This seminar will explore how print and digital conditions of publication inform the legibility, translation, and circulation of ethnic, racial, gender, and other identity markers. How do visual media produce categories of similarity and difference, and how–in turn–are these media produced and reproduced through technology? Rather than take the stability of these categories for granted, we follow the exhortation by Dr. Lorna Roth’s Colour Balance Project to “challenge the cultural innocence of common products and visual technologies” by critically analyzing the capabilities, constraints, and cultural techniques of visual media. Participants will draw from and build on the work of scholars like Dr. Roth and Zoë Smith, who reminds us in “4 Colorism: The Ashiness of It All” that in the case of comic books, “letterpress printing on newsprint reinforced a certain blankness and normality of whiteness, while overdetermining brown skin with a hypervisible—and yet inadequate—quantity of ink.” We welcome papers that consider the intersections of media and materiality in the visual construction of identity. Roth and Smith both caution against assumptions regarding the realism or authenticity of imagery. Although photography is taken as a reflection of the world, and illustrations may be understood as fictional images, these designations depend on attitudes toward technologies, forms, and genres that are historically and culturally determined. How are visual economies of recognition and difference made (and unmade) through pigments, pixels, and film? 

While our call arises from a growing movement in the study of comics and graphic narratives to account for the technological basis of racial representation, we invite projects from across media fields and theoretical interests. We are seeking papers that examine visual media through the intersection of material and virtual conditions of production/reproduction and the cultural, social, and literary discourses that correlate to racialization and identity formation.

• What might scanlation, Blue Age comics, color guides, offset printing, rasterization, perspective theory, colorization, Shirley cards, tinted filters, Ben-Day dots, and so on, reveal about the expectations informing our reading and interpretation of identity in image-texts? 


• How do the processes of producing and reproducing images affirm, challenge, or complicate these expectations? 


• How do we understand the authenticity of images and image-texts concerned with representing those like and unlike ourselves?


• How do border-crossings, cultural exchanges, trans- and remediations offer new apertures through which to critically consider how we consume visions of identity, likeness, and otherness?


• How do differences in ability shape the consumption of visual representation?


• What does it mean to translate image-texts across languages, cultures, material substrates, print conditions, and screens?