“A necessary collection, both for its crucial global scope and for its contribution to how we think about trauma and images.” – Hillary Chute
Documenting Trauma in Comics →
Why are so many contemporary comics and graphic narratives written as memoirs or documentaries of traumatic events? Is there a specific relationship between the comics form and the documentation and reportage of trauma? How do the interpretive demands made on comics readers shape their relationships with traumatic events? And how does comics’ documentation of traumatic pasts operate across national borders and in different cultural, political, and politicised contexts?
The sixteen chapters and three comics included in Documenting Trauma in Comics set out to answer exactly these questions. Drawing on a range of historically and geographically expansive examples, the contributors bring their different perspectives to bear on the tangled and often fraught intersections between trauma studies, comics studies, and theories of documentary practices and processes. The result is a collection that shows how comics is not simply related to trauma, but a generative force that has become central to its remembrance, documentation, and study.
“Davies’s introduction makes clear that comics have contributed to the construction of theoretical models of trauma, even as they extend, and even dismantle, those models. It is not only that trauma studies and theories of trauma have figured out ways of reading comics; comics themselves have contributed to the making of the field of trauma studies, its theories, hermeneutics, and analytical models. The essays in this collection are interested in calling into question assumptions about trauma, and the concomitant sign systems that have emerged to tell such stories in visual narrative—the visual tropes that frequently emerge in comics storytelling about trauma.” – Janine Utell, Full Review →
Contents
Introduction: Documenting Trauma in Comics (Dominic Davies)
Hierarchies of Pain: Trauma Tropes Today and Tomorrow (Katalin Orbán)
Emotional History and Legacies of War in Recent German Comics and Graphic Novels (Alexandra Lloyd)
The Past That Will Not Die: Trauma, Race, and Zombie Empire in Horror Comics of the 1950s (Michael Goodrum)
Exploring Trauma and Social Haunting Through Community Comics Creation (Sarah McNicol)
Comic: “Documenting Trauma” (Nicola Streeten)
Traumatic Moments: Retrosepctive “Seeing” of Violation, Rupture, and Injusty in Three Post-Millennial Indian Graphic Narratives (E. Dawson Varughese)
This Side, That Side: Restoring Memory, Restorying Partition (A.P. Payal and Rituparna Sengupta)
Visual Detention: Reclaiming Human Rights Through Memory in Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi (Haya Saud Alfarhan)
Comic: Crying in the Chapel (Una)
Folding, Cutting, Reassembling: Materialising Trauma and Memory in Comics (Ian Hague)
“To Create Her World Anew”: Charlotte Salomon’s Graphic Life Narrative (Emma Parker)
Una’s Becoming, Unbecoming, Visuality, and Sexual Trauma (Ana Baeza Ruiz)
Discourses of Trauma and Representation: Motherhood and Mother Tongue in Mriam Katin’s Graphic Memoirs (Eszter Szép)
Comic: First Person Third (Bruce Mutard)
Comics Telling Refugee Stories (Nina Mickwitz)
Migrant Detention Comics and the Aesthetic Technologies of Compassion (Candida Rifkind)
Comics as Memoir and Documentary: A Case Study of Sarah Glidden(Johannes C.P. Schmid)
Afterword (Hillary Chute)