ABSTRACT
The geopolitical relationship between the West and the rest so central to the world-form of human rights–themed comics draws upon, in literal and discontinuous ways, a genealogy of American cartoons as a technology that was historically purposed. In mid-to-late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century capitalist print media, to make the case for racial inferiority and to advocate for US imperialist expansionism. As the United States extended into the Pacific but closed its gates to Asian immigration, political cartoons surfaced as an instrumental technology for arguing the expansion and the contraction of the nation. Immediately after World War II, American comics, then at peak circulation, were slow to liberalize, much less show signs of what Howard Winant calls a postwar "racial break" in the continuity of worldwide white supremacy. The border-crossing is central to the world-form of global human rights narratives, including comics ones, speaks to the political value in prodding the West's conscience.
