Aesthetic Resistance: Racist Visual Tropes and the Oppositional Gaze in Joel Christian Gill’s Tales of the Talented Tenth

Joel Christian Gill’s Tales of the Talented Tenth employs the comics medium to confront racism and promote antiracist agency in his readership. In particular, two recurring visual tropes—blackface minstrel figures and crows—materialize racist concepts and practices while also resisting them, thus engaging readers in a contrapuntal reading practice that revises historically inscribed relations between signifier and signified, authority and subaltern. Positioning these figures in relation to a Black oppositional gaze, Tales of the Talented Tenth invites readers to witness and engage in a politics of looking that confronts and critiques cultural scripts of oppression.