Research

The project’s research was split into four historical periods:

• Early interventions (1890s-1930s)
• The Golden Age (1940s-1970s)
• Crisis and Early Activism (1970s-1990s)
• Recent Renaissances (2000s-2020s)

These loose categories helped to organise the huge diversity of comic production that exists just in Argentina, Colombia and Peru, let alone Latin America as a whole. These periods offered a window in to:

• The broad panorama of the history of Latin American comics production;
• Tracing shifts from caricature and early comic strips, to a period of growth and expansion in the mid-twentieth century;
• The establishment of comics-specific magazines, prior to an era of growing political engagement and ideological struggle over the role of comics within society.
• The recent explosion of production fomented by the digital turn.

Our research established several thematic focal points that cut across these four periods, including:

• The relationship between race and the land;
• (Neo)extractivisisms;
• Border crossings;
• Intersectionality;
• Social activism;
• The cultural underground.

We also explored the dynamic between comics, race and issues related to gender, sexuality, class and other fields of historical and contemporary struggle.

This approach helped us set up both a synchronic and diachronic study of the transtemporal and transnational relationships between comics and race in Latin America.