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Stanford W. Carpenter
Postdoctoral Fellow, 2003-2004
Stanford W. Carpenter (Ph.D. Cultural Anthropology, Rice University, 2003)
is a cultural anthropologist/research scientist at the Friends Research Institute
in Baltimore, MD, where he is focusing on the working lives of writers, artists,
and media producers who create representations of identity and community. His
research into the relationship between identity and media production is based
on ethnographic research amongst comic book creators in New York, artists working
on community based art exhibits at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum
and Olneyville Library in Providence, and editorial writers at the Baltimore
Sun newspaper as well as his own experiences as a cartoonist, writer, and visual
artist. He is currently working on a book that looks at images of race in comics
through the eyes of comic book creators titled The Work of Imagining Identity
in Comic Books for Duke University Press. He is also developing a manuscript
based on recent ethnographic fieldwork at the Baltimore Sun, and a
series of cartoons about “storytellers, headless men, scarecrows, and
Anansi the spider.”
Fellow’s Project Description
The Work of Imagining Creating, Negotiating, and Imagining Identity in Print
Media
The images of Black people and communities in the African Diaspora are built
on the global flow of representations of individual people and specific events
that have come to symbolize the group as a whole. Cultural, Ethnic, and Media
Studies have long used readership, audience reception, consumption and thematic
analyses of mass media and the visual to critique the representation of community,
ethnicity, gender, and race. Working from the argument that popular culture,
mass media, and history are the means through which people create, manage, and
maintain identity, these projects use ethnographic research amongst cartoonist,
visual artists, and journalists in the development of a more production-centered
approach to media representation by paying particular attention to the everyday
lives, creative processes, and institutional constraints that influence the
work of media producers.
I will use the Driskell Center fellowship to work on a forthcoming book titled
The Work of Imagining Identity in Comic Books. Comic books are the
product of collage, the reworking of symbols, the appropriation of narratives,
the juxtaposition of desires, and the (re) deployment of transnational flows
of images in order to create a world that bears some connection to its readers,
a world of representations of race, gender, and ethnicity crafted from icons,
caricature, and stereotypes. The book examines the representation of race, gender,
and ethnicity in comic books through the eyes of mainstream comic book producers.
Comic book producers are a relatively small segment of the U.S. entertainment
industry consisting of men, women, and corporate entities that make their livings
imagining identities and telling tales about of men in tights, mutants in leather,
and women in … well, not much at all. Within the comic book industry,
race is imagined and negotiated by individuals who bring their personal experiences,
observations, and collections of objects and images (archives) to the creation
of privately owned referential images and narratives. Comic book producers shape
and are shaped by transnational flows of stories and images. Comic book creators
are part of a decentralized production process that brings together words and
pictures in service of an art form whose creators work at the crossroads of
the imagination, commerce, myth, and law. And in many cases, they work with
established properties that have histories that are problematic in terms of
race, gender, and ethnicity. They work in an industry that only recently saw
an influx of creators from the very same racial and ethnic groups that their
properties demeaned.
I will also begin developing a manuscript based on recent ethnographic
fieldwork at the Baltimore Sun’s newsroom and editorial
board that will examine the production processes and creative negotiations
of the people who write the stories, take the pictures, and create the
images of everyday lives and issues in Baltimore’s urban African-American
communities. In addition, I will be working on a series of cartoons and
art projects that reflect on my recent ethnographic fieldwork, the production
of stereotypical imagery, representations of racialized violence, and
storytelling in the African Diaspora.
Throughout my fellowship at the Driskell Center and in my spring semester
class I will be asking the following the questions: What are the processes,
methods, and means through which identities are imagined and represented?
And how does this inform the construction of identity in everyday life?
What can a study of the everyday lives, creative processes, and institutional
constraints of media producers and visual artists teach us about the representation
of community, ethnicity, gender, and race? And how can this question be
further explored through the actual production of art and media by the
researcher?
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