Ebony Elizabeth Thomas — Into the Dark Forest: Exploring Textual Representations of Enslavement in Children's Books and Comics

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From: Thursday, January 29, 2026 12:00 PM CST
Until: Sunday, March 15, 2026 01:15 PM CDT

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas joined us virtually on Wednesday evening, January 28, 2026. This talk explores visual representations of the Middle Passage in children’s picture books and comics, re-envisioning the slave ship as a metaphorical floating “dark forest.” The dark forest, a recurring motif in speculative fiction and fairy tales, is reinforced as a space of terror, transformation and transmission in The Middle Passage (Feelings), Ebony Sea (Smalls/Lockard), and Born on the Water (Hannah-Jones/Watson/Smith). Through representations of trees, timber and wood - materials and symbols - used to construct the schooners that transported enslaved people, the layered meaning of commodification of the arboreal, natural resources, and human bodies are conjoined with mythological and folkloric associations of trees as sites of punishment, refuge and transformation.

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Ebony Elizabeth Thomas — Into the Dark Forest: Exploring Textual Representations of Enslavement in Children's Books and Comics

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