Dr. Cathy Thomas on Comic Book Cosplay and Caribbean Carnival

Please join the English Department on November 12 for a 12pm graduate seminar and 3pm research talk with Dr. Cathy Thomas, Assistant Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara.

 

12pm Graduate Seminar in the Voorhies Library and over Zoom

Zoom link: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/99158254381?pwd=WXNVSkppNEZVZ0hsRGV6YzVIV0hFQT09 

Meeting ID: 991 5825 4381 

Passcode: 847447 

 
The graduate seminar will be structured as a conversation on sexual policing and the culture of dissemblance that frames conflict in novels by African American and Caribbean women novelists. Using Darlene Clark Hine's "Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West" as a grounding text, the discussion will also touch on Real Housewives in “black spaces” and the methods & practices that remediate the requirements of respectability.
 
 
 

3pm Research Talk in 126 Voorhies and over Zoom

Zoom link: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/98033041845?pwd=UW5pa0FSYVZNU3VXTFdEcHNwbWVRdz09 

Meeting ID: 980 3304 1845 

Passcode: 238027 

 

"'Identity which does not come when called': Comic Book Cosplay and Caribbean Carnival as Embodied Cognates" is drawn from Thomas's book project, Unruly: On a Genealogy of Afrodiasporic Women and Girls. In it, Thomas explores how Black female figures disrupt the normative construction of genre and gender in narrative-based costumed pretend play to turn body spectatorship into new narratives of speculation. For Black women at play, cosplay (i.e., comic book and pop culture costume play) and masquerade (i.e., as during Caribbean Carnival) are rhetorical and performative cognates. Thomas suggests that Black women at play highlight the paradoxical dilemma of their visibility and invisibility so that, in public (whether virtual or actual), their presence becomes a phenomenological experience and political expression of their capacity as world builders. She finds that, because the category of “Black women” in this research includes people who use an array of binary, nonbinary, and contested gender categories, Black femme praxis addresses the complex relations of the real and fictive worlds their play inhabits. To demonstrate the overlap between cosplay and “playing mas” (masquerade), Thomas includes ethnographic detail and a related short excerpt from her spec fiction novel-in-progress, PoCo Mas.

 

Dr. Cathy Thomas is a creative-critical scholar working on African American, Caribbean, and comic arts literature. She has written several articles, book chapters, two chapbooks, a syndicated comic strip, and short films. She is currently completing two books. Her spec fiction novel PoCo Mas explores a historically unprecedented Afrofuture attentive to the long histories of Humanism, afterlives of anti-black violence, and aftershock of weather through the lens of Carnival and the poetics of mas(querade). Her collection of linked slipstream stories Girls on Film explores the mother-daughter-alien relation across time, race, and the silver screen. She is also researching her monograph Unruly: On a Genealogy of Afrodiasporic Women and Girls. A former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Riverside, Thomas received her PhD in Literature at UC Santa Cruz, her MFA in Creative Writing at CU Boulder, and a BA in Molecular, Cell, & Developmental Biology at Wesleyan University. Before academia she worked in HIV research, a genetics lab, a mindfulness center with a neuropsychiatric institute, and Hollywood. She is the co-Investigator on a UK Arts & Humanities Research Council global grant Women in Carnival to develop digital archives and resources for Caribbean practitioners.   

 
The event is co-sponsored by the departments of English and African American and African Studies, as well as by the graduate groups in Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, and Critical Theory. 

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