Blackouts made visible : a visual-textual analysis of Sarah Glidden's comics journalism

This thesis studies Sarah Glidden's largely unexamined book Rolling Blackouts as a significant contribution to the genre known as comics journalism. It argues that Glidden's work engages in a material struggle over the nature of journalism by using the comics form to intervene in an ongoing debate over the field's normative values. Glidden pictures how journalism can be done differently and challenges mainstream conventions by constructing (1) a model of journalistic authority that refuses to cover over deep epistemological uncertainties and (2) a complex ethics and aesthetics of listening. In addition, this thesis reads Rolling Blackouts through the lens of postcolonial theory, analyzing the way Glidden brings journalistic abstractions into contact with messy representational realities of transnational and interpersonal power imbalances. Glidden is particularly concerned with refugees created by American imperialism and how American journalists--working in comics or not--can position themselves to ethically represent these refugees. Ultimately, a close-reading of Rolling Blackouts suggests that comics journalism's documented concern with self-representation is less important than showing the intricacy of the embodied relationships between a comics journalist and her sources -- particularly when those sources are the world's contemporary subalterns.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.A.

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Journalism (MU)

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Missouri--Columbia

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Stewart, Tynan

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Hudson, Berkley

Statement dc:rights

• OpenAccess.

Language dc:language.iso

eng, English

DOI

https://doi.org/10.32469/10355/72280

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:mospace.umsystem.edu:10355/72280