Hamlet’s AfroLatinx Ghosts: Rematerializing Justice in I Am Alfonso Jones

The question of what it means to be—or not to be, especially for Black and AfroLatinx boys, frames this chapter. The subject of study is I Am Alfonso Jones, a graphic novel written by Tony Medina and illustrated by Stacey Robinson and John Jennings. The graphic novel revolves around the death of Alfonso Jones, an AfroLatinx youth, who is gunned down by a police officer, striking him in the ear, thus reminding us of the means by which Claudius killed King Hamlet. Alfonso Jones wakes up soon thereafter in the afterlife. From the vantage point of a ghost, Alfonso Jones sees his high school friends follow through on their plans to stage a hip-hop rendition of Hamlet, even as the presumptive King Hamlet (Alfonso Jones) has been killed. As a literary appropriation of Hamlet, I Am Alfonso Jones makes visible what has been left out of the works of Shakespeare—the complex inner lives of Black and Brown boys. This is to say that the graphic novel renders Black and Brown boys imagined and imaginable by representing Black and Brown boys as sensitive, intelligent, and inquisitive, by testifying to their grief and outrage when Alfonso is murdered, and by highlighting their social and political justice activism. In these ways, the graphic novel poses the possibility that countering the pathology of white supremacy, as well as one of its symptoms (police brutality against Black and Brown people), provides cogent answers to the global racism perplexing our world.