Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White
Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White
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Paperback ©2012--
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Univ. of Chicago Press
Annotation: Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White is an arresting and moving personal story about childhood, race, and identity in the American South, rendered in stunning illustrations by the author,Lila Quintero Weaver.
 
Reviews: 2
Catalog Number: #591057
Format: Paperback
Special Formats: Graphic Novel Graphic Novel
Copyright Date: 2012
Edition Date: 2012 Release Date: 03/01/12
Pages: 254 pages
ISBN: 0-8173-5714-9
ISBN 13: 978-0-8173-5714-6
Dewey: 921
LCCN: 2011036117
Dimensions: 24 cm.
Language: English
Reviews:
Kirkus Reviews

A debut graphic memoir provides a unique child's perspective on racial strife in 1960s Alabama. Weaver came to America from Argentina in 1961 at the age of five and found herself considered an outsider on both sides of the racial divide. Even within her family, there were subtle distinctions, with a mother whose European ancestry made her unmistakably white, a father considerably darker and an older sister who came much closer to an American ideal of beauty (though her voluptuous lips were considered suspect). The memoir is most compelling when it reflects this child's perspective, in a town "neatly divided between black and white. Until we arrived. We introduced a sliver of gray into the demographic pie." The illustrations are impressive throughout, as the author plainly learned much from a father who had a passion for photography and a mother who was a visual artist. Yet there are stretches where this narrative of violence and turbulence could have been written by another, more conventional observer, where the author disappears from her account of many incidents that she was too young to witness, let alone understand. At such points it reads more like a civil-rights primer (often with powerful imagery) than the account from an immigrant neither black nor white, "in America but not of America." In the afterword, Weaver explains that this began as an undergraduate project by an adult student, one who is plainly an accomplished artist but who is still learning how to frame and sustain a cohesive narrative. A powerful story of a tumultuous era by an author more adept at visual art than textual storytelling.

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Library Journal
Reading Level: 9.0
Interest Level: 9+

Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White is an arresting and moving personal story about childhood, race, and identity in the American South, rendered in stunning illustrations by the author, Lila Quintero Weaver. In 1961, when Lila was five, she and her family emigrated from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Marion, Alabama, in the heart of Alabama's Black Belt. As educated, middle-class Latino immigrants in a region that was defined by segregation, the Quinteros occupied a privileged vantage from which to view the racially charged culture they inhabited. Weaver and her family were firsthand witnesses to key moments in the civil rights movement. But Darkroom is her personal story as well: chronicling what it was like being a Latina girl in the Jim Crow South, struggling to understand both a foreign country and the horrors of our nation's race relations. Weaver, who was neither black nor white, observed very early on the inequalities in the American culture, with its blonde and blue-eyed feminine ideal. Throughout her life, Lila has struggled to find her place in this society and fought against the discrimination around her.


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