Gutiérrez Arillo: Fantastic Forms of Violence: Comic strips, the comic magazine, and the anti-Chinese campaign in Mexico

This talk considers racial violence in print culture and the specific role of cartoons in the journalistic environment. In the first third of the 20th century, comics in Mexican periodicals expanded from the first industrially produced strips in one ink (1904) and Sunday supplements in full colour for newspapers, to the new medium of the comic magazine for Pan-American circulation (1934). Across these formats, cartoons of Chinese represented haunting fantasies that simultaneously subscribed to the common Anti-Asian sentiments in the Hemisphere and responded to the local colonial legacy of slavery of indios chinos (Indigenous Chinese) and to the agendas of a markedly anti-Chinese political class after the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917).

Dr. Itzayana Gutiérrez Arillo is a postdoctoral fellow in Communication & Media Studies at Carleton University. Their research has focused on modern print culture and how industrial graphic forms such as comic strips and comic magazines have the possibility of racial violence built into them, queer underground printed ephemera such as postcards and flyers, and the tensions of transcultural belonging and nightlife, as well as material culture and the ethnohistoric relationships between Asia and Latin America, from the 16th to 19th century.

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