American Studies Commons^™

Visualizing Abolition: Two Graphic Novels And A Critical Approach To Mass Incarceration For The Composition Classroom, Michael Sutcliffe

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This article outlines two graphic novels and an accompanying activity designed to unpack complicated intersections between racism, poverty, and (d)evolving criminal-legal policy. Over 2 million adults are held in U.S. prison facilities, and several million more are under custodial supervision, and it has become clearly unsustainable. In the last decade, there has been a shift in media conversations about criminality, yet only a few suggest decreasing our reliance upon incarceration. In meaningfully different ways, the two novels trace the development of incarceration from its roots in slavery to its contemporary anti-democratic iteration and offer an underpublicized alternative.

Critical and community …

“Ever Since The Hanging Of Oliphant” Lynching And The Suppression Of Mob Violence In Topeka, Kansas, Brent M.S. Campney

Great Plains Quarterly

“The most remarkable scene ever enacted in the heart of a great city was witnessed in Topeka last night, in the final act of the tragedy on which the curtain rose with the sunrise yesterday,” reported the Topeka Daily Capital on June 5, 1889. “Twelve hours after the spirit of Alonzo T. Rodgers had taken its flight, his murderer was hung in the very center of the capital city, under the broad glare of the electric light and by a body of ‘vigilantes’ which in its composition was equalled by no other in all the history of the western world.” …