Conveying the Unspeakable. African Americans in the USA (PDF)

Essay from the year 2015 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Siegen (Philosophische Fakultät), course: Graphic Narratives of Black History, language: English, abstract: "A picture is worth a thousand words", says a famous English proverb, pointing out that a complex idea can easily be conveyed with just a single still image, or that an image conveys its own meaning more effectively than a description does.

By referring to Michal Chaney and Consuela Francis, this essay shall demonstrate that Kyle Baker draws in his visual narrative Nat Turner an image of the unspeakable. The target readers are helped to understand the torture and suffering of African Americans who were brought to the USA by the Middle Passage and Baker also visualizes the depression and misery of enslaved people.

In order to show how this visualization works, three different panels will be described and analyzed. In the first section we will discuss how exactly Baker depicts the anxiety, horror and panic of the characters. Afterwards, it will be shown in which manner despair and gloom are portrayed, and the last section will treat the ideas of hope, optimism and faith in Nat Turner.

This paper will also show how the reader gets involved into these different emotions and how he is meant to conceptualize the content of the different panels. The analyzed panels can be found in the appendix of this essay.