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Resource type: Book Chapter Language: en: English BibTeX citation key: SchadeEckert2017 Email resource to friend View all bibliographic details |
Categories: General Keywords: "Peace Party", "Tales of the Mighty Code Talkers", Boney. Roy, Didactics, Ethnicity, Fattoruso. Ron, Postcolonialism, Schmidt. Rob, USA Creators: Hill, Schade Eckert Publisher: Routledge (London, New York) Collection: Teaching Comics Through Multiple Lenses. Critical Perspectives |
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Abstract |
Educators concerned about inclusion, literary interpretation, increasing reading comprehension, textual complexity, metacognition, engaging reluctant readers, etc., essentially every literature teacher, can benefit from including multicultural graphic novels and post-colonial theory in their classrooms. This approach particularly lends itself to collaboration between history, social science, and English classes. For this chapter, I focus on narratives with an emphasis on Native American voices and characters, but this approach could be adapted for a wide range of contemporary multicultural voices. It is important to note that not all of the graphic novels and comics I reference in the chapter are written by Native American authors or illustrators; I include the texts written by non-Native authors to illustrate the history and power of colonization and emphasize Native American authors to illustrate the results of colonization and strength of the Native voice that has persevered. By doing so, I hope to clarify the ways in which post-colonial theory has helped to uncover and highlight colonized peoples’ voices and the narratives that problematize the stereotypes that result from the revisionist redistribution of power. The post-colonial lens encourages multicultural understanding, and close reading of Indigenous narratives provides vicarious experiences to help all students better understand cultural realities and experiences of diverse Native American Nations. The multimodality of graphic novels and comics, evocative with images that help students visualize cultural and social experiences that might be outside of their worldview, is particularly suited as a bridge from studying written text to understanding the oral tradition of Native American Nations. The following discussions and textual analyses will: 1) articulate specific theoretical concepts as posited by theorists who defined them, 2) demonstrate ways in which these concepts offer ways “in” to a text, and 3) model the process of constructing meaning from unique visual narratives that represent complex cultural knowledge and experience. The comics I will explore are Tales of the Mighty Code Talkers:We Speak in Secret, written and illustrated by Roy Boney, and Peace Party, written by and illustrated by Rob Schmidt and Ron Fattoruso.
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