had a long history before that and can be seen in visual work produced by ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans (Robinson 1917). It has often been used for comic effect. Part of what can make caricature comic is the way in which phenotypic excess can suggest the grotesque—a liminality between humanness and something else. Many caricatures of people are anthropomorphic, sometimes producing a feeling of the uncanny. The fusion of excess, comedy, and the grotesque has made caricatures an aesthetic practice valuable for political commentary and indicting the characters of public figures. It has thus been foundational to the art of editorial cartooning and satirical humor in cartoon art. Political cartooning came of age in the nineteenth century, with artists such as Honoré Daumier producing work for _La Caricature_ (1830–1943), George de Maurier for _Punch_ (1841–2002), and Thomas Nast for _Harper’s Weekly_ (1857–1916). It was considered such a powerful tool in attacking political figures that in 1903, a Pennsylvania state legislator introduced a bill to make editorial cartoons illegal if someone is portrayed, described,...
Race
The term "race" in critical race theory makes discriminatory ideology and practices visible where it is often treated as absent or a negligible issue. Even when confronted with empirical evidence to the contrary, many people have argued that racism is functionally not at play in various institutional and social contexts. When opponents of critical race theory idealize inattentiveness to race as a factor, this approach can obfuscate discriminatory [racial projects](https://www.thoughtco.com/racial-project-3026510). U.S. law often masks racism through a discourse of absence or invisibility. "Our constitution is color blind" is undoubtedly the best-known idea in the [*[Plessy v. Ferguson]* [(1896)](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/163/537/#tab-opinion-1917400) decision after "separate but equal." In *Plessy*, the Supreme Court upheld a Louisiana statute that had separate spaces and facilities for white and Black residents. This statement comes from Justice Harlan's dissent in the ruling and his rhetorical deployment of color-blindness---as simultaneously aspirational and factual, normative and descriptive---is the way many people would continue to evoke the term in the future. In reality, the constitution is famously not colorblind. It counts enslaved people as ["three fifths of all other persons"](https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/slavery/experience/legal/docs2.html), distinguishing them from indentured servants. Slaveholders would solidify the institution into a caste system that marked people of African descent as slaves....