Jonathan Gayles
Film Director, Professor
Fields of expertise:
Societal understandings of Black masculinity continue to endanger Black lives. These understandings do not reflect the self-actualized perspectives of Black men and the authentic performance of Black masculinity. Instead, they are the of White supremacist articulations of Black manhood that render Black men as dangerous a threat to be mitigated and, if necessary, eliminated completely. There is no doubt that such ideas, imagined as they may be, have deadly consequences in the real world.
Dr. Jonathan Gayles critically considers these ideas and their consequences within the realm of popular culture. He produced the award-winning documentary on African-American comic book superheroes entitled “White Scripts and Black Supermen: Black Masculinities in Comic Books” (distributed by California Newsreel). The American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association awarded the documentary the Peter Rollins Best Documentary Film Award for its groundbreaking engagement of the representation of Black masculinity in the genre and in popular culture more broadly. The film continues to receive screenings across the globe. He is also a co-founder of the Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Day that has, since its inception, provided thousands of attendees with exposure to more humane and whole representation of Black life in the comic book and speculative fiction genres. Dr. Gayles lectures extensively on the social construction of Black masculinity and the representation of Black masculinity across many domains across the United States and internationally. He and his work has been featured in a number of television, film and radio programs including AMC’s “The Color of Comics” and HBO Max’s “Milestone Generations.”
His critical analyses of Black Panther (2018) and Wakanda Forever (2022) are timely and extend his considerations of Black masculinity to include both historical, current and afrofuturistic representations of Black life. These analyses also include recent disruptions in these patterns of representation including HBO’s Watchmen (2009), and Lovecraft Country (2010) and Beast(2022), starring Idris Elba.
Dr. Gayles is Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Georgia State University. He is a graduate of Morehouse College and the University of South Florida. His first love is teaching, and he regards every opportunity to present as an opportunity to teach.
