Chapters – Graphic Narrative

’Graphic Borders: Refugee Comics as Migration Narratives.’ In Gigi Adair, Rebecca Fasselt, & Carly McLaughlin eds., The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature. New York: Routledge, 2024, pp.280-291.

What does it mean to draw a refugee? Why have so many artists sought to tell migrant stories through hand-drawn images in recent years? Why are these drawings or paintings of refugees so often arranged into a sequential order—what we might refer to as “sequential art,” “graphic narratives,” or even “comics”? What are the affordances and politics of these “refugee comics”? Who makes them? Where are they published and how are they read? And what kinds of artistic and narrative techniques have they developed to address the complex representational, political, and cultural questions that structure the relationship between readers and refugees? These are some of the questions addressed in this chapter. Through multiple examples from a range of different genres, forms, and platforms, it aims to give a broad introduction to refugee comics as a substantive and growing contribution to literatures of migration. Read more.

‘Intolerable Fictions: Composing Refugee Realities in Comics.’ In Ralf Kauranen, Olli Löytty, Aura Nikkilä, & Anna Vuorine eds. Comics & Migration: Representation & Other Practices. New York: Routledge, 2023, pp.257-270.

In this chapter I want to argue for a different way of conceptualising the important work that refugee comics do. Rather than emphasising comics as a medium that is somehow an antidote to the prevailing photographic and filmic streams of our hyper-visua media culture, I want to instead shift our attention to their composition and more particularly to the work they do to reconfigure the dominant relationship between image and text. To grasp the full force of this shift, we must unsettle two common misconceptions that are implied by the brief quotation earlier. First is the notion that in our digitised visual culture there are “too many images” of refugees specifically, and of war and displaced people generally. Against this assumption, I would argue that there are not “too many” of these images, and that in fact there is a dearth of them. But there are too many images of unnamed refugees, too many photographs of people contained within the frame and subject to the camera’s gaze, yet deprived of access to accompanying explanatory or self-identifying text. The second and related misconception that I argue we should reconsider is the idea that the veracity and verifiable “truth” of the photographic image is in question, and that its political impact has therefore been diminished. Rather than despairing with postmodernists that the “sign” of the photograph has now utterly fragmented away from the reality it signifies, we might be better served by questioning whether the underlying premise of this notion – which assumes that there should be a direct line between the singular photograph or image of the refugee, on the one hand, and empathetic feeling or political action on the part of the viewer, on the other – is all that helpful in the first place. Read more.

‘Pages of Exception: Graphic Reportage as World Literature.’ In James Hodapp ed., Graphic Novels as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022, pp.11-31.

I argue in this chapter that graphic reportage unsettles both the “world” and “literature” of “World Literature” in productive and pressingly political ways. With their shared inclusion of spaces of exception, the examples of graphic reportage analyzed here join up stories of otherwise disconnected, isolated, and imprisoned people, from the borders of Fortress Europe to the “Jungle” refugee camp in Calais, and from remote refugee detention centers in Canada to the militarized Mexican border city of Juárez. The artists surveyed in this chapter try to communicate stories from places where the rights-based legal fabric of the nation-state system has been cut away, withdrawn, or denied, and where a carceral humanitarianism has arisen in their place. Just as importantly, each artist uses a shared formal technique to communicate the partial mobilities of the testimonies included in their reportage, thereby insisting on nonfiction as literature, and thus troubling the notion of “literature” itself. Finally, by circulating through di&erent though sometimes connected media spaces, partially online and physically online, these pages of exception come together to form a World Literature that is not smooth or uneven, cosmopolitan or capitalist, but unforgivingly tuned into the carceral spaces that interrupt and fragment our world. Read more.

‘The Gutters of History: Geopolitical Pasts and Imperial Presents in Recent Graphic Non-Fiction.’ In Michael Goodrum, David Hall, & Philip Smith eds., Drawing the Past: Comics and the Historical Imagination in the World. Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 2022, pp.56-78.

The comics addressed in this chapter offer a contrapuntal reading of the colonial present’s Orientalist rhetoric in order to challenge it, while also challenging a tendency to fetishize the imaginative power of the comics “gutter” in much comics criticism. For it is in a contrapuntal sense that I deploy the phrase included in the title of this chapter, “the gutters of history”: the comics’ gutters materialize contrapuntal geographies and histories spatially on the page, thereby accounting for the historical omissions of the colonial present and reinserting them to effectively challenge the West’s contemporary neo-imperial interference in the Middle East. Read more.

‘Infrastructural Forms: Comics, Cities, Conglomerations.’ In Lieven Amiel ed., Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies. New York: Routledge, 2022, pp.163-176.

This chapter responds to the “three D’s” of urbanisation with its own list of “three C’s”: it makes the case for comics as an artistic and narrative form that is particularly capable of capturing the density and dynamism of increasingly global cities, comprising as they both do a complex conglomeration of variously interrelated and unevenly autonomous moving parts. Whether the accumulations of capital that coagulate into points of urban redevelopment and gentrification, for example, or the interstices of slums and favelas that are at different times ignored by and resistant to the state, the unequal spaces of today’s cities are brought into a field of mutual play and narrative position by comics and graphic narratives. This aptitude for arresting the sociospatial dynamics of the city has been described variously as a “spatial form” (Fraser) and an “infrastructural form” (Davies), but as numerous critics have agreed, it is always a distinctly urban form (see Ahrens and Meteling). Comprising narrative building blocks and an architecture all their own, comics are able to intervene into the sociospatial dialectic of urban life (see Soja), not only revealing the infrastructure of the city as a material embodiment of competing and often invisible interests but also recalibrating and reconceiving urban space towards more socially and spatially just ends – often from the ground up. Read more.

‘Infrastructural Violence: Urbicide, Public Space, and Postwar Reconstruction in Recent Lebanese Graphic Memoirs.’ In Ian Hague, Ian Horton, & Nina Mickwits eds., Contexts of Violence in Comics. New York: Routledge, 2020, pp.128-144.

This chapter argues that the cartographic and architectural representations of the city in Ziadé’s and Abirached’s graphic memoirs expose the less visible, though fundamentally embedded, infrastructural violence that both exacerbated and actively participated in the more visible instances of Lebanon’s wartime violence. In so doing, these comics allows us, following Zižek, ‘to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible “subjective” violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent,’ to instead perceive the contours of an otherwise ‘invisible,’ structural violence (2008, 1). Published some two decades after the overt violence of the Civil War came to an unstable conclusion, these Lebanese graphic memoirs engage ‘post-memorially’ with the infrastructure space of Beirut’s wartime urban landscape. By foregrounding the deeper spatial and structural violence of the war, they seek first to emphasise how this violence endures in the present, and second, to offer a future-oriented vision of a more inclusive, desegregated post-war city space. Read more.

‘Urban Comix: Subcultures, Infrastructures and “the Right to the City” in Delhi.’ In Alex Tickell & Ruvani Ransinha ed., Delhi: New Literatures of the Megacity. London & New York: Routledge, 2020, Chapter 9.

This article argues that comics production in India should be configured as a collaborative artistic endeavour that visualizes Delhi’s segregationist infrastructure, claiming a right to the city through the representation and facilitation of more socially inclusive urban spaces. Through a discussion of the work of three of the Pao Collective’s founding members – Orijit Sen, Sarnath Banerjee and Vishwajyoti Ghosh – it argues that the group, as for other comics collectives in cities across the world, should be understood as a networked urban social movement. Their graphic narratives and comics art counter the proliferating segregation and uneven development of neo-liberal Delhi by depicting and diagnosing urban violence. Meanwhile, their collaborative production processes and socialized consumption practices, and the radical comix traditions on which these movements draw (and which are sometimes occluded by the label “Indian Graphic Novel”) create socially networked and politically active spaces that resist the divisions marking Delhi’s contemporary urban fabric. Read more.

‘Introduction: Documenting Trauma in Comics.’ In Dominic Davies & Candida Rifkind eds., Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, & Graphic Reportage. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp.1-26.

This introduction unpacks some of the many complex connections between trauma, comics, and documentary form. It begins by theorising trauma as a ‘sticky’ concept that troubles disciplinary boundaries, before suggesting that comics such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980–1991) have played a significant role in the active production—rather than simply reflection or reification—of cultural and academic conceptions of trauma. It then turns to a critical overview of Caruthian and other hegemonic models of trauma, combining this with brief outlines of each of the book’s chapters to show how they seek to unsettle a dominant ‘trauma paradigm’, or to divert away from a recognised ‘trauma aesthetic’. In its final section, the introduction emphasises the important contributions made by efforts to decolonise trauma studies, exploring how several of this book’s contributors are informed by and continuing this important work, especially through their re-evaluation of the figure of the witness. The introduction concludes by drawing out and reiterating the book’s overarching contention: that comics are a generative force at the core of trauma itself, moulding and melding it into new shapes that might provide new models for working it through in the future. Read more.

‘Crossing Borders, Bridging Boundaries: Reconstructing the Rights of the Refugee in Comics.’ In Elena Fidian-Qasmiyeh ed., Refuge in a Moving World. London: UCL Press, 2020, pp.177-192.

It is into a visual culture, both of imagistic ephemerality and of prevalent anti-migrant sentiment, that comics effectively intervene. In the age of the internet, viewers in the West are trained on a daily basis to make sense of multiple images spliced with pieces of text, as they log onto Facebook feeds or scan through Twitter. Comics, especially those published online (as is the case for these refugee comics), tap into this constant stream of information, harnessing the experience of information transmission and consumption to which viewers are becoming increasingly accustomed (Gardner, 2006). In addition, however, journalism in comics form is able to do two things: first, it can document suffering that goes un-photographed. It imaginatively visualizes oral and written testimonies in order to document human-rights violations, lending them the ‘authenticity’ that contemporary news outlets and consumers demand (Smith, 2011). Second, and perhaps even more importantly, comics’ sequential and highly mediated form offers an antidote to the ‘post-truth’ culture of our contemporary world (Mickwitz, 2016), in which photographs are detached from their original context, circulate at lightning speed through multiple framings and re-framings, and are often mobilized towards dubious political ends. The laboured etchings of comics journalism offer an antidote not only to the lack of visualization but also the decontextualization of photographic images that, in their proliferation, are reduced to insignificance. Read more.