...this corpus of texts is too large to be published in a single volume. ...an online edition would be a commonsense way to provide students and scholars access to these fascinating texts by ...now-forgotten but (I believe) important writers. Perhaps a coalition of groups and institutions interested in recovery, including Legacy, the American Antiquarian Society, even the Library of Congress, in conjunction with simple e-publishing platforms such as those used by writers to self-publish on Amazon, could help create a set of standards or guidelines that would enable recovery editors like myself to bridge our current digital divide and bring forgotten texts to new readers.
Purpose
Given the lack of research on the lived experiences of racially minoritized women in academia, this paper provides primary accounts of their experience with impostorization. Impostorization ...refers to the policies, practices and seemingly innocuous interactions that make or intend to make individuals (i.e. women of color) question their intelligence, competence and sense of belonging.
Design/methodology/approach
To explore experiences with impostorization and identify effective coping strategies to counter the debilitating effects of impostorization, 17 semi-structured interviews were conducted with women of color PhD students and faculty at universities throughout the USA and across disciplines.
Findings
While impostor syndrome, which refers to feelings of inadequacy that individuals experience and a fear that they will be discovered as fraud, has garnered much attention, the present accounts suggest that the more vexing issue in academia is impostorization, not impostor syndrome. Forms of impostorization include microaggressions, grateful guest syndrome, invisibility and inclusion taxation.
Originality/value
The interviews reveal the implicit and explicit ways in which academia impostorizes racially minoritized women scholars and the coping strategies that they use to navigate and survive within academia. The accounts demonstrate the pernicious effects of labeling feelings of inadequacy and unbelonging as impostor syndrome rather than recognizing that the problem is impostorization. This is a call to change the narrative and go from a fix-the-individual to a fix-the-institution approach.
Racist caricature dominated the earliest newspaper comic strips (from 1895 to 1910). A closer look at strips by James Swinnerton and, especially, George Herriman, however, shows how these conventions ...could be manipulated to express a black comic sensibility—a sensibility that produced dark laughter by plumbing the ironic depths of American race relations.
Between 1905 and 1920, Rudolph Block, under the pseudonym Bruno Lessing, published nearly one hundred stories, nearly all set in New York’s Lower East Side, in William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan ...Magazine. Readers of these humorous stories had little idea that their author also edited the “funny pages” they devoured every Sunday in Hearst’s New York Journal; nor did they know that Block helped develop the multi-panel, half-page format that became standard within ten years of the comic strip’s first appearance. As editor, Block regularized his comic artists’ use of multiple panels, repetitive storylines, and caricature, in large part because the comic supplement was translated into both German-language and English-language versions for a multi-ethnic, working-class audience. The comic supplement demonstrates how the turn-of-the century newspaper press translated its content for multiple audiences and used dialect to both highlight and bridge ethnic difference. In his fiction, Lessing translated the multi-ethnic culture of the Lower East Side for a mainstream, English-speaking audience. As both editor and writer, he recognized the power of caricature and dialect, not only in their power to mark people as ethnic or alien but also as sites of negotiation and play—opportunities to display identity in multiple and shifting forms.
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