Conversation with Michael Dando on “Maus”

Every semester, especially when I teach asynchronous courses, I try to set up conversations with scholars and authors so that students don’t just hear and see me on the screen as they listen to the lecture. As I thought about Art Spiegelman’s Maus, I reached out to Michael Dando. I’ve spoken with Dando before about comics for his classes, specifically Luke Cage, and he has introduced me to countless works, recently Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism (2005) which I have talked about on this blog. I wanted to have someone like Dando on with me during the lecture for Maus I because of his work on comics but also because of the recent book bannings and proposed legislation that have popped up over the past year or two, notably the McCminn County school board’s unanimous decision in January to ban Maus from the classroom right before eighth graders were scheduled to read it.

The school board members removed the book, without reading it, and argued that it was not “appropriate” reading material for eighth graders. While we were in Norway, my daughter was in seventh grade, and she read Maus on her own, nothing happened. Nothing was set off. She encountered Vladek’s story, through his son Art, and came to a better understanding of the horrors of the Holocaust and its continued impact on the psyches of millions of individuals through the generational transmission of the trauma…