Melampo & co .: the children's comic and the hierarchical stereotype of the man-animal relationship

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12795/RiCH.2021.i17.02

Keywords:

History of children's magazine, History of communication, History of culture, Speciesism, Cómic

Abstract

Each children's comic is a means of escape and at the same time deeply formative, because its message (explicit and implicit) is capable of generating interpretations of reality. An example is the eternal challenge between good and evil, which directs children to distinguish the right actions from the wrong ones. In the context of this role of comics in the constitution of a kind of 'guide to the underlying values ​​of social relations', this contribution seeks to briefly define, through the analysis of some comics classics from the first half of the 20th century, what the representation of the animal world. Is it the idea (die hard) that human beings carry a "higher" consciousness and feelings that would also distinguish them from animals in the comics? Is that presumed sentimental 'inferiority' that allowed (and allows) to justify, in turn, the exploitation of the animal body is reinforced in them? How is this hierarchy expressed in the comics to strengthen (or, although more sporadically, contrast) a model attributable to the category of 'speciesism'?

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Author Biography

Pamela Giorgi, INDIRE - Research for the innovation of the Italian school

Senior researcher and journalist. Since 2001 he has been dedicated to the reorganization and communication of various archives of personalities of art and culture of the twentieth century. He has coordinated the Indire Historical Archive since 2008, paying special attention to both the history of Indire itself, heir to the National Educational Exhibition of 1925 (see “From the National School Museum to Indire” Giunti, 2009; and “Radici di future: innovation en the school throughout the 90 years of Indire “, Contini, 2015) and, more broadly, the history of the Italian school system (see, for example,” Racist pencils. School and racial laws “, Bibliography and information, 2013; “Not one excluded. The long road of inclusion in the Italian school”, Apice libri, 2018; “For fun and seriousness. Recreational books and reading books from the Antiquarian Youth Literature Fund Indire”, Indire, 2018; “The stranger Educating about identity between the 19th and 20th centuries “, Tab Edizioni, 2020), which has become one of the main focuses of his research activity. Since 2009, photography has been privileged among all types of documentaries, mainly on the reorganization of the important photographic archive that is preserved in Indire (today fully accessible online with the Indire database ‘Fotoedu. Photographic funds for the history of the school and ‘education’ is enriched with the catalog and the exhibition “The objective at school: images from the Indire photographic archive”, Giunti, 2011). The edited volume “Barbiana and her school: images from the Don Lorenzo Milani Archive”, Aska, 2014, is precisely the result of the study of the Don Lorenzo Milani school photographic archive. Since 2014 she has been a professor of the history of training processes at the IUL University, since 2021 she has been editorial director of the magazine ‘Culturas Digitales’ and professor of the Master’s Degree “Digital Territories”. ICT, social innovation and network heritage communities “of the University of Molise. He is a member of the commission of the Ministry of Education for the history of schools and of the national commission of the Ministers of Education and Culture for the promotion of reading

References

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COMA, J. (1977). Los cómics. Un arte del siglo XX. Madrid: Guadarrama

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Published

2021-12-30

How to Cite

Giorgi, P. (2021). Melampo & co .: the children’s comic and the hierarchical stereotype of the man-animal relationship. RIHC. Revista Internacional De Historia De La Comunicación, (17), 13–33. https://doi.org/10.12795/RiCH.2021.i17.02

Issue

No. 17 (2021): Media enterprises for children and youth from the 20th century to the present day: a diachronic perspective

Section

Dossier

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Received 2021-09-28
Accepted 2021-12-06
Published 2021-12-30
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