Contents

Foreword (Vinh Nguyen)

Refuge is graphic. Which is to say, the graphic—as ongoing contestation over the politics of visuality—is a crucial site where the meanings of refuge are proposed, worked through, and consolidated. In this foreword, critical refugee studies scholar, Vinh Nguyen, suggests that if it is difficult to “know” the refugee, not because of some inscrutable ontological quality, but because of the weight of ideology and discourse that the term carries, then it might be best to focus on knowing ourselves—the foundations of our lives, our histories, our beliefs, our investments. What we—we who can sleep under warm covers at night—are capable of.

Introduction: Reading Refugee Comics (Davies and Rifkind)

The introduction describes comics as a multimodal and visual-verbal form that has long crossed borders between genres, cultures, and artistic traditions, and argues that this visual plenitudes is especially adept at conveying the narrative plenitudes of refugee stories. We use the phrase “refugee comics” to refer expansively to graphic narratives that are about, by, or collaboratively produced with refugees, but we also argue that refugee comics are connected equally by their moves to reflect critically on the situation of the reader or viewer who is presumed to enjoy the stability of citizenship status. We describe this subject position, which is repeatedly constructed and addressed by refugee comics, as the citizen-viewer or citizen-reader. With this historicised and politicised analysis, we move away from the scholarly emphasis on empathy to attend instead to the representation of refugee refusals in comics—for instance, when migrants refuse to claim asylum in their first European country of arrival, as required by the Dublin Regulation, or when they refuse to tell journalists or bureaucrats what they want to hear. While refugee comics might sometimes play into humanitarian schemas of recognition, we contend thaat they can also and more productively be seen to recognize migration as an act of disregard, one that might in turn encourage readers themselves to re-cognize—to literally rethink or reevaluate—their own situation as citizen-viewers. As a critical practice, we call this approach reading for refugeetude.

PART ONE: THE SEA AND THE CAMP 

Chapter One: Clandestine Crossings: Refugee Comics at Sea (Davies)

The first chapter turns to graphic narratives that depict migrant crossings of the Mediterranean. While many refugee comics are read with the conventional documentary aim of correcting negative representations of migration with more “positive” narratives, the stakes change in the context of clandestine crossings, where even images made with humanitarian intent are often used to “capture” refugees and subject them to scrutiny. Through analyses of several artworks, including Joe Sacco’s “The Unwanted,” webcomics by PositiveNegatives, and collaborative projects by Jeff Pourquié and Tania Tervonen, the chapter develops an understanding of graphic narrative as a “counterforensic” practice that is able to turn the surveillant gaze back on state actors and border agencies, holding them to account without infringing on migrant clandestinity.

Chapter Two: The Postdocumentary Turn: Refugee Camp Comics (Rifkind)

The second chapter develops the counterforensic potential of comics by turning to recent print refugee camp comics that make visible the contradictions between humanitarian assistance and carceral control. Understanding the field of refugee camp comics through postcolonial and carceral architectural theory, the chapter argues that comics can make visible the genealogies of refugee camps in European colonialism’s establishment of border zones and detention centres to contain the racialized other. The chapter analyses two graphic narratives by western artists based on their visits to camps for asylum seekers: The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees (2018) by Don Brown and Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees (2018) by Olivier Kugler. Rifkind introduces the term “refugeeness” to understand the ambivalent political subjectivities depicted in these graphic narratives, where it is at once politically necessary for residents to identify with the category of “the refugee” to receive protection, while at the same time it is subjectively dissonant to see the self as “the refugee.”

PART TWO: VISUAL TECHNOLOGIES

Chapter Three: Unknown Knowns: Refugee Comics and the War on Terror (Davies)

The third chapter explores the colonial logic of visuality by putting Sarah Glidden’s long-form work of comics journalism, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq (2016), in conversation with theoretical work by Walter Benjamin. Through this dialogue the chapter explores how, since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, an increased visibility of and proximity to atrocity has not mobilized widespread dissent, but has rather worked in the political favour of those responsible for imperialist violence. Reading Rolling Blackouts as resistance to the war on terror’s aggressive visuality, from the interrogations of occupying forces and border agencies to interviews in asylum screenings and with western journalists, the chapter shows how Glidden’s comic creates space for refugees to assert the right to remain “unknown” or to be “known” only insofar as it is useful to them. Through these refugee refusals, Davies argues, Glidden asserts a contemplative “thinking-in-images” that allows citizen-viewers to dis-embed themselves from the paralysing position of the implicated yet disenfranchised witness and to bring alternative practices of refugeetude into view.

Chapter Four: Digital Humanitarianism: Interactive Refugee Comics(Rifkind)

The fourth chapter draws on digital comics theory, game theory, and critical refugee studies to look at how interactive digital refugee comics try to construct similar practices of refugeetude by drawing the citizen-viewer into virtual refugee spaces. Two fictional online projects are central to this analysis: Jasper Rietman’s adaptation of his wordless graphic narrative Exodus (2018) into an interactive 3D motion comic, and Sea Prayer (2017), a 360-degree interactive fictional animation based on the death of Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi. Rifkind contrasts the counterforensic strategies of these two projects by studying how one zooms out to show the scale of human displacement and environmental ruin, while the other zooms in to reveal the intimate memories and hopes of a specific refugee subject. The chapter argues that interactive refugee comics need to be approached critically: on the one hand, they are an accessible, innovative extension of print refugee comics that have the potential to reach new audiences; on the other, they further complicate questions about witnessing, othering, and solidarity that have already been posed by studies of print refugee narratives.

PART THREE: RUINS AND REFUGE 

Chapter Five: Remote Sensing: Refugee Comics in Ruins (Davies) 

The fifth chapter unpacks questions of distance and intimacy by asking how comics have responded to drone warfare and a militarized visual culture in which the act of seeing or witnessing has become synonymous with shooting and even killing. The chapter reads this deadly visuality in several graphic narratives about the Syrian conflict: Audrey Quinn and Jackie Roche’s webcomic “Syria’s Climate Conflict” (2014), Brick’s comics pamphlet East of Aleppo: Bread, Bombs, and Video Clips (2017), Hamid Sulaiman’s graphic novel Freedom Hospital (2017), and two illustrated memoirs, Marwa al-Sabouni’s The Battle for Home (2017) and Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple’s Brothers of the Gun (2018). The Syrian Civil War was the first to combine smartphones with social media to turn images into weapons, fundamentally altering the context in which refugee comics are read. By joining these developments in digital media to very material scenes of domicide and ruined infrastructure in Syrian cities, Davies shows how refugee comics have challenged conventional associations of distance with dehumanization to make space for readers to bear witness without the immediacy of physical touch.

Chapter Six: Diasporic Displacements: Second-Generation Refugee Comics (Rifkind)

The sixth chapter draws on expanded definitions of “home” in three print comics by children of refugees that highlight the enduring conditions of the refugee experience across time, space, and generations: Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi (2015), Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (2017); and Matt Huynh’s “Cabramatta” (2019). The chapter analyses these three comics through the lenses of life writing theory, diasporic studies, feminist refugee epistemology, and Marianne Hirsch’s landmark concept of “postmemory” to see how second-generation refugee artists draw themselves into the frames and panels of their parents’ stories. Despite their different historical and political situations, these three comics refute sentimental clichés of the refugee child as the epitome of abjection and helplessness to construct them as agents of their own lives. The chapter continues the book’s focus on the spaces and structures that form the refugee subject by analysing the complex sites of home, and the relationships between private and public spaces, that shape these artists’ memories of their families’ experiences of arrival and settlement.

Epilogue: Refuge Comics (Davies and Rifkind)

This short epilogue looks to the wave of short comics that were published by artists on social media in response to the devastating assault on Gaza that began in the autumn of 2023. We point to this particularly violent and visible moment of conflict, human displacement, and comics production because it exemplifies the more expansive idea of “graphic refuge” that we advance throughout the book as a whole. Moving beyond understandings of comics as straightforward pleas for the recognition of migrant rights by readers already secure in their citizenship status, we suggest the concept of “refuge comics” to refer to graphic narratives that bring into view the wider situation in which both citizen-viewers and refugee subjects find themselves. In conclusion, we argue that this different way of looking, enabled by the braided geographies and extraterritorial imaginaries of comics, might yet advance the conditions needed for refuge as a lived experience and political relationship.