Abstract This essay discusses Rebecca Hall’s Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts (2021), a genre-bending graphic novel-history-memoir, reflecting on its strengths as a teaching resource. It grapples with the exceptional qualities of the text, while also situating the work within a relatively recent tradition of classroom-friendly graphic novels that get at “difficult” history through a potent blend of historical research, personal narrative, and critical reflection on power and the production of history. The author parallels the ways Wake might be considered “subversive” with the ways recent grassroots movements to topple monuments to white supremacy and foreground African American history in public education have also been maligned and dismissed in mainstream discourse in the United States.
Anna Duensing (Fri,) studied this question.