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Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History
Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History
BUY NOW
(HTTP://WWW.BARNESANDNOBLE.COM/W/ABINA
AND
THE
IMPORTANT
MEN
TREVOR
R
OCTOBER 21ST 2011
GETZ/1104528513)
By Trevor Getz
Abina and the Important Men (http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/abinaandtheimportantmentrevorrgetz/1104528513) is an interpretation of the testimony of a young, enslaved woman who won her way to freedom in late nineteenth century West Africa and then prosecuted her former master for illegally enslaving her. October 21 marks the 155th anniversary of the date that she forced a British magistrate and a jury of eleven affluent and powerful men to hear the charges she was making against an influential male landowner.
Having encountered Abina’s testimony in the National Archives of Ghana more than a decade ago, I felt driven to turn it into an annotated graphic history both from a sense of obligation to Abina and because of an inkling that her story could speak to a cluster of political and intellectual tensions in our society and within myself. These tensions come in the form of what I call the “liberal dilemma”.
This dilemma seems to recur in a great deal of the literature, media, and art that makes up the intellectual matrix of our society. It begins with the desire deep within liberals like me to make a better world by helping everyone claim the universal birthrights of liberty, fraternity, and equality. Yet the liberal worldview is also intertwined with a history colonial privilege, bourgeois society and its attitudes towards the lower classes, and male patriarchy and paternalism. Thus the acts of “doing good” that characterize liberalism include the “civilizing mission” that hid the horrors of modern empire, the statebuilding justifications of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the sidelining of women and people of color.
(http://www.oup.com/us/pdf/highered/30335689/getz2.JPG)
Search
Search
Menu
Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History
Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History
BUY NOW
(HTTP://WWW.BARNESANDNOBLE.COM/W/ABINA
AND
THE
IMPORTANT
MEN
TREVOR
R
OCTOBER 21ST 2011
GETZ/1104528513)
By Trevor Getz
Abina and the Important Men (http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/abinaandtheimportantmentrevorrgetz/1104528513) is an interpretation of the testimony of a young, enslaved woman who won her way to freedom in late nineteenth century West Africa and then prosecuted her former master for illegally enslaving her. October 21 marks the 155th anniversary of the date that she forced a British magistrate and a jury of eleven affluent and powerful men to hear the charges she was making against an influential male landowner.
Having encountered Abina’s testimony in the National Archives of Ghana more than a decade ago, I felt driven to turn it into an annotated graphic history both from a sense of obligation to Abina and because of an inkling that her story could speak to a cluster of political and intellectual tensions in our society and within myself. These tensions come in the form of what I call the “liberal dilemma”.
This dilemma seems to recur in a great deal of the literature, media, and art that makes up the intellectual matrix of our society. It begins with the desire deep within liberals like me to make a better world by helping everyone claim the universal birthrights of liberty, fraternity, and equality. Yet the liberal worldview is also intertwined with a history colonial privilege, bourgeois society and its attitudes towards the lower classes, and male patriarchy and paternalism. Thus the acts of “doing good” that characterize liberalism include the “civilizing mission” that hid the horrors of modern empire, the statebuilding justifications of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the sidelining of women and people of color.
(http://www.oup.com/us/pdf/highered/30335689/getz2.JPG)