Tracy Lassiter's theme for her keynote speech is “Re-Visions: New Perspectives of the Old West”. The image of the American West with its rugged cowboy taming the landscape is an iconic one. However, that iconography and its correlative myths denigrate or ignore other inhabitants of the region, namely the indigenous populations who existed in the regions well before colonization and conquest. Furthermore, it often presents the landscape as a harsh, hostile territory. “Re-visioning” the American West in the twenty-first century means changing the narrative as well as changing how we see the region and its people. Current graphic novelists tell stories that situate the land and its people in new contexts reflective of how they see themselves, not how they have been perceived by others. Informed with these new perspectives, particularly those of contemporary Native American comic and graphic novelists, we can understand history differently, revising old narratives and seeing more clearly, and hence appreciating the West anew.

Tracy Lassiter has had different careers, experiences and adventures. She has been a volunteer ESL teacher in Namibia, a community library organizer in Kenya, and a backpacking hosteler around Australia. In addition, she has worked in law firms, a publishing company, a bookstore, and a technical high school, to name but a few occupations. While all have shaped her research interests and academic pursuit in some fashion, she traces her interest in comic books and graphic novels today to her time working as an editorial assistant for a publishing company in the Washington, D.C. area. There, coworkers made weekly forays to the comic book shop and introduced her to what became some of her favorite books and authors: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Jeff Smith’s Bone, Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol and many others.

She attended Indiana University to earn her MA in Comparative Literature, and while her focus was southern and eastern African women writers, she did take a graduate course on comics/graphic novels and she regularly participated in a comic book discussion group held monthly at a local bookstore. When an opportunity arose to submit a proposal to the International Comparative Literature Association’s triannual Congress to be held in Hong Kong, Lassiter submitted hers: a comparatist study of the male gaze in Daniel Clowes’s Gynecology and the Japanese manga Futaba-Kun Change. That Congress proved to be the next significant event in Lassiter’s ongoing interest in graphic narrative. There, she met three colleagues who also presented on comic books and graphic novels; they became friends quickly and, in a nod to the superhero universe, came to think of themselves immodestly as “The Fantastic Four.” For, from that friendship formed a standing committee that organized graphic narratives at every subsequent ICLA. The scholars have published widely, sometimes together (as in the conference presentations published in the International Journal of Comic Art), sometimes independently; they host panels at other international conferences and coedit journals on graphic narratives. Today, it has grown into a recognized Research Committee and, while the “core four” remain integral to the committee, the network of scholars and friends has widened. Indeed, Lassiter’s presentation today emerges from the various contacts and connections that have endured since her initial Congress presentation in 2004.

In the meantime, her academic path has landed her at the University of New Mexico’s Gallup branch campus. Informed by her postcolonial and comparatist training, her experience in international work, and her scholarship and publications on graphic narratives, she now finds rich new reading material emerging from some of the Native American communities she now serves. Working closely with her students and learning more about their culture, she appreciates the new titles, authors, and approaches emerging from what has historically been an underrepresented – and frequently misrepresented – population. She is eager to share these books to a new audience.

Lassiter currently serves as co-chair of the ICLA’s Research Committee on Comics Studies and Graphic Narratives; she is coediting a special issue on the theme of “Drawing (Hi-)stories: Rethinking Historical Graphic Narrative” for the journal Status Quaestionis ; and she is co-organizing a panel at the ESCL on “Stories, History, Communities, and Comics: Questioning Historical Graphic Narratives.”