Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Gina Stam
Guest: Michelle Bumatay, Assistant Professor of French at Florida State University
Book: On Black Bandes Dessinées and Transcolonial Power (Ohio State University Press, 2025)
Release Date: October 3, 2025

This episode centers on Michelle Bumatay’s groundbreaking study of Black bandes dessinées (French-language comics) and the concept of transcolonial power. Bumatay discusses how Black authors and artists engage with, disrupt, and transform the Franco-Belgian tradition of comics. The conversation covers terminological complexity, historical and material issues, case studies of Congolese and Ivorian comics, questions of representation, and the intersections of migration and ecocriticism, all while highlighting how comics become a powerful medium for rethinking colonial legacies.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Unpacking the Title: “Black Bandes Dessinées” and Transcoloniality

• Bandes Dessinées: Chosen specifically over “comics” to emphasize its roots in French and Belgian traditions, and to acknowledge the field's specificity as the so-called “ninth art”—a notion utilized as “soft power” by France (03:29).
• The term refers broadly to drawn strips; its meaning and scope can differ in French contexts—encompassing everything from editorial cartoons to graphic novels.
• Black as a Signifier: Used for its ability to disrupt France’s “colorblind” ideology and to align with transnational conversations about race. As in the scholarship of Dominic Thomas and Achille Mbembe, English “Black” insists on the visibility of race in contexts where France purports not to “see” it (06:08).
• Transcoloniality: A lens to analyze cross-border, postcolonial dynamics and power structures shaping both the production and reception of Black francophone comics.

“By juxtaposing these two terms, black and bandes dessinées, I’m bringing all of that into play... not delineating a subcategory, but thinking of these concepts as floating signifiers.”
—Michelle Bumatay (06:59)

2. Corpus Selection and Project Origins

• Genesis: Initial curiosity about African comics in French led Bumatay to questions of production, distribution, and readership. Accessibility was a factor—many African comics are ephemeral, hard to find, and archived in France rather than Africa (07:53, 09:26).
• Method: The project shifted from a strictly prescriptive approach to one that foregrounds context, showing how each artist navigates networks of Franco-Belgian visual “imperialism,” publishing infrastructures, and unique local conditions.

3. Counter-Visuality and Materiality

• Bumatay explores how Black BD artists challenge (“write back” against) dominant visual discourses, which historically grew entwined with caricature and colonial stereotypes (11:09).
• Materiality matters: The status of the BD object (often a luxury in African contexts) shapes both artistic choices and local accessibility.
• The work is positioned to correct scholarly neglect—such artists are underrepresented both in comics studies and French studies due to linguistic and institutional biases.

“My main goal was to bring these artists...to a larger audience. In comics studies, they’re underrepresented and understudied because they’re in French... in French comics studies, they’re underrepresented because the texts are from Africa or by artists of African descent.”
—Michelle Bumatay (12:37)

4. Case Study: Kinshasa & Plurality (Chapter 1: “A Tale of Two Kinshasas”)

• Artists: Bally Bahuti and Papun Fai Muito—both from Kinshasa but with distinct projects and methods (14:00).
• Plurality: Bahuti’s hardcover album (in the style of Tintin) weaves together music and art, enacting self-styling akin to local cultural figures. Papun Fai Muito’s self-published, photocopied magazines, distributed locally, are highly participatory—readers’ names appear in the margins, a technique borrowed from Congolese music shout-outs.
• Both exemplify self-reinvention with available resources; the local—rather than only the global—audience is foregrounded.

“Every single inch of the pages themselves become a site for self-styling ... it kind of creates this feedback loop between the local audience and the producer themselves.”
—Michelle Bumatay (16:37)

5. The Colonial Ghost: Tintin and Visual Imperialism

• The afterlife of Tintin au Congo continues to shape Congolese comics. The album’s stereotypes are still in circulation; reactions to them vary from parody to artistic rejection in favor of realism and verisimilitude (19:02).

“Publishing houses still make profit off of it ... there’s a fraught relationship. Sometimes there’s a sense of pride that Tintin went to Congo ... at other times, the caricatures...are perpetuating an anti-Black ideology.”
—Michelle Bumatay (19:32)

• Some Kinshasa artists respond by doubling down on realistic detail and place, countering Hergé’s visual simplifications.

6. The “Aya Effect” and Gatekeeping Diversity (Chapter 2)

• Aya de Yopougon by Marguerite Abouet is celebrated for diversifying the BD landscape, but Bumatay argues its popularity is inseparable from institutional frameworks—especially the role of major publishers and France’s “Francophonie” politics (22:58).
• Abouet’s success owes much to the market’s readiness, the branding by Gallimard, and the broader movement toward “managed diversity” in French publishing.

“What gets translated from French into English comes from only three publishers in France, and there’s a huge monopoly...her very first book coming out with one of the most prestigious publishers in France means it was already going to succeed.”
—Michelle Bumatay (25:41)

• The branding and public persona melding Aya (the character) with Abouet (the author) exemplifies this assimilation.

7. Subverting the Canon from Within

• Despite the branding, Abouet exceeds her packaging, using subversive narratives and characterizations that trouble the “soft” version of Francophone postcolonial Africa promoted by mainstream French publishing.
• The “Aya” brand allows her more creative autonomy than many others.

“It’s always Aya, the character’s name, that stands in for her and the success she’s garnered.”
—Michelle Bumatay (29:29)

8. Migration, Framing, and Necropolitics (Chapter 3)

• Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics and Dominic Davies’ ideas, Bumatay analyzes how recent comics expose the violent (and spectral) conditions facing migrants—beyond the trope of “humanizing” the migrant (31:05).
• Comics not only bear witness but illuminate the structural “fictions” that frame migration as apolitical or ahistorical (32:12).

Visual Example (33:30)

• In At the End of an Eternity in Tangiers:
  • The final page’s horizontal panels juxtapose colonial and contemporary extraction (labour, resource, border). Migrants are positioned as spectral or marginal, in contrast with freely moving seagulls and raw materials.

“The offshore drilling and the raw materials can go to Europe without any question. But people can’t.”
—Michelle Bumatay (34:33)

9. Decolonial Ecocriticism & Symbolic Justice (Chapter 4)

• Using Malcolm Ferdinand’s framework, Bumatay shows how BD perform “decolonial ecocriticism”—exploring environmental harm as a legacy of colonial extraction (36:17).
• Comics’ ability to present multiple timeframes and co-present realities enhances their power to chronicle slow violence (Rob Nixon) and environmental disaster.

Japhet Mieu Guitar’s Cargill, Martel, Abidjan (38:53)

• Retells the toxic waste dumping in Abidjan (2006), utilizing allegory (an avenging spirit) to mete out “symbolic justice” for victims failed by real-world institutions.
  • Visual disruptions (the shapeless spirit) enact narrative justice where actual justice was denied.

10. Intertextuality & the Colonial/Ecological Nexus (41:51)

• Two major European intertexts:
  • Hergé’s Coke en Stock (Red Sea Sharks): Depicts Black bodies as fuel for labor; in real-life, waste cargo equates to deadly extractive economies.
  • Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: Built on African objects violently extracted from context—mirrors the ideological and material violence underpinning colonial and modernist narratives.

“There was a violence done to these objects in order for European modernity to happen... it’s more so the ideological evacuating of the original person who made it...that Picasso is emblematic of in the early 20th century.”
—Michelle Bumatay (44:53)

• By referencing and rewriting these works, Bumatay’s subjects reclaim narrative and representational agency, enacting a virtual restitution for art and for histories of violence.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “They use [BD] as a form of imperialism, soft power still to this day.” (04:12)
• “Each cartoonist, each project, deserves its own set of methodological tools.” (14:15)
• “Aya is the tree that hides the forest.” —Citing Simon Pierre Mbumbo, on the overshadowing of lesser-known artists by Marguerite Abouet (12:12)
• “Comics can help us chronicle changes over time, but also create a space of multiple times all at once.” (37:16)
• “There’s a kind of restitution of African art, if only virtually.” (45:54)

Timeline of Important Segments

• 02:08 – Introduction of Michelle Bumatay and her research interests
• 03:11 – Defining “Black,” “Bandes Dessinées,” and “Transcoloniality”
• 07:46 – Project genesis and corpus selection
• 10:56 – Relationship between counter visuality and materiality
• 13:38 – Case study: Kinshasa artists and plurality
• 18:43 – Impact of Tintin and colonial visuality
• 22:29 – Marguerite Abouet, the “Aya Effect,” and publishing power
• 28:01 – Subverting limitations of the “Aya” brand
• 30:46 – Migration, necropolitics, and intolerable fictions
• 33:30 – The use of comic frames to visualize migration, exclusion
• 35:49 – Decolonial ecocriticism and the power of BD
• 38:38 – Allegory and symbolic justice in BD about environmental disasters
• 41:24 – Intertextual readings with Hergé and Picasso; artistic restitution
• 46:33 – Bumatay’s forthcoming and current projects

Further Projects by Michelle Bumatay

• Graphic Narratives of Advocating for Representation and Social Justice in French Language Bandes Dessinées (Edinburgh UP)
• An upcoming special issue of Francosphères focused on Afrotopias, inspired by Felwine Sarr.

Conclusion

This episode provides a rich, multi-layered look at Black francophone comics as a site for counter-narrative, exposure of lingering and new forms of colonial power, and creative reimagining of both cultural and ecological futures. Bumatay’s insights invite both scholars and lay readers to reconsider not just what comics are, but what they can do.