Comics and Migration: Representation and Other Practices 9781003254621, 9781032138503, 9781032184579

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COMICS AND MIGRATION

Comics and human mobility have a long history of connections. This volume explores these entanglements with a focus on both how comics represent migration and what applied uses comics have in relation to migration. The volume examines both individual works of comic art and examples of practical applications of comics from across the world. Comics are well-suited to create understanding, highlight truthful information, and engender empathy in their audiences, but are also an art form that is preconditioned or even limited by its representational and practical conventions. Through analyses of various practices and representations, this book questions the uncritical belief in the capacity of comics, assesses their potential to represent stories of exile and immigration with compassion, and discusses how xenophobia and nationalism are both reinforced and questioned in comics. The book includes essays by both researchers and practitioners such as activists and journalists whose work has combined a focus on comics and migration. It predominantly scrutinises comics and activities from more peripheral areas such as the Nordic region, the German-language countries, Latin America, and southern Asia to analyse the treatment and visual representation of migration in these regions. This topical and engaging volume in the Global Perspectives in Comics Studies series will be of interest to researchers and students of comics studies, literary studies, visual art studies, cultural studies, migration, and sociology. It will also be useful reading for a wider academic audience interested in discourses around global migration and comics traditions. Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access files at http://www.taylorfrancis.com /books/e/9781003254621 under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Ralf Kauranen is a sociologist and comics scholar affiliated to the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku, Finland. He led the project

“Comics and Migration: Belonging, Narration, Activism”, funded by the Kone Foundation and located at the Department of Finnish Literature, University of Turku, in 2018–2021. Olli Löytty is an adjunct professor at the University of Turku, Finland. His research focuses on postcolonialism, nationalism, multilingualism, and representations of cultural encounters in literature. He is currently working on the project “Literature and Reading in the Era of Climate Crisis” at the University of Helsinki. Aura Nikkilä is a doctoral researcher in art history at the University of Turku, Finland. Nikkilä’s doctoral project concerns the role of photography in migration-themed comics. She has published on multilingualism and transnationalism in comics as well as on empathy and activism in relation to graphic narratives. Anna Vuorinne is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Turku, Finland. Her dissertation examines the conventions of human rights narration in contemporary German comics depicting migration. In her publications on comics, she has also written about the questions of gender, sexuality, and feminism.

Global Perspectives in Comics Studies Series Editor Harriet E.H. Earle Sheffield Hallam University, UK

Global Perspectives in Comics Studies focuses on comics as an international form, with histories as rich and complex as the stories that fill the pages. We bring together original scholarship on a wide range of themes and theoretical concerns that span the globe. These texts present outstanding bold interventions into existing scholarly conversations, with the freedom (indeed, explicit encouragement) to collocate works by creators from different national and analytical traditions, as well as genres within the form. The books in the series are concerned with offering fresh perspectives on established concepts and theories through the comics form. Our aim in this series is to forge links across the field, to foreground artistic and academic contexts that are underrepresented, and to give attention to comics in all their various guises. Ultimately, this series wants to encourage readers to challenge their existing perspectives on a form that is central to the reading lives of so many. Books in the series Cartooning China Punch, Power, & Politics in the Victorian Era Amy Matthewson Burning Down the House Latin American Comics in the 21st Century Edited by Laura Cristina Fernández, Amadeo Gandolfo and Pablo Turnes Comics and Migration Representation and Other Practices Edited by Ralf Kauranen, Olli Löytty, Aura Nikkilä and Anna Vuorinne For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Global-Perspectives-in-Comics-Studies/book-series/GPCS

COMICS AND MIGRATION Representation and Other Practices

Edited by Ralf Kauranen, Olli Löytty, Aura Nikkilä, and Anna Vuorinne

Designed cover image: Emmi Nieminen First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Ralf Kauranen, Olli Löytty, Aura Nikkilä, and Anna Vuorinne; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Ralf Kauranen, Olli Löytty, Aura Nikkilä, and Anna Vuorinne to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons AttributionNon Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-13850-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-18457-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-25462-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003254621 Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

List of figures x List of contributors xiii Series editor’s introduction xvi Acknowledgementsxvii   1 Introduction: The entanglements of comics and migration Anna Vuorinne and Ralf Kauranen PART I

1

Migration and the use of comics

43

  2 The long road to Almanya: Comics in language education for “guest workers” in West Germany, 1970s–1980s Sylvia Kesper-Biermann

45

  3 Feminist comics activism: Stories about migrant women in Sweden by Amalia Alvarez and Daria Bogdanska Anna Nordenstam and Margareta Wallin Wictorin

62

  4 Contracts via comics: Migrant workers and Thai fishing vessel employment contracts Anne Ketola, Eliisa Pitkäsalo, and Robert de Rooy

78

viii Contents

  5 From representations of suffering migrants to appreciation of the Mexican American legacy in the United States: The NGO-produced comics Historias migrantes92 Laura Nallely Hernández Nieto and Iván Facundo Rubinstein   6 Collaborative work, migrant representativity, and racism Adrián Groglopo and Amalia Alvarez PART II

110

Configurations of nationalism and migration

137

  7 V for pissed-offedness: anti-immigrant subversion of dystopian superhero intertexts Oskari Rantala

139

  8 On the “good” side: hegemonic masculinity and transnational intervention in the representation of US–Mexico border enforcement Anna Marta Marini

153

  9 The politics of inversion in Americatown: limits in public pedagogy Christina M. Knopf

167

10 Racist and national(ist) symbols in a Finnish antiracist comics zine Olli Löytty

179

PART III

Conventions and revisions of migration narratives 11 Absented from his master’s service: Benjamin Franklin House, slavery, and comics Kremena Dimitrova

199 201

12 Tears of a refugee: melodramatic life writing and Reinhard Kleist’s Der Traum von Olympia212 Anna Vuorinne

Contents  ix

13 To see and to show: photography, drawing, and refugee representation in comics journalism on refugee camps Aura Nikkilä

230

14 Humans on the move: some thoughts about approaching migration as a journalist in comics Taina Tervonen

250

15 Intolerable fictions: composing refugee realities in comics Dominic Davies

257

Index271

FIGURES

1.1 Mohammed, Yasseen, and Salam, “Miksi?” (Why?), World Comics Finland, 2018.  1.2 Flyer from the Dessins sans papiers organisation. Distributed at the Angoulême comics festival in 2019. 2.1 Illustration by Theo Scherling, Feridun, vol. 1, Abado Verlag, 1977, p. 9. 2.2 Illustration by Theo Scherling, Feridun, vol. 1, Abado Verlag, 1977, p. 58. 2.3 Illustration by Theo Scherling, Feridun, vol. 1, Abado Verlag, 1977, p. 60. 2.4 Illustration by Theo Scherling, Feridun, vol. 1, Abado Verlag, 1977, p. 117. 2.5 Illustration by Theo Scherling, in Viktor Augustin and Klaus Haase, Blasen-Geschichten, Pädagogische Arbeitsstelle Deutscher Volkshochschul-Verband, 1980, p. 1. 3.1 Amalia Alvarez, The Stories of Five Undocumented Women, Tusen Serier, 2013, n.p. 3.2 Amalia Alvarez, The Stories of Five Undocumented Women, Tusen Serier, 2013, n.p. 3.3 Daria Bogdanska, Wage Slaves, trans. Aleksander Linskog, Centrala, 2019, p. 37. 3.4 Daria Bogdanska, Wage Slaves, trans. Aleksander Linskog, Centrala, 2019, p. 30. 4.1 Excerpt describing a situation in which the employee is asked to work during his rest period, Thai Fishing Vessel Employment Contract, Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd. (Figure also in colour on p. 121)

2 27 48 49 50 51

55 67 69 72 74

84

Figures  xi

4.2 Excerpt depicting what the employee is entitled to receive on the vessel, Thai Fishing Vessel Employment Contract, Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd. (Figure also in colour on p. 122) 4.3 Excerpt depicting a situation where the employee is injured and/or ill, Thai Fishing Vessel Employment Contract, Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd. (Figure also in colour on p. 123) 5.1 Cover of No soy de aquí ni soy de allá: Historias migrantes by José Quintero, Finestra Gestoría Cultural, 2017. (Figure also in colour on p. 124) 5.2 Maria del Carmen Reyes Garcia and Anael Tritura, “Estación migratoria”, No soy de aquí ni soy de allá: Historias migrantes, Finestra Gestoría Cultural, 2017, p. 19. 5.3 Panel from “Viacrucis” by José Eduardo Jacobo Bernal and Abi Sailer, No soy de aquí ni soy de allá: Historias migrantes, Finestra Gestoría Cultural, 2017, p. 24. 5.4 Cover of De aquí y de allá: Historias migrantes 2 by Patricio Betteo, Finestra Gestoría Cultural, 2020. (Figure also in colour on p. 125) 5.5 Eduardo Jacobo Bernal and Idalia Candelas, “José Pantaléon Martínez”, De aquí y de allá: Historias migrantes 2, Finestra Gestoría Cultural, 2020, p. 16. 6.1 Illustration by Amalia Alvarez, in Adrián Groglopo (ed.), Antirasistisk ordbok, Notis och Antirasistiska Akademin, 2015, p. 32. (Figure also in colour on p. 126) 6.2 Illustration by Amalia Alvarez, in Adrián Groglopo (ed.), Antirasistisk ordbok, Notis och Antirasistiska Akademin, 2015, p. 214. (Figure also in colour on p. 127) 10.1 Cover illustration by Heikki Rönkkö, in Karstein Volle, Kalle Hakkola, and Tuomas Tiainen (eds.), Nyt riittää!/Enough Is Enough!, The Finnish Comics Society, 2015. 10.2 Cartoon by JP Ahonen, in Karstein Volle, Kalle Hakkola, and Tuomas Tiainen (eds.), Nyt riittää!/Enough Is Enough!, The Finnish Comics Society, 2015, n.p. 10.3 Emmi Valve, “Mutta entä jos EI pelota?” (“But what if you are NOT afraid?”), in Karstein Volle, Kalle Hakkola, and Tuomas Tiainen (eds.), Nyt riittää!/Enough Is Enough!, The Finnish Comics Society, 2015, n.p. 11.1 Two advertisements from Public Advertiser Newspaper, 1762. 11.2 Kremena Dimitrova, John King – Comics-as-research Archive, London, 2021. (Figure also in colour on p. 128) 12.1 Reinhard Kleist, Der Traum von Olympia, Carlsen Verlag, 2015, p. 7. 12.2 Reinhard Kleist, Der Traum von Olympia, Carlsen Verlag, 2015, p. 28.  12.3 Reinhard Kleist, Der Traum von Olympia, Carlsen Verlag, 2015, pp. 108, 126, 66.

86

87

97

99

100

102

106

114

115

180

187

189 203 207 217 221 224

xii Figures

13.1 Aimée de Jongh, “Europe’s Waiting Room: Visiting the Refugees on Lesbos”, trans. de Jongh and Bob Bruyn, Drawing the Times, 2017, [p. 2]. (Figure also in colour on p. 129) 13.2 Judith Vanistendael, “Moria: Hellhole on Lesbos”, trans. Stefan Vanistendael, Drawing the Times, 2017, n.p. (Figure also in colour on p. 130) 13.3 Kate Evans, Threads: From the Refugee Crisis, Verso, 2016, 130–131. (Figure also in colour on p. 131) 14.1 Taina Tervonen and Jeff Pourquié, “Frontex, les frontières de la honte”, La Revue dessinée no. 7, 2015, 185. (Figure also in colour on p. 132) 14.2 Taina Tervonen and Jeff Pourquié, “Identités englouties”, La Revue dessinée no. 16, 2016, 80. (Figure also in colour on p. 133) 15.1 Benjamin Dix and Lindsay Pollock, Vanni: A Family’s Struggle through the Sri Lankan Conflict. (Figure also in colour on p. 134) 15.2 Benjamin Dix and Lindsay Pollock, Vanni: A Family’s Struggle Through the Sri Lankan Conflict. (Figure also in colour on p. 135)

232

235 240

252 255 267 268

CONTRIBUTORS

Amalia Alvarez (www.amaliaalvarez.com) is a comics creator who has roots among the Lickanantai people in the Atacama Desert and is currently living in Sweden. Alvarez works in the genres of social realism and satire, and her comics focus on racism/antiracism, representativity, feminism, gender, migration, social issues, and class from an intersectional perspective. She organises at the Swedish Antiracist Academy. Dominic Davies is a senior lecturer in English at City, University of London,

UK, and the author of Urban Comics (2019). With Candida Rifkind, he is also the co-editor of Documenting Trauma in Comics (2020) and the co-author of Graphic Refuge: Visuality & Mobility in Refugee Comics (2023). Robert de Rooy, University of Vaasa, Finland, is a doctoral student in business law and information working on a thesis with the provisional title “Fostering Dignity through Legal Design in Contracts”. De Rooy is an attorney in Cape Town, South Africa, the developer of the Comic Contract, and the founder of Creative Contracts. Kremena Dimitrova is an illustrator-as-historian, lecturer in Visual Culture, and practice-based doctoral researcher in decolonising history through comics at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. She specialises in socially engaged creative interventions and visual storytelling in the heritage sector, with a focus on unearthing hidden and marginalised narratives. Adrián Groglopo is a sociologist and lecturer in the Department of Social Work,

University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Groglopo has worked on several governmental projects regarding structural racism in Sweden. He has been the president of the

xiv Contributors

Antiracist Academy since 2013. His research focuses on the questions of coloniality, racism, and North-South political, economic, and environmental relations. Laura Nallely Hernández Nieto has a PhD in art history from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her research focuses on Mexican graphic narrative. She is part of the Latin American network of researchers of the graphic narrative RING. Currently, she is the chair of the Comic Art Working Group of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). Ralf Kauranen is a sociologist and comics scholar affiliated to the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Turku, Finland. He led the project “Comics and Migration: Belonging, Narration, Activism”, funded by the Kone Foundation and located at the Department of Finnish Literature, University of Turku, in 2018–2021. Sylvia Kesper-Biermann, Universität Hamburg, Germany, is a professor of history of education. Her research interests include comics studies, the history of schooling, legal history, and the history of torture and human rights. Currently, she is working on comic books as educational media in the second half of the 20th century. Anne Ketola, Tampere University, Finland, is a postdoctoral researcher working in the Word to Image research project (2020–2023), which produces and examines comic-style versions of complex, institutional documents. Ketola’s prior research examines multimodality in translation, focusing mainly on word–image interaction in the translation of illustrated texts. Christina M. Knopf is a professor in the Communication and Media Studies Department at the State University of New York (SUNY), Cortland, USA. Olli Löytty is an adjunct professor at the University of Turku, Finland. His research

focuses on postcolonialism, nationalism, multilingualism, and representations of cultural encounters in literature. He is currently working on the project “Literature and Reading in the Era of Climate Crisis” (University of Helsinki). Anna Marta Marini is a PhD research fellow at the Universidad de Alcalá, Spain.

Her publications are mostly focused on critical discourse analysis related to violence, representations of border-crossing and borderlands in US popular culture, and otherness re/construction in film and comics, particularly in the noir and horror genres. Aura Nikkilä is a doctoral researcher in art history at the University of Turku,

Finland. Nikkilä’s doctoral project concerns the role of photography in migration-themed comics. She has published on multilingualism and transnationalism in comics as well as on empathy and activism in relation to graphic narratives.

Contributors  xv

Anna Nordenstam, Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Gothen-

burg, Sweden, has published articles and chapters with feminist and activist perspectives on comics and has edited (with  Kristy Beers Fägersten, Leena Romu, and Margareta Wallin Wictorin) Comic Art and Feminism in the Baltic Sea Region: Transnational Perspectives (2021). Eliisa Pitkäsalo, Tampere University, Finland, works as a senior lecturer and researcher in multilingual communication. Her research interests include translating multimodal texts, the interaction between word and image in comics, and the potential of comics as a way of non-fictional communication from the viewpoint of accessibility. Oskari Rantala is working on his doctoral thesis at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, researching medium-specific narrative strategies and medial self-awareness in the comics of Alan Moore. Currently, Rantala is the chair of Finfar, the Finnish Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy Research. Iván Facundo Rubinstein is a professor at the School of Social and Political Sci-

ence, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico. He is a member of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, the Argentinean Association of Semiotics, and vice-chair of the Comic Art Working Group of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). Taina Tervonen is a French-Finnish author, journalist, and documentary film-

maker based in Paris, France. She is the author of Les Otages (2022), Les Fossoyeuses (2021), Au pays des disparus (2019), and Hukkuneet (2019) and the director of Talking with the Dead (2020). Anna Vuorinne is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Comparative Lit-

erature, University of Turku, Finland. Her dissertation examines the conventions of human rights narration in contemporary German comics depicting migration. In her publications on comics, she has also written about the questions of gender, sexuality, and feminism. Margareta Wallin Wictorin is a reader in art history and visual studies and a senior

lecturer in culture studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. She has published articles and chapters with feminist and activist perspectives on comics and has edited (with Kristy Beers Fägersten, Anna Nordenstam, and Leena Romu) Comic Art and Feminism in the Baltic Sea Region: Transnational Perspectives (2021).

SERIES EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION Comics and Migration: Representation and Other Practices Edited by Ralf Kauranen, Olli Löytty, Aura Nikkilä, and Anna Vuorinne

Though at first look, comics may be perfect for entertainment, this is only part of the uses for the form. This collection takes on the suggestion that comics can be used for education, for information, and as methods of disseminating information across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries. The collection comes from the perspective of untold histories, practitioners’ experiences, and how comics are affected by (or respond to) states’ immigration policy, among other things. The focus of this collection covers a wide area of previously unexplored or little-explored comics from the Nordic region of Europe to South Asia, allowing the volume to make important observations about the tendencies, strengths, and more problematic aspects of the representation of migration in this particular form. In tandem with more traditional critical essays, the book also discusses comics with more practical uses – from language learning resources to employment contracts. This collection presents a bold intervention into the conversation on comics as an important form for international and transnational education and communication. It is a timely and important contribution to the fields of comics studies, migration studies, and many others. Series editor: Harriet E.H. Earle, Sheffield Hallam University, UK

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors’ work with this volume – and much more – was made possible by the ample funding that the Kone Foundation granted the project “Comics and Migration: Belonging, Narration, Activism” in 2018–2021. We are highly appreciative of the work and policies of the Kone Foundation in Finland, which provides artists and scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and environmental sciences with the possibility to work in a focused manner on a long-term basis. Other institutions have also provided financial support, which has helped to realise this volume. Anna Vuorinne wishes to thank the Emil Öhmann Foundation for a personal grant that facilitated her work in 2021–2022, and Aura Nikkilä wants to thank the Alfred Kordelin Foundation for funding her research in 2022. In addition to us editors, our “Comics and Migration” project group included three versatile comics artists, educators, and activists. We extend our heartfelt thanks to Warda Ahmed, Hannele Richert, and Johanna Rojola for their friendship, inspiring discussions, and collaboration. One part of our project work was cooperation with World Comics Finland. Together, we organised a few grassroots comics workshops until a certain pandemic put an end to that. Ralf Kauranen wishes to thank the activists of World Comics Finland, and in particular Heidi Leino and Suvi Ermilä of the “Illustrating Me” project, as well as the participants, for welcoming him to attend the workshops. Without the authors of the single chapters, this volume would not exist. Their expertise, innovative approaches, and insightful perspectives have been paramount in shaping this work. We wish to thank all the authors for their cooperation as well as their patience with the editing process. We are grateful for the opportunity to publish this volume in the series Global Perspectives in Comics Studies, edited by Harriet E.H. Earle, a much-needed platform for broadening the geographical scope of comics research. Hattie’s expertise,

xviii Acknowledgements

enthusiasm, and help have been invaluable, and we wish to thank her for her support throughout the whole publishing process. We also wish to express our gratitude to Shoma Choudhury and Shloka Chauhan at Routledge India for their advice and support while editing the volume. Last but not least, we wish to thank Albion M. Butters, who has helped give the finishing touch to this volume by copyediting the final manuscript, and the comics artists who have kindly allowed us to reprint their work in the pages of this book. We would also like to extend our special thanks to Emmi Nieminen for giving us the permission to reprint her artwork on the cover of this book.

1 INTRODUCTION The entanglements of comics and migration Anna Vuorinne and Ralf Kauranen

In 2016, the Finnish non-governmental organisation World Comics Finland arranged comics workshops for adult asylum seekers at reception centres. This developed into the project “Illustrating Me”, which since has continued to organise workshops for migrant groups in Finland, often in cooperation with other NGOs active in the field of migration. One of the comics produced in such a workshop is “Miksi?” (Why?) by Mohammed, Yasseen, and Salam (Figure 1.1). In all its visual and linguistic simplicity, the comic and its context of creation highlight how comics and migration are articulated and what the premise of this volume is. On the level of representation, “Miksi?” is a four-panel story of an individual who has fled from Iraq to Finland. He works, studies, and dreams of a future as an entrepreneur in his new country, yet he is awaiting a decision concerning his application for asylum or a residence permit. The first three panels depicting the face of the I-narrator talk about flight and settlement. In the final panel, the heavy burden of the difficult wait and insecurity is conveyed with a strong simile, where the image of a tombstone with the text R.I.P. is accompanied by the narrator’s statement, “I am alive, but like dead”. Finally, in the last sentence, the comic strongly asserts that the Finnish Immigration Service is to blame for the I-narrator’s current predicament. The general, existentialist question comprising the title of the comic, at least in part, is also more concretely directed at this authority. The “Illustrating Me” project aims to give refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants the opportunity to tell their own stories and state their opinions through comics. This kind of “grassroots comics” was first generated and cultivated in development aid work, after which they have been used in different social settings and in many countries. The central idea is that anybody can do comics and express themselves through them, regardless of previous experience of the medium (Packalén and Sharma 2007). To many of the participants of the “Illustrating Me” workshops, the experience of creating comics was completely new. DOI: 10.4324/9781003254621-1

2  Anna Vuorinne and Ralf Kauranen

FIGURE 1.1 Mohammed,

Yasseen, and Salam, “Miksi?” (Why?), World Comics Finland, 2018. Translation of the text (from Kuti no. 59, n.p.): “In Iraq I was afraid. // I came to Finland. I work as a cleaner, dishwasher and I study. I want to start a business. // I have been waiting three years for asylum. I am frustrated. // R.I.P. / I am alive but like dead. It’s Migri’s [Finnish Immigration Service] fault”.

Source: Reproduced with the permission of World Comics Finland and the artists.

Introduction  3

A workshop of a day or a few hours begins with the participants being taught the basics of grassroots comics: a bound format of four panels in two tiers. A4 paper is used for sketching in pencil and A3 for the final ink or marker pen comic. The participants are taught about sequential narration and the art of drawing stick figures and facial expressions. The latter has been put to good use in the first three panels of “Miksi?”, which depict fear, joyous relief, and the weariness of the wait, respectively, creating a conventional refugee narrative through simple means. Although heavily dependent on prefabricated templates of format and visual language, the comic successfully tells an emotionally expressive and politically pregnant story. While the process of creation itself is central to the grassroots comics practice, the comics of “Illustrating Me” have been distributed through both exhibitions and an online gallery. The comic “Miksi?” and the “Illustrating Me” project point at a key dimension of the current volume: comics are not just about representations, isolated texts, intertextual relations, or singular manifestations of a medium’s affordances. Comics involve concrete and complex processes of production, distribution, and consumption. For comics to exist, to be created and read, and to have an effect, a whole world of ideational, material, and human resources needs to be mobilised. Comics and Migration: Representation and Other Practices foregrounds the breadth of different practices, that is, what is done with and what comics do with regard to another variegated phenomenon: migration. While a crucial aspect of comics in relation to migration is that the former represents the latter, this is not the only way in which the two intertwine. As the subtitle of this volume suggests, there are a myriad of other practices and functions alongside the practice of representation that connect comics and migration. Like the “Illustrating Me” project exemplifies, comics are an object and a vehicle of education, a means of expression, advocacy, social and political action, or a pastime for three men over a cup of tea. Comics studies foregrounds a close reading of the comic as text: what it shows, tells, and represents. As important as this is, the current volume aims to broaden the scope and to provide a reminder that comics are not only texts to be approached through analyses of their form and content but also objects that are made and used for different purposes. Close reading (in general terms) is not abandoned in this volume, but the overall aim is to see comics in relation to a wide range of practices besides representation and to approach comics by considering their cultural, social, and political contexts. This introduction maps the current state of research on the entanglements of comics and migration. An ambitious undertaking, this has resulted in an extensive chapter which will assist the reader who is not familiar with this broad field of research. The discussion is guided by an understanding of the relations between, on the one hand, research on comics and migration and, on the other hand, larger trends in comics studies. It is structured according to the distinction made earlier: first, we discuss research strands that focus on comics as representation, after which we turn our attention to other uses of comics, which are much less researched. Our discussion focuses on the following perspectives: cartooning and stereotypes, graphic life writing and identity, memory and trauma, witnessing and human

4  Anna Vuorinne and Ralf Kauranen

rights, readerly engagements and empathy, advocacy and NGO-produced comics, comics workshops and self-expression, and comics in education. We present the chapters of the volume interspersed with the theoretically oriented research mapping to highlight how the present volume and the various perspectives herein take part in the existing discussions and extend our understanding of the relationships between comics and migration. Before we continue, let us make some clarifications concerning the vocabulary related to human mobility. We use the term “migration” as a general rubric for the broad and variegated phenomenon of people moving from one place to another for various reasons. Similarly, when referring to people on the move, “migrant” is used as an umbrella term. In individual chapters, however, more specific terminology – such as “forced migration”, “immigration”, “labour migration”, “refugee”, “immigrant”, “asylum seeker”, and “guest worker” – is applied to describe people’s movement in different historical, social, and political circumstances. While distinct concepts like these may be useful when describing the motivations for people’s mobility, such as work opportunities, or for distinguishing between voluntary and forced movements, they also conceal or simplify the realities of migration that are often more complex than such concepts can disclose. This concerns the habit of differentiating between voluntary and involuntary migration. While this distinction is promoted, for example, by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and reflected in global and local migration policies, research has shown that “a clear-cut distinction between forced and nonforced migration does not account for the way migratory processes actually work and take place in the real world”, since people’s movements are often motivated by both compulsion and choice and grounded in several intersecting factors (Scalettaris 2007, 39; see also Atak and Crépeau 2021). As the distinction between voluntary and forced migration, or between migrants and refugees, makes evident, many migration-related concepts are intimately connected to legal instruments and policies. While terms such as “refugee” or “asylum seeker”, which derive from the legal sphere, are often used in research and quotidian language when referring to specific groups of people, migration scholars have reminded us that these labels cannot be regarded as relevant identity or group categories in a sociological or anthropological sense (see, e.g. Malkki 1995; Scalettaris 2007). The analytical usefulness of a legal or bureaucratic label is limited, as it “does not say as much about the people to whom it refers as about the system that produced the label” (Scalettaris 2007, 41). Again, the distinction between voluntary migrants and refugees is a case in point. While the premise of the international refugee regime, which is largely based on the UN Refugee Convention, is humanitarian, the need to distinguish between refugee and non-refugee migrants seems to reflect the interests of managing and restricting migratory flows to the Global North more than the interests of those who leave their homes in the Global South to search for safety and livelihood elsewhere (Scalettaris 2007, 44–45; Atak and Crépeau 2021).

Introduction  5

With these limitations and dependencies in mind, this volume approaches migration-related terms critically, understanding them as discursive formations that are historical and may take different meanings in different usages and contexts, ranging from legal definitions to everyday parlance and political propaganda. Rather than sticking with some definitive concepts, many chapters use multiple terms (such as “migrant” and “refugee”) interchangeably, thus working against dichotomous thinking, challenging the tendency to pit refugee rights against migrant rights, and promoting a broader approach to complex migratory phenomena.

Migration in comics Why then “comics and migration”? What is the relationship between the two? What do comics do vis-à-vis migration? It is clear that there has been an upsurge of comics narrating and commenting upon migration in the last few years (e.g. Naghibi et al. 2020, 295; Nijdam 2021). At the same time, as the trend has been acknowledged in research, scholars have paid attention to the longer history of connections between comics and human mobility (Gardner 2010; Marie and Ollivier 2013; Platthaus 2020; Serrano 2021b). The migratory background of comics artists, characters, and readers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States, where the mass cultural form of newspaper comics developed, has been recognised, as has Superman’s refugee background. The forebears of the current boom, such as Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga (1999 [1931]), giving insight into Japanese immigrants’ lives in the United States in the 1920s, or Moebius’ antiracist take on far-right, racist violence, “Cauchemar blanc” (1974), have gained renewed attention (see, e.g. Nabizadeh 2019, 28–42; McKinney 2020, 17, 25–28), as has the fact that a number of the most revered, canonised works in comics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries are concerned with flight, forced displacement, and migration. One only needs to think of lists of the most important “documentary comics” (on the concept, see Mickwitz 2016), which seldom fail to mention Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980–1991), Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993–1995), or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000–2003). The formation of the comics canon and its gravitation towards the documentary mode explain, at least to some extent, the interest in stories about migration in comics in the 21st century (see, e.g. Naghibi and O’Malley 2020, 307). The aforementioned works have paved the way for artists (and publishers) interested in their own lives and family histories, as well as the historical and current political and social contexts of people’s destinies in – and experiences of – conflict and displacement. At the same time, this tendency is reflective of what happens in the world: people move, and sedentary populations everywhere encounter migrants. The number of refugees in the world keeps growing – the UNHCR (2021) estimates that over 82  million people (1  percent of the world’s population) were forcibly displaced in 2020. Concurrently, border control and restrictions on transnational movements are being bolstered and debated in many parts of the world.

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Comics artists, like other people, have migrated and continue to do so. This has left traces in different comics traditions across genres. A  few examples may suffice (and at the same time suggest the kinds of movement that can be regarded as migration): Rudolph Dirks moved as a child with his family from Germany to the United States in 1884 and went on to produce the popular and long-lived strip “The Katzenjammer Kids”, a humorous view of an immigrant family whose status is underlined by the main characters’ German-English accents. Frans Masereel left Belgium for Switzerland to avoid military service in the First World War and started to produce political and socially conscious woodcut images and graphic novels in exile. Vannak Anan Prum, who left Cambodia to work in neighbouring Thailand and ended up in captivity on a fishing boat, pays witness to his travails and endurance in The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea: A Graphic Memoir of Modern Slavery (2018). Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom, adopted as a baby from South Korea to Sweden, depicts in Palimpsest (2016) the search for the protagonist’s roots in the muddled bureaucracies of international adoption. Of course, as Maus famously attests, comics artists have taken it upon themselves to depict their own family histories of migration, flight, and displacement. Examples from around the world include GB Tran’s Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2010) and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir (2017), both of which share the migration histories of Vietnamese families settling in the United States; Halfdan Pisket’s trilogy Desertør (2014), Kakerlak (2015), and Dansker (2016) focus on his father’s journey from Turkey to Denmark; Nina Bunjevac’s Fatherland: A Family History (2015) discusses the artist’s father’s life in Yugoslavia and Canada; and Emilie Saitas’ two volumes of L’Arbre de mon père (2018, 2020) trace her own transnational family history and that of her Egypt-born Greek father. The profusion of personal and family memoirs employed for narratives about migration in comics is accompanied by a growth in journalistic comics representing different aspects of migration. These comics are usually based on interviews with refugees and other displaced people and on the comics artists’ own observations of locations, events, and institutional settings that migrants journey through, are settled in, or in which they are kept against their will. With the start of the Syrian Civil War in 2011 and the increase of asylum seekers in the European Union in 2015, artists have increasingly produced comics reports from refugee camps, detention centres, and the perilous travel routes used by migrants. For an earlier example, in “Chechen War, Chechen Women” (2008), Sacco visits several settlements of Chechen refugees in Ingushetia. Many successors have traced the routes and destinies of migrants in Europe. In addition to comic books and albums, new online platforms as well as the digital sites of traditional media have provided channels for comics journalism on migration. The Drawing the Times website for comics journalism, established in the Netherlands in 2015, collects several reports from different sites, such as Aleksandar Zograf ’s “Migrants’ Stories” (2016) or Ahmed Mohammed Omer and Alice Socal’s “Across the Sahara and Onto the Metro” (2017), originally published as part of the German Comics Association’s “Alphabet des Ankommens” (“Alphabet of Arrival”) project.

Introduction  7

Yet another form of depiction of the lives and circumstances of migrating people can be found in comics artists’ renderings based on longer stays as workers or volunteers at encampments and institutions. The most well-known and studied is probably Kate Evans’ Threads: From the Refugee Crisis (2017), which draws on the artist’s experiences as a volunteer in the “Calais Jungle”. Based on her work as a comics teacher for refugees, Ali Fitzgerald draws her own experiences together with those of the refugees and the history of Berlin in Drawn to Berlin: Comic Workshops in Refugee Shelters and Other Stories from a New Europe (2018). Finnish artist Lauri Ahtinen, who has had years of experience working as a teacher in preparatory education for immigrant children, depicts the emotional lives of Hazara boys, awaiting the Immigration Service’s decisions on their asylum applications after arriving alone in Finland, in a significantly fictionalised form in the comics album Elias (2018). While the “factual approach” dominates in comics on migration (see Mickwitz 2020a, 280), there are also exceptions, such as Will Eisner’s multiple comics about immigrants in 20th-century America, beginning with A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (1978). Unquestionably a part of the international comics canon, Shaun Tan’s wordless The Arrival (2007 [2006]) includes fantastical elements that distance the story of a migrating family father from historical migration while also visually alluding to immigration in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. It is by no means a watertight distinction, but it seems that when young readers are addressed with comics on migration, fiction is the preferred mode. Morten Dürr and Lars Horneman’s Zenobia (2016) and Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin, and Giovanni Rigano’s Illegal: A Graphic Novel Telling One Boy’s Epic Journey to Europe (2017) present journeys of fictional child protagonists from the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean and Europe. While Zenobia lacks any paratexts explaining the story’s relation to real events, Illegal includes several explanatory texts, beginning with an epigraph quoting Elie Wiesel; the afterword states, “The story you’ve just read about Ebo’s journey is a work of fiction, but every separate element of it is true” (Colfer et al. 2017, 125). When representing a theme like migration, comics – both documentary and fictional – predominantly turn to mimetic, realistic, and historical approaches. The symbolic, fairy-tale treatment of border control and the relations between minority and majority populations in Wayde Compton and April dela Noche Milne’s The Blue Road: A Fable of Migration (2019) is exceptional in a field devoted to addressing the reader in an informative manner.

Research on comics and migration Many of the comics mentioned earlier could be described as “refugee comics”, a term often used to refer to comics depicting displacement, and maybe a sign of the formation of a new genre (first used in Rifkind 2017). The use of the term “refugee comics” has been open-ended, mainly referring to the common topics of migration, flight, and displacement in comics rather than to specific generic conventions

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within them (e.g. Rifkind 2017; Mickwitz 2020b). While Dominic Davies (2020b, 385) places the term on the same level as “migrant comics”, “detention comics”, and the broader categories of “documentary comics” and “crisis comics”, Nina Mickwitz (2020a, 283) concludes, “They are all . . . representative of an orientation towards topical and socio-political issues in the contemporary cycle of nonfiction comics, and share a genealogy that includes autobiographical comics and the self-publishing scene”. In line with Davies’ suggestion, the aforementioned comics can also be labelled as “crisis comics”, as defined by Sidonie Smith (2011; see also Rifkind 2017, 649) in her article on human rights-oriented comics that address catastrophe, conflicts, disaster, and human rights violations, and offer testimony, education, and commentary on these issues. The growing body and rich variety of comics on migration is increasingly acknowledged in scholarly discussions in different disciplinary frameworks and from different theoretical perspectives. While there exists a longer tradition of scholarship on the entanglements of comics and migration (evidenced, for example, by the sheer number of studies on Satrapi’s Persepolis), the recent boom of migration-themed comics has resulted in several volumes or journal special issues focusing on the matter. These include Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis, edited by Nhora Lucía Serrano (2021a), a collection of articles that focuses on comics’ representations of immigrant subjects and experiences in many different genres and works, starting with R. F. Outcault’s Yellow Kid, and ponders the ways in which immigration, both as a topic and as part of artists’ identities, has shaped the comics form and canon (Serrano 2021b, 10–11). With a focus on recent comic art, “Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in Graphic Life Narratives” (2020), edited by Nima Naghibi, Candida Rifkind, and Eleanor Ty for a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, centres on depictions of migration and migrants in the genre of graphic life writing, and “Migration in Twenty-First-Century Documentary Comics” (2021), edited by Benjamin Bigelow and Rüdiger Singer for Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, explores comics about migration through the perspective of the documentary genre. Beyond the anglophone sphere of research, the German-language anthology Krieg und Migration im Comic: Interdisziplinäre Analysen (icon Düsseldorf 2020) analyses representations of war and migration in European, North American, and Japanese comics. Tausend Bilder und eins – Comic als ästhetische Praxis in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft (Weber and Moritzen 2017) is a versatile collection of comics by students, essays, and scholarly analyses that approach the themes of comics, migration, and intercultural social processes. We assume that the wide interest in the entanglements of comics and migration will soon be reflected in monographs as well, yet at the moment of writing there is only one, Mark McKinney’s Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics (2020). Through case studies of artists and themes, such as on Farid Boudjellal or sans-papiers, McKinney designates migration as a continuous theme in French comics since the 1960s. Contrary to most studies on comics and migration, McKinney also discusses far-right xenophobia in comics. Of course, classifications of what is about migration and what is not are always

Introduction  9

arbitrary. For example, monographs with a minority focus may show a significant interest in migration, as seen in Héctor D. Fernandez L’Hoeste’s Lalo Alcaraz: Political Cartooning in the Latino Community (2017). Although these publications cover a wide range of topics and perspectives, some common interests emerge, as seen in previous research on migration-themed comics. Comics have brought into focus migration from many perspectives, being centred on the different phases of migration, that is, departure and the reasons for it, the stages of travel consisting of both movement and standstill, as well as settlement, temporarily or more permanently, in new milieux. They have highlighted migration in multiple geographical locations, as well as the experiences and emotions of migrant subjects, the circumstances enabling and hindering migration (e.g. border control and practices of incarceration), and both welcoming and xenophobic reactions of the surrounding societies, as well as the formation of identities of immigrants and their offspring. Crucially, the representations of migration in comics have often been regarded as providing readers with different perspectives and education vis-à-vis the dominant modes of representation in media in general (Mickwitz 2020a, 285). Comics have been seen as purveyors of alternatives to anonymising, dehumanising, sensationalist, and scaremongering media representations. Political cartooning and its use of stereotypes provide an ambivalent example of representations on the threshold of the sensationalist and the more nuanced depictions. While graphic life writing has been associated with analyses of identities and identity formation vis-à-vis migration, comics reportage has been interpreted in terms of humanitarian witnessing. Both forms of representation have been discussed with reference to the mediation of traumatic experiences related to migration and the potential of comics to engage with readers’ emotions, leading them to cultivate empathy and solidarity. In the following sections, we examine some of these discussions more closely.

Cartoons and stereotypes While the dominant mode of comics on migration nowadays seems to be the documentary, the history of the relationship between comics and migration has an early beginning in the sister medium of political cartoons, a medium with a historical connection to the field of journalism, albeit less clearly dedicated to verisimilitude. The humorous or satirical treatment of migration in visual-verbal short, punchy statements has a long history visible on both sides of the Atlantic during the European emigration to America (and elsewhere) in the 19th and early 20th centuries (for a discussion of one example, Joseph Keppler’s Puck magazine cartoon “Looking Backward” from 1893, see Serrano 2021b, 4–5). As Matthew Robson (2019, 115–116) states, “the format has been readily exploited both by those who affirm hegemonic political positions, and others who orient themselves towards contestation or subversion”. Studies of migration-themed cartoon art in several transnational settings affirm this. In an analysis of cartoons on harraga (or harga, irregular migration from the

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country) by two Algerian cartoonists, Hic (Hichem Baba Ahmed) and (Ali) Dilem, Farida Souiah (2016) observes that they not only make the phenomenon visible but also provide explanations for it and criticise the authorities and the unjust migration policies of Algeria and the EU. In a different vein, the cartoons of the artist Stanley McMurtry (who goes by the pen name Mac) in the British conservative newspaper Daily Mail, studied by Robson (2019), represent immigrants in an extremely negative way and depict British attitudes towards and control over immigration as too lax. In a third example from yet another milieu, Julie Alev Dilmaҫ and Özker Kocadal (2018) show how stereotypical depictions of Syrian refugees as anonymous, helpless masses in Turkey are used to satirise the country’s politics and politicians, who allegedly only use the refugees for their own gain. Both the British and Turkish cases highlight the relevance of stereotypes for political cartoons in general and with regard to the depiction of migrants in particular. According to comics artist Will Eisner (2008 [1985]), comics rely heavily on stereotyping and types, that is, simplified characters that readily convey information in the service of the narrative. The detrimental aspect of this has been noted by Derek Parker Royal, who writes about the representations of race and ethnicity in an American context: In comics and graphic art there is always the all-too-real danger of negative stereotype and caricature, which strips others of any unique identity and dehumanises by means of reductive iconography – the big noses, the bug eyes, the buck teeth, and the generally deformed features that have historically composed our visual discourse of the Other. (Royal 2007, 8) However, writing about racial stereotypes, Jared Gardner (2010, 135) notes, “Single-panel comics especially lend themselves to the work of stereotyping”. While sequential images and comics augment ambiguity, thanks to the interpretative effort demanded by elliptical narration, an image confined to one panel is better equipped for stereotypical representation (Gardner 2010, 136–138). While Gardner intriguingly suggests that the great immigration to the United States coincides with the emergence of sequential comics in the country and thus “the more nuanced and complex portrayal of racial and ethnic ‘Others’ in mainstream American comics” (Gardner 2010, 135), it is obvious that stereotypes continue to play a crucial role in the depiction of migrant (and other) minorities, in both single- and multi-panel comics, in the United States and elsewhere. In the cases studied in this volume, ethnic and racial stereotyping is most conspicuously present in the two action genre comics analysed by Anna Marta Marini in “On the ‘good’ side: Hegemonic masculinity and transnational intervention in the representation of US–Mexico border enforcement”. Here the focus is on Peter Milligan’s Army of Two: Across the Border (2010) and Doug Wagner’s ICE (2011–2012), both dealing with immigration and border control at the US–Mexico border. As Marini’s analysis shows, both comics valorise border enforcement

Introduction  11

and US interventionism and, as a part of this, reproduce negative stereotypes of migrants while depicting Mexican authorities as inept. Marini not only points out the connections of the comics with nationalist, nativist political discourse in the United States but also remarks that the comics “were not produced to explicitly embody a political statement”. In contrast, this is the exact point found in Oskari Rantala’s chapter “V for pissed-offedness: Anti-immigrant subversion of dystopian superhero intertexts”. He analyses the intermedial and intertextual connections of a film advertisement produced by the conservative, nationalist, and populist Finns Party before the parliamentary elections in Finland in 2019. The film makes use of both Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s comic V for Vendetta and its film adaptation to represent a local dystopia of corrupt, EU-friendly politicians and immigration gone out of control. Rantala’s analysis highlights how negative, racist stereotypes of immigrants are integrated with the subversive use of V for Vendetta, thus being representative of the provocative political culture of contemporary right-wing populism.

Graphic life writing and identity The political communication of cartoons provides one inroad to analyses of comics and migration. A much more common or broad-ranging framework for reading comics on migration is provided by graphic life writing, encompassing autobiographies, biographies, and family histories. As evidenced by the special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies (Naghibi et al. 2020), this also reflects a general trend in comics studies. The boom of graphic life writing comprises, among others, the famous works of Spiegelman and Satrapi, while the excitement around concepts explaining the entanglements of comics and self-representation, such as “autographics” (Whitlock 2006), has engendered a large body of scholarship focusing on (auto)biographical comics, an area that undoubtedly constitutes an important subfield of contemporary comics studies (among many, see, e.g. Chute 2010; Chaney 2011; El Refaie 2012; Ernst 2017; Køhlert 2019; Mejhammar 2020). Migration was not necessarily a central concept in such studies before the late 2010s. Instead, the discursive context is offered by the issues of diversity, multiculturalism, and transnationalism, and the representation of ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities in comics across different genres (see, for instance, Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama (2010); Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads, edited by Shane Denson et  al. (2013); Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities, edited by Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji (2015); and Drawing New Color Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives, edited by Monica Chiu (2015)). In these contexts, comics that from a later perspective appear as migration narratives are seen as stories of self-formation, where identities are negotiated in transnational and postcolonial, multicultural, and multiracial settings. An example of the analytical focus on identity and self-formation is provided by the discussions on Persepolis that have characterised the memoir as, among other

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things, feminist writing, witnessing, and a representation of Iranian-diasporic identity (Naghibi and O’Malley 2020). A common thread in these discussions, which often associate Satrapi’s autobiographical comic with the genre of Bildungsroman, the fictional counterpart of the modern (auto)biography, is the focus on the dynamic relationship between the individual and the community or society, in which the identity of the protagonist is formed (see, e.g. Whitlock 2006; Earle 2021). While the negotiations between the individual and the society have always been at the centre of both Bildungsroman and modern (auto)biography, analyses of Persepolis and other works of graphic life writing thematising migratory experiences point towards the relevance of addressing and reflecting societal assumptions and expectations from a migratory standpoint. Indeed, as Rifkind (2021, 206) notes with reference to Lila Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White (2012), in migrant and/or minority subjects’ narratives of becoming, the question that often seems to motivate the search for identity is not “Who am I?” but rather “What are you?” In the context of external demands to define and categorise oneself, the legacy of stereotypical representations of migrant and other minorities has provided one inroad to the identity work (see Hatfield 2005, 115–116; Smith 2011, 68). Apart from explicitly autobiographical comics, several analyses of Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006) point out the relevance of the stereotype for identity work and formation. While persistent racial and racist stereotypes of Asians frame the negotiation of Asian American or Chinese American identity in the comic, scholars have drawn attention to Yang’s critical and oppositional use of stereotypes (Gardner 2010; Davis 2013; Oh 2017; Ma 2021). They argue that by mixing together several narratives, visual worlds, and generic conventions from the narrative and rhetoric strategies of Bildungsroman and sitcom to the racist stereotypes circulated in cartoons and comics, American Born Chinese manages to destabilise stereotypical representations without giving way to simple alternatives (Gardner 2010, 146; Ma 2021). While this rather optimistic view of comics’ disruptive power against stereotypes is shared by many, Frederik Byrn Køhlert (2019, 157–187), for example, has problematised it by noting that, in the case of racial stereotypes that are still highly powerful and injurious today, the most effective strategy of subversion might not be deconstruction but “direct and confrontational appropriation” (Køhlert 2019, 170). Using Toufic El Rassi’s Arab in America (2007), an autobiographical comic that portrays processes of exclusion and racialisation as experienced by the Lebanon-born El Rassi in his home country (the United States), Køhlert shows how the comic, through its insistent yet reflective use of the Arab male stereotype, both unmasks anti-Arab prejudices and furnishes positive identity construction (Køhlert 2019, 187).

Memory and trauma In (graphic) life writing, processes of identity formation are inseparable from processes of memory. Accordingly, as highlighted by analyses of Persepolis or more recent critically acclaimed works such as The Best We Could Do (see McWilliams

Introduction  13

2019; Oh 2020; Gusain and Jha 2021), when graphic life narratives reflect upon personal experiences related to migration or engage with family histories of displacement, they can be regarded as cultural memory work – or “graphic spaces of remembrance”, as suggested by Serrano (2021b, 10–11), with reference to Pierre Nora’s concept lieux de mémoire – through which migratory subjects, their offspring, or other interlocutors make sense of personal and collective pasts. The comics form and its affordances when engaging with the past – including, for example, the hybrid, palimpsestic, elliptic, and fragmentary features of graphic narration – have received recurring attention in scholarship on comics and memory, as well as in discussions about memories related to displacement and migration. While Hillary Chute (2016, 192–193) compares graphic narration to archiving and suggests that it “makes the process of assembling, ordering, and preserving intelligible in a way that few forms can”, Caroline Kyungah Hong (2014, 14) sees it as “a powerful analogue for memory”. Analysing Vietnamerica, she contends that the comic’s “circular, nonchronological, repetitive structure enacts memory’s fluid patterns and the irregular, always unfinished processes of accessing the past, uncovering histories, and constructing genealogies” (Hong 2014, 14–15; see also Shay 2016). Linking the comics form to memory in a universalistic sense, Hong (2014, 18) proposes that the form carries inventive potential with regard to transhistorical and transnational memory work in particular. The affordances of comics in rendering and reflecting transnational memories are also discussed by Christina Kraenzle (2020), who views them in the context of German collective memory. With a focus on Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes (2016), a historical comic that sheds light on the largely overlooked experiences of Mozambican migrant workers in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), her analysis points towards qualities of graphic storytelling – such as the use of several distinct drawing styles and varying layouts or a scrapbook-like incorporation of historical memorabilia – that enable “nuanced memory work” where “questions about the ethics of visualizing transnational or transcultural memories” are also reflected upon (Kraenzle 2020, 231). The interest in comics as embodiments of alternative perspectives or counter-memories to “official histories” related to displacement and community-building in national and transnational settings is another common strand in discussions focusing on the nexus of migration, memory, and comics (among many, see, e.g. Cheurfa 2020; Oh 2020; McKinney 2021). An apt summary of this approach is given by Golnar Nabizadeh (2019, 1) in her book Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels, which places significant emphasis on memories related to migration, as she argues that as representations of “personal, political, social, and historical memories . . . comics can help recover marginalised and minority voices from the peripheries of representation”. The potential of the comics form to bring forth marginalised pasts and activate alternative forms of remembrance are explored in this volume as well. In her chapter, “Absented from his master’s service: Benjamin Franklin House, slavery, and comics”, which draws on her own experiences as an illustrator-researcher, Kremena Dimitrova reflects upon a project of uncovering the life story of a runaway

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slave in 18th-century colonial England. Although archival material regarding this particular case is scarce and insufficient to provide the basis for a biography in the most conventional sense – that is, in the form of a coherent, linear narrative of a life – she does not regard this as a problem but rather argues for non-narrative, experimental, and abstract modes of graphic narration that can not only challenge colonial habits of representing the past but also transform conventions of historywriting as a whole. In their introduction to Comics Memory: Archives and Styles, Maaheen Ahmed and Benoît Crucifix (2018, 3) note that “memory’s presence in comics studies has been closely tied to the concept of trauma”. This statement describes the scholarship on migration-themed comics, too. The discussions about comics’ engagements with the past and their communication of personal and cultural memories have often been focused on trauma, which can be defined as “psychological injury, lasting damage done to individuals or communities by tragic events or severe distress” (Davis and Meretoja 2020, 1). This is, of course, not surprising, since migration or displacement may be caused by tragic and violent events like war and persecution, the process of migration itself may be stressful and traumatising, and migrants may be the targets of traumatising violence, abuse, and microaggressions in host societies. Yet, this is certainly not the only explanation for the engagement with trauma and traumatic memories in research on comics on migration. As with memory, there has been a tendency to draw attention to comics’ affordances and distinctive multimodal strategies for communicating traumatic experiences, and it has even been implied that the comics form might be more suitable than other art forms when it comes to dealing with the psychological and ethical complexities of trauma. Indeed, as several scholars have shown (e.g. Chute 2016; Earle 2017), there is certainly an intimate connection between graphic narratives and trauma, yet the explanation for this might not be found on the level of the comics form but in the developments of cultural theories and representations of trauma during the last decades. As argued by Davies (2020c, 3) in the introduction to Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage, “comics have played a particularly significant role in refining the aesthetic patterns that now allow traumatic narratives to be recognized as such in contemporary Western culture”. Certainly, one of the most influential theorisations of trauma, and of the relationship between trauma and memory in particular, developed by drawing on comics is Marianne Hirsch’s (1992) concept of “post-memory”. In a later formulation, she summarises it as “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before, to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up” (Hirsch n.d.). Accordingly, since “the generation after” has no direct, experiential relationship to the past, post-memory is emphatically characterised by “imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (Hirsch n.d.). What has made Hirsch’s thinking especially compelling for comics studies is her interest in visual memorial traces of the past, and photography in particular,

Introduction  15

as embodiments of post-memory and her notion on the productive relationship between different modes of representation (photography, comics, and verbal narration) in the workings of memory and trauma across generations. Following Hirsch, many scholars have continued to explore the visual capacities of the comics form to enable reckonings of and reflections upon transnational (family) histories shadowed by trauma. In an analysis of Vietnamerica, for example, Mary Goodwin (2015) draws attention to the creative use of maps, landscapes, and other topographical elements in thematising memory’s geographical and spatial dimensions and in visualising personal, collective, and generational memories and habits of remembering related to a traumatic past. While traumas related to displacement have most often been discussed in comics studies from the perspective of victims or their offspring, Ann Miller (2015a) has drawn attention to the perspectives of the perpetrators as well. Analysing Morvandiau’s D’Algérie (2007), which engages with its author’s heritage with the French colonial settlers in Algeria, Miller points towards different features of graphic storytelling that enable making the complexities, discrepancies, and omissions in personal and collective memorialisations present in a way that is critical of the colonisers’ version of the past yet offers “not disillusion but agency” (Miller 2015a, 88). As highlighted by the discussions on comics’ capacities to reflect upon the complex entanglements of personal and public remembrance, to challenge hegemonic interpretations of the past, and to facilitate the voicing of marginalised memories, memory and remembrance are political matters, particularly if the past is marked by violence, injury, and trauma. Indeed, while comics’ engagements with the past may be regarded as identity work through which the migratory subjects reflect upon their migratory heritage or try to get a grip on a past troubled by trauma, narratives of past violence, injustices, and trauma may be mobilised as claims of recognition, reconciliation, and responsibility. Thus, as Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman (2009, 10) suggest, the concept of trauma inhabits a central position in contemporary Western human rights discourse, being a framework of recognition that is “not simply the cause of the suffering that is being treated [but] also a resource that can be used to support a right”. When remembrance and comics recollections of past migrations and displacements are approached in terms of readership and the demands that these comics potentially make of their readers and the communities at which they are aimed, the themes of memory and trauma overlap with the themes of witnessing and human rights.

Witnessing and human rights While the verb “to witness” refers to an act of seeing or experiencing something happening and “a witness” is a person who can provide testimony based on experiential knowledge, in scholarship on migration-themed comics (and in contemporary comics studies more broadly) the term is mostly employed in relation to events and circumstances characterised by violence, suffering, and trauma. In the case of migration-themed comics, witnessing, in other words, is understood as speaking

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and visualising the (painful) “truth” of migration, a practice that is mostly associated with documentary comics and has significant ethical and political gravity. While comics’ visual-verbal strategies of configuring testimony have been discussed extensively since the wide scholarly attention to Maus in the 1990s, a particularly influential formulation in recent discussions has been Hillary Chute’s Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (2016). In the book, the development of documentary comics is studied in connection to war and crises in the 20th century and earlier, with specific attention to the affordances of the comics form to perform “visual witnessing” in the face of (past) atrocities. Recently, comics’ capacities to convey visual testimony have been noted as especially palpable in the growing number of “detention comics” that attend to migrant incarceration and map places of confinement located on the fringes of nation-states and their urban centres. One of these is “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” (Olle and Wallman 2014), a journalistic online comic based on interviews with a former guard at the notorious detention facilities in Australia and published by The Global Mail. Nabizadeh (2016, 355; see also Humphrey 2016) argues that while the comic literally “carves new spaces of visibility” by graphically materialising places where representatives of the media are not allowed to enter and that are carefully kept out of public view, it simultaneously performs vital human rights work by foregrounding detention centres’ lived realities in a way that challenges existing assumptions about the detainees and gives recognition to them as individuals. Witnessing and visibility are central themes in many comics based on fieldwork on actual sites. From the perspective of a reporter-witness (Joe Sacco’s Palestine is often regarded as the starting point of this type of “refugee comics”; see Davies 2020b, 385), these document life in migrant encampments or shed light on border-crossings and management in “border regions”, such as the Mediterranean or the US–Mexico border. In this volume, comics journalists’ work of witnessing is explored in Aura Nikkilä’s chapter, “To see and to show: Photography, drawing, and refugee representation in comics journalism on refugee camps”. She examines the ways in which photographs and photographing as well as drawing are reflected upon in three journalistic comics that report from official or unofficial refugee camps. Analysing the dynamics of power in the encounters between the comics journalists and the camp inhabitants, Nikkilä considers the visibilities that refugees are given in these comics and whether their representations move beyond tropes of refugees as victims or as threats, as is familiar from humanitarian communication and (xenophobic) media discourse. While Chute (2016, 30) is reluctant to associate comics’ visual witnessing (as analysed in relation to Spiegelman, Sacco, and others) with human rights discourse, arguing that it is not about a “statutory conception of rights, or . . . lobbying for justice”, others have done just that by linking contemporary (migration-themed) comics to discourses, narratives, and representational practices related to human rights, such as “humanitarian witnessing” (Scherr 2015b, 2021) and “advocacy” (Mickwitz 2020a, 277; 2020b, 459), or by using formulations like “graphic human

Introduction  17

rights writing” (Salmi 2016) or “the human rights graphic novel” (Nayar 2021). Accordingly, although only some migration-themed comics have such a direct relationship to humanitarian work and human rights organisations, such as the NGOproduced “crisis comics” discussed by Smith or the documentary long-form comic Liebe deinen Nächsten: Auf Rettungsfahrt im Mittelmeer an Bord der Aquarius (2017) by Gaby von Borstel and Peter Eickmeyer, which portrays the work of the humanitarian organisation SOS Mediterranee, they are – through their subject matter as well as through their strategies of representation – nevertheless embedded in what may be called the cultural realm of human rights, where jurisdictional and institutional norms and conceptions of rights and responsibility are shaped, reflected upon, and negotiated (see McClennen and Slaughter 2009). A recurring issue in discussions on comics that document the plight of migrants concerns the ethical questions related to the mobilisation of representations of pain and suffering, a central feature of “the social imaginary of normative human rights” (Moore 2015, 7) at large. It may be argued that documentation of migrants’ physical and psychological suffering is required to shed light on their situation, to bear evidence of the violent operations of border regimes and migration management, and to evoke and strengthen empathy and solidarity in host populations; in the most optimistic scenario, this may raise critical awareness of struggles related to migration, strengthen the societal position of migrants, and contribute to improvements in migration laws and politics. Yet, representations of suffering may also victimise migrants, making their helplessness and powerlessness appear as (essential) properties of their subjectivity rather than circumstances characterising their position within unequal legal-political frameworks. Ethical questions also arise with regard to production and reception. If a human rights-oriented comic is based on interviews or other close engagements with individuals in a vulnerable position, how should artists deal with the consequence that their attempts to communicate other people’s painful experiences and deplorable situations to a wider public may “bring pain back into being” (Scherr 2015b, 187)? And finally, whose interest does recounting others’ suffering serve: those who are or have been in pain or those who can observe the suffering from a distance and be disturbed, moved, or even titillated by it? In this volume, the ethical and political implications of representations of migrant suffering are discussed in Anna Vuorinne’s chapter, “Tears of a refugee: Melodramatic life writing and Reinhard Kleist’s Der Traum von Olympia”. Using the “semifictional biography” of the Somalian sprinter and refugee Samia Yusuf Omar as an example, she proposes the concept of “melodramatic life writing” to describe a common mode of narration in contemporary refugee comics, where the representation of “real” circumstances, people, and experiences merges with the melodramatic rhetoric of Manichean morality and excessive emotionality. While she shares the common scepticism towards the critical potential of conventional melodramatic narratives that often run the risk of oversimplifying ethico-political issues and naturalising the position of underprivileged individuals and groups, her conclusion is that scholars should not turn away from conventions and conventionality but

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rather ask what kinds of new or alternative uses and interpretations might emerge from and through a dialogue with them. Indeed, migrants’ painful experiences and struggles may also be represented in such a way that, instead of undermining their agency and producing the opposition of “victims” and “saviours”, it foregrounds migrant resilience and strives for building solidarities across different social positions. Issues of resilience and solidarity are at the core of Anna Nordenstam and Margareta Wallin Wictorin’s chapter, “Feminist comics activism: Stories about migrant women in Sweden by Amalia Alvarez and Daria Bogdanska”, where the intersection of witnessing and human rights is explored from the perspective of feminist activism. Reading Alvarez’s and Bogdanska’s comics as documentary representations of migrant women’s struggles and resistance in Swedish society, Nordenstam and Wallin Wictorin argue that their comics are activist art with both educational and empowering purposes. While raising awareness of the discrimination and abuse faced by migrant women in Sweden, they give minority readers who might have similar experiences the resources to fight against race- and gender-based oppression. As scholarship on human rights-oriented comics (and especially on Sacco’s work) has pointed out, comics may provide a platform for critiques of hegemonic human rights discourse. By making tropes, conventions, and norms of human rights discourse visible, comics may invite their reader to an ethical contemplation of how the suffering of others is framed and what effects these framings have (Scherr 2015a, 2015b). Ultimately, this may engage readers in new practices of reading about conflicts, displacement, and suffering and apprehending human rights at large (Salmi 2016). In recent studies on migration-themed comics, their subversive potential with regard to human rights representation has been discussed most extensively in relation to “highly depersonalized” (Rifkind 2017, 650) strategies of representation. While differing in their theoretical orientations and perspectives, these studies share a common interest in the “space of migration” (Vågnes 2015, 162), as they draw attention from representations of displaced individuals that give “a human face to suffering” (Schaffer and Smith 2004, 3) to representations of geographies, infrastructures, and built environments that shape and are shaped by migration. In her studies on the representations of demolished environments and ruins, Scherr suggests that “draw[ing] the ground into a web of affective figuration that we have long associated with bodies” (Scherr 2020, 475–476; see also Scherr 2021) might help readers better grasp the scales of violence and destruction that cause suffering and displacement. With a similar focus on the built environment, in a reading of Tings Chak’s Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention (2014), Rifkind (2020) proposes that renderings of the carceral architectures of migrant detention may work both as a spatial-experiential-affective simulation of migrant incarceration and as a critique of contemporary migration regimes. If these examples are primarily concerned with how comics may materialise the violence inflicted on or by certain places and environments, Davies’ (2019) discussion on “the braided geographies of refugee narratives” points towards the strategies available in graphic

Introduction  19

narration to resist spatial configurations of violence. Focusing on the “spatial grammar” of comics that allows “braided, multi-directional relationships between different geographic spaces” to materialise, he argues for the potential of comics to challenge violent border regimes and suggests new “counter-geographic” and “decolonising imaginaries” (Davies 2019, 130–131). While the sentiment of “spaces and places, not faces” (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2017; see also Davies 2019, 129) characterises the approach of all three scholars, they differ in their takes on the empathetic possibility conventionally associated with human rights narratives. Both Scherr and Rifkind propose that the power of human rights graphic narratives representing the built environment instead of people lies in their potential to reinvigorate and reassess affective sensibilities to recognise the pain and suffering of others. However, Davies (2019; see also 2020a) remains more wary towards comics’ empathetic possibilities, insisting that the critical human rights work, or “decolonial impulse”, of migration-themed comics needs to be discussed in terms beyond empathy if the scholarship wants to address comics’ potential to challenge problematic conventions of human rights representation. This reflects a broader tendency in discussions on migration-themed comics, where comics’ potential and strategies to create and mobilise empathy as well as other readerly responses have been recurring topics of interest and debate.

Readerly engagements and empathy As our discussion has already indicated, the meanings of comics’ representations of migration are related not only to what they represent and how they do it but also to their effects on their audiences, or to “comics’ transitive potential .  .  . its ability to do things, to intervene in a reader’s world” (Scherr 2015b, 184, italics in the original). The scholarship on migration-themed comics has been deeply invested in examining comics’ possible effects on their readers, ranging from their manner of challenging predefined assumptions and stereotypical notions related to migrants to their way of offering alternative perspectives on migration imageries circulated in other media and to their means of introducing renewed forms of political reasoning and emotional attunement. While many comics directed at Western non-migrant readers evidently aim at inducing empathetic reactions and hospitality towards migrants, comics may be instrumentalised for completely different purposes as well, for example, producing hostility, fear, and hatred. Echoing wider debates on the relationship between (narrative) art and empathy in general and on affective economies of human rights representation in particular, the discussions about comics’ transitive potential have, however, most often been concerned with comics’ capacities to invite empathy with migrants – that is, experiences of identification, recognition, and/or affective resonance – in their readers; related to that, the discussions have also dealt with the critical potential and limitations of empathy as a moral emotion. Understood as identification with another person, an early example of empathy in migration-themed comics can be found in Gillian Whitlock’s (2006) discussion

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of Persepolis. Drawing on Scott McCloud’s idea that comics’ simplistic or “iconic” representation of human faces carries the power of promoting readerly identification, she argues that the iconic or cartoonish portrayal of the characters in Persepolis makes them appear as “icons through which even those of us placed as ‘the other ones,’ outside the frame, may feel an empathic association” (Whitlock 2006, 976–977). Also reflecting upon the iconicity of characters’ faces in Persepolis, Joseph Darda (2013, 39–40) takes a more critical perspective vis-à-vis McCloud’s theorisation. According to Darda, McCloud’s model of readerly engagement – where the iconic representation of a comics character is regarded as akin to the “mindimage” that readers have of themselves – is characterised by narcissism rather than by empathic attunement and ethical obligation towards another person. For Darda (2013, 41), the ethical value of Satrapi’s comic, and graphic narratives in general, does not lie in their capacity to suggest similarity and identification but instead rests in their “communicating proximity rather than sameness or categorical difference”. In a similar vein, Davies (2018) problematises the notion of empathetic identification, or the direct access to the experiences and emotional life of another person. According to him, the problem with the idea of empathetic identification in the case of migration-themed comics, which often deal with difficult or even traumatic experiences of displaced people, is, initially, that it assumes “access to the first-hand experience of the trauma of the immigrant experience” and, secondly, that it proposes a “conditional acceptance of the stranger”, as identification is the only way to recognition and hospitality (Davies 2018, n.p.). In this volume, the implications of identification are discussed in Christina M. Knopf ’s chapter, “The politics of inversion in Americatown: Limits in public pedagogy”. With a focus on the strategy of inversion, which is identified as a typical trope in antiracist texts, Knopf discusses “role reversal” in Americatown (2015) by Bradford Winters, Larry Cohen, and Daniel Irizarri. Knopf examines how the roles of “the immigrant” and “the native” are flipped in the comic as a way of inviting a white, natural-born US American readership to identify with immigrants, especially those with a Latin American background. Knopf concludes, By identifying with the American immigrant, readers [of Americatown] may gain insight as to what drives people to cross borders, broaden their perspective of what it means to be an undocumented or irregularly immigrated resident, to see how immigration is a culturally racialized concept, and/or what it is to be excluded or subjugated based on demographic characteristics. Yet she remains sceptical about the comic’s critical potential. Its pedagogical value is equivocal, she argues, not only because the inverted narrative reaffirms racial hierarchies and stereotypical conceptions regarding migration and migrant populations but also because the inversion remains incomplete in its triumphalist ideas of the United States and its citizens. Even if there is a common tendency to regard empathy as a positive readerly response, it carries several complications, especially if it is understood in terms of

Introduction  21

identification with “the strange” or “the unfamiliar”. Nevertheless, several scholars have noted that identification might not be the only or even the best way to conceptualise empathy. In his analysis of foreignness in Tan’s The Arrival and Paula Bulling’s Im Land der Frühaufsteher (2012), Singer (2020) approaches empathy through the idea of simulation. Arguing that the experience of foreignness or alienation is a central theme in both comics, which focus on the experiences of newly arrived immigrants, he proposes that the theme is communicated not only through the comics’ content but also through their narrative and visual strategies. While noting that these strategies are aimed at evoking experiences of strangeness or confusion in readers, Singer does not assume a correspondence between their experiences and those of the immigrant protagonists. Instead, he suggests, echoing Darda’s viewpoint, that such strategies place those in proximity to each other. If Singer’s article takes part in the debates on empathy in a somewhat indirect manner, Rifkind’s (2020) article on “compassion comics” – discussed earlier in relation to the representation of the built environment in detention comics – is an explicit intervention. Similarly, steering beyond identification and towards a simulative and self-reflective understanding of comics’ affective workings, her term “compassion comics” describes a “dual recognition” that migrant detention comics may evoke as they “draw their subjects and readers closer together in a more engaged, intimate relationship of knowledge of the other and . . . the self ” (Rifkind 2020, 301). The attempt of expanding and complicating the conception of empathy in comics studies guides Aura Nikkilä and Anna Vuorinne’s (2020) discussion on empathy’s different varieties in Hanneriina Moisseinen’s war- and displacementthemed comic The Isthmus (2016). They argue that “empathy should be understood as a multidimensional phenomenon of imagination, feeling, and understanding” that, at best, takes the form of openness towards difference and is characterised not only by emotional and embodied resonance but by intellectual reflection as well (Nikkilä and Vuorinne 2020, 2). In sum, while these scholars acknowledge that readerly empathy may take the form of mere projection of readers’ own emotions, experiences, and assumptions onto others, they maintain that it still has the potential for the cultivation of more critical and other-directed sensibilities. Notwithstanding the possible complexity of empathy and its value as a moral feeling, empathy is only one possible readerly response evoked by comics’ representations of migration. In the final chapter of this volume, “Intolerable fictions: Composing refugee realities in comics”, Dominic Davies takes this idea as one of his starting points as he calls for alternatives to authenticity-centred and empathyoriented models of analysing refugee comics. He argues that if we, as scholars, want to reach a more comprehensive understanding of refugee comics’ critical potential as representations, it is necessary to expand our analytical focus from notions of documentation and authenticity to notions of “fictionality” and “composition”, keeping in mind that empathy may not be the only answer when reflecting upon politically transformative readerly responses. With the help of Susan Sontag and Jacques Rancière, as well as Benjamin Dix and Lindsay Pollock’s comic, Vanni: A Family’s Struggle Through the Sri Lankan Conflict (2019), he sketches an alternative approach

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to documentary refugee comics, where the focus is not on “a straight line between their readerly perception and an ambiguously defined political action” but instead on “new configurations of what can be thought of, what can be seen, and . . . what action might be possible”.

From representations to other uses of comics Representation is a social activity, and therefore comics representing migration are always entangled with various other practices. Comics take part in political debates around migration; they negotiate identities in transnational and transcultural settings; they formulate recollections and archival traces of the past displacements into histories of human mobility; they produce knowledge about current migrants’ struggles; they contribute to discourses of rights and responsibility; and they appeal to their readers’ intellect, emotions, and morals in different ways. While the cultural, social, and political work that comics do vis-à-vis migration can be perceived on the textual level – that is, on the page (or, in the case of webcomics, on the screen) – it is crucial to turn the perspective “beyond the page” (Scorer 2020, 2; italics original) as well, to look into what is done with and through comics by different actors in various forms of social interaction related to migration. In the following sections, we turn our attention to the practices and processes where comics and their representations are put to use and, more precisely, to the kind of research on comics and migration that foregrounds not the texts but the practices surrounding them. The focus could also be described with reference to the different actors involved in these practices. Writing about refugee comics in the framework of advocacy, where comics take it upon themselves to speak for others, Mickwitz proposes that they cannot be studied only on a textual level (Mickwitz 2020a, 293; 2020b, 459). Instead, they need to be examined by taking into account the different actors associated with their production and consumption – “subjects, creators, publishers, funding bodies, readers, and critics” (Mickwitz 2020b, 459) – as parts of power-infused networks of relations. In her mapping, Mickwitz (2020a) describes several different refugee comics with regard not only to narrative or representational patterns but also to their production contexts and relations to different fields, such as human rights work and comics publishing. Turning our focus to the practices surrounding comics and migration, we take seriously Mickwitz’s call for a multifaceted study of refugee comics, yet we also hope to extend the outlook on the entanglements of comics and migration from a broader perspective. Many of the chapters in this volume open up views on those aspects of the production and consumption of comics that Mickwitz anticipates. They provide insight into the creative processes of artists and the political aspirations of organisations that use comics. It is clear, however, that the perspective on comics as representations is never far off. In her chapter, “Humans on the move: Some thoughts about approaching migration as a journalist in comics”, journalist Taina Tervonen uses her extensive experience of reportage on migration in both Finland and

Introduction  23

France to discuss her thought processes and ethical considerations when first doing journalism in the comics form with artist Jeff Pourquié. Tervonen’s description of the creative process and journalistic work provide explanations for the representational choices visible in comics. Even more so, the discussion provides the reader with insight into the journalistic field and the preconditions of working with comics journalism. In the following, we will investigate other areas of comics production: first, studies of NGO-produced comics, which often represent the practice of advocacy; second, the practice of comics workshops, providing novice creators with the opportunity to produce comics art; and, third, comics and migration in the field of education. This summarises the current state of research into the uses of comics among different actors.

NGO-produced comics and advocacy The connection between the information provided by and the readerly reactions induced by the representations in comics on migration needs to be approached in terms of what purposes comics on migration are produced for and by whom. Advocacy is one answer to the first question, and in the scholarly literature on comics, the most common answer to the second is probably PositiveNegatives (see Burrell and Hörschelmann 2019; Davies 2019; Precup and Manea 2020; Wong et al. 2020). Under the motto “True Stories, Drawn from Life”, since 2012 this non-profit organisation has produced comics and animations on humans’ experiences in situations of conflict and crisis. Many of the comics focus on the lives and destinies of refugees. In the stories, the individual human being and their experiences provide the lens for approaching and raising awareness about global social issues. One of the reasons for such relatively widespread academic interest is the organisation’s explicitly voiced methodology for comics production, in addition to its activists’ academic connections, especially those of its founder, the anthropologist and former UN official and photojournalist Benjamin Worku-Dix (aka Benjamin Dix). The creation of personal stories is based on collaborative and participatory practices (Wong et al. 2020) that have been regarded as producing “horizontal agency” among the different parties involved in the process (Precup and Manea 2020, 262). The comics may be commissioned by partner organisations or researchers. They are based on interviews with subjects who are also involved in subsequent phases of production. When possible, the subjects can comment on scripts and drafts and are given access to the final products. In addition, an aim of skill-sharing may also be on the agenda, as in the case of the animation “Dear Habib” by Majid Adin and Team Tumult about a young, unaccompanied minor from Afghanistan who settles in the United Kingdom. The subject, Habib, was not only an informant but also a participant in the production and thus given the opportunity to acquire some skill in animation. (Wong et al. 2020, 318). While these means to incorporate subjects in the production process and to ensure that their voices are heard show that PositiveNegatives pays significant attention to the problematic aspects of advocacy, the

24  Anna Vuorinne and Ralf Kauranen

fact that the stories are always mediated is a concern that cannot be ignored. For example, while Kathy Burrell and Kathrin Hörschelmann (2019, 60) laud the three comics of “A Perilous Journey”, based on the stories of Syrian male refugees in Scandinavia and published in 2015, for their decolonising potential based on the centring of the Syrian men’s perspectives and knowledge, they also state that the comics, due to their “western context” of production and consumption, “are, and can only ever be, just partially radical in their decoloniality”. The stories collected by PositiveNegatives have been regarded as a shared, transnational “memory space” (Precup and Manea 2020) and a “decolonial archive” (Burrell and Hörschelmann 2019). Concerning this collection or archive of knowledge, which has its very concrete form on the PositiveNegatives homepage, Precup and Manea (2020, 268) state that a “narrative blueprint” can be found there, despite the focus being on individuals’ personal experiences. On the one hand, this attests to the similarities of routes and experiences of being a refugee, and on the other, it risks the presentation of a universalised image of the refugee and of human suffering due to conflict more generally. The stories follow a general pattern of first outlining a peaceful beginning (“a space of nostalgia”; Precup and Manea 2020, 268), which is disturbed by conflict and disorder, followed by an insecure arrival in safety (in Europe in the refugee stories). According to Precup and Manea, the stories do not pay sufficient attention to the political circumstances of the protagonists or their different locations. The narrative similarities, however, provide for a predictability of and complementarity between stories: “where some of the stories stop, others begin; where some of the narrators skip details or cut the story short, others provide more fully-fledged accounts” (Precup and Manea 2020, 265). Thus, the accumulating collection of stories can also be seen as a means to push a more common message concerning social issues besides the testimonials and personal messages of the individual stories. A central aspect of the activism and advocacy of PositiveNegatives seems to be the care put into the distribution of completed stories. Also in this case, as in the production of the stories, collaborative practices are crucial. PositiveNegatives has cooperated with large media outlets. For example, the comics of “A Perilous Journey” were published in The Guardian in the United Kingdom and Aftenposten in Norway and exhibited at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, and later some parts were exhibited in London at the Brunei Gallery in the School of African and Oriental Studies (Davies 2019, 125). A concerted effort to reach the political elite and affect government policies was the submission of the comic “Abike’s Story” to the UK parliament in 2015. This comic, on human trafficking, was “used to humanize the policy papers which formed part of the UK’s Modern-Day Slavery Act. These legislative reforms were successfully passed by the UK Parliament later that year”, according to PositiveNegatives’ Sara Wong and colleagues (2020, 321). Wong and colleagues (2020, 324–325) have also highlighted the use of PositiveNegatives’ comics as learning resources in pedagogical settings. Not only are many of the comics attempts to popularise research findings, but also a special platform for such materials has been set up as part of the PositiveNegatives website,

Introduction  25

PosNeg Learning. Drawing on the experiences of the use of the comic “Almaz’s Story” vis-à-vis modern-day slavery, trafficking, and exploitation in one classroom in Kinshasa, Congo, Wong et al. illustrate the functions of comics as pedagogical tools. Based on student responses, they suggest that comics reading leads to different responses, including empathy with the protagonist, a willingness to learn more about a phenomenon, and attempts to find political solutions to global problems. There is, of course, an abundance of other NGO-produced comics dealing with migration. In contrast to the PositiveNegatives project, these comics have been commissioned and produced by an organisation or a project for whom the production of a comic is only one small part of their activities. Some international examples are: Karrie Fransman’s “Over Under Sideways Down” (2014), produced in cooperation with the Red Cross in the United Kingdom (see Miller 2015b); the Swedish comic book Vi ska ses igen, Sanam (We will meet again, Sanam; Ekman and Bergting 2013) produced by the children’s rights organisation Friends; the comics of the French NGO Solidarités International’s “Meantime” project in 2017 (see Mickwitz 2020a, 281); and the project “El viaje más caro – The Most Costly Journey” in Vermont, USA, connecting local migrant farmworkers and comics artists (see Bennett et al. 2021). Research on such oneoff attempts by advocacy groups to bring forth their message in “crisis comics” (Smith 2011) is scarce. The object of Laura Nallely Hernández Nieto and Iván Facundo Rubinstein’s chapter “From representations of suffering migrants to appreciation of the Mexican American legacy in the United States: The NGO-produced comics Historias migrantes” is the change of politics over the two volumes of the comic book Historias migrantes published by the organisation Finestra Gestoría Cultural, active in Zacatecas, Mexico. Their analysis shows how the reception of the first volume, which provided a gloomy picture of migration from Mexico to the United States, resulted in a second volume that approached migration from the more positive perspective of portraying Mexican influence and culture in the US context. In this case, as in other advocacy comics, the voice of migrants is indirect, mediated by research, interviews, or feedback, as with Historias migrantes, and comics artists putting it all in visual form at the end. Another category of comics comprises those produced by migrants themselves, such as “Miksi?” described in the beginning of this chapter. The voice used in a Finnish antiracist comic is the topic of Olli Löytty’s chapter, “Racist and national(ist) symbols in a Finnish antiracist comics zine”. The comics zine Nyt riittää!/Enough is Enough! was produced as a collective effort in the Finnish comics field as a reaction to the country’s harshening political climate and outright racist and xenophobic reactions to newly arrived asylum seekers in the autumn of 2015. Analysing the use of “sticky” symbols of nationalism and racism in the zine’s comics and reflecting upon his own position and the zine’s production in a Finnish context marked by whiteness, Löytty finds that the zine broadly represents a form of antiracism that denounces the racist and xenophobic expressions of fellow Finns in the country’s local context of whiteness. However, while the zine’s comics

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represent a hospitable attitude towards newcomers, only a few examples broaden the scope of the antiracist discourse in this racially defined national space.

Comics workshops and self-expression The “Illustrating Me” project is one example (as is the activity described by Fitzgerald in her comic Drawn to Berlin, mentioned before) of comics workshops enabling migrants and refugees themselves to produce comics and give expression to their own thoughts and voices. Drawings as a means of self-expression are at the centre of the activities of the Dessins sans papiers association that has organised workshops with refugees in France since 2016 (Figure 1.2). Some results of these workshops have been published as books mixing visual and verbal narration in creative ways, being more reminiscent of picture books or artists’ books than comic books (see Adem 2018; Hagar 2018; Ndepe Tahar 2018). Another case is the project “Graphic Lives: Telling Bangladeshi Migrant Women’s Stories through Graphic Narratives”, described in Sarah McNicol’s research (2018, 2019, 2020). Part research project, part educational program, the participants – nine women born in Bangladesh and living in the same community in the United Kingdom – “explored their own life stories and the historical narratives of their communities through workshops on life history, cross-cultural storytelling and digital skills” (McNicol 2018, 284). The participants were to produce their own digital comics. While the “Illustrating Me” workshops usually have lasted only a few hours, the “Graphic Lives” project was considerably more comprehensive with its five-month period of weekly workshops. In both cases, however, the preparation for comics creation has included familiarisation with visual and comics-specific narrative strategies and character design. Unlike the “Illustrating Me” workshops, which focus solely on drawing, the “Graphic Lives” project had a multimedia orientation, as the use of photographs in the comics was possible. As McNicol notes with reference to earlier studies, a lack of drawing experience and insecurities concerning drawing skills may be off-putting for some participants. However, McNicol (2019, 240) explains that the women of “Graphic Lives” were “open to the idea of drawing”. The results of the “Illustrating Me” workshops also show that drawing does not need to be a stumbling block. In addition to improving digital skills, the process of making comics was also a means for the participants to improve their English language skills (McNicol 2018). McNicol’s analyses of selected comics show how the medium proved to be a good way to discuss issues that otherwise were not easily expressed. The multimodality characteristic of comics narration allowed the participants to deal with traumatic issues in a way that could be nuanced and in accord with their own wishes. The coexistence of multiple images in comics also allowed for a depiction of the copresence of the past and present in stories where the women were telling about their identities. In the end, the novice creators in the workshops, new to making comics, “felt that the act of creating comics, and of reading one another’s, offered them

Introduction  27

FIGURE 1.2  Flyer

from the Dessins sans papiers organisation. Distributed at the Angoulême comics festival in 2019.

Source: Reproduced with the permission of Dessins sans papiers.

ways to express memories that were difficult to discuss in other circumstances and media” (McNicol 2020, 100). McNicol (2019, 240–241) is critical of the viewpoint, assumed in other projects involving participant research, that “Graphic Lives” would “give” the participants a voice. Instead, she carefully states that the project’s function was to ensure that

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the participants mastered “narrative resources” that enabled them to tell their own stories in different ways “in their own voices”. This conceptual difference is illustrative of a central dimension in most productions of comics in relation to migration: who has the power to give voice to others, and who has the possibility to use one’s own voice? Research needs to pay attention to the processes of mediation and facilitation in different settings, such as the comics field at large or more specific fields, such as NGO-produced comics or even community comics workshops.

Comics in education In their chapter, “Collaborative work, migrant representativity, and racism”, Adrián Groglopo and Amalia Alvarez raise the issue of representation and the possibilities for migrant, racialised minorities making themselves heard in Swedish society and the Swedish comics field. The discussion (partly in dialogue form) presents their cooperation on the antiracist dictionary published by the association Antirasistiska Akademin (Antiracist Academy). They propound that there is an acute need for antiracist comics produced by those having experiences of racism and the political awareness of their situation. With regard to the dictionary project with the aim of popularising scholarly antiracist discussions and terminology, Groglopo and Alvarez point at the power of cartoons to bring an ironic perspective to complement the social scientific scholarly discourse. As Groglopo and Alvarez’s case illustrates, similar to the results from the studies on comics workshops, comics and cartoons are often seen to have great educational potential. While the purpose of comics and cartoons may be that of complementing written educational material or adding alternative, critical, or humorous perspectives to it, as is the case with the dictionary, comics are also frequently used as educational tools in their own right. In a recent overview of comics pedagogy, Susan E. Kirtley, Antero Garcia, and Peter E. Carlson (2020, 12; original italics) usefully divide the educational uses of comics into the following categories: “Teaching with comics; Teaching about comics; Teaching through producing comics; and Teaching comics production as a means of processing thinking and learning”. The antiracist dictionary points to the potential of “teaching with comics”, whereas the comics workshops illustrate the fact that these categories of pedagogy are often intertwined: to be able to create comics, the participating novice creators are first provided with some education “about comics”. Only after that is the educational potential of learning “through producing comics” realised. While comics pedagogy occurs in different guises and educators are drawn to comics for various reasons, an assumption that often seems to inform educational uses of comics is that, in general, they represent a more accessible or engaging type of material than written text and are thus attractive also to those who shun the latter because of, for example, rudimentary reading skills or because they are learning a new language. While this might appear as a somewhat depreciative or uninformed view on comics reading, it is, however, accompanied by an appreciation of comics’ formal qualities, that is, their inherent multimodality and potential

Introduction  29

value in developing learners’ “multiliteracies”. As Robin L. Danzak (2011, 189) summarises the term coined by The New London Group, “This broad conceptualization of literacy highlights diversity, both of texts and of the individuals who create and interact with them”. While describing the competences required in the globalised, multimodal, and multimedial textual environment, as well as emphasising the cultural and linguistic diversity of those who participate in it, the term proposes a comprehensive conceptualisation of literacy that extends from language skills and textual comprehension to a critical civic practice that is required when navigating in the world (Danzak 2011, 189). In this framework, comics are recognised as a valuable pedagogical resource that not only may help to develop learners’ skills in critical multimodal reading and engage them in pressing global issues, such as migration, but can also provide a tool for language and literacy education in multilingual and culturally diverse settings. Reflecting the confidence in the educational potential of comics’ multimodality as well as the common view of comics providing alternative perspectives to refugee representation in the mainstream media, Claudia Deetjen (2018) discusses the usefulness of Joe Sacco’s “The Unwanted” (2010a, 2010b) as a tool for teaching multimodal reading and critical media literacy to students of English as a foreign language. In a similar vein, Michael D. Boatright (2010) deliberates on the pedagogical potential of three migration-themed comics (The Arrival, The Four Immigrants Manga, and American Born Chinese) in classrooms teaching English as the first language, examining them from the perspective of critical literacy pedagogy, where the focus is on developing learners’ abilities to detect and critically evaluate ideologies and power relations in texts. Discussing the insights provided by these comics regarding the experiences and histories of immigration, as well as their possible biases or blind spots, he concludes that the comics provide teachers with a “provocative resource” in “developing an analytical awareness of graphic novels’ power to represent immigrant experiences and how these representations privilege certain immigrant experiences while leaving countless other immigrant experiences untold” (Boatright 2010, 475). Students’ analyses of comics may help them understand broader historical and social phenomena, suggests Cian T. McMahon (2014), describing the successful use of cartoons on migration in a course called “Great Migrations in Modern Human History”. In addition to enhancing active learning, the use of digitised political cartoons, originally published before 1925, provided American students with a transnational outlook on migration as well as a means to compare historical discourses with current debates on migration. In addition to suggestions to use migration-themed comics in educational settings, there is ample research in this field. Most of the research can be described as having a predominant interest in different kinds of literacies among various groups of learners, but the studied uses extend that context. Given the interest in literacy, it might seem a bit surprising that a common denominator for many studies is Tan’s wordless comic The Arrival (see, e.g. Pantaleo and Bomphray 2011; Rhoades et al. 2015; Hanna 2022). Tan’s graphic narrative is also the centrepiece of the most extensive study in the field: Evelyn Arizpe, Teresa Colomer, Carmen

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Martínez-Roldán’s, et  al. Visual Journeys Through Wordless Narratives: An International Inquiry with Immigrant Children and The Arrival (2015). This ambitious project, carried out in multiple locations – Scotland, Spain, the USA, Australia, and Italy – explored visual literacy with wordless narratives read collectively by groups of children, among whom were both immigrant and native children and, consequently, children with different linguistic competencies. The aim was to study how the wordless comic (or picture book) enables children’s language learning and augments their cultural understanding. The wordless narrative turned out to be a good tool for language learning: in combination with the encouraging, facilitated space of the reading groups, the wordless mode helped children overcome linguistic barriers. The migration-themed visual narrative also provided the children with an opportunity to reflect on their own migrant identities as well as on more general, hegemonic understandings of migration in society. The broad pedagogical conclusion that the authors (2015, 199) draw on the basis of the study is that the education of immigrant children must be inclusive and take notice of the competencies and knowledge that these children have. Furthermore, this is made possible by the use of multimodal materials that engage children regardless of their differing linguistic competencies. The “Graphic Journeys” project, which was targeted at children who learn English as another language and carried out in a middle school in Florida, had a similar objective as Arizpe and colleagues’ project, as it aimed not only at developing learners’ linguistic skills but also at leading them to reflect upon their migratory experiences and heritage as part of their identities (Danzak 2011). The pedagogical methods were different, however, since the main focus of the “Graphic Journeys” project was not on reading but on making comics. With the production of fullcolour hardcover graphic stories as its final target, the six-month-long educational project included several kinds of preparative exercises in multimodal writing and reading, which included the keeping of personal journals, reading comics together, and conducting interviews with families. Reflecting on the implications of the project, Danzak (2011, 195) concludes that while developing competence in language and literacy, it gave the participants an experience that their perspectives and stories matter and provided them with skills to express themselves creatively. While these projects evidence the pedagogical benefits of comics in transcultural and multilingual settings, Helen Hanna (2022) gives an important reminder of the possible limitations and blind spots that these kinds of educational approaches might entail. Similarly to Arizpe and colleagues, Hanna carried out an empirical research project where The Arrival – chosen as education/research material for its “potential to offer representation and the opportunity for storytelling” – was used as a tool for teaching and researching critical literacy among migrant primary school learners in South Africa (Hanna 2022, 43). The fieldwork steered her research in a new direction, however, as she became interested in the learners’ (Black migrant children) reluctance to engage in conversations about certain topics with her (“a White researcher from a former coloniser”), most importantly the topic of race. She insists that teachers and researchers working with children’s literacy education

Introduction  31

should acknowledge refusal, or “silence and absence”, as genuine expressions of children’s agency and allow them to discuss and interpret reading materials freely without “trying to control the process to the extent that they [researchers and teachers] define the narrative” (Hanna 2022, 47). While comics’ educational benefits are today framed with rather recent developments, such as the intensified multimodality and transculturality of contemporary media spheres, the idea of using comics as tools of education is not new. Sylvia Kesper-Biermann points to this in her chapter, “The long road to Almanya: Comics in language education for ‘guest workers’ in West Germany, 1970s–1980s”. Through a case study of Feridun: Ein Lesebuch und Sprachprogramm nicht nur für Türken – an example of language-learning material where comics and cartoons played a prominent role – she sheds light on the ways in which comics were used in immigrant workers’ language education in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s and how the use of comics was motivated in the pedagogical discourse of the time. While the language education through comics was aimed at making the “guest workers” active participants in German society and even at building solidarities between “foreign” and “native” workers, Kesper-Biermann’s analysis of the materials, particularly their illustrations, shows that in fact they only reinforced the assumed differences between “Germans” and “guest workers”, defining the latter through their “fundamental alienness”. One chapter of the present volume is still to be presented. In the chapter “Contracts via comics: Migrant workers and Thai fishing vessel employment contracts”, Anne Ketola, Eliisa Pitkäsalo, and Robert de Rooy analyse a legal employment contract in comics format produced to prevent labour exploitation and facilitate the fulfilment of the legal rights of migrant employees from Cambodia and Myanmar in Thailand’s fishing industries. They argue that the comics format provides the possibility for comprehension in a situation marked by language differences and that an intelligible, transparent contract may increase awareness of and prohibit corrupted practices. The case it describes brings forth yet another perspective on the practices connecting migration and comics by foregrounding the intersection of comics and legal practices, a subfield of comics production and research that has been dubbed as “Graphic Justice” (see Giddens 2016). At the same time, it has numerous connections to the themes discussed earlier. It involves the activities of an NGO working for migrants’ rights; it presents comics as a solution to overcome linguistic barriers; and it suggests that comics can consolidate the legal position of migrant workers.

What this book is about The comic “Miksi?” presented at the beginning of the chapter is a relatively simple creation or text: it consists of a template of four panels, a monotonous ink line in both drawings and letters, the repetition of the geometric (talking) head of a sole protagonist, and crude lettering. Compared to the many celebrated works by renowned artists also analysed in the chapters of this volume, “Miksi?” seems to

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offer little material for the curious reader. Yet, what “Miksi?” shares with all other comics is its status as a part of a whole network of practices. For the novice artists of “Miksi?” – Mohammed, Yasseen, and Salam – to create the comic, numerous conditions are fulfilled. The organisation and activists of World Comics Finland must plan, finance, and schedule the workshop together with other potential organisers. Workshop participants must be found. Materials such as pencils, marker pens, paper of different sizes, rubbers, and rulers must be available. A flipchart, computer, and projector are useful for showing educational materials. The activity must take place in a room; tables and chairs are needed for the participants’ convenience. Instructors must educate the participants in comics storytelling and drawing, and interpreters may be needed to facilitate the communication between them. Everyone needs to have the right mindset for the task, and it may need to be enhanced with relaxation practices, snacks, or informal discussions at the beginning of a workshop. The participants must summon the stamina to pay attention to the instructional parts of the workshop, sketch their ideas and storyboards in pencil, sketch the comic on a larger scale, ink the final product, and consider whether to sign the comic with their real names, either with a pen name or not at all. They also have to read and discuss the produced comics with instructors and other participants, and perhaps sign a document provided by the organiser connected to approval of the publication and distribution of the comic they have created. Working spaces need to be tidied up, and comics and working materials need to be collected. Afterwards, the “Illustrating Me” comics are scanned, posted online on a dedicated website and in various social media, and occasionally exhibited physically. Here the comics find new readers, all involved in their own networks, that provide for the comic’s further life. For a seemingly simple comic such as “Miksi?” to be realised and for its potentials to be actualised during the process of creation and afterwards, in various forms of reception, convoluted conditions need to be met. If the comic is to provide its creators with the possibility of self-expression, the satisfaction of artistic production, or, for example, the relief of being able to voice their frustration and anger, and for the comic to finally reach readers, different human, material, economic, and textual resources must be mobilised. This is true of all other comics as well. In comics studies focused on comics as texts and their close reading, the resources that attract the most attention are the affordances of the medium’s formal or narrative conventions, for example, sequentiality, ellipsis, the co-presence of multiple images, the multimodality of words and images, and hand-drawing. While the comics format has been praised many times as particularly suitable for different purposes, more sceptical tones have also started to appear. Comics as the “art of tensions” (Hatfield 2005, 32–67) of various kinds may be suitable for the negotiation of variable identities, for the questioning of stereotypes, for the depiction of migrant geographies, for the sensitive treatment of traumatic histories, and for bringing forth personalised stories instead of anonymising media imagery, but their effects are the result of much more complex relations than those that are visible as aesthetic or narrative uses of comics’ affordances. The same also goes for those

Introduction  33

effects of comics that are deemed negative. Our modest proposal in this introduction and volume is that comics studies move towards paying more attention to the multiple entanglements that comics in general – and comics and migration in particular – are involved in. While differing in their topics of interest, disciplinary orientations, and theoretical perspectives, all chapters in this volume highlight the importance of studying comics in their respective contexts and in relation to different practices. Whether focusing on comics as representational practices or paying particular attention to the various other practices that comics are used for, the chapters highlight that representations or comics texts are always entangled with broader social processes and actions. This is realised in very different ways in the different chapters; while we have applied a slightly programmatic tone in this introductory chapter, the volume is not the result of the application of a single, common approach, question, theoretical framework, or methodological tool. The orientation towards what comics do and what is done with them is discussed sensitively with regard to each case and to specific research objects and research interests. Taken together, the chapters point at various ways of seeing comics as practices and how they are used. In the volume’s articles, this means examining comics’ medium-specific aesthetics and strategies of communication as well as tropes, conventions, and traditions that circulate across different media. It means that comics are interpreted within the cultural, social, and political environments of their production, publication, circulation, and consumption. This implies the identification of the different purposes that comics are used for in contexts of migration, taking into critical consideration the ideological, economic, and other factors that motivate them; it also calls for an analysis of the strategic and practical application of comics as well as reflection on the implications and outcomes of these applications. It might have been possible to organise the chapters according to the loose conceptual distinction between representation and other practices, but as we have repeatedly emphasised in this introductory chapter, making watertight distinctions between these is not possible or even preferable. These two dimensions are present in all parts and chapters of this book, even if they are given different emphases or approached from different angles. The book is divided into three parts. The first part, “Migration and the use of comics”, showcases the variety of comics practices by focusing on different kinds of applied uses of comics in the context of migration. As the case studies of the chapters extend from language training for “foreign workers” to the production of antiracist education material and from migrant-led activism to the uses of comics as instruments of sharing information and providing juridical assistance to migrants in vulnerable positions, all contributors engage with questions of power and agency in the networks of comics production and consumption. The second part, “Configurations of nationalism and migration”, focuses on nationalism in comics’ representations of migration and their contexts. The chapters draw attention to how comics may, on the one hand, reinforce nationalist, nativist, and xenophobic discourses and take part in the production of anti-immigrant sentiments and politics, and, on the

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other hand, reappropriate nationalist or anti-immigration symbols, narratives, and discourses to produce potentially more diverse or open meanings of nations and belonging. The final part, “Conventions and Revisions of Migration Narratives”, examines the conventions and norms that shape the narrative strategies and reading practices of comics (and other representations) about contemporary as well as historical displacement. Considering the ethical and political implications of prevalent patterns of narration, representation, and interpretation and reflecting upon alternatives to conventions that are possibly problematic or limited, the chapters foreground the role of graphic narration in making sense of migration. To underline our interest in the practices surrounding comics and their uses, we have included two types of texts in this volume. Although most chapters represent academic perspectives on comics and take the form of a standard research article, three chapters contain practitioners’ views on their work in a more essayistic form. These are Chapters 6, 11, and 14 by Groglopo and Alvarez, Dimitrova, and Tervonen, respectively. These have strong footholds in academic discussions, yet they focus on their authors’ reflections on comics as a means of communication. As comics studies still has some way to go to embrace practice-oriented approaches combining perspectives on representations with an interest in the processes of production, distribution, and reception, such statements by practitioners on their activities and ideas provide a necessary complement to the predominant interest in comics texts themselves. In addition to widening the scope of research towards practice-oriented perspectives, the volume also takes part in the attempt to extend comics studies towards cultural and linguistic areas that are underrepresented in (English-language) comics scholarship, including case studies that focus on comics texts and practices in northern Europe – Sweden, Germany, and Finland – as well as Thailand and Mexico. We do not imagine that this volume offers a final say on the entanglements of comics and migration. On the contrary, our wish is that its chapters inspire a continued multi-sited study of comics and migration in different geographic localities and in relation to a variety of practices.

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Hagar, Magdi. 2018. Livre I: Darfour. Paris: Dessins sans papiers. Hanna, Helen. 2022. “Recognising Silence and Absence as Part of Multivocal Storytelling in and Through Picturebooks: Migrant Learners in South Africa Engaging With The Arrival”. Literacy 56 (1): 40–49. https://doi.org/10.1111/lit.12269 Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Hirsch, Marianne. 1992. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory”. Discourse 15 (2): 3–29. Hirsch, Marianne. n.d. Postmemory. www.postmemory.net. Hong, Caroline Kyungah. 2014. “Disorienting the Vietnam War: GB Tran’s Vietnamerica as Transnational and Transhistorical Graphic Memoir”. Asian American Literature: Discourse and Pedagogies 5: 11–22. Humphrey, Aaron. 2016. “Picturing Placelessness: Online Graphic Narratives and Australia’s Refugee Detention Centres”. In Making Publics, Making Places, edited by Mary Griffiths and Kim Barbour, 49–73. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. https://doi. org/10.20851/publics icon Düsseldorf, ed. 2020. Krieg und Migration im Comic: Interdisziplinäre Analysen. Bielefeld: Transcript. Kirtley, Susan E., Antero Garcia, and Peter E. Carlson. 2020. “Introduction: A Once and Future Pedagogy”. In With Great Power Comes Great Pedagogy: Teaching, Learning, and Comics, edited by Susan E. Kirtley, Antero Garcia, and Peter E. Carlson, 3–19. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. http://dx.doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496826046.003.0001 Kiyama, Henry (Yoshitaka). 1999 [1931]. The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 (Translated by Frederik L. Schodt). Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press. Køhlert, Frederik Byrn. 2019. Serial Selves: Identity and Representation in Autobiographical Comics. New Brunswick, Camden, Newark, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Kraenzle, Christina. 2020. “Risking Representation: Abstraction, Affect, and the Documentary Mode in Birgit Weyhe’s Madgermanes”. Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 56 (3–4): 212–234. https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.56.3-4.01 Ma, Ning. 2021. “Beyond Race: The Monkey King and Creative Polyculturalism in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese”. Inks 5 (1): 61–78. https://doi.org/10.1353/ ink.2021.0003 Malkki, Liisa. 1995. “Refugee and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things”. Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1): 495–523. https://doi.org/10.1146/ annurev.an.24.100195.002431 Marie, Vincent, and Gilles Ollivier, eds. 2013. Albums. Des histoires dessinées entre ici et ailleurs. Bande dessinée et immigration 1913–2013. Paris: Futuropolis and Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration. McClennen, Sophia A., and Joseph R. Slaughter. 2009. “Introducing Human Rights and Literary Forms; Or, the Vehicles and Vocabularies of Human Rights”. Comparative Literature Studies 46 (1): 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cls.0.0061 McKinney, Mark. 2020. Postcolonialism and Migration in French Comics. Leuven: Leuven University Press. McKinney, Mark. 2021. “Naming the Place and Telling the Story in Demain, demain: Nanterre, bidonville de la Folie, 1962–1966, by Laurent Maffre”. In Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis, edited by Nhora Lucía Serrano, 89–102. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315643991 McMahon, Cian T. 2014. “Caricaturing Race and Nation in the Irish American Press, 1870–1880: A  Transnational Perspective”. Journal of American Ethnic History 33 (2): 33–56. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.33.2.0033

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McNicol, Sarah. 2018. “Telling Migrant Women’s Life Stories as Comics”. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 9 (4): 279–292. https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2018.1449125 McNicol, Sarah. 2019. “Using Participant-created Comics as a Research Method”. Qualitative Research Journal 19 (3): 236–247. https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-D-18-00054 McNicol, Sarah. 2020. “Exploring Trauma and Social Haunting Through Community Comics Creation”. In Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage, edited by Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, 85–102. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37998-8_5 McWilliams, Sally. 2019. “Precarious Memories and Affective Relationships in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do”. Journal of Asian American Studies 22 (3): 315–348. https://muse. jhu.edu/article/737319 Mehta, Binita, and Pia Mukherji, eds. 2015. Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities. New York: Routledge. Mejhammar, Kristina Arnerud. 2020. Självsyn och världsbild i tecknade serier. Visuella livsberättelser av Cecilia Torudd, Ulf Lundqvist, Gunna Grähs och Joakim Pirinen. Seriehistoriskt bibliotek nr 1. Strängnäs: Sanatorium Förlag. Mickwitz, Nina. 2016. Documentary Comics: Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mickwitz, Nina. 2020a. “Comics Telling Refugee Stories”. In Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage, edited by Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, 277–296. London: Palgrave Macmillian. https://link.springer. com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-37998-8_16 Mickwitz, Nina. 2020b. “Introduction: Discursive Contexts, ‘Voice,’ and Empathy in Graphic Life Narratives of Migration and Exile”. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35 (2): 459–465. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2020.1738079 Miller, Ann. 2015a. “Memory and Postmemory in Morvandiou’s D’Algérie”. In Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities, edited by Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji, 77–91. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315817576 Miller, Ann. 2015b. “Over Under Sideways Down: An Interview with Karrie Fransman”. European Comic Art 8 (1): 15–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/eca.2015.080103 Moore, Alexandra Schultheis. 2015. Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture. New York: Routledge. Nabizadeh, Golnar. 2016. “Comics Online: Detention and White Space in ‘A Guard’s Story’ ”. Ariel 47 (1): 337–357. Nabizadeh, Golnar. 2019. Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels. London and New York: Routledge. Naghibi, Nima, and Andrew O’Malley. 2020. “Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis”. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35 (2): 305–309. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2020.1738080 Naghibi, Nima, Candida Rifkind, and Eleanor Ty. 2020. “Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in Graphic Life Narratives”. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35 (2): 295–304. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/08989575.2020.1738081 Nayar, Pramod K. 2021. The Human Rights Graphic Novel: Drawing It Just Right. London and New York: Routledge. Ndepe Tahar, Mohamed. 2018. Le Journal de Mickey le Vieux. Paris: Dessins sans papiers. Nijdam, Biz. 2021. “Comics and Graphic Novels Are Examining Refugee Border-crossing Experiences”. The Conversation, 14 June. https://theconversation.com/comics-and-graphicnovels-are-examining-refugee-border-crossing-experiences-158257. Accessed 14 July 2022. Nikkilä, Aura, and Anna Vuorinne. 2020. “Encountering Others Through Graphic Narrative. Layers of Empathy in Hanneriina Moisseinen’s ‘The Isthmus’ ”. View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 26. http://dx.doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.26.2120

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Oh, Stella. 2017. “Laughter Against Laughter: Interrupting Racial and Gendered Stereotypes in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese”. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 8 (1): 20–32. https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2016.1233897 Oh, Stella. 2020. “Birthing a Graphic Archive of Memory: Re-Viewing the Refugee Experience in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do”. Melus 45 (4): 72–90. https://doi. org/10.1093/melus/mlaa046 Olle, Nick, and Sam Wallman. 2014. “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story”. The Global Mail. http://tgm-serco.patarmstrong.net.au/. Accessed 14 July 2022. Omer, Ahmed Mohammed, and Alice Socal. 2017. “Across the Sahara and Onto the Metro”. Drawing the Times. https://drawingthetimes.com/story/across-sahara-ontometro/. Accessed 14 July 2022. Packalén, Leif, and Sharad Sharma. 2007. Grassroots Comics: A Development Communication Tool. Helsinki: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland. Pantaleo, Sylvia, and Alexandra Bomphray. 2011. “Exploring Grade 7 Students’ Written Responses to Shaun Tan’s The Arrival”. Changing English 18 (2): 173–185. https://doi. org/10.1080/1358684X.2011.575250 Pisket, Halfdan. 2014. Desertør. Copenhagen: Fahrenheit. Pisket, Halfdan. 2015. Kakerlak. Copenhagen: Fahrenheit. Pisket, Halfdan. 2016. Dansker. Copenhagen: Fahrenheit. Platthaus, Andreas. 2020. “Das Kriegskind Comic”. In Krieg und Migration im Comic: Interdisziplinäre Analysen, edited by icon Düsseldorf, 13–20. Bielefeld: Transcript. http:// dx.doi.org/10.14361/9783839451250-002 Precup, Mihaela, and Dragoş Manea. 2020. “ ‘Life Was a Precarious Dance’: Graphic Narration and the Construction of a Transcultural Memory Space in the PositiveNegatives Project”. In Agency in Transnational Memory Politics, edited by Jenny Wüstenberg and Aline Sierp, 261–283. New York: Berghahn Books. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/j. ctv21hrgfv.17 Prum, Vannak Anan. 2018. The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea: A Graphic Memoir of Modern Slavery. New York: Seven Stories Press. Rhoades, Mindi, Ashley Dallacqua, Sara Kersten, Johnny Merry, and Mary Catherine Miller. 2015. “The Pencil Is Mightier Than the (S)Word? Telling Sophisticated Silent Stories Using Shaun Tan’s Wordless Graphic Novel, The Arrival”. Studies in Art Education 56 (4): 307–326. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2015.11518973 Rifkind, Candida. 2017. “Refugee Comics and Migrant Topographies”. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32 (3): 648–654. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2017.1339468 Rifkind, Candida. 2020. “Migrant Detention Comics and the Aesthetic Technologies of Compassion”. In Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage, edited by Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, 297–316. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37998-8_17 Rifkind, Candida. 2021. “Immigration, Photography, and the Color Line in Lila Quintero Weaver’s Darkroom: A Memoir in Black & White”. In Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis, edited by Nhora Lucía Serrano, 204–224. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315643991 Robson, Matthew. 2019. “Metaphor and Irony in the Constitution of UK Borders: An Assessment of the ‘Mac’ Cartoons in the Daily Mail Newspaper”. Political Geography 71: 115–125. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.02.013 Royal, Derek Parker. 2007. “Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative”. Melus 32 (3): 7–22. Sacco, Joe. 2010a. “The Unwanted: Part 1”. VQR 98 (4). https://www.vqronline.org/vqrgallery/unwanted-part-1. Accessed 14 July 2022.

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Sacco, Joe. 2010b. “The Unwanted: Part 2”. VQR 98 (4). https://www.vqronline.org/vqrgallery/unwanted-part-1. Accessed 14 July 2022. Saitas, Emilie. 2018. L’Arbre de mon père. Tome 1 – Mémoires d’une famille grecque en Ègypte (1948–1955). Paris: Éditions Cambourakis. Saitas, Emilie. 2020. L’Arbre de mon père. Tome 2 – Souvenirs de Grèce et d’Ailleurs (1956– 1981). Paris: Éditions Cambourakis. Salmi, Charlotta. 2016. “Reading Footnotes: Joe Sacco and The Graphic Human Rights Narrative”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52 (4): 415–427. https://doi.org/10.1080/174 49855.2016.1221892 Scalettaris, Giulia. 2007. “Refugee Studies and the International Refugee Regime: a Reflection on a Desirable Separation”. Refugee Survey Quarterly 26 (3): 36–50. https:// doi.org/10.1093/rsq/hdi0241 Scherr, Rebecca. 2015a. “Framing Human Rights: Comics Form and the Politics of Recognition in Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza”. Textual Practice 29 (1): 11–131. https://doi.org /10.1080/0950236X.2014.952771 Scherr, Rebecca. 2015b. “Joe Sacco’s Comics of Performance”. In The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, edited by Daniel Worden, 184–200. https://doi. org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496802217.003.0012 Scherr, Rebecca. 2020. “Drawing Ground in the Graphic Novel”. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35 (2): 475–479. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2020.1738082 Scherr, Rebecca. 2021. “Regarding the Ruins: Ruins and Humanitarian Witnessing in Satrapi and Sacco”. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 12 (3): 193–206. https://doi.org /10.1080/21504857.2019.1661863 Scorer, James. 2020. “Latin American Comics Beyond the Page”. In Comics beyond the Page in Latin America, edited by James Scorer, 1–28. London: UCL Press. https://doi. org/10.2307/j.ctv13xpstc.6 Serrano, Nhora Lucía, ed. 2021a. Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315643991 Serrano, Nhora Lucía, ed. 2021b. “Introduction: In the Shadow of Liberty: Immigration and the Graphic Space”. In Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis, edited by Nhora Lucía Serrano, 1–21. New York: Routledge. https:// doi.org/10.4324/9781315643991 Shay, Maureen. 2016. “Uprooting Genealogy in G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52 (4): 428–444. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2016.1228269 Singer, Rüdiger. 2020. “Cute Monsters and Early Birds: Foreignness in Graphic Novels on Migration by Shaun Tan and Paula Bulling”. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 11 (1): 74–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2019.1624270 Sjöblom, Lisa Wool-Rim. 2016. Palimpsest. Stockholm: Galago. Smith, Sidonie. 2011. “Human Rights and Comics: Autobiographical Avatars, Crisis Witnessing, and Transnational Rescue Networks”. In Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, edited by Michael A. Chaney, 61–72. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Smith, Sidonie, and Kay Schaffer. 2004. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Souiah, Farida. 2016. “Humoriste, Journaliste et artiste engagé. Le métier de caricaturiste en Algérie au prisme des œuvres de Hic et de Dilem consacrées aux ‘brûleurs’ de frontières”. L’Année du Maghreb 15: 97–113. Tan, Shaun. 2007 [2006]. The Arrival. New York: Scholastic Tran, G.B. 2010. Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey. New York: Villard.

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UNHCR. 2021. “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2020”. UNHCR. www.unhcr. org/60b638e37/unhcr-global-trends-2020. Accessed 14 July 2022. Vågnes, Øyvind. 2015. “John’s Story: Joe Sacco’s Depiction of ‘Bare Life’ ”. In The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, edited by Daniel Worden, 158–167. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496802217.001.0001 Von Borstel, Gaby, and Peter Eickmeyer. 2017. Liebe deinen Nächsten: Auf Rettungsfahrt im Mittelmeer an Bord der Aquarius. Bielefeld: Splitter Verlag. Weber, Angela, and Katharina Moritzen. 2017. Tausend Bilder und eins – Comic als ästhetische Praxis in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft. Bielefeld: Transcript. Weyhe, Birgit. 2016. Madgermanes. Berlin: Avant-verlag. Whitlock, Gillian. 2006. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of the Comics”. MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52 (4): 965–979. https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2007.0013 Wong, Sara, Rachel Shapcott, and Emma Parker. 2020. “Graphic Lives, Visual Stories: Reflections on Practice, Participation, and the Potentials of Creative Engagement”. a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies 35 (2): 311–329. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2020.1741191 Yang, Gene Luen. 2006. American Born Chinese. New York: First Second. Zograf, Aleksandar. 2016. “Migrants’ Stories”. Drawing the Times. https://drawingthetimes. com/authors/sasa-rakezic/. Accessed 14 July 2022.

PART I

Migration and the use of comics

2 THE LONG ROAD TO ALMANYA Comics in language education for “guest workers” in West Germany, 1970s–1980s Sylvia Kesper-Biermann

Germany took a long time to accept immigration as a fact of life. One important milestone along this path was the Immigration Law of 2004, the first attempt at an overarching regulation of all aspects of migration policy. Among its stipulations, it charged the government with the responsibility of fostering “the integration of foreigners living lawfully in the Federal territory on a permanent basis into the economic, cultural and social life of the Federal Republic of Germany” (§ 43 [1]). To that end, it required so-called “integration courses”. These consist of a language class and an orientation course designed to provide knowledge of “the German legal system, history and culture, rights and obligations in Germany, forms of community life, and values that are important in Germany, such as freedom of religion, tolerance and gender equality” (BAMF 2021).1 Several federal states provided additional programmes for refugees, such as Hesse’s effort to make them “fit for the rule of law” (Fit für den Rechtsstaat) in a programme that came with its own educational comic. The intent was to ensure a “largely nonverbal, strongly illustrative and friendly conveyance of the central messages” (“Fit für den Rechtsstaat” 2016, 3; for further examples, see Schwartz 2016). Picture stories are also recommended for language classes targeting immigrants (Hieronimus 2014). This is not unique to Germany; comics are also used both in and beyond Europe, including the United States, as part of a pedagogy of multiliteracies for educating immigrants (e.g. Boatright 2010; Danzak 2011). The idea that comics are ideally suited for teaching migrants is not new. They were already popular in language classes targeting “guest workers” (Gastarbeiter:innen) from Mediterranean countries in the 1970s and 1980s. This appears to have been forgotten entirely, though, and historical references to these language courses are completely absent from the current debate (zur Nieden 2009, 124). The following chapter seeks to remedy the lacuna by recalling this largely unknown aspect of (West) German immigration history. It explores which comics were used in the language education of “guest workers”, for what reason, in what ways, and to what ends. It will also take DOI: 10.4324/9781003254621-3

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into account the degree to which the experience of migration itself was addressed in the material. This chapter will limit itself to adult education, leaving aside the rather different issue of teaching German to Gastarbeiterkinder (“guest worker children”) in schools (see, e.g. Lehman 2019). Furthermore, it does not look at the situation in the GDR. I will proceed in three steps: First, illuminating the context of mass labour migration into West Germany and the status of comics in education at that time. Second, an exemplary case will be presented in greater detail, illustrating what images and conceptions of labour migration were conveyed in such materials. The comic chosen for this is Feridun. Ein Lesebuch und Sprachprogramm nicht nur für Türken (Feridun: A reader and language programme not only for Turks). The third part will look at the use of illustrated stories in educational practice, that is, language classes aimed at “guest workers”. The conclusion will then summarise salient findings.

The context: labour migration and comics in education Immigration to West Germany in the 1960s to 1980s was mainly characterised by the labour migration of “guest workers” from countries bordering the Mediterranean, such as Italy, Spain, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Turkey. This process shaped the public perception of immigration until the end of the 1980s. The largest single immigrant group came from Turkey. Altogether, the share of non-German nationals in the population rose from around 1 percent in 1960 to slightly over 5 percent in 1970 to 7 percent in 1980, remaining at roughly that level for the rest of the decade. In absolute numbers, approximately 4  million foreigners lived in West Germany in the 1970s and nearly 5 million in 1989. Most of these migrant workers took on unskilled, physically demanding jobs in industrial production at low pay and often considerable health risk. Bringing comparatively low levels of professional qualification, they clustered at the lower end of the labour market: men tended to work in engineering, the auto industry, construction, and mining, and women in the textile and food industries (Herbert 2017, 196–216; Gutfleisch and Rieck 1981, 341–344). Though the general assumption had initially been that they would return to their countries of origin after a limited stay, it had become clear by the 1970s that many “guest workers” would remain in Germany and be joined by their families. This brought an entirely new urgency to the question of how to teach them German and, associated with this, the push to achieve “integration”. This was the time when the West German educational establishment began to explore comics as educational media. Beginning in the late 1960s, they were seen as particularly suited for people considered deficient in their command of German and in need of improving their language skills, such as foreigners. Therefore, publications of the 1970s contain references to educational comics being developed as a “help for guest workers” (Kempkes 1977, 135), for example, to inform consumers about such subjects as taking out a loan or renting an apartment (Bergen 1984). This mirrors a general change in the public perception of comics, which was so thorough that Dietrich Grünewald (2010, 132) refers to a “remarkable paradigm shift”. In the 1950s and early 1960s, public discourse on comics in West Germany and elsewhere

The long road to Almanya  47

had been highly critical. The “Campaign against Filth and Trash” (Schmutz- und Schundkampagne) had emphasised the dangers that comics allegedly posed to children and young people. They were claimed to cause illiteracy, picture dependency (Bildidiotismus), violence, and juvenile delinquency, blamed for corroding public morals through their pornographic imagery, and called into question the authority of adults over children (Laser 2000). By the late 1970s, however, Wolfgang J. Fuchs and Reinhold C. Reitberger stated in their foundational Comics-Handbuch: “A rejection of graphic literature or an emphasis on its negative aspects is no longer opportune today so as not to appear reactionary” (Fuchs and Reitberger 1978, 9f). The efforts of educators were central to this development. A representative sample from between 1965 and 1982 in West Germany found the proportion of comics-related literature that dealt with the potential of the medium as a teaching tool rising to 40 percent (Knilli et al. 1989, 29). Classroom instructions for subjects including German, social studies, art, and foreign languages were published, practical experience was recorded, and studies on the reception of comics were conducted. By functioning as multipliers in civil society in schools, for example, the educators who engaged with them formed “in a way the tip of the spear of the newly emerging interest in comics” (Kagelmann 1991, 55). Fuchs and Reitberger (1978, 11) concluded: “The comics readers who were talked down to in the 1950s have grown up. Their presence in government and educational institutions has generally led to a broader understanding of and regard for comics”. This movement was not limited to educational materials targeting children. Comics were equally popular in adult education, as demonstrated by the success of the instructional comic series “für Anfänger” (for Beginners) at the time (Hangartner 2016, 294f). How did this shift affect language education for guest workers?

Feridun goes to Germany: migration in the teaching material “not only for Turks” Feridun Üstün is 30  years old. He is married, has three children, and works as a smallholder in a Turkish village in central Anatolia. Unable to support himself and his family on his income, he is in debt. That is why he resolves to go to Germany as a “guest worker” for several years to earn money. Feridun is the main character of a 1977 series of language instruction books aimed at Turkish “guest workers” in West Germany. The series was published in three volumes: a coursebook for students, a grammar book, and a teacher’s handbook (Augustin et al. 1977). It was set apart by the fact that – unlike most contemporary teaching materials – it hardly touched on life in West Germany at all. Its focus lay in the process of migration instead, thematising the journey in text and illustrations. Learners accompanied Feridun as he moved from his small Anatolian village through a nearby town and Istanbul to his train journey to Munich. Thus, the readers were familiarised with the formal requirements of immigration, the role of the Turkish employment office, the procedure of health checks, but above all with the perceptions, hopes, and fears of the protagonist. “The texts are intended . . . to help formulate and deal with the experiences of emigration”, the teacher’s handbook stated (Augustin et al. 1977, vol. 3, 3). This obviously held the

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still prevalent and widely criticised assumption that there is “a unifying and definitive immigrant experience” rather than a “sea of possible realities” (Boatright 2010, 469). The authors saw the roughly 100 drawings accompanying the class book to be central elements: The illustrations are to both motivate and create awareness, develop associations contained in the text, and encourage readers to engage with the texts. . . . The pictures are almost never ornamental additions to the text – as they often are in other teaching material. Quite the contrary – several illustrations defamiliarise the text where it otherwise allows few opportunities for distancing. (Augustin et al. 1977, vol. 3, 4) Thus, the illustrations were intended to serve two distinct purposes: illustrating the text and defamiliarising it, allowing distance to narrated events. These are evident in the two different styles into which we can divide the drawings, broadly speaking. Some merely accompany the lesson by depicting individuals and the everyday situations described in the text. They are illustrative and used as didactic tools, as in the case of Feridun and his family being introduced at the beginning of the book (Figure 2.1). This image shows the attention to realistic detail that stylistically sets these illustrations apart from the second, much larger group of drawings, which are typically in an exaggerated cartoon style. The latter style makes it immediately clear that

FIGURE 2.1 

Illustration by Theo Scherling, Feridun, vol. 1, Abado Verlag, 1977, p. 9.

Source: Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

The long road to Almanya  49

they do not depict actual persons, places, and events. Instead, they serve as vehicles for distancing, enabling associations, and encouraging reader engagement by giving an occasion both to speak about and to reflect social realities and the learners’ own situation. This allowed the book to take a stronger and more immediate position on certain aspects of migration than the text, which was dominated by basic speaking exercises. Thus, Figure 2.2 shows the entrance to Almanya, the Turkish word for Germany, in Feridun’s imagination before his departure. Feridun, standing on the right in the background in the company of his friend, watches a returnee from Germany. At the side of the gate opposite them, a man with a suitcase is kneeling, apparently about to enter “Cennet Almanya” or “Paradise Germany”. All stand in awe of the returnee’s wealth, illustrated by a wheelbarrow full of cash. The wealth difference between Germany and Turkey is illustrated further through the figures’ different clothing styles. The Turkish men lack shoes, and their clothes are shabby and torn. Meanwhile, the returnee is well dressed, strong, and assertive. The illustration exemplifies further characteristics that are typical of the book. For one thing, we only see men depicted. Women such as Feridun’s wife are marginal figures and hardly ever active participants in events. The books were clearly aimed at male “guest workers” coming to Germany without their families. Furthermore, the difference between West Germany and Turkey is depicted in terms of development along a modernisation axis. The returnee’s T-shirt sports a Coca-Cola logo, associated with “Western” progress, while the man kneeling on the left is wearing a fez, evoking traditionalism and backwardness.

FIGURE 2.2 

Illustration by Theo Scherling, Feridun, vol. 1, Abado Verlag, 1977, p. 58.

Source: Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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FIGURE 2.3 

Illustration by Theo Scherling, Feridun, vol. 1, Abado Verlag, 1977, p. 60.

Source: Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

This perspective is pervasive and made expressly clear in the introduction: Turkey is “a country where partly feudal ownership structures prevail and it stands at the level of early capitalist exploitation” (Augustin et al. 1977, vol. 1, 4). Criticism of corruption, mismanagement, and the exploitation of the population by Turkish elites is thematised repeatedly in the illustrations. A recurring theme is the image of three old men symbolising the Turkish authorities, probably the police and military, the government, and the religious leadership. These are depicted as being literally “in bed” with each other (Figure 2.3). Toothless and ineffective, they abdicate responsibility for the country and its inhabitants with a reference, depicted in the sign hanging from the bedpost, that all things will occur as God decrees. Accordingly, the authors saw many problems in the migration process, especially those following arrival in West Germany, as rooted in the “guest workers’ ” transition from a developing country to an industrialised nation and from the countryside to the city. Implicitly underlying this assumption is the then-prevalent model of “modernisation” as a linear process in discrete stages that was largely identical for societies worldwide (Pollack 2017). From this perspective, labour migration to Germany took on certain characteristics of time travel, which would necessarily entail a difficult adjustment period. The authors were not only using these depictions to connect to the experiences of their (male) migrant students but also targeting a West German audience. Not just the text but especially the illustrations were designed to help immigrants educate Germans about the culture, geography, and everyday life of Turkey. One important goal named in the book was to “enable the Turkish workers to inform German contact persons and colleagues about their previous life and potentially crack open

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their prejudice” (Augustin et al. 1977, vol. 3, 3). Ideally, German and Turkish workers were meant to read the book together and enter into dialogue that way. Both the text and illustrations show considerable empathy with the plight of Feridun and his compatriots. The authors had a sufficiently strong and detailed interest in their background to undertake a three-week study trip through Turkey in 1975, where they carried out interviews on the subject of migration (Augustin et al. 1977, vol. 3, 31). In addition, “Turkish friends and colleagues” in West Germany took part in the development of the material (Augustin et al. 1977, vol. 1, 207). The resulting work, published in 1977, is permeated by a West German perspective on Turkish labour migration. More specifically, it is the perspective of those engaged in the field known as Ausländerarbeit (working with foreigners), for example, as teachers in language classes. Its authors, Viktor Augustin and Klaus Liebe-Harkort, were experienced language educators and had a background in teacher training; Liebe-Harkort became a professor at Bremen University in 1979. They saw themselves as engaged in social work, criticised recruiting practices, took a stand against xenophobia, and aimed to combat the discrimination “guest workers” often faced, in order to facilitate their integration. However, that process – which Freerk Huisken (1987, 132) polemically called an “arrogant pedagogics of understanding” – entailed the unconscious use of long-standing stereotypes about the “backwardness” of Turkey, well established in the field (Lohmann et al. 2013). This was especially pronounced in the visual depiction of differences in development. As “friends to foreigners” (Ausländerfreunde; Huisken 1987), the authors further contributed to practices of distinction by defining these “foreign workers” as a distinct group that was expressly not part of German society. This is very pronounced in the rendering of the illustrations in Feridun (Figure 2.4).

FIGURE 2.4 

Illustration by Theo Scherling, Feridun, vol. 1, Abado Verlag, 1977, p. 117.

Source: Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

52  Sylvia Kesper-Biermann

Figure 2.4 shows a German on the left insulting Feridun as a “Damn foreigner”. His hat with the traditional gamsbart decoration identifies him as a Bavarian, the stereotypically conservative, xenophobic German. The authors obviously wish to distance themselves from this figure. His wide-open mouth indicates that he is shouting or at least speaking loudly – a common practice when encountering difficulty communicating with migrant workers. Yet for all the distance created by this (self-)ironic caricature, the Anatolian peasant in the drawing is clearly depicted as different from the German. He appears shocked, listening with his outsized ears, and responds to the insult in the kind of broken German then often referred to as Gastarbeiterdeutsch: “Me no understand” (“Ich nix verstehn”). This exaggerated, expressly extreme dichotomy between German and “foreigner” widely characterised public discourse and media representations of the time, and matched the expectations of the majority. It was how the self and the other were visually constructed, for example, in press photography (Czycholl 2020). Dark hair and moustaches were part of the “type” of the foreigner, especially of Turks (Thomsen Vierra 2018, 45). The context in which Feridun was to be used fostered this distinction. The very fact that language classes specifically for “foreign workers” existed made it clear that they were viewed as a group distinct from German society.

Comics in “guest worker” language classes Since “guest workers” came to West Germany from several countries, they had no shared language or dialect and usually little or no previous knowledge of German. In the 1960s, West German employers often offered language classes to facilitate the integration of their new hires into the labour process and help them better understand instructions or safety briefings (Luft 2009, 232–234; Gutfleisch and Rieck 1981, 345). One reason for this was the higher ratio of work accidents involving migrant labour, which was blamed, among other factors, on communication problems (Kleinöder 2015, 104–106). Some particularly dangerous industries required language proficiency tests for non-German-speaking workers to be employed. The Corporate Mining Association Unternehmensverband Ruhrbergbau, which was involved in these efforts, explained in 1966 that language served only as a “primitive mode of communication” in the workplace and that four weeks should suffice to “teach the foreigners a vocabulary of 400 nouns, which we carefully selected and collected in a picture book” (Magnet Bundesrepublik 1966, 81f). Drawings were also used elsewhere to illustrate desired workplace conduct. Some employers developed their own materials. The Hamborner Bergbau-Aktiengesellschaft collected the most important words in a 100-page Bildwörterbuch für ausländische Bergleute (Picture dictionary for foreign miners) aimed at Greek recruits in 1962 (Fund des Monats 2018). Others turned to commercially produced teaching materials designed to instil basic communication competence in the workplace in the briefest possible time. These included Hallo Kollege (Hello, colleague), produced for a language crash course that took three weeks (Dittrich et al. 1972). The aim was to establish “basic language patterns” by practising example sentences. As the teacher

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handbook explained, “Drawings and photographs are an important learning aid and offer possibilities for exercises and testing” (Dittrich et al. 1974, 113f). Language instruction beyond this very basic level was provided mainly on a local basis (Szablewski-Çavuş 2010, 43; Thomsen Vierra 2018, 34). Native and immigrant populations met in their communities, and the local authorities recognised at a comparatively early stage that these “guest workers” were not a temporary feature. In many cities, charities, labour unions, churches, community colleges, and private initiatives took up the cause of integration and communication. They were convinced that, despite all political affirmations to the contrary, West Germany was already home to immigrants and had to respond adequately to that fact (Spicka 2015). This included language classes teaching “German for foreign workers” (Deutsch für ausländische Arbeitnehmer), though this frequently took place under less-than-ideal conditions. There were no unitary standards regarding content, goals, structure, or the qualifications required of teachers. The classes were frequently taught by a wide variety of volunteers with no pedagogical qualifications, even including the janitors of guest-worker housing (Szablewski-Çavuş 2001). In 1974, Germany’s major public welfare associations and the Federal Ministry of Labour founded the Sprachverband Deutsch für ausländische Arbeitnehmer e.V. (Language Association German for Foreign Workers; see Gutfleisch and Rieck 1981, 346f). Their goal was to “create the conditions for a more effective language education of foreign workers through close and coordinated cooperation between all stakeholders and thus to fulfil the most important condition for a successful integration” (Szablewski-Çavuş 2001, 8). Until 1989, its classes served roughly 560,000 people from the European Economic Community (EEC) and non-EEC countries that “guest workers” were recruited from (Kahl 1989). Participation in these classes was strictly voluntary. No mandatory education like today’s “integration courses” existed. Conversely, there was also no legal right to language education for “guest workers” (Rohrer 1983, 27). Among the challenges of the format was the fact that learning groups were very heterogeneous. Classes included students not only from different countries but also with widely varying levels of educational attainment, previous knowledge of German, and expectations of the course. The association was charged with standardising classes for this audience. It would serve as an institutional point of contact at the national level and as a body qualifying teachers. Moreover, it had a pädagogische Abteilung (pedagogical section) that recommended and produced teaching materials. These included a notable quantity of comics. What were the reasons for the inclusion of comics? Initially, the medium of choice for educating the foreign workforce had been films. The film-based courses Guten Tag (Hello, 1966) and Viel Glück in Deutschland (Good luck in Germany, 1974) had been produced specifically for this reason with the aid of the GoetheInstitut, West Germany’s prestigious cultural organisation (zur Nieden 2009, 123, note 1). Yet, the high hopes associated with a medium seen as particularly modern were disappointed (Tumat 1972). It turned out that films were hardly ever used in actual classrooms. Instead, comics seemed to lend themselves to use with that particular target group (on the following, see also Scherling and Schuckall 1992).

54  Sylvia Kesper-Biermann

The generally high regard for comics as a teaching medium among educators in the 1970s and 1980s played a role here. Moreover, their use was likely motivated by the expectation that images could be universally understood across language barriers and thus be useful in classes with participants of different native languages. They also had some practical advantages. Unlike films, comics could be adapted to the knowledge level and composition of a given class quickly and with relatively little difficulty. Reproducing the mostly monochrome drawings was technically undemanding, while photographs were still expensive to copy at the time. Moreover, comics with empty speech bubbles presented self-evident tasks for learners. This arose in response to the frustrating experience that traditional language-learning formats such as gap texts were often not understood or depended on participants being literate in their native language, familiar with underlying grammatical concepts, and accustomed to using dictionaries – something that was far from universally the case here (Barkowski et al. 1980, 38f). In one example, the Pädagogische Arbeitsstelle des Deutschen Volkshochschulverbandes (Pedagogical Section of the German Association of Community Colleges) published a set of worksheets and transparencies (Augustin and Haase 1980) designed for individual and class work with beginners. Sheet 1 shows a sequence of images (Figure 2.5) with two men seated in a pub or restaurant. They are talking to each other, presumably about other people present outside the frame. Panel numbering provides a direction for reading the strip, whose individual panels are dominated by speech bubbles extending past their frames. This example shows clearly why comics were highly valued as teaching tools: namely, their ability to pictorially focus on the central point and concentrate on individual elements, in this case by leaving the background empty, allowing learners to focus entirely on a single object, person, or action. It also shows an effort to counteract the problem of underchallenging participants in language classes. Many of them, as the introduction to Blasen-Geschichten (Speech bubble stories) explains, had lived and worked in West Germany for years before deciding to improve their rudimentary knowledge of German. A beginners’ class would “address them too far below their level, linguistically underchallenge them especially with regard to vocabulary, provide too little practice in grammar where they need not so much an introduction as a massive correction” (Augustin and Haase 1980, n.p.). Comics were considered well suited to remedy this. Moreover, the Blasen-Geschichten expressly distanced themselves from the “dull content of most teaching books”, claiming instead to address the “native intelligence” of participants (Augustin and Haase 1980, n.p., emphasis in the original). The comics-specific form of reduction described, among others, by Scott McCloud (1994, 24–59), was particularly appreciated in the depiction of persons. The Handbuch für den Deutschunterricht mit ausländischen Arbeitern (Handbook for German classes with foreign workers) stated: “Photographs accentuate the unique, the individual, and leave little scope for ‘free’ association. The identification we wish to achieve with and through protagonists can hardly be achieved with photographs. We envisaged caricatures because they offered us the opportunity to

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FIGURE 2.5  Illustration

by Theo Scherling, in Viktor Augustin and Klaus Haase, Blasen-Geschichten, Pädagogische Arbeitsstelle Deutscher VolkshochschulVerband, 1980, p. 1.

Source: Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

56  Sylvia Kesper-Biermann

overemphasise certain details in order to better use them didactically, and because drawings – unlike photographs – can be changed” (Barkowski et al. 1980, 147). In this concrete example, the “protagonists” (Leitfiguren) – a Turkish man, a Turkish woman, a German man, and a German woman – had been developed in cooperation with a graphic artist and were re-used regularly in classes, for example, in theatre projects based on comics sequences with a set text. Drawn “artificial figures” (Kunstfiguren) were appreciated because their reduction and typecasting made for easier identification while simultaneously facilitating distancing through satirical exaggeration. Their very style identified them as artistic perspectives on the world, not reality. This made it possible to render visible the “psychological and social problems arising from emigration”, the handbook explained (Barkowski et al. 1980, 146). This method of producing individualised teaching materials that took the situation of migrants into account was far from unique. It was common for teachers of such classes to do this. More than 90 percent of them used self-made teaching materials, as shown in a survey conducted by the Sprachverband in 1988 (BehrendRoth et al. 1988, 72, 310). One reason was that, aside from the aforementioned introductory courses for German in the workplace, there were no dedicated course materials for teaching “foreign workers”. Books teaching German as a foreign language envisioned different learners, and especially more homogeneous groups. They appeared poorly suited for language classes aimed at “guest workers”. From the late 1970s onwards, several publishers developed teaching material specifically for this audience. The Sprachverband assembled a list of approved publications from among these books, and comics featured prominently in them. One such example was Feridun. Many arguments made for using comics are reflected in its volumes, as we have seen earlier. That may be one reason why 10 percent of teachers in the 1988 survey reported using it (Behrend-Roth et al. 1988, 128). In addition, Feridun also addressed another issue: “Language work with foreign workers must not merely address itself to the consequences of migration, but must look at the root causes of migration and thematise them in a dialogical process shared by locals and foreigners” (Rohrer 1983, 292). Yet another example following a slightly different approach is Deutsch aktiv, a series whose first volume was published in 1979 by Langenscheidt, a traditional language publisher (Neuner et al. 1979). It was geared towards practising “speech acts” (Sprechhandlungen) that seemed important for managing daily life in (West) Germany, presenting different aspects of culture in chapters dedicated to food, accommodation, or schooling. It was especially in its visual design that this book explored new territory. A  retrospective view notes that readers would “initially look for the text among the profusion of pictures until they noticed that it was written, as it were, into them and created opportunities for communication in concert with the illustrations to draw in the learners” (Scherling and Schuckall 1992, 6). The design went hand in hand with an attempted fundamental change in teaching method (Brill 2005, 191). Comics were to support the goal of prioritising

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oral communication over grammar acquisition. Their content was thus designed to be tied into everyday experiences in Germany and to show scenes that were relevant to the students. This approach was chosen not least because the use of comics was informed by goals beyond effective language learning. As one of the authors stated in retrospect, drawings were supposed to liven up the books, render the structure of the subject matter and the exercises more chaotic, and make them lose cohesiveness (Neuner 1996, 199, 202). Yet another reason was more decisive still: educators and others considered comics especially useful for spreading information on and providing insight into socio-economic and political realities. The authors of teaching books stated their intent to foster attitudes and values that would educate “guest workers” to be aware and active citizens. Learners should be seen as individual subjects to be supported in their self-reliance, independence, and personal growth (Brill 2005, 176f). This, too, was in keeping with the self-image of West German adult education in these years, a field that saw itself as spreading knowledge, emancipation, and active political participation throughout society (Zeuner 2015, 6–10). Accordingly, language classes were often part of a broader palette of offerings targeting “guest workers”, especially in Volkshochschule (community college) contexts. A  Berlin branch, for example, not only offered a broad “Türkenprogramm” (Programme for Turks) but also sought to promote encounters between Germans and “foreigners” in its cultural programme (Thomsen Vierra 2018, 145–152). Many people in what was called Ausländerarbeit (working with foreigners) – but also beyond that in welfare associations and labour unions – pursued a vision of emancipatory language learning that was clearly different from the efficient transmission of primitive communication skills the employers had intended. Teachers saw language learning as political education aimed at overcoming the pervasive discrimination suffered by foreign workers. In a sense, it was an extension of traditional working-class education. The final statement of a conference of foreign workers in 1974 read: The language problem lies at the heart of almost all social problems facing foreigners almost daily. While they do not know German, they are largely helpless and will never be able to defend their own interests. . . . Learning German should not be a goal in itself, but only an important instrument towards the realisation of their own situation, the building of solidarity and the pursuit of their own interests. (quoted from Szablewski-Cavuş 2001, 27) This development would begin with the German classes themselves, as the authors of Feridun explained with regard to their materials: “the teacher should always permit participants to take a critical stance. He may even have to provoke them to butcher the book (as a holy cow), to cook, to devour, and not least to digest it” (Augustin et al. 1977, vol. 3, 89).

58  Sylvia Kesper-Biermann

Conclusion Comics played an important role in language teaching for “guest workers” in West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. This placed them at the intersection of migration, language, and integration in several respects. First, comics were regarded as ideal teaching materials for labour migrants for a number of reasons, some of them specific to their characteristics as a medium. Second, certain ones – like Feridun – served to graphically depict the country of origin or the migration process, or – like Deutsch aktiv – to visualise daily life in West Germany. The artistic, in this case graphic, engagement with this topic included at the very least an attempt “to see the reality of West Germany through the eyes of foreign workers”, as the Handbuch Deutschunterricht stated in 1980 (Barkowski and Harnisch Kumm 1980, 168f). This is also an expression of an underlying attitude found among everyone engaged in this form of language education: The materials, particularly their illustrations, as well as the approach of a “target group-specific” education, not least expressed in the creation of dedicated classes for “foreign” workers, all aided the definition and social creation of “guest workers” as a distinct, clearly discernible group different from the German majority. One central factor for this adscription of (not-)belonging (Mecheril 2015) was the postulate of developmental differences between societies in West Germany and those that the “foreigners” came from. Migration to West Germany was seen as equivalent to a “leap from preindustrial conditions into a highly industrialised society, across several stages of development” (Barkowski and Harnisch Kumm 1980, 24). The typical attitude among Ausländerfreunde of the time, “well-meaning if paternalistic” (Thomsen Vierra 2018, 39), called for offering the “guest workers” help to master the unfamiliar life in West Germany and to build understanding and communication between them and the German majority. German language instruction served as a central means of integration. In the early 1980s, this was understood as a “mutual process of exchange and learning between Germans and foreigners” (Rohrer 1983, 284). The fact that West Germany was home to immigrant communities was recognised much earlier among those engaged in language education than by those in politics. However, the assumption continued that “foreigners in the country do, of course, stay foreigners and must see German-speaking countries from the perspective of the foreigner”, as the teacher handbook of Themen, a Germanlanguage teaching work of the time, phrased it (Gerdes et al. 1984, 12). Their status as foreigners, their fundamental alienness, was cast as unchangeable.

Note 1 All German quotes translated into English by the author.

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Medien 2, edited by Bodo Franzmann, Ingo Hermann, H. Jürgen Kagelmann, and Rolf Zitzlspergler, 47–59. München: Profil Verlag. Kahl, Jochen. 1989. “Sprachkursförderung durch den Sprachverband: ‘Richtlinien’ und ‘Grundsätze’ seit 1975”. In Fürs Leben Deutsch lernen. 15 Jahre Sprachkursförderung, 71–78. Mainz: Sprachverband – Deutsch für ausländische Arbeitnehmer. Kempkes, Wolfgang. 1977. “Mit Comics aufklären?” In Comics im Medienmarkt, in der Analyse, im Unterricht, edited by Wolfgang J. Fuchs, 133–135. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. Kleinöder, Nina. 2015. Unternehmen und Sicherheit. Strukturen, Akteure und Verflechtungs­ prozesse im betrieblichen Arbeitsschutz der westdeutschen Eisen- und Stahlindustrie nach 1945. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Knilli, Friedrich, Clemens Schwender, Erwin Gundelsheimer, and Elke Weisser. 1989. “Some Aspects of the Development towards a Visual Culture: The Example of Comics”. In Comicforschung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945–1984, edited by Siegfried Zielinski, Reiner Matzker, and Brigitte Domurath, 13–46. Bern: Peter Lang. Laser, Björn. 2000. “Heftchenflut und Bildersturm – Die westdeutsche Comic-Debatte in den 50ern”. In Die janusköpfigen 50er Jahre, edited by Georg Bollenbeck and Gerhard Kaiser, 63–86. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Lehman, Brittany. 2019. Teaching Migrant Children in West Germany and Europe, 1949–1992. Cham: Springer Nature. Lohmann, Ingrid, Benjamin Begemann, Julika Böttcher, Marco Claas, Lukas Dittmann, Till Hölscher, Lars Johannsen, Leslie Alice Lorenz, Britta Lübke, Henning Scholz, Malte Stolley, Finn Vogler, and Janna Sophie Zeller. 2013. “Wie die Türken in unsere Köpfe kamen. Das Türkei-Bild der deutschen Pädagogik zwischen 1820 und 1930”. Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft 16: 751–772. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11618-013-0448-3 Luft, Stefan. 2009. Staat und Migration. Zur Steuerbarkeit von Zuwanderung und Integration. Frankfurt: Campus-Verlag. Magnet Bundesrepublik. 1966. Probleme der Ausländerbeschäftigung. Informationstagung der Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände am 30. Und 31. März 1966 in Bad Godesberg. Bonn: Köllen. McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Perennial. Mecheril, Paul. 2015. “Das Anliegen der Migrationspädagogik”. In Schule in der Migrations­ gesellschaft. Ein Handbuch, vol. 1: Grundlagen – Diversität – Fachdidaktik, edited by Rudolf Leiprecht and Anja Steinbach, 25–53. Schwalbach: Debus Pädagogik. Neuner, Gerd. 1996. “Kooperative Lehrwerkentwicklung – Zur Entstehung des ersten Bandes von Deutsch aktiv”. In Deutsch Lernen, vol. 3, 197–208. Neuner, Gerd, Reiner Schmidt, Heinz Wilms, and Manfred Zirkel. 1979. Deutsch aktiv. Ein Lehrwerk für Erwachsene. Lehrbuch 1. Berlin: Langenscheidt. Pollack, Detlev. 2017. “Was bleibt von der Modernisierungstheorie? Ein Vorschlag zu ihrer Erneuerung”. Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 57: 21–46. Rohrer, Hans-Heinrich. 1983. Spracharbeit mit ausländischen Arbeitnehmern. Heidelberg: Groos. Scherling, Theo, and Hans-Friedrich Schuckall. 1992. Mit Bildern lernen. Handbuch für den Fremdsprachenunterricht. Berlin: Langenscheidt. Schwartz, Sharona. 2016. “German Cartoon Guide Teaching Migrants to Keep Hands Off Women, Not Beat Kids and Accept Gays Gets New Attention Following Group Rape Allegations”. Blazemedia, 24 January. www.theblaze.com/news/2016/01/24/germancartoon-guide-teaching-migrants-to-keep-hands-off-women-not-beat-kids-and-acceptgays-gets-new-attention-following-group-rape-allegations. Accessed 12 July 2022. Spicka, Mark E. 2015. “Cultural Centres and Guest Worker Integration in Stuttgart, Germany, 1960–1976”. Immigrants & Minorities 33 (2): 117–140. https://doi.org/10.1080/0 2619288.2014.904639

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Szablewski-Cavuş, Petra. 2001. “Skizze einer Profilierung. Der Unterricht Deutsch für ausländische Arbeitnehmer”. Deutsch als Zweitsprache, Extraheft, 23–33. Szablewski-Cavuş, Petra. 2010. “Berufsbezogenes Deutsch, berufliche Weiterbildung und berufliche Kommunikation”. In “Sprache ist der Schlüssel zur Integration”. Bedingungen des Sprachenlernens von Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund, 43–50. Bonn: Abteilung Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Thomsen Vierra, Sarah. 2018. Turkish Germans in the Federal Republic of Germany: Immigration, Space, and Belonging, 1961–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https:// doi.org/10.1017/9781108691475 Tumat, Alfred J. 1972. Deutsch als Fremdsprache im Unterricht mit ausländischen Arbeit­ nehmern. Unterrichtsmaterial – Informationen. Kiel: Landesverband der Volkshochschulen Schleswig-Holstein. Zeuner, Christine. 2015. “Erwachsenenbildung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von 1970 bis 1990”. In Enzyklopädie Erziehungswissenschaft Online. Weinheim: Beltz Juventa. www.beltz.de/fachmedien/erziehungs_und_sozialwissenschaften/enzyklopaedie_erziehungswissenschaft_online_eeo.html?tx_beltz_educationencyclopedia[article]=30385 &tx_beltz_educationencyclopedia[articleSet]=1&tx_beltz_educationencyclopedia[publi sherArticleSubject]=&tx_beltz_educationencyclopedia[action]=article&tx_beltz_educat ionencyclopedia[controller]=EducationEncyclopedia&cHash=cb0fbcc2d7ed0df445088 4b6b5b295ee. Accessed 12 July 2022. zur Nieden, Birgit. 2009. “ ‘… und deutsch ist wichtig für die Sicherheit’. Eine kleine Genealogie des Spracherwerbs Deutsch in der BRD”. In No integration?! Kulturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zur Integrationsdebatte in Europa, edited by Sabine Hess, Jana Binder, and Johannes Moser, 123–136. Bielefeld: Transcript.

3 FEMINIST COMICS ACTIVISM Stories about migrant women in Sweden by Amalia Alvarez and Daria Bogdanska Anna Nordenstam and Margareta Wallin Wictorin

Migrant women became a theme in the Swedish comics world with the publication of Fem papperslösa kvinnors historier/Cinco historias de mujeres indocumentadas/ The Stories of Five Undocumented Women by Amalia Alvarez in 2013. The album is a collection of five powerful stories about women coming to Sweden, dreaming of sanctuary and new beginnings, meeting friendly individuals, but also experiencing exploitation, racism, and violence. Three years later, in 2016, Daria Bogdanska’s Wage slaves was published.1 It is an autobiographical comics album about a young Polish woman who comes to Sweden to study at a comics art school. To make a living, she has to work without a permit at a restaurant, and she is exploited in her wages and working conditions, hence the use of “wage slave” as a metaphor in the title. The stories in both albums take place in Malmö, the third-largest city in Sweden. It is a diverse and segregated city with a documented population of almost 345,000 inhabitants in 2019 (SCB.se), hailing from 184 countries and speaking 150 languages (Hansen 2019, 155). There are a considerable number of migrants without permits living in Sweden. Exactly how many is unclear, but researchers have estimated that there were between 30,000 and 75,000 in 2014 out of a population of almost 10 million people (Moksnes 2016, 211). Many are former asylum seekers who have been denied residence and work permits. Another large, partly overlapping group consists of migrants from outside the European Union, from Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, who came to Sweden to find work to support themselves and, in many cases, their families back home as well. Their position in the labour market is unsafe and insecure, but there is a significant demand for their services among less scrupulous employers since their illegal position makes it difficult for them to ask for reasonable wages and safe working conditions (Moksnes 2016). Women without legal rights are especially vulnerable; for example, a woman without a residence permit who reports her employer for sexual assault to the police DOI: 10.4324/9781003254621-4

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would disclose her lack of permission. Any woman working without a permit in a restaurant or pub who reports being sexually harassed or raped by a colleague, employer, or customer risks being fined, imprisoned, and exported. The gravity of the situation is a function of intersecting power structures based on factors such as gender, class, ethnicity, race, nationality, sexualities, legal status, and functionality. Research has shown that undocumented female migrants are officially invisible, but they do not live invisible lives. Many of them work in restaurants or clean office buildings. Their children go to school, they stroll the streets, and they do the usual daily chores, such as purchasing groceries (Sigvardsdotter 2016). This article argues that Alvarez’s and Bogdanska’s stories about migrant women in Sweden can be regarded as feminist comics activism. Their albums are examples of comics activism according to comics scholar Martin Lund’s (2018, 42) suggested definition: “the practice of creating comics in support of or opposition to one side of a controversial issue”. They claim the right for migrant women to reside and work in Sweden in accordance with human rights, which is not agreed upon by everybody in Sweden. Their focus on women’s conditions also makes it relevant to analyse their work as feminist activism; hence, the concept of feminist comics activism is suggested here. Gender scholar Mia Liinason and sociologist Martha Cuesta discuss feminist activism as a political practice, a practice that produces stories that are performative, in order to create change. They maintain that stories generated by feminist activists in texts and in dialogues linked to actions, workshops, manifestations, meetings, and festivals can produce concrete change regarding policies, legislation, pedagogy, and language; in addition, they argue that the ways in which people formulate and communicate thoughts about themselves and others contribute to changing relations between individuals and groups in society (Liinason and Cuesta 2016, 15–19). bell hooks’s concept of “talking back” is also relevant, focusing on women moving from silence to speech, as a revolutionary gesture (hooks 1989, 12). By collecting stories and creating comics, Alvarez and Bogdanska in different ways aesthetically thematise the situation of migrant women in Sweden with the aim of “talking back”. The following analyses examine how activism is manifested verbally and visually in these comics, and how they talk back about migrant women’s situations from an intersectional perspective in which gender, ethnicity, race, nationality, and class are connected as grounds for discrimination (Hill Collins and Bilge 2016).

The Swedish comics field in relation to migration The comics field in Sweden is dominated by native Swedes as creators, not counting translations of comics from other countries. Despite the parallel increase in migration to Sweden and a rising number of new comics published at the end of the 20th century, there were hardly any stories at all about migrant women until 2011.2 One exception is “Tuula”, a comic strip published intermittently in the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter between 1997 and 2019, created by Arja Kajermo, a representative of the Finnish labour migration to Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s (Strömberg

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2009). However, immediately after the xenophobic party Sverigedemokraterna (Sweden Democrats) entered Parliament in 2010, a group of comics artists decided to cooperate in a project called “Serier mot rasism” (Comics against racism); an eponymous anthology, with stories about racism against migrants, was published by the comics publisher Optimal Press in 2011. The same year, the project “Tusen Serier” (A thousand comics) was founded to support the production and publication of comics by “those among us who live/ have lived in Sweden but don’t look ‘Swedish’ enough or don’t have Swedish family names” (Tusen Serier 2021, our translation). Based in Malmö, Tusen Serier aims to open the Swedish comics field for new comics artists, perspectives, and narratives. In 2013, Tusen Serier published Alvarez’s album about undocumented women as one of their first editions, and she started as a member of the board of the organisation, which became an independent non-profit association in 2015. It supports and arranges workshops and exhibitions and has published more than 15 books, as well as fanzines and anthologies, since 2011. The ambition is to publish each book at least bilingually, in Swedish and another language (Tusen Serier 2021); sometimes the publications are even trilingual, such as The Stories of Five Undocumented Women. Galago, the publisher of Daria Bogdanska’s Wage Slaves, is a well-established publishing house with its own eponymous comics magazine. Founded more than 40  years ago, it maintains its reputation as an alternative and politically radical leftist publisher. However, Galago released very few comics on female migrants’ experiences before 2015, when they published Rakhsha Razani’s autobiographical comics album Var ska jag lägga mitt huvud? (Where shall I lay my head?) about her childhood in Iran and her escape that concluded in Sweden. According to Nina Ernst, Razani was the first comics creator with a migrant and refugee background to introduce this experience in a graphic life narrative to Sweden (Ernst 2017, 84). Galago’s vision seems to have broadened recently, as the publisher now releases comics by writers and artists with a wider variety of backgrounds. Dotterbolaget, a network for female and trans comics artists in the Swedish cities of Malmö, Gothenburg, Stockholm, and Umeå, also has interests in comics about migrants. This network cooperates with the Asylum Group in Malmö, a non-profit organisation that has been working for the benefit of asylum seekers and undocumented people since 1991. The members of Dotterbolaget make comics, fanzines, and other material for the Asylum Group.

Creating change – The Stories of Five Undocumented Women Alvarez came from Chile to Sweden at the turn of the millennium. Artistically, she is an autodidact; she has been drawing comics since she was a young schoolgirl. In Chile, she created graphic stories about the indigenous group to which her family belongs. During the dictatorship in Chile (1973–1990), she made fanzines together with friends, and she took part in producing the country’s first fanzine made solely by women, XU (Schylström 2014). In Sweden, Alvarez has drawn illustrations for

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newspapers and journals such as Arbetaren, Liberación, Mana, and Bang. Her next book after the one about undocumented women was Fem historier om prostituerande/ Five stories about prostituters/Cinco historias sobre prostityentes, published in 2016 (Alvarez 2021). In 2018, she took part in the Swedish comics activist project “Draw the Line”, which resulted in an anthology on the issue of #metoo, edited by Malin Biller and Karin Didring (Nordenstam and Wallin Wictorin 2020). Alvarez’s contribution was an 18-page comic, “Basta”, which tells the story of a migrant woman working in a dental clinic in Sweden who is economically discriminated against and sexually harassed by her employer. The story ends with the protagonist quitting her job in protest. In 2020, Alvarez published an online version of the comic, but with the text in English and the title extended to “Basta! A Comic on Migrant Workers’ Struggles in Sweden” (Alvarez 2020, 2021). On her web page, Alvarez presents herself as “an anti-racist activist that creates comics” (Alvarez 2021). She is active on Instagram and Facebook and organises exhibitions and workshops about representation and antiracism in comics (Alvarez 2021). She has illustrated the Antirasistisk ordbok (The antiracist dictionary), edited by Adrián Groglopo (2015; see the article by Groglopo and Alvarez in this volume), and published four issues of the antiracist fanzine Antirasistiskt och postkolonialt fanzine från utanför vitheten (Antiracist and postcolonial fanzine from beyond whiteness) in 2017. The creation of the five comics for The Stories of Five Undocumented Women started with Alvarez interviewing her friend “Luz Maria” (Schylström 2014). She went on to meet other women who told her about their experiences as undocumented and created five typical stories based on true stories of migrant women from countries outside the European Union. Alvarez listened to their previously untold stories and condensed them into five comics (Alvarez 2021). “Luz Maria” tells the story of a mother who does not have permission to live in Sweden while her child has the right to stay. In the story “Asylum seeker”, Sara talks about her escape from war, without getting the right to stay in Sweden. The story “Undocumented worker” narrates the vulnerable situation of exploitation at work that a lack of documents entails. “Imported wife” is about a migrant woman living with a Swedish citizen who abuses her physically, and Carmen in “My secret life” talks about applying for asylum because of her sexuality. Violence of different kinds is present in all the stories. Amanda Casanellas and Mattias Elftorp from Tusen Serier invited Alvarez to publish a book about the women. Alvarez took the opportunity, anxious as she was to use her pen to stridently proclaim their existence and to bear witness to the injustices and crimes they had suffered (Schylström 2014). Having experienced difficulties in trying to enter the comics field in Sweden, Alvarez was pleased to make contact with Tusen Serier. Based on her early encounters, she later described the field as “almost like a private club” (Schylström 2014, our translation). She has compared the encounter with a culture clash, blocking the spread of multiple perspectives and colours (Schylström 2014). Her book was first published with a print run of 500 copies, then 500 more (Elftorp 2021).

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The comics album has a black cover on which the title is inscribed in thin white letters. There are also five white masquerade masks, four of them resembling cats, drawn against the black background. They signify the five women in the book, and the same masks are also placed, one by one, as vignettes for each story. The back cover is also black, with a white vignette in the form of brass knuckles with sharp-edged gems, resembling a piece of jewellery. A woman, perhaps defending herself with the “jewellery”, is seen taking shelter behind it; she appears to be wearing a similar set of knuckles on her right hand. Most of the pages have black backgrounds, grey speech balloons, and white panels with drawings in black – with between one and three panels and several balloons intermixed and spread out on each page. The English text is written in small white letters directly on the black page background, while the Spanish (white) and the Swedish (black) texts are inserted in the grey speech balloons. The text conveys the women’s stories in first person in all three languages. The handmade drawings in the panels give the visual narrator’s personal interpretation of the stories and convey human actions and reactions, while the regular, computer-designed forms of the captions and speech balloons give the impression of a mechanical structure framing human activities. The overall impression is dominated by a dark, serious, and sorrowful – but also angry – tone. Although the stories are also filled with pride at having coped with difficult situations and relief when talking about help given by friends, no “happy” colours are applied, only greyscale. On her webpage, Alvarez has written, “These untold stories came from the underground”. As a contrast to the darkness of the cover, on the first page, before the title page and the individual story pages, there is a white panel showing a group of women chatting, having tea, and giving each other advice and information about jobs, places to stay, etc. A connected text explains the situation: “During my time in Sweden, my new country, I got to know these five women who entrusted me with their stories, which I now give to you” (Alvarez 2013). This is an image of the activism Alvarez is part of, where the women tell each other about their problems (which she transfers into comics stories), share their experiences, and support each other in a friendly community. The image represents the politics of hope connected with feminist activism (see Liinason and Cuesta 2016). One of the five stories, the one titled “Undocumented workers”, focuses especially on problems that arise at work for undocumented people. In that way, it is comparable to Bogdanska’s Wage Slaves. The following analysis, therefore, focuses on that story. Regarding the visual and verbal narration, it gives a good idea of how all five stories are constructed. On the first page, there is a drawing of one of the cat-like masks, which can be interpreted as a symbol of someone with nine lives, a survivor. On the following page, there is a white panel with a black line drawing, in which the main character is introduced and the mise en scène is important (see Groensteen 2007, 120). The image establishes the setting with a large public sculpture in a cityscape. The sculpture is the famous Arbetets ära (The glory of labour) in the centre of the well-known square Möllevångstorget in Malmö (Figure  3.1). This sculpture, made by Axel Ebbe, consists of five naked human

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Alvarez, The Stories of Five Undocumented Women, Tusen Serier, 2013, n.p.

FIGURE 3.1 Amalia

Source: © Amalia Alvarez. Reproduced with the permission of Amalia Alvarez.

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bodies in bronze, carrying a huge boulder of granite. It was placed there in 1931 as a symbol of the history of the working class (Ernst 2017, 128; Hansen 2019, 155). The placement is significant since a large worker’s revolt, the Möllevångskravallerna (Möllevång riots), took place here in 1926. The reader is alerted to the setting by a caption at the top of the page: “Möllevångstorget, Malmö, 2012”. A  woman is shown sitting on the immense base of the sculpture and waving happily at the approaching interviewer, saying: “Why hello! How nice to see you again!” The reader is addressed when the woman communicates her story to the interviewer. Comics scholar Elisabeth El Refaie (2012, 9) has underlined the importance of drawing the reader into the story to produce an emotional and intellectual response. This is essential, of course, when it comes to activism aimed at creating sympathy for an issue, and attention is encouraged here by the protagonist’s waving hand. In this story, as in the others, Alvarez also uses frequent representations of the protagonist in close-ups and aligns the reader with the protagonist’s point of view, two methods for achieving the affective engagement mentioned by El Refaie (2012, 10). In this story, the protagonist is primarily shown in close-ups, and occasionally at a short distance, speaking and gesticulating vividly. She starts telling her story about having decided to go to the trade union with her problems. Her employer has refused to pay her miniscule wages for three months, and, on previous occasions, when he actually did pay her, he first forced her to engage in sexual intercourse. Now she is pregnant. Having paid for her journey to Sweden, he took her passport, which he still keeps even though she has repaid the last part of her debt to him. She is afraid of him since he is connected to the restaurant mafia and uses violence when it suits him. Another woman who threatened to go to the media disappeared. But the protagonist has gotten a hold of some compromising information about the employer and asks the narrator to give it to a trade union representative without mentioning her name. She regards this as an act of longed-for revenge. The story ends with the woman saying to the reader: “Don’t look at me with compassion! I don’t want your pity. I want you to help me destroy them. That’s all I want from you, then you can forget me! We’re not from the same world”. This attitude of a demand for respect and help to reveal and change the system is common to several of the stories in the book. The comics target not only native Swedish readers who might not be aware of the existence of these kinds of serious problems in Sweden but also women who perhaps find themselves in situations similar to those experienced by the protagonist. In this way, the stories work as a means of activism by pointing to conflicts and injustices, not only revealing existing deficits regarding human rights but also confirming common problems and strengthening the spirit of people in similar situations who are striving for change. The fact that the comic is trilingual makes it readable for more people. It also makes it necessary for the reader to search for the most suitable language. The reader has to decide which text to follow, and which language to read first, if not exclusively. Gradually, it becomes possible to discern a personal reading path through the text.

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Alvarez, The Stories of Five Undocumented Women, Tusen Serier, 2013, n.p.

FIGURE 3.2 Amalia

Source: © Amalia Alvarez. Used with the permission of Amalia Alvarez.

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Visually, the story conveys the protagonist’s sensitive situation by alternating between a happy face and desperate expressions. The setting dissolves very quickly in the visual narrative, which then focuses on the woman, who leans forward and then backwards, and is sometimes shown from below, then from above. As the story evolves, the woman handles various pointed objects with sharp edges. These can be interpreted as signs of her need to defend herself and also of her aggressive feelings about the situation, namely, as weapons for defence and attack. On her right hand, she wears the brass knuckles, which are also shown on the back cover of the book, while with her left hand she plays with a fork, which grows surrealistically large as she talks about her sexually abusive landlord or her employer. A third kind of pointed object is a pair of black stiletto heels, used by the protagonist as defensive weapons. She displays them from several perspectives, sometimes lifting them protectively in front of her face, at other times pointing them like guns towards an abstract threat in front of her (Figure 3.2). The story “Asylum seeker” is also clearly directed at native Swedes. After the protagonist has told her story filled with the violence that she has experienced on her way to Sweden and upon arriving in the country, she is shown turning to address the reader, saying: “Horrible? You think so? I think it’s more horrible that you don’t know about reality …” (Alvarez 2013, n.p.). This story, like the others, shows and tells how the protagonists experience their circumstances and their treatment by the Swedish society. The economic dependence of these women on cynical men is clarified and exemplified as they are sexually abused and beaten, without help from the legal system – and barely any from the health care system either. For the majority-Swedish and other readers, it becomes clear that there are deficiencies and cracks in the welfare society that enable the exclusion of migrants. Alvarez tries to make these readers understand the precarious position of undocumented women. Simultaneously, she expresses the strength in the community between women in similar situations and represents them with pride, strength, and the agency to cope with various difficult conditions and events. The protagonists tell their stories not because they seek pity but rather because they hope for legal and political change. The sharpness of Alvarez’s verbal and visual narration and the justified angry tone of the protagonists voiced in this book constitute a serious critique, and the comics album is both a result and an example of feminist comics activism.

Mobilisation – Wage Slaves Daria Bogdanska’s autobiographical comics album Wage Slaves drew a great deal of attention in the Swedish media when it was published in 2016. It received positive reviews, sold well with a relatively large print run of 4,200 copies, and is currently sold out (Olsson 2021). To date, the comics album has been translated into French (2017), Norwegian and Spanish (2018), and English, German, and Italian (2019). Regarded as an example of working-class literature, it focuses on the situation of workers in Sweden, especially exposing the exploitation of migrant women in the restaurant industry (Nordenstam 2017; Nilsson 2020). The panels in Wage Slaves are drawn in black ink on white backgrounds with distinct frames and gutters. They have various and irregular sizes, and the number

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of panels on each page varies between one and eight. Bogdanska’s drawing style is reminiscent of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis but is not as elaborated, minimalistic, or expressionistic (see Chute 2010, 135). The style in Wage Slaves is rougher and more realistic, but there are also expressionistic images, such as those showing the protagonist’s anger or despair because of her situation. Bogdanska retells her own story about Sweden, a country she first learned about through a Swedish boyfriend travelling abroad. She discusses the ordeal of an abortion in Sweden rather than an illegal procedure in Poland, and then moving to Malmö to attend comics art school.3 Being Polish, Bogdanska is a citizen of the EU; she can study for free at the Swedish school, but she cannot get a student loan. She does not have a Swedish personal identity number, without which she cannot find employment or health insurance, a bank account, a first-hand apartment contract, or membership in the restaurant workers’ union. Daria, the protagonist in the story, tries to get permission to stay in the country with the aim of getting a job, but the Tax Authority rejects her. The decision is reprinted in the book: The Tax Authority’s opinion: You have notified us that you have moved to Sweden and that you are an EEA-citizen. You have in your application stated that you intend to look for work in Sweden. Since you as a job seeker are not economically active, the Tax Authority opines that you have not proven your right to stay in Sweden. Furthermore, you have not shown a residence permit issued by the Swedish Migration Agency. The Tax Authority declines your application to move to Sweden. (Bogdanska 2019, 23)4 In this situation, Daria must find a job without a permit. Thus, she belongs to the large group of migrant women located on a low rung of the societal ladder of the black labour market. At the very bottom are thousands of migrant women from outside the EU, as this comic claims. As the comic’s title suggests, Daria and the other workers at the restaurant live as wage slaves. This concept, which is the crucial focus of the book, here signifies exploited workers who are paid less than the regulated wage level, having no employment certificate or insurance. When Daria finds a job at the inexpensive restaurant Indian Curry Hut in Malmö, she gets no contract and is paid under the counter. As a Polish citizen, she earns less money than a Swedish woman who does the same work, but more than her Bangladeshi workmate. The hierarchy is symbolically visualised with a staircase with a regionally or nationally identified woman on each step (Figure 3.3). The narrator in the caption explains the hierarchy, with the lowest paid being the most desperate ones: Those from outside Europe who couldn’t get any other job. European immigrants were also desperate but had closer to home so we made a little bit more. The Swedes were paid the best although their pay was bad too. They were bribed with free beer and food. Furthermore, it seemed like they treated the job as as [sic] a side gig. (Bogdanska 2019, 37)

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Bogdanska, Wage Slaves, trans. Aleksander Linskog, Centrala, 2019, p. 37.

FIGURE 3.3 Daria

Source: Reproduced with kind permission of Centrala.

As a complement to the verbal narration, this image documents and symbolises the protagonist’s understanding of the hierarchical structure. The caption in the next panel reads: “It didn’t feel right at all. I used to idealize Sweden. Now I saw the cracks in the pretty façade”. The protagonist is shown sitting on a bed, musing: “Equality for all humans – my ass” (Bogdanska 2019, 37). This is a turning point for Daria, who is both saddened and angered by her insight. In the story’s representations of exploitation at a restaurant, the owner is far more concerned with acquiring greater profits than with the well-being of his staff, and this is described from the protagonist’s point of view. The concept used in the title, “wage slaves”, is activated in the story when Daria reflects on her own treatment: “And they say slavery was abolished several hundred years ago” (Bogdanska 2019, 68). The comic explains this statement with an image depicting a page from a dictionary, where the terms “slavery” and “slave” are explained: “1.1 A person who works very hard without proper remuneration or appreciation, 1.2 A person who is excessively dependent upon or controlled by something, 1.3. A person who is the property of another” (Bogdanska 2019, 68). On the following page, Daria is reflecting on this, lying on her bed; just before she falls asleep, she says to herself: “I don’t want to be a slave” (Bogdanska 2019, 69). Daria is part of a modern practice of wage slavery, and the story is about how she will be able to resist that and fight the system. The young woman is strong and brave in her search for help and justice. As the story proceeds, she becomes increasingly angry with the unfair working conditions, and she transforms into an activist. A crucial turning point is the moment when she finds a newspaper article online in which a Swedish woman, a journalist,

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reports about the unregulated “black labour market”, where migrants work for low wages under bad conditions at Möllevångstorget, especially in restaurants (Bog­ danska 2019, 86). After this, Daria begins her fight against criminal employers, first by contacting the journalist, who also has worked in such restaurants, and then the local syndicalist trade union (Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganisation, SAC), which is described as helping migrants, contrary to other unions. In a naïve but empathic way, Daria educates all the workers at the restaurant and exhorts them to demonstrate and fight together against the restaurant owner, in order to get better working conditions and fair salaries, but her agitation does not end well. The workers need their money and are afraid of losing their jobs; she has been told this could be the case. After much effort and help from the syndicalist union, a meeting is held with the restaurant owner, who relents and pays Daria what he owes her – before firing her. Thus, the story shows a path to relative social justice for the individual, although the systemic structure remains intact. Bogdanska’s story points this out to the reader, who may not know these facts about the unions and the modern wage slave system, and in that sense, the comic is enlightening and works as an activist text with the aim of mobilising for change. The comics album has an overall political, leftist activist mission, presenting changes achieved through organisation and cooperation, but in the comic itself, no overall change in the system occurs. Nevertheless, the story is about hope and power. In the epilogue, Daria and her friend are walking in the street; outside a convenience store, a newspaper poster headlines her fight and how she got her money back. In the last full-page image, Daria is once again walking down the street with a cigarette in her mouth, passing an empty restaurant window. The text says, “KARMA IS A BITCH”, meaning that justice will be served in the end. The restaurant is closed, and the situation presents a sense of power and strength. For the moment, the protagonist can get on with her life in Sweden with her friends and her romances, playing in a punk band and drawing comics at a school in Malmö. But she still needs a job for a means of subsistence. The modern wage slave system is still going on in other restaurants as long as no radical changes are being made. Bogdanska received a lot of attention in real life and in the media for taking and winning the fight against the restaurant owner (Hansen 2019, 169). Two years later, she retold her story in Wage Slaves by talking back and raising the question of injustice. She was working for change because she had hope that it was possible to achieve change. As Liinason and Cuesta (2016) note, activism is “the politics of hope”, and this comics album politically works for change. The setting for Bogdanska’s story is, as in Alvarez’s story “Undocumented workers”, primarily Möllevångstorget, a square that previously functioned as a centre for workers’ protests before being occupied mainly by poorer migrants. More recently, it has been gentrified and is now described as Malmö’s SoHo (Hansen 2019, 155). The place provides a good illustration of the class structure and its workings. The middle-class benefits from the migrants’ low wages. At Möllevångstorget, migrants could until recently find inexpensive living possibilities, but now the gentrified area with expensive apartments is known for its excellent falafels, “Malmö’s national

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dish”, the cheapest fast food in the area (Hansen 2019, 168). In Wage Slaves, Daria’s friend relates the current situation to the “creative middle class” and notes: “Gentrification is in full swing” (Bogdanska 2019, 71). The white middle class is described as standing on their balconies, looking down at the people in the square on New Year’s Eve, terrified by firecrackers. In a scene from the restaurant, a young male customer discusses the middle class’s problem of choosing between buying a house in the countryside and continuing to live in the city (Bogdanska 2019, 106). The man is drawn with the attributes of a contemporary middle-class hipster: a small beard, eyeglasses, cap, and checked shirt. This panel illustrates well the class conflict, with the female worker and a middle-class man at the same restaurant; the man is perhaps not even aware of her working conditions or does not care about them. The workers meet derisory attitudes from customers. To be a migrant female worker at a restaurant at Möllevångstorget is described as being exposed to more or less patronising treatment from majority-Swedish people. In an early sequence of the story (see Figure 3.4), despite her heavy accent, Daria tries to speak Swedish to a customer at the restaurant: “Hi, hav you made decided what to order?”. The customer answers something which the protagonist perceives as: “Å E ÄR Ö Ä M Å B Å P Ö Å E Ö Ä Å”. She asks: “Sorry … What you say? Can you rip it?”. The Swedish, white female customer again answers incomprehensibly. The sequence expresses that the protagonist does not understand a word, and it invites the reader to share Daria’s predicament. She gives up and says, “I’m so sorry … my Swedish is not so good could you say that in English please …” and the customer takes the opportunity to deride her (Bogdanska 2019, 30). The customer uses a typical master suppression technique, flaunting her power by telling Daria that she should be grateful to meet someone able to speak English.

Bogdanska, Wage Slaves, trans. Aleksander Linskog, Centrala, 2019, p. 30.

FIGURE 3.4 Daria

Source: Reproduced with kind permission of Centrala.

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Wage Slaves is a political autobiographical comics album. It raises important ethical and political questions about who is included in the Swedish welfare society. How can there be “wage slaves” at restaurants in Sweden today? Why are migrants treated so poorly and so differently from majority-Swedish workers? What kind of responsibility does the state have, or the trade unions? Bogdanska finds help and solidarity among the syndicalist trade union members, the journalist, and some friends. In her comics album, she shows a way to work together against economic exploitation. After Wage Slaves, Bogdanska has continued the fight for justice in Lobbyland, another comics album also intended to gain international outreach via the internet, this time focusing on how lobbying works in the EU (Bogdanska 2018). The comic has been financed by the Greens/European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament. She has also illustrated Bostadsmanifest. 22 krav för framtidens hem (Housing manifesto: 22 demands for future homes), in which 25 Swedish researchers and activists demand improvements in the housing market to counteract the increasing urban segregation resulting from current neoliberal policies (CRUSH och vänner 2020). In 2019, Daria Bogdanska received the Robespierre Prize, a radical leftwing award, for her comics, for her work with the Swedish syndicalist trade union, and for helping Eastern European migrant workers in the salad industry in Sweden (Leninpriset n.d.).

Conclusions Amalia Alvarez’s comics album The Stories of Five Undocumented Women, based on a collection of stories told by migrant women, and Daria Bogdanska’s autobiographical comics album Wage Slaves can be regarded as feminist comics activism. They are examples of comics activism since the comics point to important issues in opposition to a controversial issue, namely, the treatment of migrant women (see Lund 2018). The emphasis on migrant women’s situation also makes it relevant to regard the comics as feminist activism, in line with Liinason and Cuesta’s discussion, since the comics have a performative potential to create change regarding politics and legislation. The stories can influence readers regarding how they formulate and communicate thoughts about themselves and others, and can contribute to changing relations between individuals and groups in society (Liinason and Cuesta 2016, 15–19). The two comics albums also show how it is possible to work together, support each other, and create hope. By creating and publishing the comics, Alvarez and Bogdanska give migrant women an opportunity to come to voice and talk back against their situation (hooks 1989, 12), as well as against people who just express pity instead of taking action. Feminist comics activism in these cases involves dealing resolutely with political issues such as migrant women’s bad working conditions and the vision of a fairer and more equal world for all. By creating stories that can be read by the majority of Swedes, Alvarez and Bogdanska contribute to the task of increasing knowledge and awareness. Their comics can also support and empower other migrant women in

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similar situations. Alvarez uses journalistic methods and bases her comic on interviews conducted with female migrants about their situations, while Bogdanska tells her own story in the tradition of feminist autobiography (see Chute 2010). Alvarez and Bogdanska are both critical of Swedish society in their comics as well as in their own lives, where the exploitation of migrant women still persists, and where justice and welfare benefits are not available for everyone. However, their comics do offer hope by showing mobilisation for better conditions, with other activists. Evidently, there is a need for radical publishing houses that work to produce feminist comics by and about people with migrant backgrounds living in Sweden.

Notes 1 The Swedish title is spelled with a lower-case s for the word “slaves”, but hereafter we use the English translation Wage Slaves. 2 From the 1990s to 2019, the number of originally published comics albums rose from 32 in 1992 to 99 in 2010. It peaked in 2015, totalling 119 albums, then decreased to 65 albums in 2019 (Hammarlund 2021). 3 From 1956 on, during the communist period, abortion was legalised in Poland, and many women came from abroad, including Sweden, until 1974, when abortion became legal in Sweden. Since 1993, Poland has had restrictions against abortion, and the number of illegal abortions is extensive (Dahlqvist 2018, 27–28). 4 In the Swedish original of the book, the text is: “Skatteverkets bedömning: Du har anmält inflyttning till Sverige och du är EES-medborgare. Du har i din anmälan uppgett att din avsikt är att söka arbete i Sverige. Då du som arbetssökande inte är ekonomiskt aktiv anser Skatteverket att du inte styrkt din uppehållsrätt i Sverige. Du har inte heller visat uppehållstillstånd utfärdat från Migrationsverket. Skatteverket avslår din anmälan om inflyttning till Sverige” (Bogdanska 2016, 25).

References Alvarez, Amalia. 2013. Fem papperlösa kvinnors historier./Cinco historias de mujeres indocumentadas./The Stories of Five Undocumented Women (Translated to Swedish by Martin Larsson). Malmö: Tusen Serier. Alvarez, Amalia. 2020. “Basta! A Comic on Migrant Workers’ Struggles in Sweden”. Migrazine 1/2020. https://www.migrazine.at/artikel/basta-comic-migrant-workers-struggles-sweden. Accessed 14 July 2022. Alvarez, Amalia. 2021. Amalia Alvarez. https://amaliaalvarez.wordpress.com/. Accessed 14 July 2022. Bogdanska, Daria. 2016. Wage slaves. Stockholm: Galago. Bogdanska, Daria. 2018. Lobbyland. Sweden: De Gröna, EFA i Europaparlamentet. https:// lobbyland.se/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/lobbyland_www.pdf. Accessed 14 July 2022. Bogdanska, Daria. 2019. Wage Slaves (Translated by Aleksander Linskog). London: Centrala. Chute, Hillary. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press. CRUSH & vänner. 2020. Bostadsmanifest. 22 krav för framtidens hem. Årsta: Dokument Press. Dahlqvist, Anna. 2018. I det tysta. Resor på Europas abortmarknad. Stockholm: Atlas. El Refaie, Elisabeth. 2012. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

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Elftorp, Mattias. 2021. E-mail to Margareta Wallin Wictorin. Ernst, Nina. 2017. Att teckna sitt jag: grafiska självbiografier i Sverige. Malmö: Apart förlag. Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics (Translated by Bart Beaty, and Nick Nguyen). Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Groglopo, Adrián, ed. 2015. Antirasistisk Ordbok. Malmö: Notis och Antirasistiska Akademin. www.antirasistiskaakademin.se/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Antirasistiskordbok.pdf. Accessed 14 July 2022. Hammarlund, Ola. 2021. E-mail to Margareta Wallin Wictorin. Hansen, Christina. 2019. Solidarity in Diversity: Activism as a Pathway of Migrant Emplacement in Malmö. Malmö: Malmö University. Hill Collins, Patricia, and Sirma Bilge. 2016. Intersectionality. Cambridge: Polity Press. hooks, bell. 1989. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press. Leninpriset. n.d. “Henrik Bromander’s Speech to Daria Bogdanska”. Leninpriset. www. leninpriset.se/prisutdelning/henrik-bromanders-speech-to-daria-bogdanska/. Accessed 14 July 2022. Liinason, Mia, and Marta Cuesta. 2016. Hoppets politik: Feministisk aktivism i Sverige idag. Göteborg & Stockholm: Makadam. Lund, Martin. 2018. “Comics Activism, A (Partial) Introduction”. Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art (SJoCA) 3 (2): 39–54. http://sjoca.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ SJoCA-3-2-04-Lund.pdf Moksnes, Heidi. 2016. “Papperslösa arbetare och möjligheterna för facklig organisering”. In Irreguljär migration i Sverige. Rättigheter, vardagserfarenheter, motstånd och statliga kategoriseringar, edited by Maja Sager, Helena Holgersson, and Klara Öberg, 209–239. Göteborg: Daidalos. Nilsson, Magnus. 2020. “Ådalens arbetare, Stockholms ärke-medelklass och Möllevångens prekariat: Plats och klass i två samtida arbetarserieromaner”. In Sted, fiksjon og historie: Hvordan former litteratur steder – og hvordan former steder litteratur? edited by Marianne Wiig and Ola Alsvik, 225–245. Oslo: Norsk lokalhistorisk institutt ved Nasjonalbiblioteket. Nordenstam, Anna. 2017. “Tre berättelser om Sverige. Fattigdom och klass i Veckan före barnbidraget, Iggy 4-ever och Wage slaves”. In Konstellationer. Festskrift till Anna Williams, edited by Alexandra Borg, Andreas Hedberg, Maria Karlsson, Jerry Määttä, and Åsa Warnqvist, 308–323. Möklinta: Gidlunds förlag. Nordenstam, Anna, and Margareta Wallin Wictorin. 2020. “Tecknade serier som feministisk aktivism: Kvinnor ritar bara serier om mens och Draw the Line”. Tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 2–3/2020: 97–112. Olsson, Sofia. 2021. E-mail to Anna Nordenstam, 4 February. Schylström, Patrik. 2014. “Amalia Alvarez i intervju om papperslösa, skapande och osynliga historier”. Bokcirklar.se, 14 April. https://bokcirklar.se/2014/04/amalia-alvarez-i-intervjuom-papperslosa-skapande-och-osynliga-historier/. Accessed 14 July 2022. Sigvardsdotter, Erika. 2016. “En papperslös livsvärld. Utanförskapets fenomenologi”. In Irreguljär migration i Sverige: rättigheter, vardagserfarenheter, motstånd och statliga kategoriseringar, edited by Maja Sager, Helena Holgersson, and Klara Öberg, 141–161. Göteborg: Daidalos. Strömberg, Fredrik. 2009. “Arja Kajermo – underbar, underbetald serieskapare?” Bild  & Bubbla 4/2009, 45–51. Tusen Serier. 2021. Tusen Serier. www.tusenserier.org. Accessed 14 July 2022.

4 CONTRACTS VIA COMICS Migrant workers and Thai fishing vessel employment contracts Anne Ketola, Eliisa Pitkäsalo, and Robert de Rooy

This chapter examines a particular type of comics that use a practice designed to overcome language barriers, namely comic contracts1 that have been created for Myanmar and Cambodian migrants who work in the Thai fishing industry. The term “comic contract” refers to legally binding contracts where the parties in the contract are represented as characters and where the contract terms are communicated mainly visually (Haapio et al. 2016, 376–377). Comic contracts represent the contents of the contract with illustrations and other visual means and employ plain language in combination with the illustrations so that the document can be understood by people with low literacy or foreign-language skills. In other words, comic contracts aim to improve vulnerable people’s access to information, or, in legal terms, one’s access to justice. Furthermore, the visuality of a comic contract invites people to engage with the information and helps readers understand and remember its contents (Kalliomaa-Puha et al. 2023 [forthcoming]). In recent years, comics have been increasingly used as a legitimate method of visual communication in various fields of practice, such as medicine (e.g. Farthing and Priego 2016; Green and Myers 2010), technical communication (e.g. Yu 2015), law (Haapio et al. 2016; Botes 2017; Pitkäsalo and Kalliomaa-Puha 2019; Pitkäsalo 2020), and social welfare (Pitkäsalo et al. 2022). Comic contracts are typically presented to the signing parties in print form. This chapter will also touch on the deployment of comic contracts via a new online contracting platform where the comic contract is presented in an audiovisual format with virtual camera movement, which takes the reader through the contract. In addition, the digital version includes a voice-over narration in different languages, which aims to assist readers with poor or non-existent reading skills. In this chapter, we refer to this type of comic contract as audio-visual contracts, a term established by Colette R. Brunschwig (2019). DOI: 10.4324/9781003254621-5

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The comic contract examined in this chapter2 is created for migrants from Myanmar and Cambodia who work for the Thai fishing industry, where poor working conditions and human rights violations have been widely reported. One of the several problems in the industry has to do with employment contracts. The Thai government has issued a standardised employment contract to be used in the industry, but no statistics exist on how often the contracts are actually provided. According to a Human Rights Watch (2018, 103) report on the working conditions of migrants, only one individual interviewed for the report could recall signing an employment contract; most others had concluded that they had been required to sign some documents but had not understood what they were for, and none of the interviewees had received a written copy of the papers they signed. In other words, even if migrants are given a contract to sign, they often do not understand its contents due to poor foreign-language and literacy skills. The document is written in contract-language jargon and is only available in Thai and English (the latter presumably serving for purposes of international human rights invigilation). In addition, as stated in a report by Plan International Thailand (2020, 34), migrant workers often come from socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, and hence many have low literacy levels. The contract cannot benefit the worker if they do not understand it. For instance, many are unaware that they are entitled to a decent amount of rest, or food and drinking water provided by the employer at no extra cost; these rights are often violated, as we discuss further in the chapter. The Human Rights Watch (2018, 9) report recommends that “Employers should be required to fully explain to workers their rights and the terms and conditions of work before they sign a contract”, and this needs to be done “in a language [the migrants] understand”. The comic contract discussed in this chapter aims to carry out this requirement. The comic contract is available in four languages: Burmese, Cambodian,3 Thai, and English. The audio-visual version of the comic contract is offered in Burmese and Cambodian – the languages of the migrant workers. In comparison to the employment contracts offered to this group of workers in the past, this particular contract aims to afford the employee the dignity of autonomously understanding their rights during employment. The comic contract has been produced by Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd,4 a South African company focused on creating visual- and audio-based contracts. The aim is for the comic contract, in both printed and audio-visual forms, to become the industry standard for transparent contracting of vulnerable migrant workers on all vessels that supply Thai Union PLC, which is one of the largest seafood companies in the world. The comic contract has the potential to improve working conditions for a great number of people: there are over 42,000 fishing vessels and approximately 200,000 fishers working in the industry, most of whom are migrants (USAID 2018, 7). However, Thai Union cannot impose comic contracts on the vessel owners, so their uptake will depend on how well they perform in the first field tests, that is, the first, monitored situations of actual use.5 The field tests will be carried out with the Thai and Burmese versions

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of the comic contract; the Cambodian version will be finalised after receiving field test feedback. Comic contracts are an example of how versatile comics are as a communication medium. Different types of comics employ different genre-specific means in their expression: instructive comics follow the typical form of instructions, and the structure of comic contracts resembles the fragmentary structure of contracts. Comics can include sequences that build narratives as well as sequences where narration is of secondary importance (Lefèvre 2000); they can include sequences of images that easily translate into narratives as well as sequences of images that are (seemingly) disparately juxtaposed, as well as anything in between (Groensteen 2014). Regardless of whether a comic contract offers clear narratives or not, the reader typically intends to parse its contents into some type of a cohesive whole. Comic contracts are legal documents. They lay out the contract parties’ roles, rights, and responsibilities, and offer clarity and protection by being as unambiguous as possible. In this chapter, we examine how the creators of the comic contract have used visual resources to create a document that is comprehensible by its users and able to fulfil its function in legal knowledge exchange. The overall aim of the chapter is to reflect on how the comic contract can benefit those workers who sign it. We do this by examining what has been included in the contract in the first place and how the contract has been made more comprehensible with visual means.

Background of the Thai fishing industry Seafood is one of Thailand’s largest industrial sectors, with annual exports valued at 5.8  billion USD (SeafoodSource 2019). The industry mainly runs on a migrant workforce, with most of the workers being from Myanmar and Cambodia (Mutaqin 2018, 81). There is ample evidence that a significant number of these workers experience work conditions that violate human rights and labour rights. For instance, according to a recent report published by Plan International Thailand in 2020, migrants regularly encounter unfair wage payment, withholding of wages, daily physical violence, emotional abuse, dangerous working conditions, and excessive working hours. According to a 2017 survey of Thai fishing industry workers conducted by the Issara Institute, over 74 percent of the respondents reported working at least 16 hours per day. Due to an entrenched system of “agents” and transport costs, recruitment into the fishing industry involves high fees that need to be covered by the worker. Many are unable to pay in advance and are forced to take out loans from local money lenders, brokers, or boat owners. According to the Issara Institute report (2017, 7), 76 percent of those surveyed had been in debt bondage. Furthermore, employers often have control over workers’ bank books and ATM cards, and migrant workers may not be able to track the debt repayments made from their salary; therefore, they may not know how much they still owe (Lindgren et al. 2019, 8). Transnational travel to the workplace is regularly arranged at night and/or via irregular, hazardous routes in order to avoid police checkpoints, and migrants may face demands for

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bribes and additional payments. Many find themselves being held in confinement at transit places, and being subjected to physical abuse by traffickers; the confiscation of personal documents such as passports and work permits is not uncommon. The comic contract was commissioned by Thai Union Group PLC. In 2017, Thai Union introduced a Fishing Vessel Improvement Program and Vessel Code of Conduct. The program was designed to provide clear guidance about working conditions on board the vessels which Thai Union sources from, in order to ensure that they do not engage in forced labour, slavery, child labour, and discrimination. A  subsequent third-party audit6 of their suppliers revealed, inter alia, that the migrant workers’ contracts did not have the required content, record-keeping was not adequate, and that crews did not understand their contracts due to language barriers or low literacy levels. Thai Union approached Creative Contracts to develop a comic contract and audio-visual contract for vessel owners to use with their workers to address these contract concerns. Thai Union requested that the comic contract be produced in Burmese and Cambodian, which are by far the major migrant languages in the industry, as well as in Thai language for the employee side. The fundamental starting point dictating the conditions for fishery employment contracts in Thailand is the Ministerial Regulation concerning Labour Protection in Sea Fishery Work B.E.2557 (2014) (hereafter referred to as the “Ministerial Regulation”), issued by the Ministry of Labour of the Thai government. It aims to strengthen legal protection for employees in the fishing industry and prevent human trafficking. The key points of the Ministerial Regulation include the prohibition of employment of persons under 18 years of age, the description of the minimum hours of rest, and the provision for drinking water, toilets, and medical supplies, to mention a few. Based on this regulation, a bilingual (Thai-English) contract has been made for public use by the Thai government, titled Sea Fishery Work Employment Contract (hereafter referred to as “Employment Contract”). As concluded in a report published by the International Labour Organization (ILO 2020, 37), the fact that this contract is not available in the workers’ native languages – and is hence typically not understood by the workers – is highly problematic. Both the Ministerial Regulation and the Employment Contract were used as the basis for the comic version of the contract.

Producing the comic contract The development of comic contracts is collaborative and transdisciplinary, with contributions from illustrators, designers, and lawyers. The production team at Creative Contracts follows a structured process to create comic contracts. The first step is to establish what terms are contained in the client’s typical verbal-only contract. However, the verbal-only contracts are often incomplete or deficient, whether by design or neglect, and often require updating to comply with relevant laws. The second step is to then get the client’s agreement on the terms that will be

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included in the comic contract. The decision is often delicate, as using terms that are too prescriptive could result in the new comic contract facing resistance unrelated to its key features of easy comprehension and transparency. The transparency of the comic contract often motivates a client to drop or tone down very onerous clauses that would escape the same level of scrutiny in a language contract. In their report on contract transparency, Shmuel I. Becher and Uri Benoliel (2021, 45) conclude that people perform at higher standards when they know that others can observe, monitor, and criticise their behaviour. Contract transparency, therefore, can encourage accountability and fairness (Becher and Benoliel 2021, 45). The terms of the contract are then interpreted in a script, which is basically a description of the images, text, and layout to best represent the terms. The script is tested with the client before the following stage, which is a rough illustration of the terms, referred to as scamps. Once all parties are happy with the scamps, the images are worked up with finer lines, referred to as inks. Once the client is happy with the inks, the client is asked to test the inks with a sample of intended users, to see whether the interpretations and visualisations are understood as intended, and that no cultural or other errors have been made. After this stage, the images get coloured and finally enhanced with shading to create a subtle three-dimensional aspect. Signing a contract is a serious moment, especially for the vulnerable user. The process of making the contract more approachable can mean including one or two mildly humorous images: the team at Creative Contracts has learned that such images, even if it is just a facial expression that elicits a smile from the user, goes a long way to help users relate to the contract, identify with the characters in the contract and put the users more at ease with the process. It also makes the provision and the contract more memorable to the users. The register used in the different language versions of the comic contract is slightly colloquial; the team has learned from past projects that sworn translations (officially accepted translations of a legal document or any document that needs to be accepted in a legal situation) are likely to baffle the users with their complex language. In other words, the text produced for the comic version of the contract has been modified so that it is more linguistically accessible for a readership with varied levels of reading proficiency. Where the original contract is written partly in the passive tense, partly addressing the reader distantly in the third person (e.g. “The employee shall completely perform his/her duties with accuracy”), the comic version of the contract addresses the reader in the second singular and the first plural tenses (“Do your work the right way”).

Structure and contents of the comic contract The comic contract is produced in four languages: Burmese, Cambodian, Thai, and English. The audio-visual version of the comic contract is produced for the Burmese and Cambodian translations – the languages of the migrant workers. The Thai version is for the employers, and the English is the baseline version made by

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the English-speaking comic contract production team for internal and compliance purposes; it is not used on the fishing vessels. The voice-over in the audio-visual version of the comic contract narrates the contract clauses verbatim, so as not to create dissonance between the text and the voice-over. This serves to give a sense of consistency and reliability to the user, so that they can feel confident about what they see and hear. While the clauses are narrated verbatim, the voice-over includes additional language in between the parts of the contract text (e.g. “We now turn to the next page”) to guide the user and to smooth the flow of the voice-over. The process of signing the contract unfolds as follows: The employee is first presented with the audio-visual version of the contract. In the beginning of the audio-visual contract video, the employee is told that they may raise their hand at any time if they do not understand something or if they have questions, and that sections of the video can be replayed if needed. After the audio-visual contract has been digitally signed, the employee receives a link to an audio-visual version of their personal contract, which they can view at any time, and a pdf version of their personal contract, which they can view, download, and print as needed. The comic contract has 16 pages (in comparison, the traditional contract used as its basis has two pages). It starts with a cover page with the words “Thai fishing vessel | Employment contract”, accompanied by a nearly full-page image of an employee boarding a vessel. The contract then presents a table of contents, which improves navigation of the document. The actual contents of the contract start with the presentation of the contract parties, the worker who signs the contract (the character in the red shirt in the figures below), and the employer (the character in the yellow shirt in Figures 4.2 and 4.3), and their personal data and contact information. The contract then introduces the employee’s job position and job activities, as well as the vessel and the geographical area in which the employee will work. The document then introduces the duration of the contract, the amount of pay, and the payment schedule. This part of the contract also includes a separate info box that says, “You will be paid via ATM”, with an image of an ATM card and the worker at an ATM machine withdrawing a stack of bills, and lines where bank and card details are to be added. The inclusion of this section can improve the worker’s awareness of the fact that the bank card should legally be in their own possession, contrary to the general custom described earlier. The following section of the contract introduces the working hours by describing the amount of rest and holidays the worker is entitled to have, and then describes what happens if the worker gets sick or injured (see Figure 4.3). The next section displays what the worker is entitled to receive on the boat (see Figure 4.2). The contract then outlines the duties of the worker and the behaviour that is expected of them on the boat. Finally, it explains that in unexpected situations (the worker getting injured, the vessel sinking, and so on), the employer has to pay for or take the worker back to the location where they were recruited. This section also includes, in large print, two government hotline numbers the worker can call if they are mistreated. The visual emphasis given to these phone numbers is well justified: according to a survey conducted by the International Labour Organization

84  Anne Ketola, Eliisa Pitkäsalo, and Robert de Rooy

in 2020, only 3  percent of workers knew that there was a phone number they could call in case they were mistreated (ILO 2020). The last page is reserved for the signatures of both contract parties, and the back cover mentions Creative Contracts as the creator of the document and the names of the documents used as its basis. In the audio-visual version of the comic contract, a virtual camera movement takes the reader through the contract pages. What the reader sees on the computer screen are static images of the comic contract pages, first as entire pages, then zoomed in on specific details. In general, audio-visual contracts carry the potential to guide the reading and to attract the reader’s focus towards the most essential contents with panning and zooming. For this reason, audio-visual contracts can be less ambiguous than regular comic contracts.

From word to image In this section of the chapter, we examine three examples from the comic contract. Each example is examined from two different perspectives. In the first place, we compare the comic contract with its source materials, namely, the Ministerial Regulation and the Employment Contract currently used in the industry. Our discussion aims to show that the comic contract displays the contents of the Ministerial Regulation more accurately than the Employment Contract, from which certain essential contents have been omitted. We also show examples of content that has been added to the comic contract in order to guarantee the actualisation of the employees’ rights beyond the current local laws. Second, we analyse the ways in which the verbal content has been converted into visual form in ways that aim to support comprehension. In particular, we examine the need to restructure information as well as different visual means that have been used to convey temporality and causality. Our first example is the visual translation of the sentence “Sometimes you may be asked to work in your rest time, but you will be given time to rest after” (Figure 4.1). This information is presented in the Ministerial Regulation but not in the Employment Contract. The International Labour Organization’s report mentions that having to work on call at any time, seven days a week, is one of the prevalent forms of involuntary work on the vessels (ILO 2020, 27).

FIGURE 4.1  Excerpt

describing a situation in which the employee is asked to work during his rest period, Thai Fishing Vessel Employment Contract, Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd.

Source: Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd. and Thai Union Group PCL. Reproduced with kind permission.

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The source sentence presents a possible situation and its outcome at a future point in time. The visual translation of this sentence is a strip of four panels: A man (who has in the first pages of the comic contract been identified as the worker who signs the contract) is resting on a bed with a hat over his eyes. Another man arrives to interrupt his rest and says something; a speech bubble displays the iconic image of a fish in a fishing net. The worker then handles fish, perhaps sorting them by size. Finally, the worker rests again. The semantic content of the source sentence (being asked to work while resting, then resting again) corresponds to the second and the fourth panels of the strip. However, these two panels alone are not quite enough to fully convey the sentence visually; instead, a small narrative has been created in which temporal points of reference (the first and third panels) have been added. The first panel (the man resting) emphasises the idea that the man is indeed resting before the interruption arrives. The third panel (the man sorting fish) is needed to fully contextualise the action that takes place in the final, fourth panel (resting after work). The source sentence presents a possible situation and its outcome at a future point in time. The visual expression is grounded in the “present”; it offers very limited means to convey temporality. Referring to different points in time needs to be done by adding panels that construct a narrative. The white arrows between the panels add to the narrative effect, guiding the reader from one state of action to the next. To aid interpretation, the comic contract includes verbal information where necessary – based on the images alone, the worker might misinterpret this part of the contract (in the case of this strip, for instance, it may not be unambiguously clear what the speech bubble with the iconic fish image refers to). The voiceover that reads the corresponding verbal information in the worker’s own native language significantly improves the document’s comprehensibility for a low-proficiency reader and diminishes possibilities for false interpretations. Naturally, not all types of verbal content need to be presented as visual narratives in the comic. As our second example, we analyse a different type of visual solution, an entire comic contract page (Figure 4.2), including individual panels. This comic contract page shows a collection of parts of the Ministerial Regulation and the Employment Contract that are thematically linked; they all present things that are provided to the employees on the vessel. The title of the page is “what will we give you on the boat?” There are nine list items in total: for instance, clean drinkable water, healthy food, toilets, and training in the use of tools and equipment and safety procedures. The final panel on the page includes the word “Other”, followed by dotted lines to be filled out in case any additional inclusions are needed. Further, one piece of information has been added to the page: unlike the source materials, the comic contract states that the employer must provide the worker with “a safe and healthy place to sleep”, which can reasonably be considered as a basic human right for an employee. According to the International Labour Organization report (ILO 2020, 23), only 17 percent of the surveyed workers had a bed of their own on the vessel. As the Employment Contract that is currently used does not require employers to provide beds, they have been under no obligation to do so.

86  Anne Ketola, Eliisa Pitkäsalo, and Robert de Rooy

FIGURE 4.2 Excerpt

depicting what the employee is entitled to receive on the vessel, Thai Fishing Vessel Employment Contract, Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd.

Source: Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd. and Thai Union Group PCL. Reproduced with kind permission.

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The information included on this comic contract page is mentioned here and there in the source documents. The decision to collect it on one page conveniently condenses information into a single place. The title works as introductory wording to all the panels. The thematic assembly of this information also makes it easier for the reader to grasp it at a glance. If examined in terms of comics theory, the page could be viewed as what Thierry Groensteen (2014, 171) describes as an inventory of images: a set of juxtaposed images that are drawn from the same thematic repertoire (“things that I am entitled to receive on the vessel”). Unlike the previous example, there is no narrative being built between the individual images, but the images can be interpreted as belonging together. Our third example deals with a part of the comic contract that presents the employee’s rights in case they get sick or injured (Figure 4.3). The information presented in this example is not included in the Employment Contract presently used in the industry. The Ministerial Regulation includes the information regarding the length of sick leave and wages during sick leave, but the information regarding the employee’s and their families’ right to compensation in cases of permanent disability or death has been added. This is another example of how the comic

FIGURE 4.3 Excerpt

depicting a situation where the employee is injured and/or ill, Thai Fishing Vessel Employment Contract, Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd.

Source: Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd. and Thai Union Group PCL. Reproduced with kind permission.

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contract can improve the ability of the fishing industry employees to understand their rights. Working in the fishing industry imposes significant risks for worker safety and health. According to the workers surveyed in the 2020 International Labour Organization report, 30 percent stated that within the past five years they had experienced work injuries or illnesses that required medical attention and required them to take time away from work. The most common of these injuries were slips, falls, cuts, and lacerations (ILO 2020, 20–21). This example includes both panels that combine into a narrative and panels that are separate. The top three panels – visually interconnected by the slanted panel edges that are missing from the panels in the bottom row – are a separate strip that forms a narrative: the employee has hurt his arm; the employer takes him to the hospital; a doctor dresses the wound. Unlike our first example earlier, creating the visual narrative has not required additional panels. The bottom row displays three separate panels that introduce other information related to injuries and sickness (the employer paying a hospital fee; a banknote as well as a calendar with 30 days marked in blue, juxtaposed over an image of the employee lying in bed, looking sick; the employee with an amputated arm as well as a banknote, juxtaposed over an image of his family members crying while looking at a frame – assumably the man’s photo – suggesting the man has deceased). The gutters on the bottom row differ from the upper row on purpose: the broader gutters between the bottom panels aim to indicate that these panels are to be interpreted as separate. If one were to interpret the bottom panels as a narrative, misinterpretations might result (for instance, one might think that the employee is only entitled to paid sick leave after an injury, as opposed to a sickness of any sort). Again, the voice-over ensures that readers with a low level of reading proficiency understand this information correctly. The last two panels with smaller insets – images overlapping a larger one – demonstrate that representing causality is not as visually straightforward as it is verbally. In the middle panel, there are smaller, juxtaposed insets (banknote, calendar page of a month) over a larger background image (man lying in bed looking sick). It was the production team’s intention to depict the inset images as the result of the situation depicted in the background image (e.g. paid sick leave resulting from an illness), but the precise relationship between the images needs to be described verbally. The final panel, however, does not follow the same visual logic. A similar inset image of a banknote is presented in the same panel with two other images: the man with the amputated arm in a small, superimposed image, as well as the larger background image of the family members crying. Two blue arrows point from the banknote to the two other images. The banknote represents the idea of financial compensation, and the arrows indicate to whom the compensation will go (to the worker himself if he is alive, and to his family if he is deceased). This solution has perhaps resulted in there being too much semantic content in one panel, so that it may be difficult to understand. The two semantically equal scenarios of getting injured or dying in the source sentence are not visually translated as equal. The solution of presenting one scenario superimposed over the other might be confusing, especially

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without the clarifying voice-over. On the other hand, the relative image size of the death scenario can be interpreted as the death being a greater tragedy than the injury.

The way forward: an industry-wide change The prevention of labour exploitation within the Thai fishing industry requires action on various fronts. As the report by the Issara Institute (Issara Institute and International Justice Mission 2017, 33–34) concludes, the Royal Thai Government is responsible for enforcing the laws surrounding the industry and proactively investigating and punishing systematic violations of criminal and labour law. The report maintains that, on an international level, buyers and retailers of Thai foods have an important role in encouraging the Thai government to establish a robust framework and support the fishing industry to implement necessary changes. The report also encourages media, advocacy groups, and consumers to apply pressure on global brands by tracing their supply chains, in order to affect the sourcing decisions of multinational corporations worried about a potential loss of brand value (Issara Institute and International Justice Mission 2017). The Human Rights Watch report (2018, 8–9) remarks that labour inspectors working with the industry need better tools to help them investigate working conditions in the industry and spot indications of forced labour; they also need more interpreters in order to properly dialogue with workers. The report also acknowledges the language gap regarding employment contracts: a contract written in Thai and in legal jargon is not accessible to migrant workers and thus does not improve their access to justice. In this chapter, we have discussed a measure that has been introduced as an attempt to bridge this comprehension gap: the comic contract presents contract information in the migrant workers’ native languages in an audio format (as opposed to written text only, which is inaccessible to poor readers), in simple language (as opposed to contract jargon), and, most importantly, in a visual format that aims to support comprehension of the contents. In addition, the comic contract aims to further improve the rights of workers with the inclusion of information that is mentioned in the Ministerial Regulation but missing in the Employment Contract, as well as details that are not, strictly speaking, required by local law, such as the right of employees and their families to compensation in cases of permanent disability or death. By making the contract contents more comprehensible, the comic contract has the potential to improve workers’ access to justice by informing them of what they are entitled to and how they need to act in case their rights are violated. In general, the transparency of a contract makes it harder for contract parties to engage in unethical behaviour (Becher and Benoliel 2021, 45–46). Yet, implementing such an innovation in such a large, corrupt industry is not a straightforward operation. The field tests will provide the first insights into the reception of the comic contract. The comic contract can potentially be an impetus for improvement of existing practices, but only time will tell if all the agents involved will take the steps that are necessary to achieve the required changes.

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Notes 1 Even though the term comics contract may be more idiomatic with regard to current parlance in comics studies, where comics is regularly used as a singular noun, this chapter employs the term comic contract since that is the term established in all but one of the articles we use as references. In her work, Brunschwig (2019) employs the term contract comic and justifies this ordering of words by emphasising that contract comic is more aligned with the terminological orientation indicated by terms such as contract design. Our view is that both word orders make sense, but they display different orientations to the topic. In English (open) compound words, the first word describes the qualities and essence of the second. A comic contract is a contract that has the quality of being in a comics-style format; a contract comic is a comic that conveys the contents of a contract. Since the focus of our chapter is on the ability of the analysed document to improve the rights of its primary users, it makes sense for us to primarily examine it as a contract. 2 This chapter is a part of the “Graphic Justice” research project (2020–2024), funded by the Academy of Finland (decision number 333367). 3 The official name of the language is Khmer. However, within Thai society, the term Khmer is somewhat established to refer to long-established members of the Khmer minority in Thailand who do not experience a great deal of discrimination or obstacles in the country. In this article, we refer to the language spoken by Cambodian migrants as Cambodian to eliminate associations with the Khmer people per se. 4 Chapter author Robert de Rooy is the founder of Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd and was involved in the process of creating the comic contract discussed here. This chapter, particularly the third section, is based on his insight into the production process. 5 At the time of writing the chapter in 2021, the global COVID-19 pandemic made the logistics of the field tests challenging to coordinate in Thailand. If things proceed as planned, they will be completed before the end of 2022. 6 The results of the audit are unpublished; they were shared with Creative Contracts during the project.

References Becher, Shmuel I., and Uri Benoliel. 2021. “Dark Contracts”. Social Science Research Network (SSRN) Online Library. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3911528. Accessed 14 July 2022 Botes, Marietjie. 2017. Visual Communication as a Legal-ethical Tool for Informed Consent in Genome Research Involving the San Community of South Africa. PhD thesis. Pretoria: University of South Africa. Brunschwig, Colette R. 2019. “Contract Comics and the Visualization, Audio-Visualization, and Multisensorization of Law”. University of Western Australia Law Review 46 (2): 191–217. Farthing, Anthony, and Ernesto Priego. 2016. “ ‘Graphic Medicine’ as a Mental Health Information Resource: Insights from Comics Producers”. The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 6 (1): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.16995/cg.74 Green, Michael J., and Kimberly R. Myers. 2010. “Graphic Medicine: Use of Comics in Medical Education and Patient Care”. The Veterinary Record: Journal of the British Veterinary Association 166 (11): 574–577. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c863 Groensteen, Thierry. 2014. “Narration as Supplement: An Archeaology of the InfraNarrative Foundations of Comics”. In The French Comics Theory Reader, edited by Ann Miller and Bart Beaty, 163–181. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Haapio, Helena, Daniela Alina Plewe, and Robert de Rooy. 2016. “Next Generation Deal Design: Comics and Visual Platforms for Contracting”. In Networks: Proceedings of the 19th International Legal Informatics Symposiom IRIS 2016, edited by Erich Schweighofer,

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Franz Kummer, and Walter Hoetzendorfer, 373–380. Wien: Österreichische Computer Gesellschaft OCG. Human Rights Watch. 2018. Hidden Chains. Rights Abuses and Forced labor in Thailand’s Fishing Industry. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/report/ 2018/01/23/hidden-chains/rights-abuses-and-forced-labor-thailands-fishing-industry. Accessed 14 July 2022. ILO. 2020. Endline Research Findings on Fishers and Seafood Workers in Thailand. The International Labour Organization. https://www.ilo.org/asia/publications/WCMS_738042/ lang--en/index.htm. Accessed 14 July 2022. Issara Institute and International Justice Mission. 2017. “Not in the Same Boat: Prevalence and Patterns of Labour Abuse across Thailand’s Diverse Fishing Industry”. The Responsible and Ethical Private Sector Coalition against Trafficking (RESPECT). https:// respect.international/not-in-the-same-boat-prevalence-patterns-of-labor-abuse-acrossthailands-diverse-fishing-industry/. Accessed 14 July 2022. Kalliomaa-Puha, Laura, Anne Ketola, and Eliisa Pitkäsalo. 2023 [Forthcoming]. “Sarjakuva, sosiaalihuolto ja saavutettavuus”. In Kieli, vuorovaikutus ja saavutettavuus. Kohti kieliellistä osallisuutta, edited by Jenny Paananen, Meri Lindeman, Camilla Lindholm, and Milla Luodonpää-Manni. Helsinki: Gaudeamus. Lefèvre, Pascal. 2000. “Narration in Comics”. Image and Narrative 1. www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/narratology/pascallefevre.htm. Accessed 14 July 2022. Lindgren, Daniel, Giulia Zaratti, and Karnmanee Thanesvorakul. 2019. Evaluation of the Electronic Payment System in the Thai Fishing Industry. Rapid Asia. https://humanityunited.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FINAL-E-payment-study_2019.11.08.pdf. Accessed 14 July 2022. Mutaqin, Zezen Z. 2018. “Modern-day Slavery at Sea: Human Trafficking in the Thai Fishing Industry”. Journal of East Asia and International Law 2018 (1): 75–97. http://dx.doi. org/10.14330/jeail.2018.11.1.04 Pitkäsalo, Eliisa. 2020. “Traduction intersémiotique et contexte: Des contrats en bande dessinée en tant que documents juridiques accessibles”. Meta: Translators’ Journal 65 (1): 123–141. https://doi.org/10.7202/1073639ar Pitkäsalo, Eliisa, Anne Ketola, Vaula Haavisto, and Laura Kalliomaa-Puha. 2022. “Image Analysis as a Visualization Tool – Translating Contracts into Comics”. In Research Handbook on Contract Design, edited by Marcelo Corrales, Helena Haapio, and Mark Fenwick. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Pitkäsalo, Eliisa, and Laura Kalliomaa-Puha. 2019. “Democratizing Access to Justice: The Comic Contract as Inter Semiotic Translation”. Translation Matters 1 (2): 30–42. http:// dx.doi.org/10.21747/21844585/tm1_2a2 Plan International Thailand. 2020. “The Report on the Route of Migration from Myanmar and Cambodia to Thailand. The Fostering Accountability in Recruitment for Fishery Workers Project”. SALT. https://media.salttraceability.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2020/05/12094037/migration_route_report.eng_.fairfish.pdf. Accessed 14 July 2022. SeafoodSource. 2019. Thai Union, Environmental Groups Praise EU’s Decision to Lift Yellow Card. SeafoodSource. www.seafoodsource.com/news/environment-sustainability/thai-unionenvironmental-groups-praise-eu-s-decision-to-lift-yellow-card. Accessed 14 July 2022. USAID. 2018. “Thai Union eCDT and Crew Communications Pilot Assessment Report”. The USAID Oceans and Fisheries Partnership. www.seafdec-oceanspartnership.org/wpcontent/uploads/USAID-Oceans_Thai-Union-eCDT-and-Crew-CommunicationsPilot-Assessment_March-2018.pdf. Accessed 14 July 2022. Yu, Han. 2015. The Other Kind of Funnies: Comics in Technical Communication. New York: Baywood Publishing Company.

5 FROM REPRESENTATIONS OF SUFFERING MIGRANTS TO APPRECIATION OF THE MEXICAN AMERICAN LEGACY IN THE UNITED STATES The NGO-produced comics Historias migrantes Laura Nallely Hernández Nieto1 and Iván Facundo Rubinstein2 In this chapter, we analyse the two Mexican comic books No soy de aquí. No soy de allá. Historias migrantes (I am not from here, I  am not from there: Migrant stories, 2017) and De aquí y de allá. Historias migrantes 2 (From here and from there: Migrant stories 2, 2020), edited by María del Carmen Reyes García, director of the NGO Finestra Gestoría Cultural,3 in collaboration with historian Eduardo Jacobo Bernal.4 The comic books focus on migration from Mexico and Central America to the United States. Both Reyes García and Bernal live in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, one of the states with the greatest number of migrants, including Zacatecans with migration history, migrants from other Mexican states, and migrants from other Latin American countries who are just passing through. There is a shift in discourse between the two volumes: while the first is characterised by a discourse of disincentive – representing the different forms of suffering that migrants face on their journey to the United States – the second presents a more optimistic discourse, which emphasises the importance of Mexican American for the history and culture of the United States. This shift in discourse corresponds to a change in the production conditions of the two books: while for the first one, Reyes García and Bernal did background research based on statistics and reports to outline the stories, in the second volume they incorporated the perspective of migrants and their demands for a more positive representation of migration. In other words, while the editors spoke to the migrants in the first volume, in the second volume they listened to them and took account of their living situations, their desires, and their wishes. DOI: 10.4324/9781003254621-6

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We start by presenting an overview of the migratory situation in Mexico in general and the state of Zacatecas in particular. After that, we introduce the sociosemiotic approach used in the analysis. Finally, we present our analyses of the two issues of Historias migrantes, respectively. In our analysis of the first book, we focus on the genre of melodrama and the characters’ lack of agency. In our analysis of the second, we focus on the Mexican American historical and cultural connections made in the comic book’s stories.

Migration from Mexico to the United States The border between Mexico and the United States is the tenth longest land border in the world, with a total extension of more than 3,000 km. In 2019, the number of Mexican migrants was 11.8 million, and of these 97.4 percent resided in the United States (CONAPO 2021, 47). During the Second World War, due to the increased demand of workforce in the agricultural sector, the US government implemented the Bracero program to compensate for the lack of farmworkers. Since then, migration from Mexico to the United States steadily increased until there was a downturn in 2005, when the number of migrants began to decrease, from 700,000 in 2005 to 159,000 in 2014 (Arroyo Alejande and Rodríguez Álvarez 2018, 100). The decrease was initiated by a change in the United States’ foreign relations after 2001 in the context of the “War on Terror”, and it intensified with the economic crisis of 2008 and the subsequent rise in unemployment. Between 2009 and 2015, US authorities apprehended nearly 3 million undocumented Mexican migrants; nevertheless, in 2016, remittances reached a historical high of nearly 27 billion US dollars (CONAPO 2017). Nearly half of the municipalities in Zacatecas register high emigration, and a large proportion of households have at least one family member who lives in the United States. The economic basis of Zacatecas consists of primary extractive industries, such as mining and agriculture, that are subject to the fluctuations of international commodity prices, unfavourable conditions for agriculture, and a lack of technological development, resulting in high unemployment and insufficient salaries for workers. In addition, the myth of the “easy dollar” and the dream of the American way of life (Mestries Benquet 2002, 88) have meant that emigration has been seen as a viable or even necessary choice. Many municipalities and homes in Zacatecas have depended to some degree on the remittances of migrants (Delgado Wise and Rodríguez Ramírez 2004). Moreover, during 2021, remittances comprised nearly 13 percent of the gross national product of the state of Zacatecas (CONAPO 2021).

A socio-semiotic approach In our analysis, we use the socio-semiotic approach (see Verón 1998). This means that we consider the production conditions of the comics – the social context that influenced their production and left discursive marks on it – and the variety of

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rhetorical and thematic markers present in them. Rhetorical markers are visual and textual elements of discourse, which can be isolated as discrete units and which establish syntagmatic relations between them (Kinkenberg 2014, 142–144). By thematic markers, we mean the themes and motifs of the stories as their minimal units of meaning, which, contrary to rhetorical markers, cannot be isolated (Ducrot and Todorov 1974, 257). For our analysis of rhetorical and thematic markers, we use the concept of meaningful units, proposed by media scholar Román Gubern (1979, 110–111) in his comics analysis influenced by film studies: the basic units, the macrounits, and the montage. While the basic unit refers to the panel, macrounits are global elements that define, compose, and integrate the panel, such as the drawing style and colour scheme. Other macrounits include framing (composition, setting and scenery, and characters), qualification (camera angle and lighting), and comics-specific conventions, such as speech balloons (which can contain dialogue, inarticulate sounds, thoughts, and visual metaphors), onomatopoeia, and motion lines. Finally, the montage arises from the relationship between significant units. The macrounits of montage are graphic (comics page) and narrative (sequence). The scene is the meaningful unit in montage, and scene montage can be analysed from the point of view of continuity in terms of spatial structures, temporal structures, and psychological structures. In addition to the discursive analysis of the comics, we also interviewed the editors of the volumes of Historias migrantes, Reyes García and Bernal. As they stated in the interview, the social and cultural importance of migration for the people of Zacatecas led them to edit the two volumes: the first one, titled No soy de aquí ni soy de allá, was published in 2017,5 and the second one, De aqui y de allá, in 2020. According to Reyes García, migration is part of daily life in Zacatecas: We know that many migrants from southern Mexico or Central America come aboard on “La Bestia” – the train taken by Central American migrants during their journey to the US border – and this is their place of passage. Here, there are people who give them food or clothing to continue their journey. (Reyes Garcia and Bernal 2020; interview quotes translated from Spanish by the authors) In the same way, Bernal mentioned that “here [in Zacatecas], at least one member of our family lives on the other side. Therefore, when we were young, we all had listened to stories about the troubles and adversities of border-crossing” (Reyes Garcia and Bernal 2020). As we show, the production conditions changed from the first volume to the second, and this change was accompanied by a modification in the process of sense assignment: while the first volume appears to seek to disincentivise migration to the United States – through a strong presence of the melodrama that emphasises the suffering of the migrants, the second volume stresses the importance of

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Mexican Americans in the history and culture of the United States – through a more positive and hopeful narrative. It is important to notice that the aim of García Reyes and Bernal in the first volume was not to disincentivise the border-crossing; as they stated in our interview, the aim was to sensitise the readers to the obstacles and dangers that migrants had to face on their journeys to the United States. Nevertheless, when we analyse the first volume, the tone of the stories, condensed in the cover image, shows only the negative side of border-crossings. The shift between the first volume and the second can be explained as a result of feedback from migrants, who wanted to read positive stories about migration from Mexico to the United States. In other words, the expectations of migrants, which had not been considered in the production of the first volume, became the production condition of the second one.

Melodrama as a production condition of the first volume We found two main production conditions of the first volume: knowledge about migration from Mexico to the United States based on secondary sources and the significance of the genre of melodrama. When doing background work for the first issue of Historias migrantes, the editors limited their research to secondary sources without seeking contact with or information from migrants themselves. The starting point was data provided by reports by the BBVA Foundation and the United Nations. This also explains the strong presence of infographics in the volume: there is data included on global migration in the form of a two-page map of the main destinations of migrants around the globe, and a full page of statistical data on migration in Mexico. Besides García Reyes and Bernal, several artists participated in the comic book: Augusto Mora, Jorge Luis Villa Esparza, Anael Tritura, Leopoldo Elías Smith Mac Donald, Patricio Betteo, and Abi Sailer. They charged only a little for their work, and in some cases did it for free. Reyes García and Bernal provided the artists with “a script, some visual references and a general idea” (Reyes Garcia and Bernal 2020). As the editors informed us in the interview, the artists were free to modify the script, but they had to limit their stories to the number of pages that García Reyes and Bernal had established based on their printing budget. They wanted to distribute the comics for free, so they applied for funding from the Program for Municipal and Community Cultures (PACMYC) of the Secretary of Culture of the state of Zacatecas. As the editors note, they wanted to use “the potential of the comics language to reach the public that does not have a mobile phone, for example, or that does not have access to the internet” (Reyes Garcia and Bernal 2020). As we mentioned earlier, their intention was to make a comic to raise awareness of the precarious situation and the adversities faced by those who travel to the United States across Mexican territory. When starting the project, the editors did not want to limit the readership. Instead, they sought to reach different kinds of publics: the migrants themselves as well as those people not familiar with the struggles of the migrants.

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The second production condition is the genre of melodrama (see also Vuorinne in this volume on the use of melodrama in comics on migration). Melodrama operates on feelings that subjugate characters, especially those in the role of victim. Sadness, tears, and despair stress the vulnerability of the characters, and sometimes, often at the end of stories when the conflict has been solved, relief, excitement, love, and redemption appear. Therefore, instead of the story itself, “what matters is the rhetoric of passion, the intensity of feelings, the inscrutable meanders of destiny” (Bartra 2002, 151; all Spanish quotes translated by the authors). Melodrama’s focus on intense feelings brings the risk of representing characters without agentic capacity. We understand the concept of agency as the ability of individuals to act or intervene in a certain established social order (Giddens 1984). Melodrama forms a part of the sentimental education of Mexican society: the genre was fundamental in the magazines of the Golden Age of comics during the 1940s (Bartra 2002). Moreover, this genre has been predominant in comics, radio soap operas, and, later, television soap operas, and it is considered one of the main ways in which Latin American society is integrated through the mass media (Martín Barbero 1993; Rincón 2008). In Mexico, melodrama has influenced narratives of other genres, such as adventure, suspense, and humour (Cornelio-Marí 2020; Repoll 2021). Melodrama is present in the narratives of the stories as well as in the way in which characters are constructed in the 2017 issue of Historias migrantes. The stories entertain a melodramatic tone: here, we can find the representation of loneliness and sadness as a central topic, as the sole feelings experienced by migrants. More­ over, the stories emphasise the migrants’ lack of agency and their subjugation to their situation. The rhetorical markers of melodrama can be found in the visual representation of facial expressions, in the postures of the characters, and in the narrative text boxes. Moreover, in some of the stories, the thematic markers tend to reinforce the presence of melodrama. On the cover of the first Historias migrantes, artist José Quintero represents the death that awaits many migrants (Figure 5.1). The framing is based on a long shot that shows a skeleton emerging from the desert. It is Uncle Sam, wearing a top hat with the stars and stripes of the American flag. A bald eagle perches on the character’s shoulder while it spreads dollar bills on the Mexican side of the US border wall. That Uncle Sam takes the form of the skeleton or death symbolises the false lure of the United States. The cover image depicts not only the bleak future of migrants but also the factor that inspires migration. The longitudinal image field is similar to a cinematographic high-angle shot, in which the camera focuses down on the setting and the characters from an elevated perspective. In the bottom of the image, two men carrying backpacks and water bottles walk next to the border wall where a vulture sits and waits. Although the purpose of the editors was not to address stories of the typical Mexican male migrant, this stereotype is reproduced in the cover illustration. The artist probably employed this visual resource because, as Román Gubern and Luis Gasca (1988, 27) write, the stereotype is a simplified image or idea, stable and ritualised, which is widely accepted.

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of No soy de aquí ni soy de allá: Historias migrantes by José Quintero, Finestra Gestoría Cultural, 2017.

FIGURE 5.1 Cover

Source: © Finestra Gestoria Cultural. Reproduced with kind permission.

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According to Reyes García and Bernal, the initial objective of the project was to narrate the adversities people face when attempting to cross the border. They were especially interested in the experiences and specific problems of minority groups, such as “children, women, transgender, and Central-American migrants” (Reyes Garcia and Bernal 2020). Therefore, in our analysis of the comic book’s stories, we focus on those depicting children, pregnant women, and trans women. These characters and their stories tend to reinforce the melodramatic tone; as they are innocents who live in an underprivileged position in society, the tone frame of loneliness and sadness is expressed more intensely. The first story that we look more closely at, “Estación migratoria” (Detention centre), written by Reyes García and illustrated by Anael Tritura, is presented in the form of an internal monologue of a child shown sitting and lying on the floor of a US detention centre, his scarce belongings next to him (Figure 5.2). The child wonders why there are so many children alone there and where their parents are. The markers of melodrama can be found in the illustrations and in the text. In the first case, the loneliness of the child is represented by an absence of outlines in the panels; there is no spatial representation of the floor, the walls, or anything else that informs where the child is. The illustrations only show him sitting or lying on the floor waiting, lonely and sad; there is no representation of the journey. Moreover, there is also an absence of outlines in the text, which floats around the child and emphasises the lack of agency; the child says that he feels “solo” (lonely) and, despite being “grande y fuerte” (big and strong), sometimes he only “quisiera llorar” (wants to cry) (Reyes García and Tritura 2017, 19). The child expresses his emotions in first-person narration, which can be seen as a sign of agency, since “boys and girls are always agents and their action is always present but it is the social structures that prevent the visibility of this phenomenon or inhibit it; in the end, the adults exercise dominance” (Pavez Soto and Sepúlveda Kattan 2019, 207–208). In this story, the child can express his thoughts but is not free to act. Another story, “La Línea” (The line), written by Leopoldo Elías Smith Mac Donald and illustrated by Patricio Betteo, is about a pregnant woman whose water breaks while she is crossing the desert. She is five months pregnant, but to make a deal with the “coyote”, the human trafficker, she lies, saying that she is only in the first trimester of her pregnancy. She suffers from the heat of the sun and the lack of shade. She is unable to keep up with the other migrants, and when left behind her water breaks in the middle of the desert. The story ends there. Like the previous story, we can find the markers of the genre of melodrama in the images and in the narrative text: the images represent the moment at which the woman is left behind by the other migrants, and it is possible to see the line of people moving away from her and disappearing at the vanishing point. The immensity of the desert is represented as a distant line on the horizon, and the woman is the sole figure standing in the last panels. Contrary to the previous story, the lack of agency cannot be found in individual text fragments or in single illustrations; it is the main theme of the story. As Ducrot and Todorov (1974, 257) propose, the theme of a story cannot be isolated, as it is interwoven into the narration. Therefore, the lack of agency in “La

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FIGURE 5.2 Maria

del Carmen Reyes Garcia and Anael Tritura, “Estación migratoria”, No soy de aquí ni soy de allá: Historias migrantes, Finestra Gestoría Cultural, 2017, p. 19. Translation of the text, by Aura Nikkilä: “I don’t want to go back. / Everything was so hard and I feel so lonely. Every day I think about my grandma’s tomato soup. She said that it makes your soul feel warm. Perhaps a little. / I am big and strong now … But sometimes I only want to cry … / I would like to be home for Christmas”.

Source: © Finestra Gestoria Cultural. Reproduced with kind permission.

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Linea” is understood after reading the full story, which provides the explanatory context for the story’s last panel. Here, the woman holds her abdomen and says “It hurts! It feels like peeing” in a reference to her water breaking. Because of her desperation, she seems to be unaware of her current situation. Her incomprehension can only be grasped in the context of the whole story. Her lack of agency is accentuated by the absence of options: she cannot go to a hospital, nor can she find any help. She is trapped in the desert. The fact that the story ends when her water is breaking reinforces this idea: she is unable to resolve her plight. Another story, “Viacrucis” (The way of the cross), written by Eduardo Jacobo Bernal and illustrated by Abi Sailer, follows two trans women seeking to cross into the United States. They undergo different forms of abuse, from corruption to discrimination and the threat of being killed. They are kidnapped and left at a shelter where coercive methods, based on Catholic ideas, are employed to change their gender. The women manage to escape, and they sleep on the street until they see an ad in a newspaper: “Are you a migrant? Do you belong to the LGBT community? We can help you”. Following the instructions in the ad, they reach a shelter called Diversidad Migrante, an NGO providing aid to members of the LGBT community. At the end of the story, one of the characters decides to stay with the NGO while the other travels to the United States. In this story, unlike in the other stories, melodrama is combined with the migrants’ agentic capacity. The melodramatic overtones appear in the representation of the different violent situations that the trans women encounter and must overcome. For example, in the foreground of the first panel, one of the characters is bleeding, and she exclaims in tears that she cannot stand it anymore (Figure 5.3). Nevertheless, the story reveals the options that these trans women migrants have. They can, for example, go to a shelter that helps members of the LGBT community. As Reyes García and Bernal explain, both the two trans women and the NGO Diversidad Migrante really exist. When they were creating the stories of Historias

FIGURE 5.3  Panel

from “Viacrucis” by José Eduardo Jacobo Bernal and Abi Sailer, No soy de aquí ni soy de allá: Historias migrantes, Finestra Gestoría Cultural, 2017, p.  24. Translation of the text, by Aura Nikkilä: “I  can’t stand it anymore Flor!”

Source: © Finestra Gestoria Cultural. Reproduced with kind permission.

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migrantes, the authors spoke with Jorge Luis Villa, a member of the NGO, who told them about the situation of two trans women on their way to the United States. García Reyes and Bernal decided to conduct an interview with one of the women to present their story. The comic not only represents a real-life situation, but there is also a desire to inform the readers about an actual NGO that helps members of the LGBT community who want to cross the US border. According to García Reyes and Bernal, the total print run of the first volume of Historias migrantes was 3,000, plus the digital versions of the comic on Facebook and ISSUU.6 Many readers were migrants, whose opinions and feedback turned out to be important for the production of the second volume. The comic was presented in several cities in the Mexican states of Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, and Aguascalientes, as well as at the 2018 comics festival “Conque” in the city of Querétaro, and at several comics stores in Mexico City. The comic book was also presented to migrants who were already in the United States or on their way there. With the help of the government body National Institute of Migration (INM), García Reyes and Bernal were able to distribute the comic to children who were detained inside a US detention centre. They also were able to disseminate the comic among a Mexican community in Houston, Texas, and to the residents of a shelter for migrants in Tijuana, Mexico. Although most of the migrants who read the comic book were happy with the stories, Reyes García and Bernal got suggestions from them. The editors received feedback in the several comics presentations they gave, as well as via e-mail and as comments on Facebook. No specific discussions on the comics were arranged, as the feedback was given spontaneously by the migrants who had read the comic. In the interview with García Reyes and Bernal, they informed us that there had not been any plans to do a second volume. The decision to do it was motivated by the feedback and suggestions that the stories needed to also demonstrate some positive dimensions of migration: “They pointed out to us the need to also represent the successful stories of those who achieve a better life through migration” (Reyes Garcia and Bernal 2020). This feedback had a great influence on the second volume.

The discourse on the importance of Mexican Americans in the United States De aquí y de allá: Historias migrantes 2 is characterised by a more positive and hopeful narrative on migration than the original issue of the comic book. García Reyes and Bernal used the comments and suggestions of the migrants who had read the first comic book as a starting point. The result is a volume in which, from its cover to the last story, the focus is on the importance of Mexican Americans in the history and culture of the United States. Unlike the first book, in this second volume, the stories cover a more extensive timeline, from the early 20th century to the present. Moreover, the characters of the stories are named, real-life historical persons; they are not abstract or anonymous types. The cover of this volume, by Patricio Betteo, presents a hopeful vision of the migrants’ transit between Mexico and the United States (Figure 5.4). The choice

102  Laura Nallely Hernández Nieto and Iván Facundo Rubinstein

of De aquí y de allá: Historias migrantes 2 by Patricio Betteo, Finestra Gestoría Cultural, 2020.

FIGURE 5.4 Cover

Source: © Finestra Gestoria Cultural. Reproduced with kind permission.

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of framing highlights the action of the subjects in relation to their surroundings (see Gubern 1979, 125). In this case, the framing comprises a long shot showing the central characters in full. The open framing, allowing the central characters space, conveys the idea of hope. The angle is similar to an aerial shot that situates the reader at the same level as the characters in the image. The background colour palette refers to the Golden Hour; this is a term used in photography and cinema to refer to the moments before sunrise and prior to sunset. Images captured at this time convey the idea of serenity and warmth, due to the tones of the sky. In the image, the clear white vertical line between the blue and pink colours represents the border. The characters are a couple, a man and a woman, flying through the clouds. The man carries a suitcase and a backpack; the woman is pregnant. From both figures emerge cords, representing their bond with Mexico. The cover artist explains: I imagined a transit through the air, almost mystical. I  thought for a long time, trying not to fall into clichés. Not by land, so fraught with danger, but traversing an imaginary line in the sky. I thought about the unbreakable connection to the origin; that is why I drew those long umbilical cords. Those are like the lifelines of divers or astronauts. (De aquí y de allá: Historias migrantes 2, 2) The human characters are surrounded by white doves that accompany them on their journey. It is possible to read the image as the couple leaving behind a darker Mexico for a brighter United States, where the sun is rising. That could mean a new opportunity, a better life. The foreword of the second volume emphasises that “estamos seguros que habrá más union entre las personas y entre los países pues hoy el mundo ya no requiere muros, sino puentes que nos ayuden a dejar atrás el racismo y el odio” (we are sure that there will be more union between people and between countries because today the world no longer requires walls, but bridges that help us leave behind racism and hatred; De aquí y de allá: Historias migrantes 2, 1). The editors chose to build stories around inspiring characters with the ability to act and cope with their circumstances. As they point out, migrants Are not only bodies abandoned in the desert. We want to make it visible that there are successful stories, and that the country of origin does not determine behaviour. Latin-American people are not predestined to be a burden on the US; we are part of their society and their culture. (Reyes Garcia and Bernal 2020) The importance of Mexican Americans in the United States is represented through the depiction of a varied gallery of characters: the so-called “Pachucos” during the mid-20th century, their discrimination and overcoming of that, the importance of the band Los Lobos for the Chicano movement, and the significance

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of a Mexican American soldier who was a hero in the Second World War. The role of Mexican Americans in the United States is thematised in the narratives and reinforced through rhetorical markers such as iconic figures, framing, and the representation of the characters. Divided into two parts, the first story, “Zoot suit riots”, written by Eduardo Jacobo Bernal with illustrations by Edgar Cito, aka Edgar Camacho, deals with the so-called Sleepy Lagoon murder, for which young Mexican American men were convicted in 1943. The first part of the story is narrated by the character Henry “Hank” Leyvas, who is going out dancing. His mother, who questions his exotic clothing – he is depicted wearing a jacket and baggy pants, a typical aesthetic expression of the so-called “Pachucos”, also known as Zoot Suits – has a worried look on her face. In a flashback, Hank remembers he was at the lake with his girlfriend Dora when two men came and threatened to hurt her and beat him up. When Hank and his friends returned to the scene to take revenge, a brawl broke out. The depiction of the fight ends with a panel with a gunshot shown only as an onomatopoeic “POW”, followed by a page with a paperboy on his bike throwing a newspaper. In a closeup shot, we can read (in English, in contrast to the Spanish otherwise used in the comic) the headline of a Los Angeles newspaper: “One killed and 10 hurt in boy ‘wars’, José Díaz, 22” (Bernal and Edgar Cito 2020, 8). Hank is sentenced to life in prison, along with others, for the murder. The second part of the story presents an event that occurred in June 1943, when a group of US sailors claimed to have been attacked by a gang of “Pachucos”. This unleashed a mobilisation of around 200 soldiers in downtown Los Angeles; they attacked everyone who wore a zoot suit, burning their clothes. In the face of this persecution, the Mexican American community organised to protest against discrimination in different cities of the United States. On the protesters’ banners we can read in English “Justice!”, “Stop discrimination”, and “We will not be intimidated” (Bernal and Edgar Cito 2020, 10). The Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee’s banner is carried by the people in the front; the committee raised money and made speeches for the defence effort and developed the national campaign against the racist and divisive indictments and yellow journalistic depictions (Obregón Pagán 2003, 86). The depiction of the protests is followed by a panel which again shows a newspaper headline. Dated 26 October  1944, it announces: “Pachuco free! Hank Leyvas and 17 others out of jail” (Bernal and Edgar Cito 2020, 10). On the last page, Hank is once more preparing to go out, and his mother asks him to stop dressing in a zoot suit. He answers that his outfit “es para que sepan que somos pachucos y aquí estamos, que nunca nos vamos a ir” (is for them to know that we are Pachucos, we are still here, we are never going to leave; Bernal and Edgar Cito 2020, 11). These young men were one of the first symbols of the mixture of cultures, not only because of their clothing but also due to the creation of their own slang, a mixture of Spanish and English, with new words and the modification of existing language (Sánchez Garay 2018, 310). This story shows the organisation and struggle of the Mexican American community to combat discrimination and defend the minority’s civil rights.

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The mixture of cultures is also thematised by Ricardo Peláez Goycochea in terms of music in the story of the band Los Lobos. In the 1960s, the Chicano movement was underway in the United States. It was a movement of socio-political dissidence through which the community of Mexican descendants sought to vindicate their civil rights and establish their own cultural and political identity (García y García 2007, 9–10). The term “Chicano”, a pejorative term referring to a person of Mexican origin living in the United States, was redefined and adopted. One of the most well-known bands of Chicano culture is Los Lobos. The story chronicles details of the band’s history in the 1960s, their interaction with the Chicano community who hired them to entertain at social events, and their militancy in the Chicano movement, up to their last albums. As a rhetorical marker, a graphic element that is repeated and that forms the axis of the narrative is the figure of the wolf. Peláez Goycochea also uses different iconic figures that are representative of Mexican culture, such as several panels depicting guitars. The background in one such panel is inspired by the iconography of so-called Tenango embroidery, which portrays the flora and fauna of Mexico. The band is characterised by the fusion of rock ‘n’ roll, country, blues, and punk with traditional Mexican music. In one panel, this union of American and Mexican rhythms is represented by a bald eagle with outstretched wings, similar to the eagle of the Great Seal of the United States. In front of it are an accordion, a double bass, two maracas, a guiro, and an acoustic guitar. The instruments are pierced by a rattlesnake, one of the symbolic animals of Mexico. The next story, with a script by Eduardo Jacobo Bernal and art by Idalia Candelas, recounts the exploits of José Pantaleón Martínez, a local hero in Taos, New Mexico. He was an American soldier of Mexican origin who participated in the Second World War. The story begins with a panel with a full shot presenting an approaching military ship and the troops who landed on Attu Island in the Pacific Ocean on 26 May 1943. Martínez, a 22-year-old youth, is brave and proactively takes the initiative to attack the Japanese artillery. The determination of the soldier is also emphasised by the rhetorical markers of the character’s facial expressions; his gaze is serious and direct, and his mouth is open because he is leading his companions and giving them orders. He disarms two machine-gun stations impeding the passage of the allied troops but is then wounded. As he lays dying on the ground, the discrimination he suffered as a child for not being an American comes into his mind. In an internal monologue, he remembers that he only knows Mexico through his father’s stories. Thus, he feels the United States is his homeland, for which he is willing to die. In the next panel, his family receives the United States Congressional Medal of Honor for his outstanding participation in the Battle of Attu. The verbal narration attests that this was the first time the distinction was bestowed on a Mexican American soldier. The last panel depicts soldiers who carry the US flag alongside the Mexican flag during the battle (Figure 5.5). There is an intertextual reference to the painting La Liberté guidant le peuple (1830) by Eugène Delacroix. The composition is structured as a pyramid; the figure above the others is Martínez leading his companions. At

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Jacobo Bernal and Idalia Candelas, “José Pantaléon Martínez”, De aquí y de allá: Historias migrantes 2, Finestra Gestoría Cultural, 2020, p. 16. Translation of the text, by Aura Nikkilä: “ ‘Official figures estimate that during the Second World War around 500,000 Mexicans fought on the Pacific front. Of them 30,000 were born in Mexico and the rest were Mexican Americans.’ / We are going to sing to the countrymen of Denver and tell them a story that they will never forget. / José Pantaleón Martínez, a brave and loyal man, knew how to raise your national flag high. / New Mexico was the cradle where Pantaleón was born, and the battlefield was where he gave his heart. The whole of Denver, Colorado remembers you with loyalty”.

FIGURE 5.5 Eduardo

Source: © Finestra Gestoria Cultural. Reproduced with kind permission.

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the top, the flags of Mexico and the United States are flown at the same level. The vanishing point of the illustration lies in the rays of light entering through the foliage of the trees and illuminating the flags and the soldiers. The reference to Delacroix’s painting emphasises the victorious combat of the soldiers of both nations against the Japanese Imperial Army. This again highlights the important role of Mexican Americans in US history.

Conclusions In this chapter, we have analysed a shift in the two volumes of the comic book Historias migrantes. On the one hand, there is a strong presence of melodrama in the first volume; the migrants are represented as victims of adversity, with bonds to a tragic destiny and having very little agentic capacity. On the other hand, the second volume seeks to direct the readers’ attention to the importance of Mexican Americans in the history of the United States and its culture. This shift from disincentive to valuation corresponds with a change in the production conditions of each book. In the first book, the editors Reyes García and Bernal based their stories on their own background research of secondary sources, and in the second, they tried to incorporate into the comics the feedback provided by migrant readers of the first. After the distribution of the first comic, Reyes García and Bernal decided to include the perspective of the migrants in a second volume. This was not a minor thing but a decision of great significance in that it changed the tone of the stories. In the second volume, the melodramatic style – the sadness, the loneliness, the lack of agency – is replaced by an optimistic view of migrants and their agency in terms of transforming not only their lives but also the culture in which they had settled (in this case, the United States). Nevertheless, we should not overestimate the shift. It was important that the editors decided to take the feedback of migrants into account, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, they could not distribute the second volume in the same way as the first one. They have not yet had the opportunity to get much feedback on the last volume, receiving only a few comments by e-mail and on social media. Moreover, it is important to consider to what degree the comic book manages to represent the hopeful vision that migrants suggested, as the stories focus on well-known historical characters, not the stories of so-called ordinary migrants. Despite these considerations, we maintain that the shift between the first and the second volume is important because it exhibits the benefits of including in comics on migration the perspective of the persons represented. In the case of Historias migrantes 2, it means approaching the living situations of the migrants, the narrative of success, focusing on the contributions of Mexican Americans to US history and culture, and the possibility of attaining a better life. It was possible to represent all this due to the comments and suggestions of the migrants. In this process, we can see the importance not only of speaking to migrants but also of listening to them. This allows for a better pathway to the advocacy of human rights.

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Notes 1 The participation of this author was conducted with the financial support of the Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme of UNAM, advised by PhD Vicente Quirarte Castañeda. 2 UNAM, Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme of UNAM, grant holder of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Science and Humanities (CEIICH), advisor PhD Aimée Vega Montiel. 3 This NGO works with cultural management in Zacatecas through collaboration with different institutions and professionals in culture and the arts. The organisation’s aim is to create cultural synergy to solve social problems. 4 For the sake of convenience, we will henceforth refer to the two books as Historias migrantes and Historias migrantes 2. 5 The title of the first volume is a reference to the 1970s song No soy de aquí ni soy de allá by the Argentinian songwriter Facundo Cabral. 6 ISSUU is a platform that allows users to upload and publish magazines or publications (in print layout) online.

References Arroyo Alejandre, Jesús, and David Rodríguez Álvarez. 2018. “Muros y migración MéxicoEstados Unidos”. Papeles de Población 24 (95): 89–114. https://doi.org/10.22185/24487 147.2018.95.05 Bartra, Armando. 2002. “Piel de papel. Los ‘pepines’ en la educación sentimental del mexicano”. In La fabricación del arte nacional a debate (1920–1950), edited by Esther Acevedo, 127–156. Ciudad de México: CONACULTA. Bernal, Eduardo Jacobo, and Idalia Candelas. 2020. “José Pantaléon Martínez”. In De aquí y de allá: Historias migrantes 2, edited by María del Carmen Reyes García and Eduardo Jacobo Bernal, 12–16. México: Finestra Gestoría Cultural. Bernal, José Eduardo Jacobo, and Abi Sailer. 2017. “Viacrucis”. In No soy de aquí ni soy de allá: Historias migrantes, edited by María del Carmen Reyes García and Eduardo Jacobo Bernal, 24–28. México: Finestra, Gestoría Cultural. Bernal, José Eduardo Jacobo, and Edgar Cito. 2020. “Zoot suit riots”. In De aquí y de allá: Historias migrantes 2, edited by María del Carmen Reyes García and Eduardo Jacobo Bernal, 4–11. México: Finestra Gestoría Cultural. CONAPO (Consejo Nacional de Población). 2017. Yearbook of Migrations and Remittances. México: SEGOB, CONAPO, BBVA Research. CONAPO (Consejo Nacional de Población). 2021. Yearbook of Migrations and Remittances. México: SEGOB, CONAPO, BBVA Research. Cornelio-Marí, and Elia Margarita. 2020. “Mexican Melodrama in the Age of Netflix: Algorithms for Cultural Proximity”. Comunicación y Sociedad e7481: 1–27. https://doi. org/10.32870/cys.v2020.7481 Delgado Wise, Raúl, and Héctor Rodríguez Ramírez. 2004. “Organizaciones transnacionales de migrantes y desarrollo regional en Zacatecas”. Migraciones Internacionales 2 (4): 159–181. Ducrot, Oswald, and Tzvetan Todorov. 1974. Diccionario enciclopédico de las ciencias del lenguaje (Translated by Enrique Pezzoni). México: Siglo XXI. García y Garcia, Esperanza. 2007. El movimiento chicano en el paradigma del multiculturalismo de los Estados Unidos. México: Centros de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte CISAN, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Universidad Iberoamericana.

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Giddens, Anthony. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Gubern, Román. 1979. El lenguaje de los comics. Barcelona: Península. Gubern, Román, and Luis Gasca. 1988. El discurso del comic. Madrid: Cátedra. Klinkenberg, Jean-Marie. 2014. Manual de semiótica general. Bogota: Universidad de Bogotá. Martín Barbero, Jesús. 1993. Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to the Mediations (Translated by Elizabeth Fox and Robert A. White). London: SAGE. Mestries Benquet, Francis. 2002. “El rancho se nos llenó de viejos: Crisis del agro y migración internacional en Zacatecas”. Estudios Agrarios 8 (19): 81–135. Obregón Pagán, Eduardo. 2003. Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime LA. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Pavez Soto, Iskra, and Sepúlveda Kattan, Natalia. 2019. “Concepto de agencia en los estudios de infancia. Una revisión teórica”. Sociedad e Infancias 3: 193–210. Repoll, Jerónimo. 2021. “Estrategias transmedia para el melodrama en México”. Virtualis 12 (22): 56–76. Reyes García, María del Carmen, and Anael Tritura. 2017. “Estación migratoria”. In No soy de aquí ni soy de allá: Historias migrantes, edited by María del Carmen Reyes García, and Eduardo Jacobo Bernal, 18–19. México: Finestra Gestoría Cultural. Reyes García, Maria del Carmen, and Eduardo Jacobo Bernal, eds. 2017. No soy de aquí ni soy de allá: Historias migrantes. México: Finestra, Gestoría Cultural. Accessed 20 July_ 2021. https://issuu.com/eduardojacobo/docs/historias_migrantes_5ba4f7eaa2fc9d Reyes García, María del Carmen, and Eduardo Jacobo Bernal. 2020. Zoom Interview with Laura Nallely Hernández Nieto and Iván Facundo Rubinstein, 9 December. Reyes García, María del Carmen, and Eduardo Jacobo Bernal. 2020. De aquí y de allá: Historias migrantes 2, edited by México: Finestra Gestoría Cultural. https://culturazac.gob. mx/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/c%C3%B3mic_historias-migrantes-2_completo_ compressed_compressed.pdf. Accessed 18 June_2021. Rincón, Omar. 2008. “La telenovela: Un formato antropófago”. Chasqui. Revista Latinoamericana de Communicación 104: 48–51. Sánchez Garay, Elizabeth. 2018. “Tín Tán: El pachuco irónico”. In Migrantes somos y en el camino andamos. Ensayos sobre identidad, migración y cultura transfronteriza, edited by Ivonne Solano Chávez, 309–328. México: Consejo Editorial H. Cámara de Diputados. Verón, Eliseo. 1998. La semiosis social. Fragmento de una teoría de la discusividad. Barcelona: Gedisa.

6 COLLABORATIVE WORK, MIGRANT REPRESENTATIVITY, AND RACISM Adrián Groglopo and Amalia Alvarez

In 2014, the Antiracist Academy (ArA), an association of migrant and racialised antiracist academics in Sweden, published an antiracist dictionary (Groglopo 2015) with the aim to explain central concepts and support antiracist work among activists and young people concerned with racial/ethnic inequality. The dictionary was composed of short written keywords in the area of racism studies, which were discussed and problematised. It was complemented with a series of cartoons or illustrations to highlight the significance of popular imagination through graphic narratives. The dictionary was created through a collaboration between antiracist academics and the comics artist Amalia Alvarez, known for her graphic work on racism in Sweden (see also Nordenstam and Wallin Wictorin’s chapter in this volume). The coordinator and editor for the dictionary was the president of the Antiracist Academy, Adrián Groglopo, an antiracist researcher who worked on the governmental inquiry into structural ethnic discrimination (SOU 2006) and at civil society organisations related to antiracism. In the latter part of this chapter, we describe this collaborative work between academic writing and comics drawing in the making of the antiracist dictionary in Sweden. The history of Sweden in relation to colonialism and imperialism (Lauesen 2021), the production of (pseudo)scientific knowledge on race biology (i.e., the State Institute for Race Biology in Uppsala between 1922 and 1958), and the fact that Swedish cities and the labour market are structured by racial/class segregation (Delegation mot segregation 2021) are well known. Moreover, the rise of the farright movements during the 1990s and their evolving into a political party (Sve­ rigedemokraterna), which became the second largest by the year 2020, is proof that racism is a feature of Swedish society. However, the question of structural racism is not acknowledged by political leaders or the mainstream media as a factor in the lives of many non-white Swedes, as well as those of non-European immigrants and their children. By “structural racism”, we mean a system of racial division and oppression for some and privileges for others, on the grounds of the colonial ideas DOI: 10.4324/9781003254621-7

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of race or ethnic and cultural hierarchies and belonging. It is a system configured on the basis of White supremacy, a central western ideology for the reproduction of nationhood, belonging, power, and the making of racial privilege through and for the state apparatuses at the core of westernised capitalist societies. The immigration of refugees from the global south to Sweden has increased massively since the 1980s, along with the globalisation of corporate-based free market policies destabilising many economies in the global south. Migrants from the global south became a cheap labour force for the neoliberal political and economic system in the Western countries during the 1990s and onwards. Alongside this neoliberal process, migrants were generally framed socially and politically through racial euphemisms, devaluing them in the labour market. Sweden started to develop into one of the most racially and economically segregated countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD 2019). The process of racialisation has been determined not only by racial historical structures but also by the division of labour in the Swedish class structure, as well as by policies of white liberal supremacy, which are regarded as policies of integration and diversity. It conditions the migrant and the racialised population as subaltern classes in a system of domination that works by denying the racialised migrant political agency (Mulinari and Neergaard 2004). The representation of migrants and racialised communities in cultural production and political spaces is usually filtered by practices of tokenism, as a way of covering dominant racial structures and reproducing dominant discourses (Osanami Törngren and Ulver 2020). It is under these social and political conditions that the Antiracist Dictionary was produced and consciously designed to support the struggle against (structural) racism. The texts were written by a team of researchers from the ArA. The association’s board decided that the dictionary had to popularise academic discourse to become accessible to anyone reading it. With this aim, the association approached Amalia to talk about the possibility of collaborating. Adrián and Amalia gathered to talk and discuss and sketch different ideas related to the texts. We wanted to make visible the different expressions of racism and white supremacy that are regularly experienced by our communities. Although our experiences and mechanisms of discrimination are different – we have different genders and different skin colour, and we live and work in different spaces – we share a common understanding of the system we live in. For us, the position of enunciation in the texts and the illustrations was significant. It could not replicate the gaze of the dominant culture, and therefore it was necessary to move away from the space and representation of the racialised other (see Mohanty 1988). We see the illustrations as well as the texts in the dictionary as democratic instruments to intervene in a racial society, to share and connect to the popular imaginary of the subaltern racialised communities, and to connect to shared experiences of racial domination that are conditioning our lives. In the following section, we present a dialogue between the two of us about the collaborative work, our understanding of racism and related concepts in the dictionary, and the difference between being represented and having representativity in the realm of comics.1

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Collaboration between art and academic writing Adrián Groglopo: After applying for funding to publish two books about racism in Sweden in 2014, the ArA was financed by the Swedish Agency for Youth and Civil Society (MUCF). One of the books was the Antirasistisk ordbok (Antiracist dictionary), in which 43 different concepts within the area of racism studies were discussed, defined, and problematised. The entries were written by over 20 anti­ racist researchers from all over Sweden. My role was not only to write some of the entries but also to edit them all and make them accessible to readers not accustomed to academic language. Bearing that in mind, the board decided to add some illustrations to accompany the intricate use of academic language, trying to find analogies already existent in the popular imaginary of Sweden’s racialised subaltern classes. We heard about someone drawing antiracist comics in the city of Malmö. We got in contact with you, Amalia, and that is the beginning of the collaboration between the ArA, me, and you. The purpose was to work together to choose the texts that were going to be interpreted and illustrated. It really was a collaboration between arts and texts. It was something new for me, a crossing between social sciences and art. Why did you accept to collaborate in the making of the dictionary? Amalia Alvarez: Professor Irene Molina, who knew my work, invited me to participate and I accepted because I knew the organisation and the academics in it. I found the project attractive because it needed material that was democratic, or more accessible and digestible, that would identify the types of racism that we reproduce daily. As a political comics creator and a non-European immigrant, I must try much harder to get exposure than a Swedish cartoonist. This is because of my body, my clothes, how I speak, my name, my neighbours, the place where I was born, and the circumstances of how I got here. All this defines my credibility among Swedish cartoonists born here. They have the resources of the language but lack the experience of having been formed in another context outside of Europe. As an indigenous woman, I inherited the lived experience of being the focus of racist colonial histories, even in Sweden. This society forces me to carry the burden of being the focus of the system of racism. However, I also inherited from the Latin American context the ways of survival and how to fight racism. This knowledge allowed me to interpret the concepts of the dictionary very easily. The process of reading the material was, however, a bit of an effort for me, because Swedish is my second language, and I learned it as an adult. It was a question of not only translating the material but also understanding it, and in the process of interpreting the texts into ideas for cartoons, the translation process, too, became easier. In the process of designing the illustrations of the dictionary, it was important for my work to ridicule white supremacy and structural racism. In our talks, I suggested that I use irony in the illustrations, and you were also enthusiastic about challenging the rigorous side of the academy. The drawings’ lines are not intended to look beautiful but rather to pinpoint the content of the message. This is because we concluded that the focus would be mainly on the content in our work, which meant for me working with academic material interpreted in a humoristic and ironic way. This allowed me to draw illustrations accessible to a broader public outside the academy.

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AG: All right, let’s have a look at a couple of them. The first one is the one depicting a woman with a child on her shoulders crossing out a word on a poster (Figure 6.1). The image is connected to the dictionary concept “assimilation”. The heading of the poster in the image reads “Talk about integration”, and you can see that the word “integration” is crossed out and replaced by “assimilation”. The poster lists all the speakers at the “Talk about integration” event, and all speakers addressing questions related to immigration are called Svensson, a very typical Swedish surname. How did you come up with this illustration and what does it mean? AA: The image of the mother with the girl on her shoulders is inspired by the lived experience of many non-European immigrants that I know. Both the mother and the girl are crossing out text on the public poster, where only Swedish names are seen as framing the problems and resistance of the immigrant population. This has been a constant problem for us immigrants who are not included as political agents in our own situations. This is a characteristic, in my experience, of Swedish society, where national organisations are presented as benevolent actors with the aim of civilising immigrants, and we immigrants as objects to be civilised. There are strong societal forces that push for the subordination of immigrants and activities reproducing the binary of a “we” and “the other”. Even if we learn Swedish or learn about our new country, we are still going to be treated as outsiders. I think this drawing should be updated in about ten years to highlight the changes, if any, that have occurred in the Swedish society with respect to the national self-image and migration. AG: Some of your drawings work in a more symbolic way, like the one about stereotypes and structural racism, where you drew a white rabbit directing the whole scene (Figure 6.2). In what way did you understand that and why is there a white rabbit at the centre of the illustration? AA: The idea of stereotypes is represented by the white rabbit, who wears jewels on its fingers and is a symbolic representation of innocence. The rabbit is dictatorially assigning people waiting in line towards doors that are of different sizes and are all narrow. Four of the five doors are open and lead to a precipice. The last door has a large padlock, because the people in line do not have access to it. The allocation of people is based on racial stereotypes, in part specific for Sweden, depending on the white rabbit’s racial understanding of the origin of those who wait in line. The rabbit is saying: Latin Americans to gate 5: dance teachers; Indian and Chinese to gate 2: something with low-paid computing; Ethiopians and Kenyans to gate 4: runners; Arabs and Somalians to gate 3, to be thrown out by security guards; Thais: NOTE! Berry picking only in the summer and autumn; Roma people: What are you doing here?! Go straight to the police registry, gate 1! This drawing is based on the lived experiences of me and my neighbours in our contact with the employment office. Some of us were academics in our countries of origin, but in the Swedish system, our non-European origin was what marked us. Together, we started to discuss our experiences, for example, in the employment office,

114  Adrián Groglopo and Amalia Alvarez

by Amalia Alvarez, in Adrián Groglopo (ed.), Antirasistisk ordbok, Notis och Antirasistiska Akademin, 2015, p.  32. Translation of the text: “Discussion about about assimilation. Lecturer: A. Svensson. Migration: T. Svensson. Asylum: T. Svensson. Discrimination: E. Svensson. Feminism: A. Svensson. Unregistered immigrants: T. Svensson. Culture and integration: E. Svensson. Everything about immigrant issues: B. Svensson. Project managers: Svensson and Svensson. Free coffee served to the immigrants and Svensson”.

FIGURE 6.1  Illustration

Source: Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

Collaborative work, migrant representativity, and racism  115

by Amalia Alvarez, in Adrián Groglopo (ed.), Antirasistisk ordbok, Notis och Antirasistiska Akademin, 2015, p. 214.

FIGURE 6.2 Illustration

Source: Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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in the social service offices, in the companies where we were looking for jobs, or in contact with the police. A central feature in the dictionary that I was struck by when I read it, and that we discussed together, was the question of white dominance or white power, which defines our role in society. In order to grasp the idealisation of Swedish (white) normality, I visited an area in the city where I live, where white Swedish families hang out with their children. In a landscape with blue skies and yellow flowers, the colours of the national flag, the Swedish families with their children strolled slowly, enjoying the paradise, carefree. I saw mothers teaching children how to treat animals with a touching compassion, and the fathers behind them with children in their arms, satisfied, hugging their families. Seeing this reminded me of the white Christmas photos in magazines that show what the perfect family should look like. Occasionally, these photos include white bunnies as a symbol of tenderness and purity. The combination of all these elements was so exotic to me: the Swedish nation, where evil does not exist and compassion for animals equals the idealisation of a normality of white people and white symbols (white rabbits, white Christmas, white families, white lies, etc.). All this inspired me to draw the white bunny as a symbol of white power, that is, white dominance, in a symbolic representation of innocence. In the image, the rabbit is on a pedestal that marks the power structure. On each side of the pedestal, there are cameras that represent the guarding of the structure and the control of another small rabbit figure that tries to overturn the solid structure with a kick. The structure appears old and has evidence of attacks with stones and eggs, objects thrown by hand. On the left of the pedestal, there is a hole in the ground, and from that hole, you can see hands trying to fling stones at the solid structure. People are waiting orderly and obediently in line to be allocated and have documents in their hands. That is the experience that I and my neighbours had and still have today.

On representativity AG: What you say is very interesting, and it makes me think about how important it is to try to concretise those abstract power structures into ironic metaphors. That is a popular and useful instrument to fight back structural power, or at least one of the ways. And that takes us to the question of representation and representativity. We have been inserted in this society for quite some time in different ways, but with many similar experiences of being racialised, as I mentioned earlier. You work with comics from an antiracist perspective, and I have been working as an antiracist academic for some time. All this is done within a context where white supremacy is imposed like a blanket on these professions. How do you see this society and your position in it? AA: From my own experience as a comics creator in Sweden, having several years in the industry, I have gotten the impression that there is a great lack of representativity in the Swedish comics scene. I mean, there are comics written, and sometimes drawn by, non-whites on the Swedish comics market, with perspectives based on experiences other than just “white” experiences. However, they are mostly comics from other countries that have been translated into Swedish. Thus,

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they do not operate within the Swedish context, which of course does not make them less important, but they cannot possibly include the perspectives of a person or community, racialised as non-white, in the Swedish society. Consequently, our experiences, our life stories, and the condition of being a non-white immigrant in Sweden are made invisible. Swedish society sees our reality through media that continuously depict us as criminals and remind us that we have no part in this society. It becomes more difficult to get acceptance for antiracist comics, because Swedish society makes it hard to discuss or even avoids the discussion on structural racism. And when racism is debated, the discussion is taken over by people who have never suffered racism, or maybe suffer it and don’t understand it or, even worse, excuse it. Instead, these people should raise the discussion with academics that have both theoretical knowledge on racism and experiences of being racialised, oppressed by racial structures and white dominance. And you, as an academic, how do you see this society from your position? AG: What you say about representativity is very interesting and accurate. Since I  arrived in Sweden in the early 1990s, the image of the immigrants has been represented in stereotyped, prejudiced ways, where the immigrants themselves are publicly and politically devalued from telling their own situation and story. If the institutional arrangement of white supremacy lets you in, it frames you as immigrant within a mega-narrative of exotic cultures and undeveloped places with troubled pasts. In other words, as an immigrant, whether you speak out or not, whether you tell your experiences or not, the interpretations of your body, skin colour, accent, name, or clothing put you in an interpretive jail of knowledge established by a history of (post)colonial white supremacy. It is there that we lose the horizon of being able to establish an equal conversation, since the interpretation and the possibility of being able to speak is closed and/or distorted. The white liberal discourses about diversity and integration become the ground for a ready-made, interpretative filter on non-white, non-European migrants caught between white nationalist discourses: the liberal and the conservative or fascist. We become filtered representations of diversity in liberal discourses but a threat in conservative and fascist discourses. Representativity, as the political outbreak of the subaltern subject (or class) intervening in powerful and influential spaces in society, may be difficult to achieve under these types of conditions. Hence, as an academic working within the university, I clearly see those interpretive hierarchies that are manifested at the university. What an invandrare (“immigrant”) says does not have the same symbolic and institutional value as what is said by someone who is already seen as a representative of “Swedish society”. In this sense, the institutional arrangements of “diversity” shown as progressive liberal reforms have a hidden performance of racial and symbolic internal hierarchies. But, in any case, how do we get out of this interpretive jail? AA: I believe that it can be done – otherwise I would not have dedicated myself to this difficult task of activism! I think it is about creating tools, using the ones that exist and repairing those that are forgotten, creating and collecting strategies to show our colonised histories to ourselves. It is about struggle and resistance, and

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envisioning how the collective influences us, and how we influence it back, in the local context and in the global south. I have no doubts that we, who are racialised as non-whites in this country, are called to tell our realities, the history of our ancestors, and how it affects our values and, of course, our bodies. This should be seen in connection with the form of diversity that looks for bodies only as representation for this “diversity” and nothing else. The experiences and the political consciousness of that racialised body are not important in this diversity framework, only the body and the show-off – that’s what’s important for a society that wants to see itself as benevolent but instead is promoting white dominance like the white rabbit! I believe that comics are a democratic tool, where a pencil and a paper, available to everyone, can help us tell, with text and images or just images, a reality by having representativity – that is, a reality arising from the knowledge of our bodies and life experiences, political consciousness of how racism structures us and our own reflection about it, and from that experience recognising ourselves in the collective. AG: Here we are making a critique of power, a modern/colonial historical power that frames the stories of those who were created as the others. Without colonialism, there would not be the modern era that would create the primitive, the uncivilised, the developed, and the modern human. It is a criticism of the non-existence of people’s stories – stories of abuse, symbolic, political, and social mistreatment that is normalised by different means, in the Swedish or European context by fascist nationalism or liberal progressive nationalism. While the first one tells us to our faces that we are not welcome and that they do not want us here, the other tells us that we are welcome if we subordinate ourselves to the system of racial dominance. And between these two nationalisms, political, symbolic, and economic power is distributed, creating within the realpolitik the social subjugation and political invisibility of the subaltern migratory classes. However, it is the liberal progressive nationalism that may allow you to become a second-class citizen as long as you accept that position through the framework of integration policies and being part of that diversity, what we choose to call representation or politics of representation. The fascist nationalism, on the other hand, will make you a pariah. But how do you understand the difference between representation and representativity? AA: The stories that are told in comics depend on the reality of the author, whether it is the manuscript and/or the graphic content. The context of the stories is perceived differently, depending on the experience of the creator. For example, a European white heterosexual man will not be able to relate to the reality of a non-white, non-European woman because he lacks that experience. What this European male author or artist will do is create a reality based on his knowledge about others, thus transforming this non-European woman into an object of his work. This is what I understand as representation. The author or artist (or politician) is representing somebody else, not only without acknowledging the other’s experiences in the realm of racial and class power but also by appropriating and reinterpreting the political meaning of the non-white, non-European woman. This woman is represented by someone else, without having the possibility to speak out or act on her own terms. Representativity, however, is, for me, when the object of

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this author or artist becomes a subject in her own work. Nevertheless, the terms “representation” and “representativity” are synonymous in English, not explicating this difference. But in Spanish and in the context of Latin America, I use the differentiation between representación y representatividad. It is a difference that must be made to conceptualise the social reality of white dominance and structural racism that condition how political agency and experiences among subordinated migrant sectors of society are represented. Comics, from the manuscript to the final product, are the result of collective reflections of common experiences. They are stories that I  draw, but they are collective works based on the experience of being the focus of racism. Creating antiracist comics having representativity – by someone that has the experience of being the target of racism and is politically aware of it – is not something nice and interesting, but an urgent need. If we do not acquire representativity, that is, tell our stories ourselves, we contribute to the dehumanisation of our bodies and stories, which causes us constant pain and a poor quality of life. Raising the standard of comics in this way and removing them from the Eurocentric perspective would also contribute to democratising Swedish society.

Note 1 The dialogue was conducted through video communication and e-mail during spring 2021.

References Delegation mot segregation. 2021. “Segregation i Sverige. Årsrapport 2021 om den socioekonomiska boendesegregationens utveckling”. DELMOS 2021/334. https:// www.delmos.se/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Segregation-i-Sverige.pdf. Accessed 5 December 2022. Groglopo, Adrián, ed. 2015. Antirasistisk Ordbok. Malmö: Notis och Antirasistiska Akademin. www.antirasistiskaakademin.se/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Antirasistisk-ordbok.pdf. Accessed 14 July 2022. Lauesen, Torkil. 2021. Riding the Wave: Sweden´s Integration into the Imperialist World System. Montreal: Kersplebedeb. Mohanty, Chandra. 1988. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”. Feminist Review 30 (1): 61–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/1395054 Mulinari, Diana, and Anders Neergaard. 2004. Den nya svenska arbetarklassen: rasifierade arbetares kamp inom facket. Umeå: Boréa. OECD. 2019. OECD Economic Survey of Sweden. www.oecd.org/economy/surveys/OECDeconomic-surveys-sweden-2019-overview.pdf. Accessed 14 July 2022. Osanami Törngren, Sayaka, and Sofia Ulver. 2020. “Who Is Marketised in Colour-Blind Sweden? Racial and Ethnic Representation in Swedish Commercials 2008–2017”. Genealogy 4 (4). https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy4040100 SOU (Statens Offentliga Utredningar). 2006. Integrationens svarta bok: agenda för jämlikhet och social sammanhållning: slutbetänkande. Utredningen om makt, integration och strukturell diskriminering. SOU 2006:79. Stockholm: Fritze.

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FIGURE 4.1  Excerpt

describing a situation in which the employee is asked to work during his rest period, Thai Fishing Vessel Employment Contract, Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd.

Source: Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd. and Thai Union Group PCL. Reproduced with kind permission.

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FIGURE 4.2 Excerpt

depicting what the employee is entitled to receive on the vessel, Thai Fishing Vessel Employment Contract, Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd.

Source: Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd. and Thai Union Group PCL. Reproduced with kind permission.

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FIGURE 4.3 Excerpt

depicting a situation where the employee is injured and/or ill, Thai Fishing Vessel Employment Contract, Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd.

Source: Creative Contracts (Pty) Ltd. and Thai Union Group PCL. Reproduced with kind permission.

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of No soy de aquí ni soy de allá: Historias migrantes by José Quintero, Finestra Gestoría Cultural, 2017.

FIGURE 5.1 Cover

Source: © Finestra Gestoria Cultural. Reproduced with kind permission.

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of De aquí y de allá: Historias migrantes 2 by Patricio Betteo, Finestra Gestoría Cultural, 2020.

FIGURE 5.4 Cover

Source: © Finestra Gestoria Cultural. Reproduced with kind permission.

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by Amalia Alvarez, in Adrián Groglopo (ed.), Antirasistisk ordbok, Notis och Antirasistiska Akademin, 2015, p.  32. Translation of the text: “Discussion about about assimilation. Lecturer: A. Svensson. Migration: T. Svensson. Asylum: T. Svensson. Discrimination: E. Svensson. Feminism: A. Svensson. Unregistered immigrants: T. Svensson. Culture and integration: E. Svensson. Everything about immigrant issues: B. Svensson. Project managers: Svensson and Svensson. Free coffee served to the immigrants and Svensson”.

FIGURE 6.1 Illustration

Source: Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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by Amalia Alvarez, in Adrián Groglopo (ed.), Antirasistisk ordbok, Notis och Antirasistiska Akademin, 2015, p. 214.

FIGURE 6.2 Illustration

Source: Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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Dimitrova, John King – Comics-as-research Archive, London, 2021. Ink on paper.

FIGURE 11.2 Kremena

Source: Kremena Dimitrova.

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FIGURE 13.1  Aimée

de Jongh, “Europe’s Waiting Room: Visiting the Refugees on Lesbos”, trans. de Jongh and Bob Bruyn, Drawing the Times, 2017, [p. 2].

Source: Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

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FIGURE 13.2 Judith Vanistendael, “Moria: Hellhole on Lesbos”, trans. Stefan Vanisten-

dael, Drawing the Times, 2017, n.p. Source: Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

Kate Evans, Threads: From the Refugee Crisis, Verso, 2016, 130–131.

Source: Reproduced with the permission of the artist.

  131

FIGURE 13.3 

132 

FIGURE 14.1 Taina

Tervonen and Jeff Pourquié, “Frontex, les frontières de la honte”, La Revue dessinée no. 7, 2015, 185. Translation of the text: “Drones, radars, satellites, thermographic surveillance, biometric controls: / Frontex / European Agency for the External Borders / Warsaw / Since its inception in 2004, the budget of Frontex has grown from 19 million to 89  million euros. / In general, greater and greater sums of money are allocated to border control. // This money serves to finance operations of border control, coordinated between European states” (Trans. Tui Clark for Drawing the Times).

Source: Reproduced with the permission of the authors.

  133

Tervonen and Jeff Pourquié, “Identités englouties”, La Revue dessinée no. 16, 2016, 80. Translation of the text: “So I decided to hang it up in my office. // To remember the dead” (Trans. Tui Clark for Drawing the Times).

FIGURE 14.2 Taina

Source: Reproduced with the permission of the authors.

134 

FIGURE 15.1 Benjamin Dix and Lindsay Pollock, Vanni: A Family’s Struggle through the Sri

Lankan Conflict. Source: First published by New Internationalist © 2019, p. 133. Reprinted with kind permission.

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Dix and Lindsay Pollock, Vanni: A Family’s Struggle Through the Sri Lankan Conflict.

FIGURE 15.2 Benjamin

Source: First published by New Internationalist © 2019, p. 241. Reprinted with kind permission.

PART II

Configurations of nationalism and migration

7 V FOR PISSED-OFFEDNESS Anti-immigrant subversion of dystopian superhero intertexts Oskari Rantala

In the 2019 parliamentary elections, the Finns Party (Perussuomalaiset) defied expectations and became the second largest party in the Finnish parliament. The nationalist and populist party succeeded in increasing its number of seats despite major challenges during the previous term, including a party split and most of the MPs exiting. A  significant component of the highly successful campaign was a video advertisement titled V niin kuin ketutus. The phrase is tricky to translate precisely, but literally it means “V for being pissed off”, or “V for pissed-offedness”, as ketutus is a noun.1 Being a narrative short film rather than a simple advertisement, the video caused controversy and was a topic of heated discussion due to its depiction of violence and the portrayal of immigrants as sexual predators. Nonetheless, it reached hundreds of thousands of views before the elections, and one of the main actors even became an MP. From the perspective of comics studies, V niin kuin ketutus is especially interesting because of its intermedial relations with comics. It depicts a dystopian Finland governed by corrupt politicians and overcome by high levels of immigration; this dystopia is situated inside the story world of a comic book in the video. Furthermore, the advert extensively appropriates V for Vendetta, a comic by Alan Moore and David Lloyd (1982–1985, 1988–1989; see Moore and Lloyd 1990), and its 2005 film adaptation directed by James McTeigue and written by the Wachowskis. Whereas the original dystopian graphic novel takes a strong political stand against English fascist movements, as well as the anti-minority policies of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, the film adaptation is more concerned with the erosion of civil liberties in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the “War on Terror”. In this chapter, I discuss the ways in which the narrative strategies and aesthetics of these works are employed and their politics subverted in order to advance an anti-egalitarian and anti-immigrant agenda and manufacture exploitable political controversy in the contemporary media landscape. The first section addresses the DOI: 10.4324/9781003254621-9

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political context and publication of the advert. In the second, I detail the contents of V niin kuin ketutus before delving into a discussion of the similarities and dissimilarities of the heroes and villains portrayed in the advert, the graphic novel, and the film adaptation. The final section of the article focuses on the connections of V niin kuin ketutus and the emerging style of right-wing politics, foregrounding culture war, controversy, and transgression.

Introducing the renewed Finns Party The parliamentary elections of 2019 were crucial for the Finns Party. Two years prior, the party had split after a contested leadership race when Jussi Halla-aho became the party leader. The majority of the party’s MPs and all the government ministers left in protest, and it was also ousted from government as the other members of the centre-right coalition rejected Halla-aho’s radical anti-immigration program (Seuri et al. 2017). The 2019 elections were essentially the first time that the renewed Finns Party was able to fully introduce its new approach to the voting public. Not counting the inconsequential 2018 presidential elections, no major elections had been held since the leadership change. An important shift in Finnish politics had taken place, but it was yet to be determined whether there was support for a more unapologetically anti-immigrant party in the mould of the Italian Lega Nord, Alternative for Germany, Austrian Freedom Party, or French National Rally (formerly the National Front). These are all parties that the new Finns Party will soon align itself with in the European Parliament. V niin kuin ketutus was published online on 20 March 2019, two weeks before advance voting was set to begin. The nearly seven-minute video first caused controversy when a shorter teaser version was aired in movie theatres. Moviegoers who objected to the advert started to voice their concerns through social media, criticising the cinema chain Finnkino for giving a platform for an ad that was commonly described as “racist propaganda” and “far-right violent fantasy” (see tweet Finnkino 2019a and the replies). On 25 March, the feminist and antiracist advocacy group Fem-R accused Finnkino of mainstreaming racism (Fem-R 2019). Finnkino individually replied to this and nearly a hundred other calls to discontinue airing the advert with the same short statement, which was posted repeatedly. According to this statement, they supported “tolerance, freedom of speech and democracy”, pledged to “not accept racism or discrimination”, and announced that the Finns Party campaign would be ending the next day (e.g. Finnkino 2019b; 2019c; 2019d). Even though the campaign ran its course and ended as planned (Sunila 2019), several foreign far-right news sites such as Voice of Europe and Fria Tider suggested falsely that the Finns Party advert was taken down due to accusations of racism (Emma R. 2019; Fria Tider 2019). An English-language version of the ad was uploaded a week after the original V niin kuin ketutus, but its number of views are a fraction of those of the original. In the English version, the “V for” wordplay of the Finnish title has understandably been replaced and the title is KETUTUS – A story of being seriously pissed off.2 The

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Finnish title does require some interpretation. “V niin kuin” means “V for”, but the title is somewhat humoristic, as the word ketutus does not start with the letter “v”. For a Finnish-speaking audience, it is obvious that the last word of the title is a placeholder for the stronger expletive vitutus. The meaning of both expressions is roughly the same but ketutus is a more playful and less vulgar term. This underscores the issues around what can be said in a political advert aimed at a mainstream audience. Similarly, a great deal of the political subtext is not stated explicitly. Instead, certain things are clearly hinted at with a knowing wink at the audience, as I will demonstrate in the next section. Strategies involving doublespeak and flexible play with symbols and meanings have a strong history in the European radical right (Vaarakallio 2017, 199–200). The election cycle was marked by high tension and even some acts of violence, which are exceptional in Finnish politics. The former Finns Party chairperson and a leftist candidate of Somalian origin were assaulted at the same time as V niin kuin ketutus was making headlines. As a result, politicians from many parties condemned the advert and accused the Finns Party of inciting racist hate crimes. Being in the spotlight was beneficial for the party, however. Scholars have suggested that manufacturing controversy is a viable strategy for populist parties in the contemporary media landscape; thus, by criticising the video, the political opponents of the Finns Party in fact increased its visibility and reach (Laakso et al. 2019). As the storyline of the video featuring corrupt politicians, predatory immigrants and a violent vigilante monster is ultimately framed as fiction, condemning the advert can be played down as a lack of sense of humour or irony. As scholar Maria Mäkelä (2019, 458) points out, the film is a pastiche of speculative fiction, making it easy to argue that the narrative was not supposed to be taken at face value to begin with. She argues that this rhetoric of fictionality provides an effective counterargument to any criticism of the story: It was not supposed to be true and therefore its supposed racist elements do not warrant a discussion. Specifically, Mäkelä (2019, 457) considers it a parody of “Marvel comics, dystopian Hollywood blockbusters and video games”. Undoubtedly, several references to various kinds of popular culture narratives can be found, but a more thorough discussion is in order. Above everything else, V niin kuin ketutus references a single comics work (which is not a Marvel comic) and a specific dystopian Hollywood blockbuster.

Imagining an immigration dystopia V niin kuin ketutus opens in a dimly lit space filled with old posters and books. An unidentifiable person walks through this library, picks up a comic book titled V niin kuin ketutus from the shelf, and sits down to read it. When the comic book is opened, the camera zooms into an illustrated image of Helsinki Cathedral. At this point, the viewer is transported into the story world of the comic and the drawing is replaced by a real-life video image of the same tower with the camera soon panning over the city. A voice-over narrator starts reciting the text that was some seconds earlier visible in captions on the comic book page: “There was once a small

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nation, inhabited by content and happy people” (V niin kuin ketutus, 00:34).3 Even though the name of the country is not mentioned, it is obvious that the events are taking place in Helsinki, Finland. In addition to the cathedral, other recognisable landmarks such as the Parliament House soon make an appearance. The narrative starts like a fairy-tale and the narrator quickly paints a picture of a country where people are patriotic and everything is well. Then a stain in the idyll is introduced: “One day, the country’s democratically chosen leaders decided to betray the promises they had made to the people” (Vnnk, 0:50). The narrator informs the audience that the corrupt political elite do not care about the people and instead are focused on making themselves rich by taking in too many refugees. How this economic arrangement actually works remains a mystery. Visually, the narrative shifts back and forth between video segments recorded with live actors and illustrated comics panels, reinforcing the experience of reading a comic book. Especially the scenes filling in the backstory with a larger cast and more action are represented in comics format. In one scene, a young white woman is pulled by dark hands into a car that stops next to her on the street, suggesting that a rise in immigration leads to sexual violence. In another, bribed mainstream media brands anybody taking part in an anti-rape demonstration a racist. According to the narrator, “the country that once was safe for women and children . . . was now a thing of the past” (Vnnk, 2:45). The verbal narration is often vague and does not make as specific accusations as the visual storytelling. As the comics panels explicitly reveal a harrowing and violent kidnapping, the narrator laments the irresponsible immigration policy, which leads to “those who were never in need of an asylum” (Vnnk, 1:50) also moving to the country. When the safety of women and children is mentioned, the images reveal a hooded figure with a knife in his hand. It is a clear reference to the deadly knife attacks in Turku, Finland, in August 2017, perpetrated by a radicalised asylum seeker. The attacker, who was inspired by jihadist terror groups and intentionally targeted women, was the first person to ever receive a sentence for terrorist crimes in Finland. The illustrated image shows the actual scene of the crime with the Turku Market Square and Orthodox Church in the background. The video also contains some aggressive jabs at the perceived opponents of the Finns Party’s agenda. When the corrupt politicians bribe a newspaper editor to make the mainstream media their propaganda platform, a money-filled briefcase changes hands in front of the headquarters of Helsingin Sanomat, the largest Finnish newspaper, which is often vilified by right-wing populists for its liberal bent. A moment later, the narrator describes the instructions that members of the political elite hand down to their suffering people: “Most importantly, people were told not to give way to fear and hate” (Vnnk, 3:01). The lines echo a phrase frequently used by the former Finns Party chairman and founder Timo Soini, who acted as the Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time of terrorist attacks in Nice in 2016 and in Stockholm in 2017. While Soini urged people not to give way to fear (e.g. Saroniemi 2016; Waris 2017), the more militant wing of his party demanded that it was, on the contrary, “time to give way to fear” (Waris 2017). After Jussi Halla-aho

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took power, Soini was expelled from the party and became a prime example of a person who was not aggressive enough in pushing the anti-immigrant message. Ironic wishes of “not giving way to fear” are frequently used quips in the new and more radical Finns Party circuit (e.g. Halla-aho 2019). After establishing the dystopian world, the main storyline of V niin kuin ketutus begins. As a result of the influx of immigrants, there is financial hardship and “ordinary Finns” – all played by white men – lose their jobs and end up homeless. The people who are not listened to become frustrated or, as the title puts it, pissed off. Their growing anger is depicted as black smoke rising all around the city and finally taking embodied form, as a monster is created in the depths of the earth. This quasi-superhero is a naked and growling muscular man with a long beard and superhuman strength. The creature tracks one of the members of the leading cabal to his limousine, in which he is cruising around the city with scantily clad women. The monster attacks the people in the car, scaring away the politician’s companions. He then forces the man to repent his wrongdoings, resign, and leave the country in shame. When his work is done, the monster vanishes into thin air. At this point, the reader in the library closes the comic book and it is revealed that he is the Finns Party leader Jussi Halla-aho. Looking straight into the camera, he announces that in reality, “there is no Pissed Off Monster, and it is not going to come and save anyone” (Vnnk, 6:18). Instead of waiting for a supernatural saviour, he urges the electorate to vote for his party and for change. The sole reason Halla-aho gives is that the old parties will not “change their objectives” (Vnnk, 6:24). What exactly needs to be changed and how his party plans to accomplish it remains unsaid. It is an interesting political advert in the sense that it does not promise anything. V niin kuin ketutus simply depicts a dystopian reality that is itself fictional. The rhetoric is negative: voting for the Finns Party will lead to something else. The crux of the advert is obvious, of course – namely, that the party plans to heavily restrict immigration if it gets into power – but no promises are made or plans laid out. In fact, immigration policies in Finland are already strict and the percentage of the foreign-born population is lower than in any other Nordic or Western European country (OECD 2021).

Pissed off monster versus V V niin kuin ketutus plays with many tropes of popular culture but an obvious reference point, already apparent from the title, is V for Vendetta. Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd, the dystopian tale about a postapocalyptic Britain under a fascist regime first appeared in Britain in 1982–1985 and in the United States in 1988–1989.4 In the story, a lone terrorist of seemingly superhuman competence attempts to take down the regime by assassinating prominent party members and inciting a popular insurrection. His goal is to plunge the country into chaos, out of which a new system of free citizens might grow: “With anarchy, from rubble comes new life” (Moore and Lloyd 1990, 258).

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The enigmatic main character, known as V, hides his face behind a Guy Fawkes mask that has later been popularised as a symbol of anti-establishment rebellion by a plethora of movements, ranging from the hacker-activists of Anonymous and wealth-inequality protesters of Occupy Wall Street to Arab Spring demonstrators. More recently, it has been used by democracy protesters in Hong Kong as well as Donald Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol in 2021 (Siu 2019; Pengelly and Luscombe 2021). There is some irony in the fact that aspects of the story have been liberally employed by agents across the political spectrum, even by the far right (e.g. Nyqvist 2019), when the original hero of the comic strip was fighting fascism and espoused an anarchist ideology. Against the backdrop of nuclear war, brutal secret police, and ever-present surveillance cameras, V wages a one-man war against the one-party state. Moore and Lloyd’s comic discusses the justification of political violence, the philosophy of anarchy, and resistance against authority. In addition to the unconventional content, the drawing style is somewhat experimental, with Lance Parkin (2013, 90) dubbing Lloyd’s approach a visual joke. Strong contrasts and the omission of object outlines lead to a striking black-and-white style that is at odds with the story the images are telling: “morally, there was nothing but gray. We were asking the reader to consider some interesting questions” (Moore, quoted in Khoury 2003, 75). Despite fighting genocidal villains, V is an ambivalent antihero who comes across as a potentially deranged and morally compromised character capable of murder and torture. V is a borderline case between an extremely competent but still ordinary human being and one with clearly superhuman abilities. In this sense, he resembles comics superheroes such as Batman and Night Raven, who are mentioned as inspiration alongside dystopian writers like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley in Moore’s 1983 essay describing the genesis of the character (Moore 1990, 270). Like the Pissed Off Monster of the Finns Party advert, V is not a superhero in the classic sense. Peter Coogan (2009), for example, defines the superhero as the trinity of mission, powers, and secret identity. Both characters do have exceptional powers and a clearly defined mission, but they lack the double identities of hero and their secret alter ego. On the other hand, V does have an intriguing origin story, a prevalent trope in superhero narratives. He had been an inmate and a human guinea pig in the fascist administration’s research facility, in which most test subjects died horrendously. However, one of the inmates, known as “the man in room five”, manages to destroy the whole facility and escape. In a pivotal scene, the comics narrative shows the threatening naked silhouette against the burning buildings, a sight witnessed by the doctor whose diary entries constitute the textual channel of the comics narrative in the episode. That is the moment when “the man in room five” – the number that the Roman numeral V stands for – is transformed into V. The importance of the moment is underlined by the repetition of the panels in different comics scenes (Moore and Lloyd 1990, 67, 83), representing the persistent memories tormenting the doctor. Bishop Lilliman, another one of V’s victims who had been present, states that he is still having horrifying nightmares about “a black shape against the flames” (Moore and Lloyd 1990, 60), before V kills him.

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In the movie adaptation, some major plot elements are rearranged, but this scene and the origin story of V remain intact, even though some details have been altered. Now, the research is instrumental for manufacturing a virus scare which helps the totalitarian regime win crucial elections. What remains, however, is the striking visual of a dark silhouette of a man standing against the flames when he has set himself free. Mimicking the panel repetition in the comic, the film employs the same frames in several scenes even more extensively (McTeigue 2005, 33:14, 57:16, 1:22:20, 1:37:55). V niin kuin ketutus also mimics the scene when the anger of fedup Finns has reached a boiling point. As the Pissed Off Monster is rising from the volcanic depths, he is presented in a similar way: a threatening, naked figure in the dark set against fiery lava streams. He even has a flaming V emblem on his chest. Both the Pissed Off Monster and V are avenging figures, ready to fight for oppressed people and violently meting out punishments for political crimes. Even though one features in a seven-minute ad and the other in a 250-page graphic novel (or a two-hour film), the arc of the story is similar. There is injustice caused by the morally and politically bankrupt leaders, which the avenger is going to take out, vanishing after his work is done. In the end of Moore and Lloyd’s story, V is killed by police bullets, but his protégé Evey Hammond takes his place as V at the crucial moment to incite the masses to take down the dictatorship. In the graphic novel, a period of brutal chaos ensues, and it is unclear whether V’s insurgence is successful. The film ends on a more hopeful note, as the police state is toppled in a seemingly bloodless coup. The vigilantism of the cinematic V is more unproblematic and the ending less ambiguous, and in some respects the Finns Party advert is a descendant of the film rather than the graphic novel.

Villains, fascists, and elites The most striking difference between V for Vendetta and V niin kuin ketutus stems from the political dimensions of the narrative. Whereas the Orwellian government of V for Vendetta is run by militaristic fascists, the Finns Party’s dystopia seems to be a product of corrupt liberal elite. Suitcases filled with money, expensive suits, private limousines, and the dramatic cut to a European Union flag when the sinister abuses of power are discussed reference the stereotypical conception of a globalist elite. Outlined in various conspiracy theories, globalism has been adopted by more mainstream nationalist and populist politicians, such as Donald Trump and Jussi Halla-aho, who have used it prominently (e.g. Borger 2019; Suomen uutiset 2018b). In V for Vendetta, V’s opponents have ethnically cleansed Britain and violently repressed minorities, mirroring the objectives of real-life fascist groups that were active in the 1970s. The fascist organisation that took power in the comic strip is called Norsefire, the letters of which are obviously reminiscent of the British farright party National Front. In the 1970s, National Front campaigned against nonwhite immigration, organised violent demonstrations, and enjoyed some electoral success until Thatcher took the Conservative Party in a more nationalist direction and marginalised the more radical right-wing movements (Trilling 2013). In

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Moore and Lloyd’s alternative future, that did not happen, and the fascists remained a strong – and ultimately the strongest – political force. In the film adaptation, the politics are Americanised to some extent (Parkin 2013, 322). The Norsefire are not called fascists and they win an election by staging terror attacks. As the film plays with ideas of a false-flag terror attack and the ways in which a resulting climate of fear can be capitalised on, it is easy to see its connections to the various 9/11 “Truther” conspiracy theories that posit that the Republican administration had a role in the attacks on the World Trade Center (Parkin 2013, 324). By 2005, concerns about the erosion of civil liberties in the aftermath of the “War on Terror” were widely shared, and V frequently makes comments that can be applied to the contemporaneous political situation in the United States. It can be argued that the film adaptation tapped into the Zeitgeist and made the story the cult classic it is today. However, the shift in politics is interesting. There is a huge gap between the film adaptation and the Finns Party advertisement, but it is not quite as large as the one between V niin kuin ketutus and the original V for Vendetta. As far as politics are considered, one of the most important scenes in V for Vendetta takes place when V infiltrates the government television station and forces the network to air his statement to the British public. This scene reveals some of the changes in political orientation between the comic and the film adaptation. Moore and Lloyd’s V delivers a dark and threatening monologue about humans’ inability to make their own decisions. With images of Stalin and Hitler behind him, V accuses his listeners of giving power to oppressive rulers and causing atrocities. The video message is something of an ultimatum, urging people to take more responsibility and “to be your own boss” (Moore and Lloyd 1990, 114). This is an important scene in the film adaptation as well, but the contents and the tone of the speech have shifted dramatically. In the film, V is still inciting the people to take down the government, but much of the wider political argument is missing, and a major line is that “there’s something terribly wrong with the country” (McTeigue 2005, 19:05). The people are not called out as enablers of a fascist dictatorship. Instead, V suggests that something is wrong, and if the viewers feel the same way they should join him and take back control. The political message has been significantly watered down, even though more general scepticism towards authorities resonated much more with the audience at the time than any discussion focused on anarchy and fascism would have. “There is something wrong with this country” is a flexible sentiment, and it can accommodate different takes on what is specifically wrong – be it the erosion of civil liberties or the rising level of immigration. Whereas the comic and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the film are egalitarian, anti-fascist, and anti-conservative works, V niin kuin ketutus is certainly not. V for Vendetta portrays a fight to take down a dystopian, patriarchal order, but the Finns Party advert pursues an agenda that can be described as anti-egalitarian and antifeminist, subverting the politics of the work it is emulating in an interesting way. Is there some accidental irony in the fact that a work explicitly attacking fascism and the political far right is appropriated in a political advert of a radical nationalist

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anti-immigration party – or was it a deliberate choice by the creators? That is impossible to say. However, one should bear in mind that other aspects of the film are meticulously planned, and the narrative is carefully constructed. All things considered, the end product is extremely professional and there is no comparison to it in the history of Finnish political advertisements. With only few exceptions, the producers have not been willing to discuss the advert in public and the identities of most of the creators are not mentioned anywhere. Even the director Timo Peltokangas is not credited, although he has discussed his role in one e-mail interview in general terms. Answering questions about whether he saw the violent aspects of the advert to be problematic, he stated that they used “the methods of the world of movies in order to evoke and amplify feelings” and that the mode of storytelling should be compared to “Marvel comics and movies” (Heinonen 2019).

An alt-right vendetta In the recent study of populism and political extremism, one of the most discussed topics has been the movement that is often referred to as alt-right. It is an amorphous, loose network of provocative right-wing actors which emerged as a formidable political force after it played a significant role in the surprise win of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016 (Heikkilä 2017). The movement grew out of transgressive internet culture, beginning as something of a sarcastic reaction to mainstream liberal politics and modern feminism (Nagle 2017, 10–27). On the other hand, it has been intentionally shaped by different far-right operatives (ADL 2021; SPLC n.d.). One of the most interesting aspects of the movement is that it has co-opted the playbook of progressive movements of past decades. Angela Nagle (2017, 40–53) writes about the Gramscian right, which believes that political change follows cultural change, and that one must wage culture war in order to win in politics. It is indeed useful to consider V niin kuin ketutus as cultural warfare. It is not as relevant as a political advert for a specific election campaign as a creation seeking to challenge the ways in which immigration can be framed in public discourse. The central issues that the alt-right is preoccupied with include “IQ, European demographic and civilisational decline, cultural decadence, cultural Marxism, antiegalitarianism and Islamification”, as well as challenging “the right-wing conservative establishment” – that is, what the alt-right is an alternative to (Nagle 2017, 12). These currents are present in European right-wing populist movements, and the allies of the Finns Party have forcefully challenged the established mainstream conservative parties around the continent. Under Jussi Halla-aho’s leadership, the Finns Party has been approaching these same concerns; indeed, many of the issues mentioned earlier were topics that Halla-aho himself wrote extensively about when he first entered the political scene (Saresma and Tulonen 2020). Discussion on the theory of replacement and Cultural Marxism have moved from the fringes to Suomen uutiset, the official news website of the party (e.g. Suomen uutiset 2018a; Hamilo 2017).

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Nagle actually mentions V for Vendetta in her book, writing that “V for Vendetta . . . and the ‘dark age of comic books’ influenced the aesthetic sensibilities of this broad online culture” (Nagle 2017, 13). However, she does not elaborate on the impact of comics culture on the alt-right movement. In the cultural history of comics, the so-called dark age signifies the period that began in the 1980s after works such as Watchmen by Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986–87) and The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller (1986) brought more adult themes and inventive storytelling strategies to the fore in anglophone commercial mainstream comics, resulting in a wave of violent and grim superhero narratives which dominated the 1990s (Voger 2006, 8). However, Nagle is probably referring not to comic books themselves but to the influx of action movies based on comics gaining momentum during the first decade of the 2000s. The film V for Vendetta is certainly part of this cultural shift, which is visible in the success of such titles as Hellboy (2004), Sin City (2005), 300 (2007), the Dark Knight trilogy (2005–2012), Watchmen (2009), KickAss (2010), and the first films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the aggressive inside jokes, popular culture appropriations and the attacks on the boundaries of acceptable political speech, the alt-right ethos is apparent in V niin kuin ketutus. An aggressive approach and the efforts to break political taboos are not surprising, but employing a work like V for Vendetta is intriguing. On the one hand, it is a testament to the impact that the comic and the film adaptation have had on the cultural mainstream and political imagination. On the other hand, this choice produces irony and complex double meanings. When a narrative opposing nativism is remixed to present refugees as violent criminals, the subversive shift in the politics is apparent. Another shift takes place in sexual politics. The advert purports to be especially concerned about the rights and safety of women. The increasing violence against women is portrayed as the primary consequence of immigration, an interesting choice considering that the Finns Party is a characteristically male party. Over 70 percent of party members and a similar portion of its MPs are male, and the party has been reluctant to act on women’s rights issues. For example, its stance on defining rape in the criminal code as based on lack of consent – a major feminist initiative in Finland during the past few years – has been negative (Härkönen and Sundman 2019). In the advert, women are either victims of violent crime or, alternatively, escorts who accompany the villain in his limousine, bringing into question his morality and integrity. Any active positive role for a female is lacking, in stark contrast to V for Vendetta in which Evey Hammond is the protagonist. As Heli Askola (2019, 59, 64) points out, the Finns Party has shown minimal interest in gender equality issues and has instead sought to depoliticise them. Despite the comparatively high rate of violence against women in Finland, the party’s “manifestos are generally silent” about it (Askola 2019, 61). However, immigration proves a suspicious exception. In the context of immigration from non-Western countries, gender equality is suddenly under threat (Askola 2019, 56). Following this logic, restricting immigration protects women from violence, but it is rather difficult to consider these concerns for women’s rights as genuine. Calls for the safety of

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(white) women have, of course, always been integral in the propaganda of nativist and patriarchal movements. It cannot be denied that V niin kuin ketutus was successful, and it possibly had an impact on the election results. It received a tremendous number of views, rose to the political agenda at the exact right time, and forced even the opponents of the Finns Party to discuss it right before the elections. It is impossible to say how the campaign would have played out without it. In polls, the party was already gaining steam prior to publishing the advert, but it was a vehicle for addressing a younger, more mediasavvy audience. Many commentators did connect it with minor assaults against politicians that took place during the campaign period, so it is conceivable that the advert could have damaged the party’s prospects, had the circumstances been different. In subsequent elections, the same production company, Cinepic, has produced further video advertisements for the Finns Party. In the European parliamentary elections in May 2019, the party published one accompanied with a note saying that it was “from the creators of Ketutus”. Apparently, the advertisement has left a legacy that is worth exploiting. It should be noted, however, that the new EU elections advert was a more humorous and light-hearted take on the supposed overreaches of the European Union. It is conspicuously less risqué and did not rely on popular culture intertexts or pastiche. Popular culture has political power and potential, but wielding it successfully is a serious undertaking, requiring significant effort and the right circumstances. The results, however, can have substantial impact in the contemporary media landscape. Anti-immigrant sentiment has remained at the core of the Finns Party politics. At the time of writing, campaigning for the municipal elections 2021 is under way, and the Finns Party election manifesto begins with accusations that the current centre-left government is using too much taxpayer money on harmful immigration, development cooperation, and EU packages (Finns Party 2021). The latest tweet by Jussi Halla-aho quotes a news story about an attempted crime that fits the Finns Party narrative: the victim was a Finnish woman, whereas the perpetrators “looked like they have Arab background”, according to a witness (Halla-aho 2021). It seems likely that the Finns Party will strive to keep immigration a contentious issue in Finnish politics for the foreseeable future, despite the low numbers of immigrants in the country. Time will tell how the party will succeed and what shape the political messaging around the issue will take in the years to come.

Notes 1 Other possible translations would include annoyance and irritation, but being pissed off is the translation used in the official English subtitles. 2 I use the original Finnish title in this article, as it highlights the intermedial connections that are relevant for this discussion. 3 Subsequently, I will refer to V niin kuin ketutus as Vnnk (in references, see Finns Party 2019) and provide an approximate timestamp for the quotations. I  use the English subtitles of the original rather than the English version, even though the differences between the two seem to be minimal. All word choices and timings are not identical, however.

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4 Originally, the strip appeared in the comics magazine Warrior between 1982 and 1985. When the magazine folded, the story remained unfinished for a few years until it was picked up by DC Comics and published in comic book format in the United States. The black-and-white Warrior segments were coloured and republished in 1988 and the story concluded the following year in the last four comic books of the 10-issue series.

References ADL. 2021. “Alt Right: A Primer on the New White Supremacy”. Anti-Defamation League. www.adl.org/resources/backgrounders/alt-right-a-primer-on-the-new-white-supremacy. Accessed 14 July 2022. Askola, Heli. 2019. “Wind From the North, Don’t Go Forth? Gender Equality and the Rise of Populist Nationalism in Finland”. European Journal of Women’s Studies 26 (1): 54–69. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506817748341 Borger, Julian. 2019. “Donald Trump Denounces ‘Globalism’ in Nationalist Address to UN”. The Guardian, 24 September. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/24/ donald-trump-un-address-denounces-globalism. Accessed 14 July 2022. Coogan, Peter. 2009. “The Definition of the Superhero”. In A Comics Studies Reader, edited by Jeet Heer and Ken Worcester, 77–93. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Emma R. 2019. “Election Film That Tells the Truth About Finland and Europe Banned From Cinemas Due to ‘Racism’ ”. Voice of Europe, 4 April. https://web.archive.org/ web/20190405120030/https://voiceofeurope.com/2019/04/election-film-that-tellsthe-truth-about-finland-and-europe-banned-from-cinemas-due-to-racism. Accessed 14 July 2022. Fem-R. 2019. “Fem-R vaatii Finnkinoa lopettamaan perussuomalaisten rasistisen vaalivideon esittämisen”. FEM-R, 25 March. www.fem-r.fi/fem-r-vaatii-finnkinoa-lopettamaanperussuomalaisten-rasistisen-vaalivideon-esittamisen. Accessed 14 July 2022. Finnkino. 2019a. “Näytämme kaikkien mainospaikan ostaneiden puolueiden mainontaa teattereissamme. Samoin kuin Perussuomalaiset, niin ovat myös Kokoomus ja Vihreät . . .” Twitter, 24 March. https://twitter.com/Finnkino_FI/status/1109905151765159940. Accessed 14 July 2022. Finnkino. 2019b. “Finnkino puolustaa suvaitsevaisuutta, sananvapautta ja demokratiaa eikä toiminnassaan hyväksy rasismia eikä syrjintää. Esityksessä ollut 30-sekuntinen PS:n . . .” Twitter, 25 March. https://twitter.com/Finnkino_FI/status/1110170082959941632. Accessed 14 July 2022. Finnkino. 2019c. “Finnkino puolustaa suvaitsevaisuutta, sananvapautta ja demokratiaa eikä toiminnassaan hyväksy rasismia eikä syrjintää. Esityksessä ollut 30-sekuntinen PS:n . . .” Twitter, 25 March. https://twitter.com/Finnkino_FI/status/1110172818023636992. Accessed 14 July 2022. Finnkino. 2019d. “Finnkino puolustaa suvaitsevaisuutta, sananvapautta ja demokratiaa eikä toiminnassaan hyväksy rasismia eikä syrjintää. Esityksessä ollut 30-sekuntinen PS:n . . .” Twitter, 25 March. https://twitter.com/Finnkino_FI/status/1110173556405604352. Accessed 14 July 2022. Finns Party. 2019. V niin kuin ketutus. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzCK4tTu2nE. Accessed 14 July 2022. Finns Party. 2021. Asiat tärkeysjärjestykseen. Perussuomalaisten kuntavaaliohjelma. www.perussuomalaiset.fi/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/PSkuntavaaliohjelma2021.pdf. Accessed 14 July 2022. Fria Tider. 2019. “Global filmjätte stoppar Sannfinländarnas valfilm”. Fria Tider, 1 April. www.friatider.se/global-filmj-tte-stoppar-sannfinl-ndarnas-valfilm. Accessed 14 July 2022.

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Halla-aho, Jussi. 2019. “Älä anna pelolle valtaa”. Twitter, 12 February. https://twitter.com/ halla_aho/status/1095338889663766529. Accessed 14 July 2022. Halla-aho, Jussi. 2021. “Uhrin äiti kertoo, että tekijät ovat ‘arabitaustaisen näköisiä’ ”. Twitter, 31 May. https://twitter.com/Halla_aho/status/1399301720849764352. Accessed 14 July 2022. Hamilo, Marko. 2017. “Mitä kulttuurimarxismi on – ja mitä valtamedia väittää sen olevan”. Suomen uutiset, 15 September. www.suomenuutiset.fi/mita-kulttuurimarxismi-mitavaltamedia-vaittaa-olevan. Accessed 14 July 2022. Härkönen, Anni, and Robert Sundman. 2019. “ ‘Seksi ilman suostumusta on raiskaus’ – Eduskunta käsitteli raiskauslainsäädännön muuttamiseen tähtäävää kansalaisaloitetta, Yle seurasi”. Yle 18, September. https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-10976824. Accessed 14 July 2023. Heikkilä, Niko. 2017. “Online antagonism of the alt-right in the 2016 election”. European Journal of American Studies 12 (2). https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.12140 Heinonen, Jukka. 2019. “Perussuomalaisten kohutun vaalivideon tuottaja: ‘Pienellä yhtiöllä ei ole varaa sylkeä minkään asiakkaan suuntaan’ ”. Seura, 26 March. https://seura.fi/asiat/ ajankohtaista/perussuomalaisten-vaalivideon-tuottaja-pienella-yhtiolla-eiole-varaasylkea-minkaan-asiakkaan-suuntaan. Accessed 14 July 2022. Khoury, George. 2003. The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore. Raleigh: TwoMorrows. Laakso, Ville, Päivi Puukka, and Matti Koivisto. 2019. “Tutkijat: Perussuomalaisten vaali­ video toimi kohun logiikkaa hyödyntämällä, levityksessä apuna videon paheksujat”. Yle, 27 March. https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-10709338. Accessed 14 July 2022. Mäkelä, Maria. 2019. “Disagreeing with Fictionality? A Response to Richard Walsh in the Age of Post-Truth Politics and Careless Speech”. Style 53 (4): 457–463. https://doi. org/10.1353/sty.2019.0038 McTeigue, James. 2005. V for Vendetta. Burbank: Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2006. DVD. Moore, Alan. 1990. “Behind the Painted Smile”. In V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, 267–276. New York: DC Comics. Moore, Alan, and David Lloyd. 1990. V for Vendetta. New York: DC Comics. Nagle, Angela. 2017. Kill All Normies: The Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-right and Trump. Winchester: Zero Books. Nyqvist, Petra. 2019. “Ohje ‘pettureiden palkasta’ löytyy Soldiers of Odinin somesivulta”. Uusi Suomi, 24 March. https://puheenvuoro.uusisuomi.fi/petranyqvist/272449-ohjepettureiden-palkasta-loytyy-soldiers-of-odinin-somesivulta. Accessed 14 July 2022. OECD. 2021. Foreign-born Population. https://doi.org/10.1787/5a368e1b-en Parkin, Lance. 2013. Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore. London: Aurum Press. Pengelly, Martin, and Richard Luscombe. 2021. “Democrats Ponder Delaying Trump Impeachment Trial in Senate for Months”. The Guardian, 10 January. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/10/donald-trump-capitol-attack-impeachment-abc-pollmajority-joe-biden. Accessed 14 July 2022. Saresma, Tuija, and Urho Tulonen. 2020. “Halla-ahon ahdistus ja ironia. Ulossulkeva suomalaisuus ja ahdas nationalismi Scripta-blogissa”. Joutsen/Svanen Erikoisjulkaisuja 4: 141–164. https://doi.org/10.33347/jses.85310 Saroniemi, Soila. 2016. “Ulkoministeri Timo Soini: ‘Hyökkäys tavallista ihmistä ja demokratiaa vastaan’ ”. Iltalehti, 15 July. www.iltalehti.fi/uutiset/a/2016071521911214. Accessed 14 July 2022. Seuri, Ville, Eeva Palojärvi, and Paavo Teittinen. 2017. “Hallitus kaatuu: Sipilä puolusti hajottamista A-studiossa, perussuomalaisten Huhtasaari ihmetteli päätöstä”. Helsingin sanomat, 12 June. www.hs.fi/politiikka/art-2000005250430.html. Accessed 14 July 2022. Siu, Jasmine. 2019. “Hong Kong’s Mask Ban Unconstitutional Say Pan-Democrats, as They Ask High Court to Overturn Emergency Law”. South China Morning Post, 31 October.

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www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3035739/hong-kongs-mask-banunconstitutional-say-pan-democrats-they. Accessed 14 July 2022. SPLC. n.d. “Alt-right”. Southern Poverty Law Centre. www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/ extremist-files/ideology/alt-right. Accessed 14 July 2022. Sunila, Carlos. 2019. “Finnkino selventää: Perussuomalaisten kohutun vaalivideon trailerin esittämistä ei keskeytetä – ‘Kampanja olisi muutenkin päättynyt, mainos on sääntöjen mukainen’ ”. MTV Uutiset, 25 March. www.mtvuutiset.fi/artikkeli/finnkino-selventaaperussuomalaisten-kohutun-vaalivideon-trailerin-esittamista-ei-keskeyteta-kampanja-olisimuutenkin-paattynyt-mainos-on-saantojen-mukainen/7338292. Accessed 14 July 2022. Suomen uutiset. 2018a. “Halla-aho: Puhe väestönvaihdoksesta ei ole foliohattuilua tai liioittelua”. Suomen uutiset, 17 April. www.suomenuutiset.fi/halla-aho-puhe-vaestonvaihdoksesta-foliohattuilua-liioittelua. Accessed 14 July 2022. Suomen uutiset. 2018b. “Jussi Halla-aho: ei demokratia ole kriisissä, vaan liberaali globalismi”. Suomen uutiset, 16 June. www.suomenuutiset.fi/jussi-halla-aho-demokratiakriisissa-liberaali-globalismi. Accessed 14 July 2022. Trilling, Daniel. 2013. “Thatcher: the PM who brought racism in from the cold”. Verso Books Blog, 10 April. www.versobooks.com/blogs/1282-thatcher-the-pm-who-broughtracism-in-from-the-cold. Accessed 14 July 2022. Vaarakallio, Tuula. 2017. “Perussuomalainen kaksoispuhe”. In Jätkät & jytkyt. Perussuomalaiset ja populismin retoriikka, edited by Emilia Palonen and Tuija Saresma, 199–217. Tampere: Vastapaino. Voger, Mark. 2006. The Dark Age: Grim, Great & Gimmicky Post-modern Comics. Raleigh: TwoMorrows. Waris, Olli. 2017. “Poliitikot tarttuivat Tukholman terrori-iskuun heti – ‘On aika antaa pelolle valtaa’, ‘äänestäkää vakauden puolesta’ ”. Iltalehti, 18 April. www.iltalehti.fi/kuntavaalit-2017/a/201704082200099537. Accessed 14 July 2022.

8 ON THE “GOOD” SIDE Hegemonic masculinity and transnational intervention in the representation of US–Mexico border enforcement Anna Marta Marini

At the turn of the 2010s, two comic book miniseries were created representing the enforcement on the US–Mexico border and its discourses: Peter Milligan’s Army of Two: Across the Border (IDW, 2010; see Milligan and Soy 2010) and Doug Wagner’s ICE (12 Gauge, 2011–2012; see Wagner and Steelfreeze 2011–2012).1 Both are characterised by similar protagonists, depicted as overwhelmingly tough, muscular US agents whose duty is to enforce border security; among them, the presence of enforcers of Latinx heritage facilitates the articulation of different kinds of racialised discourses. As the characters move across the border, the reconstruction of the “other side” is vague and stereotyped, reinforcing the US nationalist message underlying the series. Army of Two: Across the Border is riddled with hints at its main ideological discourse, oversimplifying borderland conflicts and legitimating violent US transnational intervention. If in this miniseries the absence of protocols seems to be justified by the protagonists’ role as mercenaries, in ICE it reflects the real-life existence of a state of exception along the border concerning detention facilities and operations. Focusing on the persecution of “illegals”, ICE depicts extrajudiciality as a necessary part of federal border enforcement, constructing heroic figures by means of border-related tropes and the reproduction of Latinx anti-immigration discourse. This chapter delves into the connections between the comic books and the variety of existing discourses related to immigration across the US–Mexico border, such as nativist stances and consolidated Latinx conservative discourses. It also highlights how the comic medium has been exploited to support the idealisation of border enforcement. In fact, both miniseries legitimise anti-migrant violence and perpetuate negative stereotypes pervasive in US public discourse, while they reproduce the quintessential features of hegemonic masculinities and their transnational heroic agency.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003254621-10

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Borders and boundaries: extrajudiciality and transnational intervention American interventionism has historically been defended by means of discourses portraying the United States as the “embodiment of democratic ideals and the vector for the expansion of liberal democracy” as well as global market capitalism (Ives 2007). In institutional discourse, intervention has often been justified by constructing the idea of an assumed threat to democracy posed by the intervened context, exploiting notions of “national interest”. On the US–Mexico border, in the 1990s militarisation and enforcement shifted from a low-intensity conflict to measures that later characterised post-9/11 border strategies, based on “prevention through deterrence” (for a thorough study, see Dunn 2010). In 2003, the Border Patrol was reorganised and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency was created, followed by implementation of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act in 2006. The presence of enforcement agents became pervasive along the boundary, often unsupervised by higher levels of the federal enforcement hierarchy, pushing migrants to choose more dangerous crossing points farther away from the urban areas. In the following years, extrajudicial persecutions became a growing issue as ICE personnel and operations progressively increased. The federal handling of border and immigration issues is directly connected to invasive practices violating Mexico’s sovereignty and the US interventionist role in the political downturns and turmoil characterising Central American states. Thanks to operations connected to transnational agreements – such as the Mérida Initiative (2007) – the asymmetrical power relationship between the United States and Mexico has been strengthened, allowing the former to intervene in the management of narcotraffic-related issues in Mexican territory. The analysed comic miniseries propose a blend of representations of extrajudicial practices and interventionist discourses. Both the enforcer protagonists and the governmental entities endorsing them seem to consider that Mexico’s sovereignty can be violated, due to its internal conflicts and alleged political instability. The dichotomy between the territory inside and outside a country’s boundaries establishes a border that legitimates intervention and sovereignty at the same time (see Agamben 2003; Santos 2017, 115), as the former is a transgression of the latter. US interventionist discourse has often relied on emptying the meaning of the sovereign status itself, justifying intervention as a means to “help” the foreign country reassess its sovereignty. As ideologies are significations of reality built into the dimensions of discursive practices and contribute to “the production, reproduction or transformation of relations of domination” (Fairclough 1992, 87), more or less overt racial ideologies permeate such justifications and build articulated imaginaries of the assumed threat posed by the ethnic foreign other. The other country becomes, in fact, a new frontier for the anti-immigration enforcers, implying challenges involving both an exoticised environment and humans reduced to either criminals or ordinary civilians bereft of any agency at the mercy of a “savage” political context. As will be explained here, such heroic constructions are often related to a

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form of hegemonic masculinity that is characterised ad hoc and usually framed by narratives of exceptionalism (Kendrick and Nagel 2020, 6). Army of Two is a six-issue comic inspired by the homonymous third-person shooter video game series, first launched in 2008 and composed of three instalments so far. Its last release, Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel (2013), is also set in Mexico, albeit based on a different storyline that revolves around a conflict with a local drug cartel. The events narrated in the six-issue miniseries take place between the storylines of the first and second instalments (2010, titled Army of Two: The 40th Day) and mark a tentative articulation of a transmedia franchise. The main characters are Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem, mercenaries who worked as long-time partners for the private military contractor Security and Strategy Corporation. Upon leaving SSC, they established their own private military firm called TWO (Tactical Worldwide Operations), to which a “state department” (possibly National Homeland Security) assigns cases whenever an official intervention of the US armed forces would be inadequate. The plot of the comic is relatively simple: Tyson and Elliot are appointed to a “secret” mission to help the Mexican army fight a drug cartel near the border; the development of the conflict leads them to infiltrate a prison, where Tyson remains undercover until rescued. A subplot revolving around the young criminal Jaime’s rise to power facilitates the insertion of discourses that unsuccessfully challenge the comic’s main ideological discourse. On the one hand, Jaime coherently argues against the legitimacy of the United States’ intervention in Mexican politics; on the other hand, the protagonists – Elliot in particular – either dismiss or dismantle such arguments in a rather contemptuous way. The crux of the underlying political discourse is overt, and it appears at the very beginning when their logistics coordinator Alice Murray outlines the new mission, by explaining that “an alliance between a drug cartel and the maras street gang is threatening to overrun an entire territory”. She then comments that the “Mexican army is doing its best but–” and her sentence is completed by Tyson: “–let me guess. It could use a little help”. It is then explained that the mission will be promoted by the government, as “the USA doesn’t want an imploding state at its doorstep” (#1, 4 bold in original). The patronising interventionist discourse lies at the base of the White Saviour trope informing most interactions between the TWO and Mexican authorities throughout the series. The diegetic premises of the whole storyline are supported by the idea that the Mexican government cannot handle the conflicts caused by the measures taken in the context of the War on Drugs campaign and the Mérida Initiative. The topic of the American society’s drug consumption fuelling narcotraffic production, networking, and prosperity is touched upon but dismissed early in the first issue, when attaché Major Rodriguez brings up the topic. This dialogue establishes the stereotyped notion that Mexicans yield to anti-American sentiments, which the TWO will dismantle through their demonstration of prowess. Elliot is the main character embodying the nativist discourse against immigration and justifying the extrajudicial actions the mercenaries perform. Unnecessary violence

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is legitimated throughout the whole series by the opposition between the main point of view – with the TWO as standard-bearers of the US government – and their “enemy”, a non-descript category constituted by whoever does not comply or share the ideological premises of their missions. Elliot acts for an assumed greater good; the violence he perpetrates is extreme, yet legitimised by the fact that he kills “bad guys”, according to a shared set of beliefs and values peculiar to the mainstream Anglo US nationalist ideology. ICE is a five-issue miniseries composed of an establishing issue in which the protagonist is introduced and four regular issues. By analysing the contents and promotion given to the miniseries, the choice to depict Immigration and Custom Enforcement operations seems to be due to a wish to exploit the burning issue of immigration for a rather superficial representation and action-packed narrative. The main storyline revolves around Cole Matai, an ICE agent of Hawaiian origins, whose appearance is clearly inspired by popular actor and ex-wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Right from the start of the establishing issue, homosocial patterns are oriented towards camaraderie among members of the enforcement team, who share moments joking and relaxing together. A common emotional thread specifically characterising Cole: he is a vengeful person since childhood and immigration enforcement allows him to turn vengeance into a heroic act. In the first issue, he is shown as the coordinator of an ICE team composed of the Latinx agent Ezra, the female agent Alli, and the weapons expert Benno. After an initial operation on and across the border, Cole and his team are assigned a case in Alabama (#1, 13) and then Texas, where they are tasked with capturing a powerful Mexican drug lord named Morales. Shortly after they manage to successfully detain the criminal, however, Morales escapes and sets out to take revenge (#2, 21). His men subsequently attack the team, directing their violence in particular against Ezra, whom they torture and kill brutally (#3, 12). An enraged Cole decides to seek justice on his own terms, crossing the border to chase Morales with the help of his two surviving teammates; after a direct confrontation with the drug lord, he subdues and detains him. The operation described at the beginning of the first issue shows the team’s overbearing attitude towards Mexican authorities: without any previous agreement, ICE agents intervene in Mexican territory, taking over a local police operation employing heavy weapons and a helicopter (#1, 4–12). As assumed jurisdictional boundaries are discussed further on in the series, this type of intervention is represented as legitimate – even though it is not in reality. Likewise, when Cole eventually captures Morales and escapes towards the border chased by the drug lord’s men, armed backup agents intervene with a helicopter, shooting through the border fence against both criminals and the Mexican military (#4, 18). The protagonist’s attitude towards Mexican authorities is evidently patronising and – as seen in Army of Two – the implied idea is that the Mexican government needs American intervention to handle internal and transnational conflicts. Cole takes the matter of pursuing Morales into his own hands, disobeying his superior – who will in any case

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help the apparently deserting team, supporting such discourse – because in Mexico no one will chase or capture him, due to either corruption or strategic incapability. The dynamics of the team’s border-crossing are never quite clear, as they cross several times without passing through any border controls. When Cole decides to recapture Morales and avenge Ezra’s death, the trio unrealistically crosses into Mexico in a private car stocked with military weapons (#3, 20–22). The protagonist’s own manifestations of unnecessary violence – such as punching his fingers into Morales’s wound and overtly threatening him (#4, 21) – are just as crude as the drug lord’s, and yet justified by the narrative construction. Patronising discourses resurface again when Cole declares that he finds it “ironic that [he’s] spent the better part of [his] life securing this border. And all this time . . . Mexico should have been building a fence to keep [him] out!” (#3, 23, bold in original), as he clearly represents a powerful threat to local gangs and armed forces alike. Furthermore, Mexico is represented as a stereotyped tropical location (in particular in #4) despite the series being set in the borderlands, where a desertic orography and phytogeography are definitely predominant.

Performed manliness and the construction of American superiority In mainstream US popular culture, the action genre is characterised by protagonists that are “usually solitary (or highly individualized), athletic, white men” (Gallagher 2006, 45), whose role in the narrative translates the contradictions inherent in current masculinities into spectacular violence and displays of exceptionalism. Like many US action heroes, the protagonists of Army of Two and ICE conflate “the working-class idea of physical strength” (Gallagher 2006, 10) and a self-asserted moral superiority. Also worth considering is the transnational setting, located on and across the US–Mexico border. The border becomes an ideal setting for the spectacular agency of male protagonists, who reproduce a heroic configuration otherwise embodied by the western hero in the liminal place represented by the binational borderlands. As Yvonne Tasker has highlighted, “action, war movies, and Westerns have all been characterised as generic sites that are in some fundamental way about masculinity” (2017, 111). In both action and western texts, male agency is marked by mobility across frontiers coupling “physical movement or scenes of action with themes of independence” (Tasker 2017, 111). The male hero challenges enemies and obstacles that stand in between him and an idealised notion of freedom. As the southwestern cowboy legends do, the protagonists of Army of Two and ICE embody “what is best about [American society] – spiritedness, energy, courage, competence, a passion for freedom, and an idealistic drive to pursue justice” (Kleinfeld and Kleinfeld 2004, 43). Thus, in both series the border becomes a contemporary stage for the enactment of heroic masculinity, inscribed in hegemonic paradigms – referring to culturally embedded actions, discourses, and behaviours that assert male dominance (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Connell 2019, 8) – blended with racist and

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nationalist tropes. Army of Two and ICE are marked by a pervasive hypermasculinity, with most sequences and dynamics revolving around male characters and their mutual relationships. In general, male protagonists are described as stereotypical action characters and portrayed as violent, unrealistically invincible, boisterous, and hyperbolically virile. They seem to be driven in a rather Manichean way by the notion that one man’s victory compels another man’s defeat, and their hegemonic masculinity “is embodied and enacted through displays of strength, athleticism, risk-taking, and heterosexual prowess” (Myers 2012, 127). As it will be highlighted, a few discrepancies can be observed between the two comics with regard to the performance of manliness; nonetheless, in both cases the hegemonic masculine construction is exploited to support a racialised hierarchy within their comicverse. The character dynamics in Army of Two can be easily reconducted to the three characteristics of hegemonic masculinity identified by Sharon R. Bird (1996, 121), based on her fieldwork in the early 1990s in the north-western region of the United States: emotional detachment, competitiveness, and the sexual objectification of women. It seems fundamental for both Tyson and Elliot to avoid expressing any kind of feelings that do not belong to the semantic context of fighting, competition, and war. The male protagonists lash out in rage and squabble, but there is no space for feelings that might imply weakness or vulnerability in the realm of the masculinity they embody. Despite their necessary cooperation and perfect coordination in the field, their personal relationship is fuelled by competitiveness in what seems to be continuous metaphorical arm-wrestling and expressions of toughness. Their constant bickering is presented as peculiar to their interactions and “typical” of manly friendship. If on the one hand their cooperation would help to sustain a symmetric relationship (Messner 1990), on the other the dynamic between them is one of a sustained fight for a superior position. When Elliot discovers that Tyson and Alice have organised a trap to have the mercenaries arrested and thus infiltrated in a specific prison (#3, 9), he feels his position threatened. Subsequently, during their escape he lets Tyson slip and abandons him in the prison (#3, 20) – leaving him at the mercy of the resident criminal mob; it is never really clarified if he did it on purpose or not. Issue 4 is centred around Elliot’s mission to free Tyson from the prison, after discovering that he is still alive. From this moment on, however, his attitude is disparaging, and he repeatedly accuses Tyson of having become a criminal himself. While rescuing him, Elliot unnecessarily murders Tenoch – a boy with whom his partner has developed a friendly relationship – because “he’s the fucking enemy” (#5, 1), in an act characterised by a sense of vengeance and punishment directed towards Tyson himself. The only female characters in the series are Alice and the assistant Karla, both depicted as scantily dressed with ample cleavage. Alice is described positively in terms of her professionality, but whenever Tyson and Elliot mention her, a shift towards sexual objectification and implied inferiority is evident. They need to rely on her professional contribution, yet it is implied that her “nice quiet desk job in the office” (#1, 8) is inferior, requiring less bravery and capability, and overall “feminine” to an extent.

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The main organising principle among the male characters is the juxtaposition of legitimate American bodies and those of the Latinx other. On the one hand, the TWO team represents the American government and its strength and skilfulness in comparison with the members of the Mexican armed forces – who are either nondescript or stereotypically constructed. The US mercenaries are physically imposing, well-shaven, and efficiently equipped, whereas the members of the Mexican military interacting with them are physically and strategically unimpressive, moustachioed, and implicitly weaker. When the couple is separated and Tyson is left at the prison, the protagonists’ ideological roles come to light. The comic implicitly suggests that Tyson Rios is of Mexican descent, as he displays a tattoo representing a stylised, Aztec-like eagle head on his shoulder and he fluently speaks Spanish. Even if it is never declared overtly, he represents the US Latinx body serving the country, judged by the “real American” Elliot and the racialised perception of Latinx migrant soldiers as ambiguous and prone to betrayal, due to their heritage and implicitly alleged disloyal nature. At the beginning of the series, Tyson seems to be the dominant, strongest pole in the couple, a construction informed by the fact that Elliot has recently sustained an injury and cannot keep up with his partner. This idea is suggested as well by the decision Tyson makes with Alice to withhold from Elliot their plan to infiltrate the prison. Such a construction is instrumental to support the ideological discourse revealed at the end of the series: no matter how physically strong Tyson may be, his “Latinxness” is exposed, and it represents an unbridgeable weakness for which the only solution is hiding. At the end of their mission, Tyson falters in his conviction to intervene in a country that is not their own, to which Elliot replies angrily, justifying his extrajudicial actions in Mexican territory by claiming that he “only kill[s] bad guys”. Tyson expresses understanding towards the Mexican insurrectionists and draws a parallel to himself and Elliot; admitting to their own social origins, he links their upbringing – which led them to the violent life of a mercenary – and that of the criminals they happened to fight. Nonetheless, such an admission of poverty puts him in a position of further inferiority, establishing a new hierarchy between the couple (Messner 1990) that will be confirmed on the following page: Tyson reminds Alice that the two would not work together again, but Elliot overbearingly has the last word, stating that they will (#6, 21). The sequence could have provided an interesting exploration of the debate on US interventionism, but it ends up instead as just one more episode of bickering. The manliness performed in ICE presents some discrepancies compared to the dynamics characterising the protagonists of Army of Two, albeit being ascribed to patterns distinctive of hegemonic masculinity. The male protagonist as well as his main antagonist are hypermuscular, virile, and violent. Vengeance is implicitly depicted as an acceptable and even heroic value when its performer is Cole, whereas it is a sign of cruelty and weakness when performed by Mexican criminals and migrants. The secondary character Benno seems to be meant to embody the stereotypical hyper-American military sidekick: he is blond and tall, constantly

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chews on gum, and is recklessly brave. Setting off on their border-crossing mission, he assumes that there will be intrinsic risks, stating that if he “[goes] out, it’s in a blaze of glory” (#3, 20). Despite the presence of Alli as a female member of the team, the camaraderie she shares is usually constructed on hegemonic masculine homosocial patterns. Especially in the second issue, a shift can be observed towards a tentative postmodern – and yet not quite postfeminist – version of hegemonic masculine toughness, constructing a momentaneous bromance relation between Cole and Ezra. The sequence in which they spend the evening together after an operation seems to be a sort of celebration of their heteronormative intimate friendship (among many, see Sedgwick 1985; Hill Nettleton 2015), which will be honoured by Cole’s revenge after Ezra’s murder. Nonetheless, such a shift is not explored, and it comes across as a pretext to legitimise the protagonist’s subsequent manifestations of violence. Racialised masculinity is pervasive, both in the representation of Mexican agents and in the articulation of Morales’s character. During the first operation across the border, the main Mexican police character is represented as scruffy and moustachioed, wearing a stereotyped hat that could not be part of a uniform (#1, 4), in neat contrast with the protagonist’s well-shaven, tidy, and hypermuscular appearance throughout the series. Cole’s overbearing toughness is constantly juxtaposed against the representation of a masculinity that is other, characterised by an innate inclination towards betrayal, arrogance, immorality, and stupidity – in the case of Mexican criminals and illegal migrants – or hot-headedness and an inability to discern the boundaries of judicial action in the case of his Mexican American colleague. The only character showing prowess equal to Cole’s is Morales, fundamentally constructed as the “bad” version of the protagonist. The two are equally violent, heteronormative, and overbearing; the difference between them lies in the “side” of the border – in a material and metaphorical sense – they are standing on and thus embody.

Good migrants, bad hombres, and the blurring of racial boundaries In both Army of Two and ICE, the influence of discourses derived from nativist rhetoric is evident. Such kinds of discursive strategies are based on the idea that the ethnic other represents a non-negotiable threat to US safety and sovereignty, and they exploit more or less covertly racialised imageries and tropes “including ‘thugs,’ ‘gangs,’ ‘Muslim terrorists,’ ‘Mexican drug lords,’ and ‘illegals’ often constructed as potential ‘invaders’ from dark and stigmatized spaces” (Rosino and Hughey 2016, 12). Racist mental representations are typically expressed, formulated, defended, and legitimated in discourse (van Dijk 2008, 103), through the construction of categories and stereotypes, and via the depiction of such discursive devices. Particularly related to the border and immigration contexts are a variety of consolidated stereotypes, which characterise the US institutional and mediatic discourse on both the borderlands and Latinx subjects. Such discursive constructions range from

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common hydraulics and war-related metaphors to the identification of migrants as polluting agents, threatening an assumed moral and ethnic integrity of American society (among many, see Santa Ana 1999, 2002; Cisneros 2008). In Army of Two, migration-related topics are implicit to the storyline and the Latinx characters appearing throughout the miniseries. The subplot revolving around Jaime and his rise to power – from a fearful young boy to gang boss and political terrorist – is based on a rather inaccurate reconstruction of the maras criminal environment. The maras – youth gangs historically present in the region known as Triángulo Norte de Centroamérica (composed by the states of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) – have increasingly developed as a transnational network starting in the 1980s, when local civil war conflicts induced a migratory flux towards the United States. This allowed the gangs to acquire and later import behavioural patterns and systems of values typical of American street gangs (Cruz 2007, 359). The main maras currently operating transnationally – the Mara Salvatrucha and the Pandilla del Barrio 18, respectively known as MS-13 and Barrio 18 – originated in the Latinx neighbourhoods of Los Angeles as networks of youth ascribing to an “identity franchise” connected to the small-time gangs back in their country of heritage (Cruz 2007, 357). Since the 1990s, the steady immigration influx – paired with the systematic deportation of undocumented Central American migrants – has fostered the development of strong transnational connections (Cruz 2014). The maras are linked to a defined subculture characterised by behaviours, symbols, and practices distinctive of US borderland street gang culture, such as tattoos and graffiti. Using bodies as a vessel to display affiliation, tattoos become a means to communicate belonging to an identity in which the US American, Mexican, and borderland characters blend inextricably (Zúñiga Nuñez 2008, 98). Furthermore, the US–Mexico borderlands have been characterised by an aesthetic phenomenon called cholismo (Valenzuela 2002, 26); these identity marks are copied by local border maras-clone gangs (Merino 2001, 176), which appropriate the characteristics of the transnational US neighbourhood gangs. Army of Two – and to an extent ICE as well – is based on a hodgepodge reinterpretation of the borderland criminal context, taking tattoo customs as the criminals’ main identifying element, and yet constructing it incorrectly. After being left behind by his partner, Tyson tries to mix with the mob ruling the prison, in order to survive and then attempt escape. Upon rescuing him, Elliot accuses him of having “felt at home with those guys”, as if he were “one of the family” (#5, 2, bold in original). He also suggests that Tyson accepted to be tattooed, submitting to the gang because he felt at ease in such an environment due to shared ethnic origin. It is worth noting that the change in the description of Tyson’s character is instrumental to the conservative discourse underlying the comic. Elliot’s stance is supported by the nationalist constructions implicit in the series itself, and its connection to conservative discourses well known to the American public is evident. Such discourses are often based on a system of strategies in which the definition of us – the social group sharing a conservative nativist set of values – is opposed to them, a group identified with an alleged liberal stance on

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immigration-related topics. Them can also be embodied by immigrants in general and, possibly, a wider group constituted by ethnic minorities perceived as cognate of the immigrant category. Such opposed political poles are circumstantially made explicit in the final dialogue, in which Tyson’s suggested agreement with Jaime’s anti-interventionist discourse is set in opposition to his partner’s accusation of having turned “into a bleeding heart liberal” (#6, 19). In ICE, the topic of immigration is explicitly central to the diegetic development and the underlying ideological discourses. Once again, the categories of illegal migrants and criminals overlap, and their Mexican origin is assumed by the protagonists by looking at their tattoos. The juxtaposition is precisely based on the “reading” of tattoos, although it is not clear – or quite reasonable – that a person’s undocumented status can be identified “based on their tats” (#1, 15). If on the one hand Cole presents himself as understanding of the Mexican American community’s reticence to collaborate, on the other he leads his team to intimidate and aggressively chase locals based on such tattoos, besides threatening them with deportation (#1, 18–23). Morales’s escape (#2, 19–21) is characterised by dialogue filled with racial slurs, as the guards identify “spics” – a derogatory term for Hispanics – as “crotch rot”, exploiting many metaphors related to insect invasion (they “spread”), depicting Mexico as a “third world” and “sewer of a country” full of “beans and whores”, and resorting to typical stereotypes on Mexicans as hotel workers and domestic underpaid staff. Subsequently, the reader discovers that the dialogue was part of the plan to facilitate the escape. Nonetheless, the accomplice guard is Mexican American, the brother of an agent murdered by Morales; he stresses that the death of his brother will allow him to “take care of [his] sweet little grieving piece of ass” (#2, 21), referring to the widow. Once again, “bad” Mexican characters are depicted by means of immorality, vulgarity, stupidity – the guard gets killed by Morales anyway – and betrayal. Furthermore, Ezra’s character comes across as a subtle yet well-defined racial parody. The Mexican American agent is constructed by exploiting a few common Latinx stereotyping paradigms: he wears a rosary and speaks English interspersed with occasional Spanish code-switching. He also sports a moustache, goatee, and long hair, which makes his appearance reminiscent of a blend between Spanish colonial imagery and Hollywood characters, such as those interpreted by Mexican American actor Danny Trejo. Upon his death, Ezra is described by his teammates as implicitly family-oriented, albeit devoid of any private life outside the agency, highlighting that they represented “[not] just a team to him. [The team]’s his family” (#3, 20). Such a discourse identifies Ezra as a “good” migrant dedicated to protecting the country and securing its borders, a paradigm supported by his ideological stance expressed overtly in the series. Despite his dedication, though, the agent is not on par with Cole’s integrity and professionality. During the first capture of Morales, Ezra incites his superior to shoot the criminal, to which Cole replies “that’s not how it works, Ezra” and tells him to “stand down. That’s not who we are” (#2, 12–13). The whole sequence centres on a debate between the two, as Ezra – presumedly driven by

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his hot-headed Latinx nature – wants to kill Morales, whereas Cole lectures him that ICE should not behave in spiteful extrajudicial ways. Cole’s condescending attitude towards the Latinx agent is a fundamental component of his discourse; in this case, he highlights that Ezra uncontrolledly killing Morales would “jeopardize everything we stand for”. Clearly the protagonist’s discourse is contradictory and instrumental to the ideological discourse underlying the comic itself: it condemns the Latinx agent’s reactions and yet at the same time it legitimises Cole’s vengeful, extrajudicial actions. Such an exchange between colleagues is followed by a dialogue between Ezra and Morales himself, in which the latter accuses the former of betrayal of his own (Mexican) people. The accusation gives Ezra the possibility to articulate his conservative Latinx discourse by defining the “good migrant” paradigm embodied by “families that come here legally”, threatened by “bad migrants”, like those represented by Morales. This discursive construction evidently identifies all undocumented migrants as criminals, and it is supported by exploiting the assumed centrality of honour as a shared value among Latinx people. The agent accuses Morales – and thus all the “illegal” migrants he represents – of being “a cancer” to be removed; in this way, he yields to common immigration-related metaphors. The overwording – or repetition of specific topics (see Fairclough 1989, 115) – revolving around the notion of legality reveals a preoccupation for strengthening the intrinsic ideological message: all undocumented migrants being necessarily criminal and guilty of posing a threat to those living in the United States legally. Ezra underlines the side he stands on by predicting the death penalty that Morales will be subjected to, claiming that “Uncle Sam’s gonna fry your ass!” (#2, 15). Cole and Ezra then spend the night out drinking – although only the Latinx agent gets awkwardly drunk, again marking his physical and moral weakness in contrast with Cole’s superior character (#2, 16–17). In this sequence, which is dense with dialogue, a customer at the bar offensively calls Ezra a “dumbass wetback” and Cole violently attacks him, exclaiming that his teammate serves the country (#2, 16) and thus reprising the paradigm of the “good” Latino. Ezra seems to accept being called a “wetback”, however, because that is the way Mexican migrants are “normally” called; surprised by Cole’s defensive reaction, he asks if he does “know [he’s] Mexican, right?” (#2, 17). Just as it happens with Tyson in Army of Two, Ezra’s “Latinxness” is exposed, implying an inadequacy that cannot be bridged as it is deeply rooted in his origins. The pervasive racist depiction of Latinx migrants through verbal and non-verbal structures emphasises a negative, popularly shared meaning of them in both series. Although there is an apparent concession that some of them are “good people” – especially if they served in the US armed forces – the fundamental connection between criminals and any kind of migrant with undocumented status is evident, regardless of the complexity of the bureaucratic US immigration system. Migrants in general seem to represent a threat that cannot be compensated by the presence of “good” ones, perpetuating constructions historically grounded in mainstream American nativist discourse, which was overtly exposed in the discourse of Donald

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J. Trump’s campaigns and presidency. Contrary to statistics, Latinx migrants are often viewed as criminals, drug dealers, and rapists – and just “some . . . are good people” (Donald J. Trump, announcement of candidacy, New York, 16 June 2015); here, the definition of “good” mostly overlaps with conservative, right-wing Latinx groups. The lack of factual realism and cogency, as well as the apparent reduction of ethnic conflict to circumstantial or personal occurrences, is revealing of the overall superficiality with which both comics tackle border-related topics. Despite basing their narratives on intrinsically political representations and connecting directly to existing political discourses, both series were not produced to explicitly embody a political statement. Such superficiality is nonetheless very problematic, as it delivers messages reinforcing hegemonic nativist representations that embody social conflicts deeply ingrained in US society. The exploitation of issues related to border enforcement and immigration – mostly for the evident sake of supporting the development of action-driven plots – contributes to a widespread reductionist perception of border reality by the public that is otherwise fuelled by an overload of superficial and biased news coverage. Albeit non-deliberately, ideological discourse informs both Army of Two and ICE, perpetuating asymmetric power relations and constructions peculiar to Anglo-US nationalist and interventionist discourse, being delivered through the reproduction of hegemonic masculinity as an embodiment of an alleged American national superiority.

Note 1 The original ICE miniseries was followed by the prequel miniseries ICE: Critical Mass (2014–2015, 4 issues) and ICE: Bayou Blackout (2015, 3 issues), both dealing with terrorist plots unrelated to the US–Mexico border and actual immigration fluxes.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2003. Stato di eccezione. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Bird, Sharon R. 1996. “Welcome to the Men’s Club: Homosociality and the Maintenance of Hegemonic Masculinity”. Gender and Society 10 (2): 120–132. Cisneros, J. David. 2008. “Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of ‘Immigrant as Pollutant’ in Media Representations of Immigration”. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 11 (4): 569–602. Connell, Raewyn W. 2019. “Masculinities in Troubling Times: View from the South”. Masculinities Journal 12: 5–13. Connell, Raewyn W., and James W. Messerschmidt. 2005. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept”. Gender & Society 19 (6): 829–859. https://doi.org/10.1177 %2F0891243205278639 Cruz, José Miguel. 2007. “El barrio transnacional: Las maras centroamericanas como red”. In Redes transnacionales en la Cuenca de los Huracanes. Un aporte a los estudios interamericanos. Segunda parte: Redes formales, informales e ilícitas, edited by Francis Pisani, Natalia Saltalamacchia, Arlene B. Tickner, and Nielan Barnes, 357–381. México: Miguel Ángel Porrúa.

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Cruz, José Miguel. 2014. “La transformación de las maras centroamericanas”. Cuestiones de Sociología 10. www.memoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/art_revistas/pr.6342/pr.6342.pdf. Accessed 14 July 2022. Dunn, Timothy J. 2010. Blockading the Border and Human Rights: The El Paso Operation that Remade Immigration Enforcement. Austin: University of Texas Press. Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Discourse and Power. New York: Longman. Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Blackwell. Gallagher, Mark. 2006. Action Figures: Men, Action Films, and Contemporary Adventure Narratives. Berlin: Springer. Hill Nettleton, Pamela. 2015. “Hanging with the Boys: Homosocial Bonding and Bromance Coupling in Nip/ Tuck and Boston Legal”. In Screening Images of American Masculinity in the Age of Postfeminism, edited by Elizabeth Abele and John A. Gronbeck-Tesco, 120–134. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Ives, Andrew. 2007. “The Importance of the Idealist Discourse in Defence of American Foreign Policy Initiatives: Beyond Rhetoric towards a New Form of Imperialism”. Revue LISA/LISA e-journal 5 (3): 90–98. https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.1611 Kendrick, Sam, and Joane Nagel. 2020. “The Cowboy Scientist Saves the Planet: Hegemonic Masculinity in Cli-Fi Films”. Masculinities Journal of Culture and Society 14: 5–34. Kleinfeld, Judith, and Andrew Kleinfeld. 2004. “Cowboy Nation and American Character”. Society 41 (3): 43–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02690182 Merino, Juan. 2001. “Las maras en Guatemala, capítulo II”. In ERIC, IDESO, IDIES e IUDOP, Maras y pandillas en Centroamérica, 109–217. Managua: UCA Publicaciones. Messner, Michael A. 1990. “Boyhood, Organized Sports, and the Construction of Masculinities”. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 18 (4): 416–444. https://doi.org/10.1177 %2F089124190018004003 Milligan, Peter, and Dexter Soy 2010. Army of Two: Across the Border. San Diego: EA Comics Productions/IDW Publishing. Myers, Kristen. 2012. “ ‘Cowboy Up!’ Non-hegemonic Representations of Masculinity in Children’s Television Programming”. The Journal of Men’s Studies 20 (2): 125–143. https://doi.org/10.3149%2Fjms.2002.125 Rosino, Michael L., and Matthew W. Hughey. 2016. “Speaking through Silence: Racial Discourse and Identity Construction in Mass-Mediated Debates on the ‘War on Drugs’ ”. Social Currents 4 (3): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F2329496516663223 Santa Ana, Otto. 1999. “Like an Animal I  Was Treated’: Anti-Immigrant Metaphor in US Public Discourse”. Discourse  & Society 10 (2): 191–224. https://doi.org/10.1177 %2F0957926599010002004 Santa Ana, Otto. 2002. Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse. Austin: University of Texas Press. Santos, Wagner. 2017. “Soberania estatal e intervenção: uma análise de discurso da intervenção militar norte-americana no Iraque em 2003”. Revista Brasileira de Ciência Política 23: 111–144. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0103-335220172304 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1985. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Tasker, Yvonne. 2017. “Contested masculinities: The Action Film, the War Film, and the Western”. In The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender, edited by Kristin Lene ́ Hole, Dijana Jelaca, E. Ann Kaplan, and Patrice Petro, 111–120. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315684062 Valenzuela Arce, José Manuel. 2002. “De los pachucos a los cholos. Movimientos juveniles en la frontera México-Estados Unidos”. In Movimientos Juveniles en América Latina.

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Pachucos, malandros, punketas, edited by Carles Feixa, Fidel Molina-Luque, and Carles Alsinet, 11–34. Madrid: Ariel. Van Dijk, Teun A. 2008. Discourse and Power. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wagner, Doug, and Brian Steelfreeze. 2011–2012. ICE. Pelham: 12 Gauge Comics. Zúñiga Nuñez, Mario. 2008. “Las ‘maras’ salvadoreñas como problema de investigación para las ciencias sociales”. Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos 33/34: 87–110.

9 THE POLITICS OF INVERSION IN AMERICATOWN Limits in public pedagogy Christina M. Knopf

Americatown (BOOM 2015–2016; see Winters et al. 2016) envisions a near future in which economic collapse and other disasters prompt Americans to seek refuge abroad, whether through legal or illegal immigration, creating “Americatowns” wherever they settle, including the titular enclave in Buenos Aires. The story follows Owen, a recent arrival, who has come to Buenos Aires to save his family back in the United States. The publisher describes Owen’s struggles as “just a small part of the hardships and conflicting agendas in an immigrant community trying to build itself in the shadow of a once great nation” (Winters et al. 2016, back cover). Slated as an eight-issue series, the comic became a hardcover collection after just seven issues, released in 2016. Graphic Policy described the 176-page graphic novel as “a brilliant example of social commentary in an entertaining package” (quoted in Winters et al. 2016, back cover). Multiversity Comics reviewer Kevin McConnell noted “that given today’s political climate stories about immigration are bound to strike a chord with readers”, but whether that chord is “enlightening or infuriating” depends on their pre-existing views on immigration issues. While McConnell suggests that Americatown may provide a “fun twist” by flipping the script of US immigration concerns (2015, para. 1), he was underwhelmed by the comic’s failure to explain how the main characters had arrived at their crisis. The fact that McConnell perceived this narrative lapse as a weakness, that he needed to know “how these characters got to this point” (McConnell 2015, para. 6), suggests the limits of Americatown’s ability to reframe migration and immigration debates for meaningful reflection. The need to know why Owen takes such desperate measures to save his family may indicate doubts about the necessity or relatability of his plight. Similar doubts are echoed in anti-immigration rhetoric, such as that repeatedly expressed by President Donald Trump, who in 2018 suggested that migrants should make their own broken, corrupt countries better rather than seeking to live in a new land (see his speech to the United Nations, quoted in Somin 2018, para. 1; tweet, quoted in Somin 2019, para. 1). DOI: 10.4324/9781003254621-11

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Americatown, like many antiracist texts, uses inversion; it flips the narrative in order to connect with audiences or reframe ideas. The trope of inversion has been used in a variety of artefacts connected to issues of race. Texts such as Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1961) and its 1964 movie adaptation, and HBO’s White Man’s Burden (1995) use inversion to set “a portrayal or advocacy on its head to show the limits of the advocacy” (Bates 2007, 194). These narratives use role reversal to make a political statement about the intersections of race, class, and power. White Man’s Burden, for example, places African Americans in the stereotypical role of European Americans and vice versa, with the hope that White viewers will be able to better identify with oppressed subjects who physically resemble them (Bates 2007). The same kind of role reversal is found in Americatown, with White US citizens being forced to illegally immigrate to South American countries in the way that Latinx people are currently immigrating to the United States. Michael Boatright (2010, 469) proposes that there is an educational benefit to reading graphic novels about immigrant experiences. They offer one avenue of “public pedagogy”, with teaching moments found not in schools but in relationships of culture, power, and politics, where the public is a site for educational discourse (see Sandlin et al. 2010; Giroux 2004, 62). Comics and graphic novels encourage audience involvement in ways that are unique compared to other media, adding to their particularly persuasive power (see, e.g. McCloud 1994; Wolk 2007). In McLuhan’s (1964) terms, they are a cool or low-resolution medium, requiring audience attentiveness and mental engagement, making them a fruitful means of public pedagogy. Comics can play a critical role in both reproductions of and resistance to hegemonic discourse, often with lessons about civic action (see, e.g. Khoja-Moolji and Niccolini 2015). Popular culture is indeed educational, producing both meanings and feelings about issues in politics, crime, race, gender, legal and medical professions, family life, and relationships (see, e.g. Guy 2007), but its effects are shaped by audience expectations (DeFleur and Ball-Rokeach 1982; Rubin and Windahl 1986). Inversive texts, popularised by the 1968 “blue-eyes/brown-eyes” experiment, are often used as an access point for such educational endeavours (Stewart et al. 2003, 1899). As a rhetorical trope, inversion is a kind of irony or satirical mode that critically reverses hierarchical relationships for political or ideological messaging (Kavaler 1996, 155). Inversive texts as a form of public pedagogy, however, may be counterproductive because inversion “allows the naturalization of racist social hierarchies” (Bates 2007, 194). Although Americatown attempts to challenge the dominant narrative about migration in the United States, using identification through sentiment, its simplistic role reversal is nevertheless coloured by a Western tradition that presumes a racialised hierarchy. The next section first describes the basis for inversion in Americatown and then provides some examples of the inversion, which may open space for dialogue about immigration and racial politics. Following that is a consideration of how inversion limits Americatown’s advocacy within the milieu of migration-related graphic narratives.

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Premises and provocations: immigration and inversion in Americatown From 1965 to 2020, the number of immigrants in the United States more than quadrupled, reaching a record 44.8  million foreign-born US residents in 2018 (Budiman 2020). Mexico is the top country of origin for the US immigrant population, and Mexican-born peoples comprise the single largest group of unauthorised immigrants in the United States. Between 2007 and 2017, however, immigration from Mexico declined while immigration from Central America (Budiman 2020) and South America increased (Zong and Batalova 2018). Migrants from Central America often cite gang violence and extortion, political turmoil, civil wars, drug trafficking, environmental catastrophe, poverty, and domestic violence as reasons for leaving their countries (Gonzalez 2019). Regardless of their origin, migrants and immigrants face dangers of robbery, rape, detention, deportation, and death on their journeys (Sundaram 2020). In the near future of Americatown, people from the United States are flocking to South America – traveling through Cuba on their way to cultural enclaves and immigrant ghettos in countries like Argentina. This is the basis for the comic’s inversion: the United States is not only no longer a desirable destination for immigrants from around the world, but Americans themselves – who in the real world worked to reduce immigration in the early decades of the 20th century (Cohn 2015) – are now desperate enough to emigrate, legally or not, fleeing across the southern border they tried so hard to secure. The story follows Owen, who has left his wife and pre-adolescent daughter in Philadelphia in order to find work in Buenos Aires, with the goal of sending money back to them to help cover their living expenses. Unfortunately, finding work is difficult without legal documentation and fluency in Spanish. By the time he has paid the smugglers who got him into Argentina and the underworld connections that allow him to work illegally as a hot dog street vendor, as well as the migrant aid/rights lawyer helping his adult son who is detained by immigration agents and his portion of rent in a ghetto flophouse, he is unable to support his family, who are in danger of losing their home. Despite being a work of fiction, Americatown works in a similar manner as some comics journalism depictions of undocumented immigrants, in that it portrays people with complex lives often overshadowed by their “illegal” label (Pruteanu 2020, 218). It is not uncommon for contemporary migration stories to act as public or advocacy narratives, drawing on story elements to produce greater reader understanding of issues and experiences (see, e.g. Mickwitz 2020, 459; Ganz 2009). Americatown attempts to achieve understanding and identification by bringing its audience closer to the issues and experiences of migration. Readers, particularly American ones, are thus invited to identify with Owen. When the comic started in 2015, the United States was only slowly climbing back to the employment rates it had enjoyed before the 2007–2009 recession (Kang and Williamson 2016); unemployment was a familiar topic to many Americans, as was the threat of foreclosure,

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with approximately 3.7 million Americans losing their homes between 2007 and 2010 (Dharmasankar and Mazumder 2016). Owen and his fellow migrants in Buenos Aires struggle against prejudice, whether from native Argentinians disgusted by their poor Spanish-language skills, employers who are unwilling to take a risk hiring migrants, or a mayor boosting his own political image through a tough immigration stance. They experience a lack of amenities to be able to worship in their own language, the marginalisation of their staple foods as ethnic cuisine, and a lack of tolerance for their native customs, such as celebrating the Fourth of July. Readers are effectively asked to put themselves in Owen’s shoes – to imagine and understand what it would be like to have everything that is familiar made unusual and for everything important to be rendered unattainable. Throughout the book, small moments of dialogue draw attention to the inherent racialised politics of immigration in America. The names of the American immigrants in Argentina are mispronounced or replaced with stereotyped monikers like “Tonto” or slurs like “gringo”. As a group they are referred to as “yankees” or “yanquís”. It is assumed they all speak with drawls and say “y’all”. Their Whiteness is commented on by others, with their skin colour serving as an unmistakable marker of their outsider status. New arrivals, like Owen, are considered “greenhorns”, untrusted even by fellow American migrants. The potential horrors facing migrants are presented early in the story when a young woman is held hostage by the group smuggling her into Argentina. Unable to connect to her source for payment back in the United States, the smugglers put her up for sale on the dark net, open to bidding for organ sale, sex-trafficking, or other fates. Another young girl, immigrating by herself, accepts work as a gang enforcer when faced with no other prospects for survival. Visually, both of these figures showcase a loss of innocence, being depicted with diminutive stature and large eyes juxtaposed against determination conveyed by a firm-set mouth; often they are seated with knees drawn up in a foetal pose. Meanwhile, raids by immigration officials are portrayed as media spectacles and political stunts, designed to win viewers and votes more than to uphold the law. One immigration agent calls these manoeuvres “circus acts” and “gimme raids” done for optics, not because there is any “real threat” (Winters et al. 2016). The contrast of individual victimisation and militaristic manoeuvres helps to highlight the distance and disjuncture between the personal and political levels of immigration practices and policies. One sequence documents a series of interrogations conducted by “La Migra” – immigration officers – among undocumented immigrants picked up in raids under the mayor’s “Tough Love” anti-immigration campaign. As the agent challenges each immigrant about their decision to come to Argentina illegally, they share pieces of their stories. One man explains, “I left because I could not get a job – anywhere – not to mention health insurance for my sick daughter. I’m just doing what I have to do. I’m sorry”. A woman echoes this, saying, “I was desperate. We were desperate”. Visually, the scene is depicted on a page divided into five similar panels. In each, the same agent is seated on one side of a table, suggesting a single scene of a single interview. However, the immigrant answering the questions changes in each

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frame. Though the unique circumstances of each are revealed in their answers, the effect is that of a singular, collective immigration narrative – at least as perceived by the government. Their individuality is lost, not only for the reader but also for the agent, who is unmoved and sees each as just “a criminal” who broke the law (Winters et al. 2016). Likewise, the mayor is unmoved by the immigrants’ plight. With the city divided into neighbourhoods known familiarly as “Little Persia”, “Chinatown”, “Little India”, and “Americatown” – the way US cities have their own Little Italy and Koreatown – the mayor is told “Rather than ‘illegal’ immigrants, it’s advised you refer to them as ‘undocumented’ ” (Winters et al. 2016). Concerned about his upcoming re-election campaign, the mayor begrudgingly acquiesces to the politically correct soundbite, though he still fumes over the immigrants’ illegal entry into his city. In another scene, Americans queue up at Owen’s hot dog cart. One remarks that Owen, being from Philadelphia, should serve cheesesteaks. Owen replies: Tell me about it. Or bagels and cream cheese? Buffalo wings? What do I have to do, start an import business to serve true American food? Think about it: Frankfurters? Hamburgers? Pizza? Pretzels? That would be German, German, Italian, and German. (Winters et al. 2016) The dialogue offers a reminder that America itself is a land of immigrants, of people who came from other places, and whose combined cultures created what it is to be American.

Contradictions and complications: perils of polyvalence Americatown attempts to displace readers by having them consider what it would mean if US citizens could only pursue the “American Dream” outside of the United States. Through displacement, it may challenge dominant or pre-existing notions of identity, belonging, or trauma (see Díaz-Basteris 2020 for a discussion of traumatic displacement and Puerto Rican comics artists). And yet, despite Americatown’s apparent efforts to make the predicament of the immigrant comprehensible to the average American citizen, the inversion it uses to promote identification with migrants may limit its success. Indeed, this is the peril of any ironic strategy that opens some aspect of reality to critique through distortions of the familiar. In creating a counternarrative that highlights gaps in dominant myths while offering a plurality of perspectives for understanding experiences (Jones 2010; Marzouki 2015), the polyvalence allows for multiple interpretations that may transform the intended message (Gring-Pemble and Watson 2003, 149–151). Owen is a White American. He is depicted as a loving husband, a devoted father, a hard worker, an educated man, a Christian, and a patriot. As far as the reader knows, he was a law-abiding citizen before leaving the United States. He is someone that American readers should recognise as emblematic of the American

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Dream: he had a career as a civil engineer, a family with two children, a house in Philadelphia, and an industrious spirit. The reader’s ability to identify with Owen is, however, limited by the characterisation of Owen as a victim or “greenhorn”. He is an outsider. He is pitiable. He is contemptible. Physically, he is depicted as middle-aged, weary, and sad. His face is lined with both stubble and worry. He has a tanned skin tone with dark hair, which makes him visually similar to both the native Argentinians depicted in the narrative, especially the immigration officer pursuing him, and the US immigrants, who include White (often blonde or redheaded) and Black persons. This colouring marks Owen as a liminal figure caught between two places and two peoples. This liminality may serve to make Owen a recognisable character to multiple groups, or it may alienate him from readers as an Other, one who is in but not of a place, and therefore whose belonging to groups of natives or to immigrants, to Argentinians or to US Americans, is different and therefore lesser, because throughout much of history identity has been attached to particular geographies and embedded within specific cultures (see Alghamdi 2011, loc. 84). Emotionally and intellectually, Owen is portrayed as having a youthful naïveté. He is unprepared for winter temperatures in July. He has not considered a plausible cover for his undocumented status. He is surprised by the use of aliases, by corruption, and by the lengths people will go to for survival. Though childlike depictions of non-White migrants and refugees are often used to help render them “less threatening to Western audiences” (Manea and Precup 2020, 482), Owen’s simplicity may make him just appear as a foolish White character to cynical White readers – or, given his complexion, as a stereotypically ignorant nonWhite character to prejudiced White readers. In all of these possible readings, Owen’s innocence helps to reinforce his place, and by extension the migrant’s place, in an inferior socio-political position. Furthermore, Owen is not recognisable as a typical American hero figure, because he fails to achieve the American Dream. Though physical and social displacements from the greater US society are common to heroic tropes, the hero is defined by acquiring at least the promise, if not the goal, of desired success (Susetiyo 2017). Owen’s quest, however, hopelessly fails. As a foreigner within the story’s setting, Owen may be further unrecognisable to US readers. Instead, it is the natives of Buenos Aires – the “Porteños” – who are performing the more identifiable American role. They are citizens, mostly naturally born, of a country currently being remade in the image of newcomers vying for their city’s resources of jobs, funds, and space. In one scene, Owen is working at his hot dog cart and messes up a customer’s order because he cannot understand the person’s Spanish-spoken request. As the disgruntled man walks away, muttering that Owen is an idiota, a narrative “voice over”, carried forward from the Argentinian immigration agent’s interrogative rant with detained migrants, asks: Why is it that I speak English better than most of you people speak Spanish?

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You know what that tells me? It’s one more way you come here on your terms, not ours. (Winters et al. 2016) This sequence highlights common complaints about Latinx migrants in the United States, with efforts to treat undocumented immigrants as lawbreakers and criminals (Skerry 2013) and to limit Spanish-speaking in the country for all immigrants (Díez 2019). Such an attitude may thus be easier for readers to identify with than Owen’s downtrodden humiliation, especially because the Porteños are frequently depicted as sympathetic characters, such as the distraught wife of an immigration agent who has been severely injured in a botched raid. American readers, however, may not be able to see themselves in the more villainous characteristics of the Porteños. The shallow, image-conscious mayor is perhaps too shallow. He is also too Trump-like, with an orange-tinted complexion and blonde pompadour, not to mention his strong anti-immigration campaign and unshakable focus on re-election. Another Porteño, a corrupt immigration agent, is distanced from the general American self-perception and experience when he attempts to pay off a criminal with Nazi china. Such extreme characterisations make it less likely that readers will see their own biases reflected in the figures, and it perpetuates an idea, common in fictions that tackle racial issues, that racism is an individual flaw rather than a systemic problem (Liera-Schwichtenberg 2000). Despite this, the hot dog scene does attempt to discredit the American arrogance of being a world power and chosen people by juxtaposing Owen’s shame with the agent’s words, “You yanquís. Still thinking the world is your clam … Still thinking you come from the Promised Land” (Winters et al. 2016). Nevertheless, the sequence replicates, and thereby reinforces, the existing socio-political hierarchy that places migrants below natural-born citizens, regardless of the nationalities and localities involved. Similar narrative moments happen throughout the book, as when an American clergyman uses scripture – Jeremiah 29:7 – to advocate for assimilation, asking his flock to see themselves as the Jews in Babylon, to think of Americatown as Judeatown and to pray for the welfare of Buenos Aires, “to love thy neighbor”, and to give up their own Independence Day celebrations on 4 July to celebrate Argentinian independence on 9 July. Like Americatown’s inverted allusion to “English-only” policies, this call for assimilation echoes recent insistence that immigrants share American values, culture, and traditions (Branson-Potts 2017). The inversion of Americatown not only recreates racial and social hierarchies but is also limited in its dependence on dominant stereotypes at play in US debates surrounding immigration – especially immigration from Central and South America. Indeed, Americatown’s use of ironic inversion may reinforce pre-existing attitudes about undocumented immigrants as freeloaders or criminals, the importance of English-only policy, and the value of cultural assimilation. Owen appears as a sympathetic individual but potentially an exception to a norm of less sympathetic undocumented migrants, especially because the fellow Americans who aid him throughout his journey are in Argentina legally. Moreover, by drastically changing

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the socio-economic conditions of the United States but keeping vestiges of gang violence and extortion that currently send Central and South American migrants to the United States, the reader may be authorised to see veracity in concerns that Latinx are criminals or corrupt. The inversion offered by Americatown is thus insufficient, as suggested in moments that reassert America as a shining city upon a hill, such as an American-born immigrant observing, “I see a man putting the ‘I can’ back in American”, when Owen begins to rally against the inequities he faces (Winters et al. 2016), and the clergyman suggesting, “Maybe the best way to celebrate America is in the example it set for other countries like Argentina whose Independence Day took its cue from ours” (Winters et al. 2016). The public pedagogical potential of Americatown is complicated not only by the limits of inversion but also by its dystopian narrative. Dystopian literature often presents some variation on a theme of totalitarian regimes demanding complete obedience from citizens, ineffectively challenged by lingering but languishing individualism (Claeys 2010). Dystopian narratives extrapolate present trends and conditions in one form or another, offering a pessimistic blueprint or nightmarish vision of society’s future based on its current trajectory (Claeys 2010; Crook 2000). Americatown arguably offers readers an economic and political dystopia as much as an immigration parable. Its story is as concerned with economic collapse, government surveillance, and systemic corruption on a global scale as it is with the migrant’s plight. Perhaps the strongest social commentary it makes is in suggesting the inevitable downfall of the United States. In Americatown, the residents have created “a wall of blame”, which displays a mishmash of graffiti condemning their homeland’s failings. Two different two-page splash illustrations focus on the wall, one early in the book and one near the end. These illustrations reveal the wall to include the Mayflower (the original ship of immigrants to the land that would become the United States), a crucified Uncle Sam, the Enola Gay plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, an angry Statue of Liberty with a hammer held aloft, the twin World Trade Center towers, a tattered American flag, a line of missiles, a gas-masked Uncle Sam ladling toxic soup into the Michelin Man’s tire, and Martin Luther King, Jr. standing among angels. Conquest, war, zealotry, capitalism, pollution, and prejudice – among other American sins – are included on the “wall of blame”. Such a dystopian story, combined with the comic’s detailed attention to the city – as captured through its use of maps, crowded street scenes, graffiti art, and neighbourhood locations such as diners, bars, and rooftops – push Americatown into the “citypunk” subgenre of urban dystopia (see DS 2016). It offers a dystopian urbanscape that is a variation of recognisable present territories. In citypunk comics, “urban places become sites of addiction and starvation while technological enterprises” of corporations and governments flourish (DS 2016, 107). These are stories of overpopulation, economic conflicts, and political scandal that see protagonists drift through city streets, criminal enterprises, and chemically and/or technologically altered realities. They are stories of modernity and alienation (DS 2016). Within this dystopian subgenre, Owen’s struggle is simply representative of

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modern existence in the technocapitalist West; his status as an immigrant may be merely a metaphor for the labourer’s estrangement from production and society. Underscoring this reading of the book are panels filled with neon signs, glowing cell-phone displays, bright laptop screens, holographic projections, hovering drones, electronic onomatopoeia, and vaguely humanoid robots – all at odds with the displaced Americans.

Conclusion Americatown’s use of inversion is neither pro-migrant nor anti-migrant. It makes no clear case in opposition to border walls or open borders. From any side of the issue, the comic’s portrayal of migrant lives allows readers access to the harsher realities of immigration, particularly for those people who are driven to risk illegal bordercrossings. As presented in the comic, however, those realities could engender more sympathy from readers by portraying immigrants as casualties instead of criminals. Or, those realities could lend support to strict immigration policies by demonstrating the practicality of being able to speak the host country’s language, the necessity of documentation for employment, housing, and aid, and the hardships of overpopulation on a city. In fact, either reading is understandable within the “crisis mentality” that dominates many media narratives of immigrants and refugees (Esses et al. 2013, 519). Inversive texts like Americatown can open dialogues surrounding migration and related social, cultural, political, and racial dynamics. They provide an opportunity to better understand how categories of “us” and “them”, or Self and Other, are created and maintained. In particular, comics engage audiences through multiliteracies that negotiate the place of creators, characters, and readers in relation to one another (e.g. Danzak 2011; Ghiso and Low 2013). Americatown can thus enable natural-born US citizens, particularly White Americans, to see themselves as Others and as racialised. By identifying with the American immigrant, readers may gain insight into what drives people to cross borders, broadening their perspective of what it means to be an undocumented or irregularly immigrated resident, realising how immigration is a culturally racialised concept, and/or feeling what it is like to be excluded or subjugated based on demographic characteristics. Such opportunities offered through inversion must nonetheless be balanced against the limits of inversion, with a critical eye towards the larger historical and cultural legacies in relation to which texts such as Americatown appear. As Bates (2007, 209) reminds us, they do “not exist in a cultural vacuum” but instead intersect “with other cultural messages”. Americatown’s use of inversion challenges some of those messages; for example, Owen does not bring drugs with him into the country, and he is not being exiled from his home as an undesirable, as has been suggested of immigrants (see Moreno 2015). But its use of inversion also reinforces other cultural messages – such as migrants creating an “enemies at the gate” crisis (see Esses et  al. 2013, 519). The broad cultural assumption reinforced through the narrative is that there are natural or naturalised hierarchies in identity. The

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immigrant, the migrant, or the refugee, whether sympathetic or criminal, whether from North America or South America, falls to the bottom of the socio-political ladder. Additionally, the comic continues to privilege the US perspective, placing the United States and its people in a heroic role on an international stage. The United States may have failed its people in Americatown’s dystopian future, but US citizens themselves are still admirable and seemingly free of any culpability in the downfall of their home country, which is heralded as a leading model of democracy in the world.

References Alghamdi, Alaa. 2011. Transformations of the Liminal Self: Configurations of Home and Identity for Muslim Characters in British Postcolonial Fiction. Bloomington: iUniverse. Bates, Benjamin R. 2007. “Race, Inversive Performance, and Public Pedagogy in White Man’s Burden”. In Whiteness, Pedagogy, Performance, edited by Leda M. Cooks and Jennifer S. Simpson, 193–212. Lanham: Lexington. Boatright, Michael D. 2010. “Graphic Journeys: Graphic Novels’ Representations of Immigrant Experiences”. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 53 (6): 468–476. http://dx.doi. org/10.1598/JAAL.53.6.3 Branson-Potts, Hailey. 2017. “Trump Wants Immigrants to ‘Share Out Values.’ They Say Assimilation Is Much More Complex”. Los Angeles Times, 11 April. www.latimes.com/ local/lanow/la-me-ln-immigrant-assimilation-2017-story.html. Accessed 15 July 2022. Budiman, Abby. 2020. “Key Findings about U.S. Immigrants”. Pew Research Center, 20 August. www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-findings-about-u-s-immigrants/. Accessed 15 July 2022. Claeys, Gregory. 2010. “The Origins of Dystopia: Wells, Huxley and Orwell”. In The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, edited by Gregory Claeys, 107–134. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521886659.005 Cohn, D’Vera. 2015. “How U.S. Immigration Laws and Rules Have Changed Through History”. Pew Research Center, 30 September. www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/09/30/how-u-simmigration-laws-and-rules-have-changed-through-history/. Accessed 15 July 2022. Crook, Stephen. 2000. “Utopia and Dystopia”. In Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of the Present, edited by Gary Browning, Abigail Halci, and Frank Webster, 205–220. London: SAGE Publications. https://dx.%3Cwbr%3Edoi.%3Cwbr%3E org/10.4135/9781446218310.n15 Danzak, Robin L. 2011. “Defining Identities Through Multiliteracies: EL Teens Narrate Their Immigration Experiences as Graphic Stories”. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 55 (3): 187–196. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/JAAL.00024 DeFleur, Melvin L., and Sandra Ball-Rokeach. 1982. Theories of Mass Communication (4th edition). New York: Longman. Dharmasankar, Sharada, and Bhash Mazumder. 2016. “Have Borrowers Recovered From Foreclosures During the Great Recession?” Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. www.chicagofed.org/publications/chicago-fed-letter/2016/370#. Accessed 15 July 2022. Díaz-Basteris, María Fernanda. 2020. “Traumatic Displacement in Puerto Rican Digital Graphic Narratives”. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35 (2): 467–474. https://doi.org/10.1 080/08989575.2020.1741188 Díez, Beatriz. 2019. “ ‘English Only’: The Movement to Limit Spanish Speaking in US”. BBC, 3 December. www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50550742. Accessed 15 July 2022.

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DS, Joao Rosmaninho. 2016. “Citypunk: Transgeographies in Science Fiction Comics”. In Edgelands: A Collection of Monstrous Geographies, edited by Erin Vander Wall, 107–114. Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848884816_012 Esses, Victoria, Stelian Medianu, and Andrea S. Lawson. 2013. “Uncertainty, Threat, and the Role of the Media in Promoting the Dehumanization of Immigrants and Refugees”. Journal of Social Issues 69 (3): 518–536. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12027 Ganz, Marshall. 2009. “Why Stories Matter: The Art and Craft of Social Change”. Sojourners, March. https://sojo.net/magazine/march-2009/why-stories-matter. Accessed 15 July 2022. Ghiso, María Paula, and David E. Low. 2013. “Students Using Multimodal Literacies to Surface Micronarratives of United States Immigration”. Literacy 47 (1): 26–34. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4369.2012.00678.x Giroux, Henry A. 2004. “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals”. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1 (1): 59–79. https://doi. org/10.1080/1479142042000180926 Gonzalez, Daniel. 2019. “The 2019 Migrant Surge Is Unlike Any We’ve Seen Before. This Is Why”. USA Today, 23 September. www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/ 2019/09/23/immigration-issues-migrants-mexico-central-america-caravans-smuggling/2026215001/. Accessed 15 July 2022. Gring-Pemble, Lisa, and Martha Solomon Watson. 2003. “The Rhetorical Limits of Satire: An Analysis of James Finn Garner’s Politically Correct Bedtime Stories”. Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2): 132–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630308175 Guy, Talmadge C. 2007. “Learning Who We (and They) Are: Popular Culture as Pedagogy”. New Directions for Adult & Continuing Education 115: 15–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ ace.263 Jones, Jeffrey P.  2010. Entertaining Politics (2nd editon). Lanham: Rowman  & Littlefield Publishers. Kang, Jamie-Lynn, and Lisa M. Williamson. 2016. “Unemployment Rate Nears Prerecession Level by End of 2015”. Monthly Labor Review, April. www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/ article/unemployment-rate-nears-prerecession-level-by-end-of-2015.htm. Accessed 15 July 2022. Kavaler, Ethan M. 1996. “Pictorial Satire, Ironic Inversion, and Ideological Conflict: Bruegel’s ‘Battle Between the Piggy Banks and Strong Boxes’ ”. Netherlands Yearbook for the History of Art 47: 154–179. Khoja-Moolji, Shenila S., and Alyssa D. Niccolini. 2015. “Comics as Public Pedagogy: Reading Muslim Masculinities through Muslim Femininities in Ms. Marvel”. Girlhood Studies 8 (3): 23–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2015.080304 Liera-Schwichtenberg, Ramona. 2000. “Passing or Whiteness on the Edge of Town”. Critical Studies in Media Communication 17 (3): 371–374. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295030009388403 Manea, Dragoş, and Mihaela Precup. 2020. “Infantilizing the Refugee: On the Mobilization of Empathy in Kate Evans’ Threads from the Refugee Crisis”. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35 (2): 481–487. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2020.1738078 Marzouki, Mohamed El. 2015. “Satire as Counter-Discourse: Dissent, Cultural Citizenship, and Youth Culture in Morocco”. The International Communication Gazette 77 (3): 282–296. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1748048514568762 McCloud, Scott. 1994. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Paperbacks. McConnell, Kevin. 2015. “Everyone Around the World Is Coming to ‘Americatown’ #1”. Multiversity Comics, 14 August. www.multiversitycomics.com/reviews/americatown1-review/. Accessed 15 July 2022.

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McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mickwitz, Nina. 2020. “Introduction: Discursive Contexts, ‘Voice’ and Empathy in Graphic Life Narratives of Migration and Exile”. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35 (2): 459–465. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2020.1738079 Moreno, Carolina. 2015. “9 Outrageous Things Donald Trump Has Said About Latinos”. HuffPost, 31 August. www.huffpost.com/entry/9-outrageous-things-donald-trump-hassaid-about-latinos_n_55e483a1e4b0c818f618904b. Accessed 15 July 2022. Pruteanu, Simona Emilia. 2020. “Framing the Immigration Discourse and Drawing the Citizen: Concrete Representations of the ‘Migration Crisis’ in Comics Journalism”. In Citizenship and Belonging in France and North America, edited by Ramona Mielusel and Simona Emilia Pruteanu, 217–233. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. http://dx.doi. org/10.1007/978-3-030-30158-3_12 Rubin, Alan M., and Sven Windahl. 1986. “The Uses and Dependency Model of Mass Communication”. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3 (2): 184–199. https://doi. org/10.1080/15295039609366643 Sandlin, Jennifer A., Brian D. Schultz, and Jake Burdick. 2010. Handbook of Public Pedagogy: Education and Learning beyond Schooling. New York: Routledge. Skerry, Peter. 2013. “It Takes Two: Immigration and the Rule of Law”. Brookings, 9 May. www.brookings.edu/articles/it-takes-two-immigration-and-the-rule-of-law/. Accessed 15 July 2022. Somin, Ilya. 2018. “Why It’s Wrong to Demand Immigrants Stay Home and ‘Fix Their Own Country’”. Reason, 3 November. https://reason.com/volokh/2018/11/03/why-its-wrongto-demand-immigrants-stay/. Accessed 15 July 2022. Somin, Ilya. 2019. “The Injustice of Demanding That Migrants Go Back and ‘Fix Their Own Country’ ”. Reason, 15 July. https://reason.com/volokh/2019/07/15/the-injustice-ofdemanding-that-migrants-go-back-and-fix-their-own-countries/. Accessed 15 July 2022. Stewart, Tracie L., Jacqueline R. LaDuke, Charlotte Bracht, Brooke A.M. Sweet, and Kristine E. Gamarel. 2003. “Do the “Eyes” Have It? A Program Evaluation of Jane Elliott’s ‘Blue-Eyes/Brown-Eyes’ Diversity Training Exercise”. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 33 (9): 1898–1921. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2003.tb02086.x Sundaram, Arya. 2020. “ ‘Scared for My Life’: Why More Indians Are Joining Migrants on Risky Journey to Reach the U.S”. The Guardian, 3 February. www.theguardian.com/ world/2020/feb/03/india-migrants-mexico-us-border. Accessed 15 July 2022. Susetiyo, Sandra Puguh Budi. 2017. “Hero Archetype in Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings the Movie (2014)”. Allusion 6 (1): 107–117. Winters, Bradford, Larry Cohen, Daniel Irizarri, Vladimir Popov, Matt Battaglia, Shawn Aldridge, and Scott Newman. 2016. Americatown. Los Angeles: Archaia. Wolk, David. 2007. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge: Da Capo Press. Zong, Jie, and Jeanne Batalova. 2018. “South American Immigrants in the United States”. Migration Policy Institute, 7 November. www.migrationpolicy.org/article/south-americanimmigrants-united-states-2017. Accessed 15 July 2022.

10 RACIST AND NATIONAL(IST) SYMBOLS IN A FINNISH ANTIRACIST COMICS ZINE Olli Löytty

On the black and white cover of the comics zine, a hand is grabbing a lion by the tail and pulling it back, away from the image centre. Or, following a more violent interpretation, the hand is smashing the lion against the block letters that form the words “Nyt riittää!” (the Finnish equivalent of “Enough is enough!”) and the Finnish title of the zine (Figure 10.1; Volle et al. 2015). Be that as it may, due to the force of the action, the crown on the lion’s head, a sword it has been holding, and a sabre on which it has been standing are scattered around. By the look on its face, the lion seems to be in great pain. At the bottom of the cover runs the English name of the zine: Enough Is Enough! Finnish Comics Culture