Breaking and Remaking the Myths: History, Legacy, and the American Dream in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Captain America and Black Panther
Start Date
19-7-2022 1:00 PM
End Date
19-7-2022 2:00 PM
Description
This panel will discuss essayist and journalist T-Nehisi Coates’ recent simultaneous runs on the “Black Panther” and “Captain America” series in the context of the skepticism, hope, and desire to challenge historical myth as seen in long-form works like “Between the World and Me” and “We Were Eight Years in Power”. We argue that these two comics are an accessible Rosetta Stone to introduce and decode the complex narrative threads of Coates’ larger body of work – and from an LIS standpoint, a means to engage with and complement other pivotal works that inspired it. Parallels between these two contemporaneous series and contradictions between their different standpoints will be identified, and suggestions for how the superhero metaphor can be used to answer questions of history and identity will be provided. This panel will also make the case for curating collections and hosting community discussions of these related works.
Breaking and Remaking the Myths: History, Legacy, and the American Dream in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Captain America and Black Panther
This panel will discuss essayist and journalist T-Nehisi Coates’ recent simultaneous runs on the “Black Panther” and “Captain America” series in the context of the skepticism, hope, and desire to challenge historical myth as seen in long-form works like “Between the World and Me” and “We Were Eight Years in Power”. We argue that these two comics are an accessible Rosetta Stone to introduce and decode the complex narrative threads of Coates’ larger body of work – and from an LIS standpoint, a means to engage with and complement other pivotal works that inspired it. Parallels between these two contemporaneous series and contradictions between their different standpoints will be identified, and suggestions for how the superhero metaphor can be used to answer questions of history and identity will be provided. This panel will also make the case for curating collections and hosting community discussions of these related works.