Reading Post-slavery Subjectivities in Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

abstract:I argue that Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth shares with the work of cultural critics Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe an awareness of how the terms of slavery continue to shape our contemporary political reality and our individual identities. Ware challenges readers to recognize signs of slavery’s afterlife in a comics narrative about four generations of white men. This essay charts the complex pathways by which slavery and its violence continue to circulate in the novel’s contemporary landscape, indelibly marking both its white and its Black characters.