Postcolonial Comics : Texts, Events, Identities 2014045621, 9780415738132, 9781315817576

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Postcolonial Comics

This collection examines new comic-book cultures, graphic writing, and bande dessinée texts as they relate to postcolonialism in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone settings. The individual chapters are framed within a larger enquiry that considers definitive aspects of the postcolonial condition in twenty-first-century (con)texts. The authors demonstrate that the fields of comic-book production and ­circulation in various regional histories introduce new postcolonial vocabularies, reconstitute conventional “image-functions” in established social texts and political systems, and present competing narratives of resistance ­ articular signifiand rights. In this sense, postcolonial comic cultures are of p cance in the context of a newly global and politically recomposed landscape. This volume introduces a timely intervention within current comic-bookarea studies that remain firmly situated within the “U.S.-European and Japa­ nese manga paradigms” and their reading publics. It will be of great interest to a wide variety of disciplines including postcolonial studies, comics-area studies, cultural studies, and gender studies. Binita Mehta is Professor of French and Director of the International Studies Program at Manhattanville College, U.S. where she teaches a variety of courses in French language, literature, and film. She is the author of Widows, Pariahs, and ‘Bayadères’: India as Spectacle (2002) and has published several articles and book chapters on French and Francophone literature and film, South Asian diasporic cinema, and on the Francophone bande dessinée. Pia Mukherji earned her doctorate in English Literature from the ­Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, U.S. Her research and publications are in the areas of British modernism, newmedia texts, and diasporic cultures. She has taught a variety of courses on ­modernism, postcolonial literatures, film studies, and writing in the New York and Boston areas.

Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently) colonized areas, and will include material from non-anglophone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures. Series editors: Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney.

  1 Land and Nationalism in Fictions from Southern Africa James Graham   2 Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization Exploiting Eden Sharae Deckard   3 The Idea of the Antipodes Place, People, and Voices Matthew Boyd Goldie   4 Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives Violence and Violation Edited by Sorcha Gunne and Zoë Brigley Thompson   5 Locating Transnational Ideals Edited by Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio   6 Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature Remitting the Text Kezia Page   7 Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present S. Salih

  8 Postcolonial Nostalgias Writing, Representation and  emory Dennis Walder   9 Publishing the Postcolonial Anglophone West African and Caribbean Writing in the UK 1948–1968 Gail Low 10 Postcolonial Tourism Literature, Culture, and Environment Anthony Carrigan 11 The Postcolonial City and its Subjects London, Nairobi, Bombay Rashmi Varma 12 Terrorism, Insurgency and Indian-English Literature, 1830–1947 Alex Tickell 13 The Postcolonial Gramsci edited Neelam Srivastava and Baidik Bhattacharya 14 Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers and Reception Edited by Bethan Benwell, James Procter and Gemma Robinson

15 Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing Edited by Rehana Ahmed, Peter Morey, and Amina Yaqin 16 Edward Said’s Translocations Essays in Secular Criticism, Edited by Tobias Döring and Mark Stein 17 Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East Rethinking the Liminal in Mashriqi Writing Norbert Bugeja 18 Critical Perspectives on IndoCaribbean Women’s Literature Edited by Joy Mahabir and Mariam Pirbhai 19 Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective Anna Ball 20 Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres Edited by Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio 21 Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures Literature, Cinema and Music Edited by Karima Laachir and Saeed Talajooy 22 The Postsecular Imagination Postcolonialism, Religion, and Literature Manav Ratti 23 Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa A Postcolonial Outlook, Edited by Walid El Hamamsy and Mounira Soliman

24 The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art, and Journalism Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut Edited by Caroline Rooney and Rita Sakr 25 Fiction, Film, and Indian Popular Cinema Salman Rushdie’s Novels and the Cinematic Imagination Florian Stadtler 26 Language and Translation in Postcolonial Literatures Multilingual Contexts, Translational Texts, Edited by Simona Bertacco 27 Postcolonial Custodianship Cultural and Literary Inheritance Filippo Menozzi 28 Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial Literature Transnational Narratives from Joyce to Bolaño Laura Barberán Reinares 29 The Future of Postcolonial Studies Edited by Chantal Zabus 30 Postcolonial Comics Texts, Events, Identities Edited by Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji

Related Titles Postcolonial Life-Writing Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation Bart Moore-Gilbert

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Postcolonial Comics Texts, Events, Identities

Edited by Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors 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. All rights reserved. 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. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Postcolonial comics : texts, events, identities / edited by Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji. pages cm. — (Routledge research in postcolonial literatures ; 53) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Comic books, strips, etc.—History and criticism. 2. Graphic novels—History and criticism. 3. Postcolonialism in literature. I. Mehta, Binita, 1962- editor. II. Mukherji, Pia, 1966- editor. PN6714.P676 2015 741.5'9—dc23 2014045621 ISBN: 978-0-415-73813-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-81757-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction1 B inita M ehta and P ia Mukherji

Part I Geographies of Contact: Gibraltar / Malta / Asia-Pacific   1 Plural Pathways, Plural Identities: Jean-Philippe Stassen’s Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar

29

M ichelle B umatay

  2 Joe Sacco’s “Prying Outsiders”: Marginalization, Graphic Novel Form, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Representation

44

Sam K nowles

  3 Tezuka Osamu’s Postcolonial Discourse towards a Hybrid National Identity

59

Roman Rosenbaum

Part II Francophone Post-Histories: Algeria / Congo / Gabon   4 Memory and Postmemory in Morvandiau’s D’Algérie

77

A nn M iller

  5 Guilty Melancholia and Memorial Work: Representing the Congolese Past in Comics

92

V é ronique B ragard

  6 Visualizing Postcolonial Africa: La Vie de Pahé B inita M ehta

111

viii Contents

Part III Postcolonial Politics: India   7 Postcolonial Demo-graphics: Traumatic Realism in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm

131

P ramod K . N ayar

  8 Graphics of Freedom: Colonial Terrorists and Postcolonial Revolutionaries in Indian Comics

142

H arleen S ingh

  9 Graphic Ecriture: Gender and Magic Iconography in Kari

157

P ia M ukherji

Part IV War, Nationhood, and Transnationalism: The Middle East 10 Visualizing the Emerging Nation: Jewish and Arab Editorial Cartoons in Palestine, 1939–48

171

J effrey J ohn B arnes

11 Drawing for a New Public: Middle Eastern 9th Art and the Emergence of a Transnational Graphic Movement 

187

M assimo di Ricco

12 Men with Guns: War Narratives in New Lebanese Comics

204

L ena I rmgard Merhej

Contributors Index

223 227

Acknowledgments

The following materials have been reprinted with kind permission from the original copyright holders: Bassil Zeina, La Furie des Glandeurs, Issue 4, page 12 Charles, Jean-François & Maryse Charles, Bihel Frédéric. I. Africa Dreams: L’ombre du Roi (Casterman, 2010), p. 23. © Casterman. Reprinted with kind permission from Casterman. La Vie de Pahe T.1-Bitam and La Vie de Pahe T.2-Paname. Art & Colors by Pahé; Script by Pahé. © Editions Paquet – Geneva. Perrissin, Christian & Tirabosco, Tom. Kongo: Le ténébreux voyage de Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. (Futuropolis 2013), p. 140. © Futuropolis. Reprinted with kind permission from Futuropolis. Osamu Tezuka’s  Message to Adolf  (part1) Translator: Kumar Sivasubramanian. New York: Vertical, 2012, Vol.1: page 115 and 399. © Tezuka ­Productions. Stassen’s depiction of Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in Morocco. © Futuropolis / Dist. LA COLLECTION the fdz, Samandal issue 0. The first page of “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar:” a map of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean Sea. © Futuropolis / Dist. LA COLLECTION “Two Images and Text” from the book JOURNALISM by Joe Sacco. ­Copyright ©2012 by Joe Sacco. Used by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved. “Two Images and Text” from the book JOURNALISM by Joe Sacco. ­Copyright ©2012 by Joe Sacco. Used by permission of Penguin Random House UK. All rights reserved.

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Introduction Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji

The edited volume Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities examines new comic-book cultures, graphic writing, and bande dessinée texts1 as they relate to postcolonialism in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone settings. As we attempt to describe our work in relation to established comics’ scholarship on minority, ethno-racial, postimperial, and multicultural themes, the key terms under investigation in this introductory essay will include two basic categories: multimodal comics narratives and their surrounding postcolonial moments. The readings in this collection will be framed, therefore, within a larger enquiry, one that considers definitive aspects of the postcolonial condition in twenty-first-century contexts. To introduce such graphic forms and practice as “meaningful postcolonial work,”2 we first look to a field of research that has broadly employed two distinct approaches to think about comics: first, in terms of (visual/ verbal) textualities,3 and next, in relation to (social/popular) cultures. Early structural and semiotic studies of graphic language systems and grammars, image-semiologies, and comics-narratologies, primarily in French scholarship, designated comics as complex, encoded texts and located them within a theoretical paradigm of “meaningful” structures.4 Comics codes were then made problematic and characterized variously as ideological, deep, or (de) constructive by later Marxist, psychoanalytic, or postmodern/poststructuralist revisions within a continuing critical tradition.5 The second paradigm of comics analysis is usefully outlined in Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s authoritative cultural history of American comics. Gabilliet studies the development of the “forms of modern comic art”6 as related problems of definition and periodization. To determine if comics were indeed “born with the mass production of the American comic strip in 1896,”7 Gabilliet proposes that we first define the medium by examining the historical limits of comics art and narrative. The basic picture-narrative theory of comics indicates a vast inventory of formal pretexts that evolve from diverse iconographic traditions, histories, and media.8 How, then, should we locate the specific category of comics within this comprehensive register? Gabilliet suggests that a precise differentiation requires the expansion of the term to accommodate extra-aesthetic criteria. “Comics as a medium … is a result of a multiplicity of endogenic (aesthetic) and exogenic (technological, economic, social) factors.”9 While noting

2  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji David Kunzle’s assertion that the origin of modern comics started in 1453 with a technological breakthrough, the standardization of the mobile printing press, Gabilliet further examines comics history in relation to technological, economic, and cultural shifts in the context of mass publishing since the 1830s.10 In naming comics as a cultural medium of the long twentieth century, we find that its politics can be identified variously: as the incorporated visual economy of a conservative mass culture or within a critical history of recuperating comics from a mass to a ‘popular’ cultural product.11 Crucially, these distinct methodologies of reading comics, as textual compositions and as cultural forms, are both organized around a common enquiry: how can we think about comics as both meaningful and political? Can we further elaborate these notions of comics more specifically, as instances of postcolonial textuality or as aspects of public culture in the postcolony, for example? It is precisely in such interrogations that we may perhaps find a way to address the question central to our own study: how do comics studies connect to postcolonial histories, criticism, and writing? Postcolonial Comics: Textualities and Public Cultures Colonial textuality has long been identified as a persistent and strategic practice of epistemic violence: self-identifying as legitimate systems of knowledge, engaged in naming the self/other binary, and encoding names in hierarchies of significance in (post) imperial contexts.12 Historically, “imperial relations … were always crucially maintained in their interpellative phases by textuality, both institutionally [and] informally,”13 working as “ensembles of linguistically based practices [deployed] in the management of colonial relationships.”14 These operations attempted to simultaneously legitimize colonial discourse as well as to erase and contain subversive textualities. In postcolonial negotiations of such a “vast semantic field of representations”15 that supported Western colonial enterprise, the most effective interventions seem to proceed from an understanding of the notion of unstable systems and signification; in fact, in the recognition of “colonialism both as a set of political relations and as a signifying system, but one with [the] ambivalent structural relations”16 that mark colonizing encounters. Postcolonial textualities, therefore, enter colonial discourse deconstructively, inhabiting its ambiguities and fissures, and thus initiate a “persistent questioning of the frame, which at one level, is the space of representation, and at another level, the frame of western modernity itself.”17 The essays in this volume demonstrate that graphic writing, particularly enabled by complex signifying resources, may be read as an effective category of “postcolonial textuality,” foregrounding colonial legacies and (re)scripting missing or misrepresented identities in their precise contexts. Additionally, we propose postcolonial comics are uniquely able to perform the characteristic

Introduction  3 “deconstructive image functions” that remain a central paradigm of resistance in Timothy Brennan’s critique of dominant “economic image-­functions” signifying cultures of current global neo-liberalism. Brennan argues that ­established textual visualities encode rules of perception that regulate and determine “usable” ideas of global peripheries in the present ­“information” age. The political utility of these perceptions to new systems of imperial power are tied to their figurations as “calculated zones of invisibility,” “serviceable abstractions,” or “repositories for counter-modernity.”18 The critique then prescribes the important postcolonial work of decoding and contesting image-objects of everyday ideology within resistant postcolonial visual cultures and in the deconstructive textual strategies of postmodern iconographics. The essays in this edition examine how comic-book production and circulation in contemporary regional histories usefully employ and introduce precisely such new postcolonial vocabularies. These scripts employ visual grammars, image-texts, and graphic performances that reconstitute conventional “image-functions” in established social texts and political systems and thus, perhaps, re-envision competing narratives of resistance or rights. In this sense, new comic cultures are of particular significance in the context of a politically recomposed global landscape. The “creolization” of contemporary comics forms and their reading publics arising from “the global flux of ideas and images [within which] voices and registers overlap” necessarily creates a “proliferation of genres and cultural exchanges within contemporary visual cultures” and places local texts within an “expanding global public sphere [where] the imperatives of the sign – drawing, art, photography, images or comics – can now no longer be perceived as cultural symbols [that communicate] obsolete authenticities.”19 The postcolonial comic thus becomes a particularly appropriate venue that offers radical and progressive alternatives to the notion of obsolete authenticities, and, as such, “bears witness – to testify, to accuse, to archive.”20 The readings of text, event, and identity in the essays that follow seek to clarify precisely these moments of postcolonial elucidation. Apart from reading comics textualities, our studies of new comics cultures from, for example, Lebanon, Algeria, Egypt, or India may be usefully allied with the theoretical expression of a new category, that of public culture as a condition of modernity in the postcolony. Drawing on recent studies on South Asian public culture as a late-modern formation distinct from Western histories of elite, mass, and popular cultures21 or public spheres where consumer practices depoliticize communicative action,22 we propose that current transnational comics scenes may be contextualized within “new public modernities”23 which particularly emphasize cultural registers such as the circulation of images, the political roles of visuality, “the importance of symbolic actions as opposed to rational speech, and the links between mass media and the emancipatory dimensions of art, display and performance.”24 In contrast to familiar notions of the dominant ‘mass-manufactured’ or the marginal/subcultural ‘popularized’ in Western

4  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji culture theory, Appadurai and Breckenridge describe public culture as a way to enter “modernity within particular historical frames,” characterized by a “mainstream quality” and occupying spaces created by new media, “nomad technologies,” and the “current manipulation of signs” in a field of global cultural flows.25 By linking “the forms of the popular to the problematics of the public sphere,” postcolonial public cultures escape “specific Euro American master narratives”26 of civil society27 and uncover “zones of contestation, incorporations and exclusions,” as well as “sites of resistance, contested cultural assumptions, and subversive political possibilities.”28 The reconstitution of new visual grammars, iconographies, and performances appears central to the projects of postcolonial public cultures, as recorded in several studies. For example, Deborah Poole replaces the notion of common visual cultures characterized by shared symbolic codes with the idea of a postcolonial visual economy as “fields of vision structured systematically in terms of inequalities and disadvantages flows.”29 Sandria Freitag studies how various visual and spectacular/bodily performative registers and practices underwrote India’s emerging spectacles of modernity, including, for instance, South Indian “courtly cultures [and] live performance traditions”30 Ranajit Guha’s concept of the “third idiom” in modern Indian popular culture erases given binaries of tradition/modernity, metropolis/ periphery.31 Kajri Jain studies the history of mass-manufactured “calendar” or “bazaar” art in the (post)colonial Indian culture industry to emphasize differences in “the contexts of mass culture in modern Europe and modern India,” especially in relation to the “cultic image” and other visual idioms in the (post)colonial Indian market economy.32 Using this critical frame of reading, the idiomatic, political, and situated aspects of postcolonial comics texts and histories may be examined as expressions of emergent public cultures that demonstrate how “modernity can become a diversely appropriated experience” in different (post)national imaginaries. Comics Scholarship In this section, we will mark the theoretical ground for this project by situating our enquiry within, first, the field of mainstream comics research, and next, comics studies that relate more specifically to the legacies of imperialism. The distinct agendas in Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities may be introduced by looking to the useful notion of “canonicity” to help place and then differentiate the present project in relation to an established body of contemporary comics criticism and texts that reference Western (post)imperial and mainstream cultures and concerns. In keeping with this objective, this project seeks to introduce a timely intervention within current comic-book area studies that remains firmly situated within the “USEuropean and manga paradigms”33 and their reading publics. Recent work in comics scholarship is characterized by a wide range of critical methods

Introduction  5 and approaches, and may be somewhat broadly organized into social histories of comics production,34 representational and semiotic criticism,35 and thematic studies, as, for example, in the super-hero genre or autographics.36 The readings in each category are often analytically rigorous, insightful, and varied. But an overview of the field must bring to our notice that the “comics exceptionalism”37 of current scholarship in such Anglo-American or European traditions misses how contemporary “ninth art” production in global contexts records historical critique, political action, or emergent transnational narratives of trauma, gender, protest, and global exchange. Chute and Dekoven’s recent introduction to contemporary “Comic Books and Graphic Novels” in The Cambridge Introduction to Popular Culture is illustrative in that the survey is presented as a comprehensive summary of existing criticism on comics format, genre, and history. The essay constructs a dominant frame of analysis using studies of European pretexts leading to a largely American history of modern graphic cultures. The trajectory describes popular Western print and newspaper comic texts at the turn of the nineteenth century, the stand-alone American drawn strips and the superhero genre of the 1930s, political comics in the Anglo-American and European 1940s tradition, the mid-century underground comic movement following the federal censorship code of 1954, and comic autobiographics from the 1970s. The extreme significance, in the twenty-first century, of an international range of regional graphic texts and “the global circulation of narratives mapping both individual lives and world-historical events” is only briefly noted at the close, as the focus remains firmly on the contemporary American scene and the work of Ware, Bechdel et al.38 A possible second comparative frame allows our approach to position itself as distinct from yet related to an established corpus of engaged scholarship that questions the politics of minority/marginal representations within mainstream comics traditions, investigates events of colonization and decolonization in (post)imperial graphic cultures, or studies the subcultures and spaces of resistance occupied by Western alternative comics histories.39 Some of the best-known and often cited graphic novels that focus on themes of otherness in recent years have been Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003, 2004), Art Speigelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986, 1991), and Joe Sacco’s graphic journalism. Apart from an interest in Satrapi’s IranianFrench history, the Jewish experience during the Holocaust in the case of ­Speigelman, and the Arab world in the work of Sacco, most studies that examine m ­ ulticultural and minority/marginalized themes and communities seem to reference comics representations that are set largely within a US context as narratives of national identity politics. There have been several booklength studies that either point to the stereotypical portrayal of non-white ethnic groups or lament their absence in comics written in the United States. Among these are Michael A. Sheyahshe’s Native Americans in Comic Books (2008), Fredrik Strömberg’s Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History (2003), and William H. Foster III’s Looking for a Face like Mine (2005).

6  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji In Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History, Strömberg suggests that some believe that “cartoonists depict people from other ethnic and racial groups with stereotypical traits simply because it is harder to differentiate between persons from a national group other than one’s own” and the cartoonist’s work merely reflects “what society has deemed acceptable at a certain point and time.”40 Dr. Charles Johnson, a black cartoonist and scholar, does not “buy the idea that an artist is merely a creature of his time, a tabula rasa inscribed with the bigoted beliefs of his Zeitgeist.” For him, the use of stereotypes suggests a “lack of invention, daring, or innovation” on the part of the cartoonist who “is content to uncritically work with received, prefabricated imagery and ideas minted in the minds of others. …”41 One of the reasons for such stereotyping, explains Johnson, was that blacks were never part of the “artist/audience equation” since comics were written by whites for white audiences.42 Although black presence in comic books continues to be small, their portrayal is less stereotypical, even though they are often included “just to be the Black character in a certain context.”43 Like ­Johnson, Native American comic book writer and filmmaker Jon Proudstar tells Michael Sheyahshe that cartoonists do not “want to do the homework” of differentiating the various Native American tribes, thus portraying all Native people alike.44 Both agree that this will change when more black, Native American, and other non-white, ethnic minority comic-book artists start telling their own stories. William H. Foster III adds: “although slow in coming and certain [sic] still fraught in stereotypes, the portrayal of Black characters in comics is evolving.”45 In the Francophone context, the Belgian comicbook artist Hergé’s (real name Georges Remi) comic book Tintin au Congo has been criticized for its stereotypical and racist representations of the black Congolese. We will discuss this in more detail later in this introduction. Other books that are concerned with multicultural themes in comics often study them within a U.S. context, although some do discuss the adaptation of such representations in other countries, for example, by examining the transposition of popular U.S. superheroes into other cultural locations. Recent multicultural studies include the 2007 special issue of the journal MELUS, entitled Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative, Frederick Luis Aldama’s Multicultural Comics: From ‘Zap’ to ‘Blue Beetle’ (2010), and Transnational Perspectives in Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads (2013), edited by Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein. Derek Parker Royal, in the introduction to the special issue of MELUS, explains that the essays in the journal study the representation of ethno-racial characters and subject matter in U.S.-based comics, addressing “the possibilities, and even the potential liabilities, of comics when representing ethnoracial subject matter. … It is a response to what several critics of graphic narrative have seen as a defining mark of American popular culture: its problematic relationship to ethnic difference.”46 He adds that the contributors of his issue “map out the theoretical, literary, and historical contexts of

Introduction  7 graphic narrative and their links to multi-ethnic subjectivity.” 47 However, the engagement with the ethno-racial other in this essay collection remains positioned primarily within a domestic context. Some of the essays included in Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives, especially in the section of the book entitled “Transcultural and Transcultural Superheroes,” venture beyond the U.S borders. In the foreword to the book, John A. Lent states that the book’s contributors “broaden ­literature searches beyond the United States and superheroes, draw upon Asian, European, Middle Eastern, and North American works for analysis, and scrutinize issues of transnationalism … as well as others such as hybridity and globalization.”48 The editors, all American Studies scholars, state that the goal of their book is to “address two critical blind spots: the overall neglect of graphic narratives in the increasing transnational field of American literary and cultural studies … and the relative dearth of transnational investigations of graphic narratives in the growing field of comics studies. …”49 Their volume “concentrates on largely American genres and productions as an exemplary field of transnational exchange”50 and their aim is “to train a transnational focus … on American productions and genres, … to ‘do national American studies with a transnational consciousness’.”51 For example, the book contains chapters on Indian and Japanese manga versions or “transcreations” of the American comic superhero Spider-man. Shilpa Davé, in her essay entitled “Spider-Man India: Comic Books and the Translation/ Transcreating of American Cultural Narratives,” concludes that although the “development of the Spider-Man India series as a transcreative product shows the limitations of working with an established icon because the creators were bound by the dictates of American narratives and conventions of storytelling,” the series “also opened up the possibility of creating new venues in the form of graphic narratives that pave the way for creative hybrid projects. …” Following Spider-Man India, publishing companies in India such as Liquid Comics decided to develop and market comics “rooted in Indian culture and mythology” rather than “trying to translate or transcreate other American heroes.” 52 While Davé suggests that America remains the context for the transplanted American comic book superhero in India, the essays in our volume on Postcolonial Comics remove a dominant reference from the equation altogether as they explore political and social phenomena in various geographical regions, examining how specific colonial and postcolonial histories shape their politics and aesthetics, and how these then translate into graphic storytelling. The essays in Aldama’s Multicultural Comics: From ‘Zap’ to ‘Blue Beetle’ focus mainly on comics created in a multicultural U.S. context, analyzing racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities as characters and themes in American comics, although one of the book’s “strengths,” as Derek Parker Royal puts it in the foreword to the book, is its “willingness to enlarge our understanding of ‘multicultural’ (a term usually linked to U.S.-based culture) and expand its scope beyond the confines of comics produced in

8  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji or related to American ethnicity.”53 One such essay in the book, Suhaan Mehta’s “Wondrous Capers: The Graphic Novel in India,” analyzes recent graphic novels written by Indian writers that break away from the mainstream Indian comics industry dominated by the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) series that present an “airbrushed view of India’s past and present” to create an “alternative space by accommodating voices that habitually fall outside the realm of Indian socio-politico-cultural discourses.”54 While the books examined above are primarily concerned with studying comic books that address multicultural themes and ethnic minorities in the U.S., the Franco-Belgian bande dessinée or French-language comic book, often tackles subjects that deal with issues of French colonialism and postcolonialism, including those involving scenes of contemporary multiethnic and multicultural France. There have been several critical and historical studies of the French-language comic book: a collection of essays, The Francophone Bande Dessinée (2005) edited by Charles Forsdick, Laurence Grove, and Libby McQuillan; Ann Miller’s Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to the French Language Comic Strip (2007); Lawrence Grove’s more recent Comics in French: the European Bande Dessinée in Context (2010); and Joel Vessels’s Drawing France: French Comics and the Republic (2010).55 More closely related to our project, the Belgian critic Philippe Delisle has two books that analyze the Francophone Belgian bande dessinée written during the colonial period. The first is Bande dessinée et imaginaire colonial: Des années 1930 aux années 1980 (2008), in which, in addition to examining the well-known and much discussed Tintin au Congo where the detective hero visits the Belgian colony of the Congo, he studies other “espaces ­coloniaux mis en valeur par la bande dessinée franco-belge ‘classique’” (other colonial spaces emphasized by the “classic” Franco-Belgian comic book). Delisle also analyzes the representation of the “indigènes” or the native Congolese in these comic books. They sometimes seem like “de ‘grands enfants’ très craintifs” (very fearful “big children”), sometimes like “des êtres perfides et violents” (perfidious and violent beings), and the enterprise of colonialism is analyzed as a system understood as bringing progress and civilization to these native people. Finally, Delisle also analyzes bandes dessinées published during the 1980s to show how a new generation of Belgian BD artists, influenced by their predecessors, represent colonialism in their work. 56 In his second book, De“Tintin au Congo” à “Odilon Verjus”: Le missionnaire, héros de la BD belge (2011), Delisle examines the recurring figure of the Christian missionary in fiction between 1920 and 1960 – although at the end of the book, he analyzes the more recent series “Odilon Verjus” in which an apostolic worker becomes the hero of the series. Delisle’s study focuses on the missionary character, who often plays the hero in Belgian colonial-era bandes dessinées and other literary forms, in order to analyze the function of religious propaganda represented by a proselytizing Christian mission.57 Delisle concludes that the romantic figure of the adventurous and civilizing

Introduction  9 Catholic missionary contributed to furthering the colonial agenda. As he puts it, the Belgian comic book between the years 1920–1960 “semble d’ailleurs avoir été plus qu’un simple miroir de la propagande missionaire. … Elle paraît avoir contribué elle aussi à mobliser les esprits et les energies” (seems to have been more than just a simple mirror of missionary propaganda. … It appears to have contributed to mobilizing minds and energies).58 Apart from Delisle’s study of the Belgian comic book during the colonial period, Mark McKinney’s research on the history and politics of the colonial and postcolonial Francophone bande dessinée is to date the most in-depth study on the subject. McKinney has written three books, one an edited volume and two single author books on the Francophone bande dessinée, studying colonial and postcolonial French-language comic books. In his edited volume, History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels (2008), McKinney states that his aim is to examine “the importance of history and politics” for French cartoonists of the past and how French language cartoonists have “engaged with history and politics in recent years,” including the question “how one might view colonialism, Nazism, and racism in past works, some of it produced by the acknowledged masters of the medium?”59 The field of French-language comics includes texts from both European French-speaking countries such as ­Belgium, France, and Switzerland and also the French-speaking ex-French and Belgian colonies in North Africa, West Africa, Reunion, Quebec, and New Caledonia, among others. However, the main production of Frenchlanguage comic books remains located in Belgium and mainland France.60 McKinney explains that although the French and Belgian governments do support African comic book artists, it is primarily the publishing environment in Africa as well strict censorship practices that force African comicbook artists to publish their comic books in France. McKinney notes how world-famous Belgian and French comic-book authors such as the Belgian Hergé and the French René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo who wrote the Astérix series “have inevitably been read as incarnating various aspects of French or Belgian cultural identity,” but that “such identities were problematic constructions riddled with contradictions and shaped by tensions of various sorts, including ethno-linguistic, class, national, and racial ones.”61 As mentioned earlier, McKinney gives the example of Hergé’s popular Tintin au Congo, published in 1930–31 and also available in English, which was recently criticized for its racist content by the British Commission for Racial Equality and was subsequently moved from the children’s to the adult section of the Borders Bookstores in the U.K. and the U.S. He describes how French comic books today, such as Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical Persepolis which deals with the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, and Joann Sfar’s comic books such as The Rabbi’s Cat (2005), which discusses the plight of Algerian Jews in colonial Algeria (18), highlight issues of national and cultural identity in their work and are significantly different in the way

10  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji they portray French and Belgian cultural identity.62 They “must be situated with respect to the colonial legacy and also to a world order whose references have shifted dramatically, to modified or new forms of influence, domination, and contestation.”63 McKinney adds that the focus of scholarly books on French-language comics is on the formal aspects of the medium, conducting structuralist and semiotic analyses of the comic books; fewer deal with history and politics.64 His book therefore includes essays that “carefully and thoughtfully analyze political and historical dimensions of representations in bandes dessinées,” starting with earlier comic books to more recent comics that examine how colonialism and imperialism are represented in French-language comics.65 McKinney’s second book, The Colonial Heritage of French Comics (2011), examines evidence of imperialist and racist assumptions in the serialized bandes dessinées composed by the founding father of the French comic book, Alain Saint-Ogan, in the 1930s. McKinney analyzes a volume of Saint-Ogan’s Zig et Puce comic-book series entitled Zig et Puce aux Indes, that presents an exoticized India of snake-charmers, sacred cows, and elephants.66 Saint-Ogan was an important influence on Hergé who, in Tintin au Congo, routinely exaggerates the facial features of the black Congolese as colonial subjects, thus using reactionary aesthetic conventions to perpetuate stereotypes of the native Congolese. McKinney’s book is now part of a growing literature examining the representation of imperialism and colonialism in French-language comic books. Earlier studies did not deem comic books, considered a lower art form, as appropriate material for serious examinations of such issues. In addition to identifying imperialist assumptions in Saint-Ogan’s work and their influence on Hergé and a company of other comic-book writers, McKinney is also interested in how SaintOgan’s work has been “republished in recent years, with little attention to the colonialism and racism that pervade them.”67 He blames this on the “religious and political conservatism” of many mainstream publishers, as well as an “aggressive, reactionary nostalgia for colonialism among certain individuals and entities. …”68 The colonialism and anti-semitism of Hergé’s work have been identified by scholars but there has been no full-length study of his work because writers have been unable to gain access to the Hergé archives in Brussels that are guarded by his widow and the Hergé trust.69 McKinney also analyzes graphic representations of colonial-era exhibitions in France and Belgium, as well as colonial-era expeditions abroad and how they connect to contemporary ideas of such events.70 He adds that his study aims to show “colonialism and imperialism have left their imprint on French comics, generally in the form of unsavory images and colonialist narratives. There are, of course, still both republished and brand new works that perpetuate the tradition of colonialist ideology and imagery. …”71 McKinney’s concludes by asserting that more scholarship is needed to investigate connections between French-language comics ideologies and events of colonialism and imperialism.72

Introduction  11 Although he touches on these themes in the previous book, the ­chapters in Redrawing French Empire in Comics (2013) examine contemporary Frenchlanguage comics that deal with French colonial history and its repercussions in postcolonial France. McKinney states that he is interested in detecting and analyzing the “French colonial affrontier” (5), “… a boundary that … divides and connects France” to its colonies.73 Although he examines comic books that deal with France’s ex-colonies in Indo-China, his focus is mainly on French-Algerian relations, a shared, often violent history that has produced a “long, rich, complex and fractured French-Algerian cultural formation, including many French-language comics and graphic novels related to Algeria, drawn and read on both sides of the Mediterranean from before independence to the present.”74 He adds: The affrontier is a faultline across and through which national and trans-national identities are constantly being reconstituted. By redrawing empire in comics, cartoonists reenvision identities of the French and of the (formerly) colonized, including people from Vietnam and Algeria, where two of the bloodiest and most protracted modern wars of decolonization were fought. Some of the “iconic figures of the colonial affrontier in French comics” are “the mixed couple, the métis/se [a person of culturally and ethnically mixed descent], the post-colonial immigrant (and family) and the war victim.” 75 According to McKinney, very few comic books dealing with the colonial period were published after 1962, when the majority of the French colonies achieved independence. Comics with colonial themes remerged in French comics twenty years later in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the arrival of “post-colonial ethnic minorities as a cultural and political movement” and the election of François Mitterrand as President in 1981, since he and his government encouraged “multicultural initiatives.”76 Thus ­McKinney’s goal in this book is to “analyze comic books, especially those drawn after 1962, … as a way of ascertaining whether and how French popular culture is post-colonial. …”77 Although McKinney includes chapters in his first book that analyze BDs by comic-book writers from Francophone countries in Asia, Francophone Canada,78 and Africa, he is more concerned with comic books that deal with colonial and postcolonial issues in metropolitan France. There is a long tradition of the African Francophone bande dessinée drawn by African authors that dates back to the 1950s and then continues through the postindependence period into the 1960s and 1970s. We see comic book authors from the Congo, Senegal, Cameroon, and Madagascar during this period drawing in newspapers, periodicals, and magazines. In the 1980s and 1990s we had African publishing houses publish comic books by Francophone African writers and artists, and African comic-book artists began receiving recognition in Europe. Three Malagasy comic-book artists were

12  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji invited to the Angoulême festival in 1986, and Barly Baruti from the Congo was awarded the Éditions Casterman prize.79 Since the late 1980s, African comic-book writers have joined together in associations in African and Europe to promote their art. Although comics published in local languages in Francophone African continue to be popular, financial difficulties and problems with censorship have led to the closing of many of these African publishing houses, and Francophone African writers either self-publish or have to depend on French, Belgian, and Swiss publishers. Many contemporary ­Francophone African writers live and work in the diaspora, in France, Belgium, and ­Switzerland, and collaborate with European artists.80 A collaboration between Franco-Ivorian writer Marguerite Abouet and French artist Clément Oubrerie, for example, led to the series Aya de Yopougon, whose first volume was awarded the 2006 Prix du Premier Album at Angoulême’s Festival de la Bande Dessinée.81 Other writers who live in Europe include the Gabonese writer and artist Patrick Essono Nkouma, whose pen name is Pahé, Edimo Simon-Pierre Mbembo of C ­ ameroon, and Barly Baruti of the Congo. One of the essays in this volume, “Visualizing Postcolonial Africa in La Vie de Pahé,” describes how the author discusses the difficulty of having his comic book published in his native Gabon, given his acerbic critique, in text and image, of the dictatorial Gabonese regime.82 In summary, we have surveyed an established field of contemporary comics histories and criticism that engages with a variety of colonial, minority, and multicultural themes to help introduce the parameters of our own enterprise in Postcolonial Comics. However, we also recognize that the questions which ­follow from this situated exercise, though important, seem to derive e­ xclusively from relative associations: is the postcolonial comic, then, a minority genre? Does it differ from works engaged with postcolonial issues in metropolitan traditions? Does it mimic or is it original, is it subversive, influenced or submissive in relation to colonial or Western histories of comics production? In this sense, it also seems to us that the framing of the postcolonial argument exclusively within a relative, comparative, or parallel field that includes mainstream comics studies and postcolonial writing introduces a metropolitan/ regional binary and thus assumes a Western priority, authority, and determination in its conception of postcolonial projects of reading, writing, or political practice. Therefore, in taking seriously the alternative to established canons of texts and analyses, we will try to clarify, in conclusion, the specific nature of our postcolonial project as distinct from these given frames of reference. Primarily, we would like to designate Postcolonial Comics as an active political project, not a reflexive exercise in that it must “reject the determining register of specific colonialities and imperial concerns that continue to generate meanings, desires, actions.”83 It also attempts to reject the “first in the West and then elsewhere” formula of global time as applied to postcolonial revisions.84 Postcolonial emergence has long been theorized alternatively in a sideways relation to Western or imperial trajectories, rather than bound to memories of alienations and absences within colonized histories.85 Amir Mufti suggests hierarchical modalities be replaced by forms of “global

Introduction  13 comparativism” that stem from the realization that “societies on either side of the imperial divide now lead deeply imbricated lives that cannot be understood without reference to each other.”86 As such, Mufti extends Said’s notion of contrapuntality, a term that emphasizes the idea of “transnational perspectives on literary performance” and “lateral and contrapuntal readings [of] specific contextualizations, transmissions and migrations of texts.”87

The Postcolonial Transnational To elaborate this paradigm further, we would like to address once more the relation between the postcolonial and the transnational. Various studies have noted the coincidence of the discourses of (post)colonialism and present-day globalization. For example, Masao Miyoshi distinguishes an old colonialism that operated in the name of “nations, ethnicities and races” from a new deployment of power through transnational corporations that “tend toward nationlessness.”88 Hardt and Negri contend that the postmodern Empire is decentered and mobile and unfolds along global networks.89 In contrast, Neil Smith describes the “profound spatiality” of a system of global domination that remains territorialized or national, and Arjun Appadurai speaks of the global cultural economy as a diversity of “global vernaculars.”90 As a primary focus of our readings, we recognize that thematic variations of events and identities in postcolonial comics reflect precisely this defining shift in contemporary postcolonial thought – that is, a singular focus on the ethics and politics of current transnational experience.91 A renewed dialogue between postcolonialism and globalization has recently directed an effectively “rerouted” postcolonial discourse and has shaped an evolving critical paradigm comprising a wide range of cosmopolitan themes.92 These include, for example, the politics of postnational identity (Kwame Anthony Appiah, Gilroy, Brennan), transnational statelessness and reinscriptions of locality within maps of migrancies or hybridities (Gikandi), or diasporic ethics as viable modes of postcolonial responsibility (Arjun Appadurai). As such, our study of the postcolonial transnational comic acknowledges a turn towards the examination of disparate practices, representational and socio-economic, derived from transformed colonial institutions that are then linked to “contemporary notions of the global.”93 The essays in this collection, therefore, travel very widely and also within specific histories and textual fields.94 They examine current South Asian graphic fiction that draws on iconic and mythological traditions to picture contemporary scenes in the global South: changing metroscapes, sexual and environmental politics, colonial terrorism and postcolonial governance. We also study, in particular, how the new Middle Eastern and Arabic comic industries offer a wide range of graphic interventions within specific moments of historical crises to think about postmodern trauma, the possibility of solidarities and protest in transnational communities, or the politics of new visual technologies. Texts include graphic war memoirs (Lebanon, Egypt) and new media serials (Cairo,

14  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji Beirut). Subjects include experiences and locations as diverse as Arab-Spring graphics, post-war Jewish nationalism, and Lebanese civil-war memories. We locate geographies of contact and exchange in the Asia-Pacific and in the Francophone world. Readings consider personal memoirs that record the French and ­Belgian presence in colonial Algeria and postcolonial Africa, especially Gabon and the Congo, the creation of new manga visual styles in postimperial Japan, and an exchange between Belgian Francophone comics about colonial-era Congo and contemporary Congolese comics on aspects of the DRC as a postcolonial state. Choosing a single principle of organization, we have divided the essays in this volume into four sections that study postcolonial graphics from different geographical areas. Part I, Geographies of Contact: Gibraltar/ Malta/Asia-Pacific, includes three essays. Michelle Bumatay’s “Plural Pathways, Plural Identities: Jean Philippe Stassen’s ‘Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar’” challenges dominant discourses of global migration by identifying polyvalent narratives of such resettlement patterns. Sam Knowles’s “Joe Sacco’s ‘Prying Outsiders’: Marginalization, Graphic Novel Form, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Representation” studies Sacco’s own status as a outsider, an Australian citizen of Maltese descent, conflated with that of his position as the narrator/outsider in an Indian scene of rural caste politics in “Kushinagar.” Roman Rosenbaum, in “Tezuka Osamu’s Postcolonial Discourse towards a Hybrid National Identity,” observes how the transnational characters in Osamu’s manga Adolfo ni tsugu pioneer aspects of a postcolonial graphic discourse in Japanese popular culture. Part II is entitled Francophone Post-Histories: Algeria/Congo/Gabon. Ann Miller in “Memory and Postmemory in Morvandiau’s D’Algérie” tells the story of Algeria during and after the event of colonization from the perspective of a Pied-Noir. Véronique Bragard in “Guilty Melancholia and Memorial Work: Representing the Congolese Past in Comics” demonstrates how the Congo has been represented during the late colonial and the postcolonial periods by Belgian and Congolese comic-book writers and artists. Binita Mehta’s “Visualizing Postcolonial Africa: La Vie de Pahé” examines an autobiographical bande dessinée in which the author/subject Pahé tells his personal story while critquing the socio-political situation in postcolonial Africa and contemporary France. Part III, Postcolonial Politics: India, consists of three essays that engage with different facets of history and politics in postcolonial India. Pramod K. Nayar, in “Postcolonial Demo-graphics: Traumatic Realism in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm,” discusses links between the forms of the graphic memoir and the politics of democracy using the context of the Emergency in India during the 1970s. Harleen Singh, in “Graphics of Freedom: Colonial Terrorists and Postcolonial Revolutionaries in Indian Comics,” conducts a close reading of two comic books published by the Indian Amar Chitra Katha series to show the mutation of colonial terrorists to postcolonial revolutionaries as part of the refashioning of national history. Pia Mukherji’s “Graphic Écriture: Gender and Magic Iconography in Kari” studies painterly, iconic,

Introduction  15 and magical idioms in Amruta Patil’s graphic novel to think about the notion of postmodern intertextuality in relation to feminist identity politics. Part IV, entitled War, Nationhood, and Transnationalism: The Middle East, contains three essays on graphic literature representing the Middle East. While Jeffrey John Barnes, in “Visualizing the Emerging Nation: Jewish and Arab Editorial Cartoons in Palestine, 1939–48,” examines newspaper cartoons in Jewish and Arab newspapers in the ten years preceding the creation of the Jewish state, Massimo di Ricco’s “Drawing for a New Public: Middle Eastern 9th Art and the Emergence of a Transnational Graphic Movement” describes the history of a contemporary pan-Arab, transnational graphic movement. Lena Irmgard Merhej’s narratalogical analysis of graphic war stories, “Men with Guns: War Narratives in New Lebanese Comics,” signposts iconic images of armed men featuring in the literature of inherited sectarian conflicts that still disturb the peace in contemporary Lebanon. In conclusion, we would like to acknowledge an important argument: Postcolonialism articulates a politics of resistance to the inequalities and exploitation of humans and the environment, and the diminution of political and ethical choices that come in the wake of globalization. … If globalization is the dominant or hegemonic ideology in the world today, postcolonialism, at its best, constitutes one of its main adversaries or forms of resistance.95 Civil war memories, migrations and resettlement of labor, exiles, and refugees, arms-trafficking, state policing and schooling, new sexualities and cities, the Arab spring, digital-era journalism, environmentalism, and youth movements are, broadly, current graphic events that help tell a larger story about the changing politics of postcolonial thought and experience in this collection, and, in so doing, critically examine the issues at stake in representing the assembly of contemporary postcolonial conditions.

Notes 1. Although terminology is important within comics cultures for commercial as well as creative reasons, we will not enter here into a discussion of definitions that have been much debated: comics, graphic narrative, graphic writing, graphic novel, graphic album, bande dessinée, BD. We will be using many of these terms throughout the book to discuss various kinds of multimodal storytelling that uses text and image in combination. 2. Krishnaswamy, Revathi and John C. Hawley, eds. The Postcolonial and the Global. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 3. 3. See, for example, Will Eisner’s classic description of the comics medium: “The format of comics presents a montage of both words and image, and the reader is thus required to exercise both visual and verbal interpretive skills. The regimens of art (perspective, symmetry, line) and the regimens of literature (grammar, plot, syntax) become superimposed upon each other. … And it is this disciplined

16  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji application that creates the ‘grammar’ of sequential art.” In Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. New York: Norton, 2008, 2. Other picture-narrative models include texts characterized by sequential images (McCloud 1993), the arthology of symbolic/iconic images and panels (Groensteen 2007), or interactive multimodal text-image exchanges (Harvey 2001). 4. “Semiology and structuralism dominated, to a large extent, early comics research [as] comics represented an almost complete catalogue of semiological problems.” The structuralist perspective focused on the study of the comics narrative, often analyzed as mythological systems (referencing Roland Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss), or on the study of comics as a graphic language system. Some early semiological studies of images and the grammar of comics include the work of Hunig (1974) on syntactemes and minimal visual units, Koch (1971) on representemes or minimal differentiating units, Kloepfer (1977) and Oomen (1979) on systems of phonemes and paradigms. Eisner’s Sequential Art (1986) was a pioneering study of sequential language and comics codes. McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1993) described the formal apparatus and grammar of comics, including style, spacing of panels, closure time, gesture, image, text, and color. In Magnussen, Anne and Hans-Christian Christiansen, eds. Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press University of Copenhagen, 2000, 12–13. 5. Psychoanalytical analyses of deep comic structures is exemplified in the work of Phillipe Marion (1993) on graphic traces and reader direct mediation. The Marxist approach to comics structures encoded with or resisting indoctrinatory, conventional, and dominant social ideologies is represented in the work of ­Dorfman and Mattelart (1975) and Martin Barker (1989). “In the 1980’s, [with] the establishment of post-modernism as a cultural category, the analysis of popular culture was disengaged from the Marxist line of criticism. … The postmodern perspective questions the structuralist approach, according to which an analysis should lay open the underlying structures of [conservative] meaning in popular cultural texts, [and instead designate] popular culture as polysemic.” Examples of such methods include Barker’s reading of Deconstructing Donald, which combines Foucault, Propp, and Volosinov; Ole Frahm’s Butler/ Deleuze-inspired deconstructive framework on the repetition and destabilization of comics signs; and the after-structuralism work in French and Belgian comics research by Groensteen (1986) on poetic dimension and intentionality or Fresnault Druelle (1988) on supplementarity and third meaning. In Magnussen, Anne and Hans-Christian Christiansen, eds. Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press University of Copenhagen, 2000,16–22. 6. Gabilliet, Jean Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Translated by Bart Beatty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005, xi. 7. Ibid., xi. 8. Tracing the evolution of the sequentially imaged narrative, Beaty and Weiner identify precursors that include examples of Paleolithic cave art, sequences of paintings on papyri and tomb walls in ancient Egypt, architectural friezes from classical Greece and imperial Rome, medieval European tapestries, stained-glass scenes and illuminated books that prefigure William Blake’s anti-industrial and mystical painted narratives in the nineteenth century. Beaty, Bart H. and Stephen Weiner, eds. Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: History, Theme and Technique.

Introduction  17 Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013, 3. Petersen’s work on proto-comics histories and traditions describes preliterate art and mythologies from South African, Native American, and Aboriginal cultures, picture recitation and cyclic narrative texts from Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain sacred literatures, ninth-century Chinese popular scrolls and caricatures, eighth-century Japanese courtly and erotic picture recitation, nineteenth-century Hokusai Manga and eighteenth-century British caricature art. Petersen, Robert S. Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Narratives. Santa Barbara, Denver, Oxford: Praeger, 2011. 9. Gabillet, xi. 10. For discussions related to culturally distinct varieties of comics forms – comics, manga, manhua, bande dessinée, historitas, cergam, fumetti – see the collection of essays in Frederico Zanettin’s Comics in Translation. St. Jerome Publishers, 2008, and John A. Lents’s Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humor Magazines and Picture Books. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001. 11. The examination of postwar mass-culture industries in the context of late capitalism was famously initiated by the Frankfurt school of critical theory, notably in the writings of Adorno, Horkhiemer, Benjamin. The critique describes the rise of incorporated forms of popular culture within fascist and neo-fascist contexts as the institutions of organized capital worked to promote profit motivated consumerist economies. In summary, “every aspect of life is scripted, style is formulaic mediocrity, and image is propaganda” (Weaver 29). Later revisions of this paradigm by the culture critics of the Birmingham Center including H ­ oggart, Williams, Hall, and McRobbie developed the notion of progressive popular cultures that contest dominant identity politics and ideologies. For a review on the establishment of critical theory (Frankfurt School) and cultural studies (Birmingham Center), see John A. Weaver’s Popular Culture Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. 12. Colonial textualities, supported by “the constitutive powers of state apparatus like education and the constitutive field of knowledge within these apparatus,” have been variously documented. For example, Stephen Slemon has listed how Edward Said (1979) examines forms of Orientalism within colonial texts; Talal Asad (1973) and others examine colonial anthropology; Alan Bishop (1990) examines the deployment of Western concepts of mathematics against African schoolchildren; Timothy Mitchell (1988) examines how the professional field of political science came into being through a European colonialist engagement with the cultures of Egypt; Gauri Viswanathan (1989) examines the foundations of English literary studies within the structure of colonial management in India. Slemon, Stephen. “The Scramble for Postcolonialism.” De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson. London, New York: Routledge, 1994, 15–30, 18. 13. Tiffin, Chris and Alan Lawson. “Introduction.” De-Scribing Empire: Post-­ Colonialism and Textuality. London, New York: Routledge, 1994, 1–13, 3. 14. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492– 1797. London, New York: Methuen, 1986, 2. 15. Slemon, Stephen. “The Scramble for Postcolonialism.” De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson. London, New York: Routledge, 1994, 15–30, 18. 16. Ibid., 22. 17. Ibid., 24. Slemon particularly references Homi Bhabha’s work on the productive effects of colonial power, describing his basic argument that “ambivalence is everywhere [as] an effect of colonial discourse. This means that there must

18  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji always be resistance to power within any moment of colonialist articulation [because] colonial representations are always overdeterminations [of their] subject forming strategies.” 18. Timothy Brennan, “The Economic Image-Function of the Periphery,” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, eds. Ania Loomba et al. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, 101–124. See pages 101–112. 19. Enwezar, Okwui. “Rapport des Force: African Comics and their Publics.” Africa Comics. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 17–23, 18. 20. Repetti, Massimo. African Arts. Los Angeles, Summer 2007, Vol. 40, 247. 21. Twentieth-century culture theory has studied the category of popular culture in opposition to elite, cultivated traditions of arts, discourse and life styles as well as local folk traditions, and seen it as enabled by late capitalism and mass communications and production technologies. See Hinds, Motz, and Nelson, eds. Popular Culture: Theory and Methodology: A Basic Introduction. Madison WI: The University Press, 2006, 50–51. The dominant critical paradigms of the Frankfurt school of critical theory and the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies include approaches that read mass-mediated culture as reactionary, used as the instruments of fascist statism and class domination, or, conversely, “popular culture as predicated on a sense of its own alterity [and] marginality,” as well as its congruence with a “model of subalternity [understood as] a supple culture of the colonized which manipulated eclectic signs against the dominant colonial structure.” See Christopher Pinney’s “Introduction: Public, Popular and Other Cultures.” Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, eds. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 1–35, 3–4. 22. Appadurai and Breckenridge remind us that “while there have been several now classic descriptions of public life that draw on European discourses surrounding privacy, civility, citizenship and the state (Arendt 1951; Goffman 1963; Sennett 1976), the most influential recent discussion of the public sphere as a historical formation is contained in Jurgen Habermas’ study The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere 1960.” The depoliticization of public life by the domination and consumption of mass media – as diagnosed by Habermas – is described as “the structural transformation of the public sphere in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as one that involves a move away from a public critically reflecting on its culture to one that consumes it.” Appadurai, Arjun and Carol A. Breckenridge. “Public Modernities in India.” Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, 1–19, 4. 23. Ibid., 1–19, 10. 24. Ibid., 3. 25. Ibid., 6–7. 26. By “loosening the link between the word ‘public’ and the history of civil society in Europe” Appadurai and Breckenridge identify postcolonial public modernity: “public in this usage ceases to have any necessary or predetermined relationship to formal politics, rational communicative action, print capitalism, or the dynamics of the emergence of a literate bourgeoisie. Thus the term becomes emancipated from any specific Euro American master narrative and indicates an arena of cultural contestation in which modernity can become a diversely appropriated experience.” Appadurai, Arjun and Carol A. Breckenridge. “Public Modernities in India.” Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian

Introduction  19 World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, 1–19, 5. 27. Ibid., 5. 28. Ibid., 3. 29. Deborah Poole. Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Quoted in Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, eds. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 9. 30. Freitag, Sandria B. “Visions of the Nation: Theorizing the Nexus between Creation, Consumption and Participation in the Public Sphere.” Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, eds. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 35–76, 39. 31. Dalmia, Vasudha and Rashmi Sadana eds. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 1–9. 32. Kajri Jain. “Mass Production and the Art of the Bazaar.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, eds. Vasudha Dalmia and Rashmi Sadana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 184–205, 185. 33. Chute, Hilary and Marjorie Dekoven. “Comic Books and Graphic Novels.” The Cambridge Introduction to Popular Culture, eds. David Glover and Scott McCracken. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 187–94, 187. 34. Social histories of comic traditions include the works of, for example, David Kunzle, Jean-Paul Gabilliet (Of Comics and Men, 2010, is an overview of the American comic-book industry from the 1930s to the present), R. C. Harvey (The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History, 1996), and Bradford Wright (Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture, 2008). 35. Representational and semiotic criticism include the work of McCloud, Eisner, Carrier’s The Aesthetics of Comics (2000), Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics (2007), Varnum and Gibbons, eds. The Language of Comics: Word and Image (2007). Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics is a seminal study of the formal and semiotic properties of comics. Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics remains a popular introduction to the language of comics. The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History by Robert Harvey is based on studies of auteurs (Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman) and genres such as the Western and the superhero. 36. Thematic studies of, for example, the superhero genre or autographic are well documented. The superhero theme is extensively studied in, for example, Geoff Klock’s How to Read Superhero Comics and Why (New York: Continuum, 2002); Terrence Wandtke, ed., The Amazing Transforming Superhero! Essays on the Revision of Characters in Comic Books, Film and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007); Angela Ndalianis, ed., The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (New York: Routledge, 2009); Will Brooker’s Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon (New York: Continuum, 2001); and Peter Coogan’s Superhero: The Secret Origins of a Genre (Austin, TX: Monkeybrain Books, 2006). Autographics, as described in Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti’s introduction to a special edition of Biography (2008), studies recent visual and textual cultures of autobiography, and begins with a survey of graphic life narratives including the work of Art Spiegelman, Harvey Pekar et al.

20  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji 37. Robert S. Petersen. Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Narrative. Santa Barbara CA: Praeger, 2011, xxii. 38. Chute, Hilary and Marjorie Dekoven. “Comic Books and Graphic Novels.” The Cambridge Introduction to Popular Culture, eds. David Glover and Scott McCracken. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 187–94, 194. 39. We are particularly mindful of the scholarship of, for example, Dorfman/ Mattelart, Aldama, McKinney, Delisle etc. who study issues and conditions of “diversity and otherness” and point to “orientalist and paternalistic attitudes” in existing scholarship. 40. Fredrik Strömberg. Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History. Foreword by Charles Johnson. Korea: Fantagraphics Books, 2003, 23, 24. 41. Ibid., 12. 42. Ibid., 8. 43. Ibid., 14. Johnson explains that although black comic-book artists in the 1960s and 1970s did write about “integration, equality, and brotherhood,” and later black cartoonists did deal with grimmer “inner-city black life” (15–16), he is hoping a for a day when they are “fully and creatively free” (16) and when American audiences “will accept and broadly support stories about black characters that are complex, original … risk-taking, free of stereotypes, and not about race or victimization” (17). For more on stereotypes in comics, see W. A Coupe, “Observations on a Theory of Political Caricature,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 11.1 (Jan. 1969), 79–95; Derek Parker Royal, “Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative,” MELUS, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Fall 1997), 7–22; and Jack Glascock and Catherine Preston-Schreck, “Gender and Racial Stereotypes in Daily Newspaper Comics: A Time Honored Tradition?” Sex Roles, Vol. 51, Nos. 7/8 (October 2004), 423–431. 44. Michael Sheyahshe, A. Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study. North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company, 2008, 192. 45. William H. Foster III. Looking for a Face Like Mine: The History of African Americans in Comics. Waterbury, CT: Fine Tooth Press, 2005, ix. 46. Derek Parker Royal, “Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative.” MELUS, 32.3 (2007), 8. 47. Ibid., 9. 48. Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein, eds. Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, xiii-xiv. 49. Ibid., 1. 50. Ibid., 3. 51. Ibid., 7. 52. Ibid., 140. 53. Frederick Luis Aldama, Multicultural Comics: From ‘Zap’ to ‘Blue Beetle.’ ­Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010, x. 54. Ibid.,173. 55. In the Introduction to Charles Forsdick, Laurence Grove, and Libby ­McQuillan’s The Francophone Bande Dessinée (2005), McQuillan states that although it is “the first collection of essays exclusively dedicated to the study of Francophone BD published in an English-language academic context,” the comic book has been studied extensively in France and Belgium (7). The French and Belgian government both subsidize the art form. In the 1980s, both the French government and the Belgian government opened national institutes of conservation

Introduction  21 and research in the Centre belge de la bande dessinée (CBBD) in Brussels in 1989, and the Centre national de la bande dessinée et de l’image (CNBDI). (Joel E. Vessels in his book Drawing France: French Comics and the Republic says the CNBDI underwent a name change in 2009 to Cité Internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image (CIBDI, 14) in Angoulême, France in 1990 (Forsdick, Grove, and McQuillan 7). The first national festival of the BD, Festival de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême, was held in 1972 and has been held there every year since, with prizes given annually to the best BD (Forsdick, Grove, and McQuillan 10). The 1960s and 1970s saw the many academic studies of the BD at the undergraduate and graduate level that applied mainly semiotic theory to the study of the BD (Forsdick, Grove, and McQuillan 9–10). The 1980s and 1990s saw a series of theoretical works on how to read the BD. These include Pierre Masson’s Lire la bande dessinée (1985), Benoît Peeters’s Case, planche, récit (1991), Jan Baetens and Pascal Lefèvre’s Pour une lecture moderne de la bande dessinée (1993), and Thierry Groensteen’s Système de la bande dessinée (1999) (Forsdick, Grove, and McQuillan 12). The book by McQuillan et al. includes essays that apply various approaches to the study of comics, “from socio-historic, via theories of comedy, to narratalogically based analysis” (Forsdick, Grove, and McQuillan 13). Ann Miller’s Reading bande dessinée: Critical Approaches to the Frenchlanguage comic strip (2007) examines the history of the French comic book from the nineteenth century to the present day and applies various analytical frameworks and critical approaches to the reading of French comic books, such narrative theory, psychoanalysis, national and postcolonial identity, and cultural studies, among others, to study the form of French comic books. Laurence Grove’s more recent Comics in French: the European Bande Dessinée in Context (2010) provides a study of the “technical and formal qualities of the bande dessinée” and takes a chronological approach, providing an overview of French-language comics from the Middle Ages to the contemporary BD. In his book, Grove does not concern himself only with the bande dessinée “but with the notion of French-related text/image culture in general” (8). He includes titles of publications in English on French-language comics and also studies the BD as a cultural phenomenon, suggesting “knowledge of the bande dessinée might be applied to further our understanding of sexism in France, the colonial Other, the popularity of Disneyland Paris, as well as a plethora of other issues” (9). Joel E. Vessels’s Drawing France: French Comics and the Republic (2010) examines the importance and the changing role of the bande dessinée in French culture. As such, “it explores the shifting political and cultural place of the image and the BD through a rough combination of social discourse, governmental policy, and popular culture.” The book studies selections of the BD from different historical periods of French history to analyze the “eternal construction of Frenchness itself … investigating the nation as it transitioned from civic monarchy to civic republic and finally to a multiethnic, multicultural and multitongued nation …” (14). 56. Philippe Delisle, Bande dessinée et imaginaire colonial: Des années 1930 aux années 1980. Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2008), 11. All translations are my own. 57. Philippe Delisle, De “Tintin au Congo” à “Odilon Verjus”: Le missionnaire, héros de la BD belge. Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2011, 7, 9. 58. Delisle, De“Tintin au Congo,” 195.

22  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji 59. Mark McKinney, ed., History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2008, 4. 60. Ibid., 5–6. 61. Ibid., 3. 62. Ibid., 3. 63. Ibid., 5. 64. Ibid., 20. 65. Ibid., 22. 66. McKinney, Mark, The Colonial Heritage of French Comics. Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2011, 1–3. 67. Ibid., 19. 68. Ibid., 12–13. 69. Ibid., 19. 70. Ibid., 20. 71. Ibid., 164. 72. Ibid., 164. 73. McKinney, Mark. Redrawing French Empire in Comics. Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 2013, 3. 74. Ibid., 5–6. 75. Ibid., 7. 76. Ibid., 8. 77. Ibid., 33. 78. There is a rich tradition of Francophone Canadian comics (la bande dessinée québécoise) by Quebec comic-book artists. The annual comic book festival in Quebec, Le Festival de la BD francophone de Québec, has been held every spring in Quebec City since 1988. Among the many Quebec comic-book writers is Guy Delisle, who has written several graphic narratives, mainly travelogues, in comic-book form that deal with themes of otherness and multiculturalism. These include Shenzhen (2003) and Pyongyang (2006) about his travels in China and North Korea respectively, as well as Chroniques birmanes (2007) and Chroniques de Jérusalem (2011) about his visit to Burma (now Myanmar) and Israel. The latter won the Fauve d’Or prize for best album at the Festival de la bande dessinée d’Angoulême in 2012. 79. Massimo Repetti. “African ‘Ligne Claire’: Comics of Francophone Africa.” IJOCA, 9.1 (Spring 2007), 520. 80. Ibid., 522–33. 81. Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier, Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011, 139–140. 82. There are several books, articles, and blogs that discuss the African Francophone bande dessinée. For more, see the article by Massimo Repetti, the book by Odile Casenave and Patricia Célérier, and Christophe ­Cassiau-Haurie and Christophe Meunier’s Cinquante années de bandes dessinées en Afrique francophone. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010. The Gabonese comic-book artist Pahé’s blog is one among several blogs on the African BD. John A. Lent’s Cartooning in Africa (2009) and Comic Art in Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America: A Comprehensive, International Biography (1996) are other examples of books on the subject of African comics. There are also books that deal with comic-book writing in specific African countries, such as Christophe Cassiau-Haurie’s Histoire de la BD congolaise (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010). From November 15, 2006-March 18, 2007,

Introduction  23 the Studio Museum of Harlem in New York City organized a first-ever exhibit in the United States on comic art from Africa called Africa Comics. The works of thirty-two African artists from all over Africa were exhibited. A two-hundredpage catalogue accompanied the exhibition: http://www.studiomuseum.org/ exhibition/africa-comics. 83. Pratt, Marie Louise, qtd. in Mukherjee, Ankhi. “Postcolonial Responses to the Western Canon.” The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature II, ed. Ato Qyuason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 771–801, 781. 84. Chakraborty, Dipesh, qtd. in Mukherjee, Ankhi. “Postcolonial Responses to the Western Canon.” The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature II, ed. Ato Qyuason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 771–801, 781. 85. For example, Spivak’s idea of praxis as “reversing and displacing the apparatus of value coding” or Said’s description of postcolonial emergence as an open textuality, a “family of ideas permanently in discourse” as belated regroupings and redispositions of imperial narratives. In Mukherjee, Ankhi. “Postcolonial Responses to the Western Canon.” The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature II, ed. Ato Qyuason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 771–801, 795. 86. Ibid., 781. 87. Ibid., 781. 88. Coopan, Vilashini. “The Ruins of Empire: The National and Global Politics of America’s Return to Rome.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, eds. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005, 80–100, 85. 89. Ibid., 93. 90. Ibid., 95–97. 91. Revathy Krishnaswamy identifies the current “shared cultural grammar of hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and difference” between “the postcolonial and the global” and describes a growing body of critical analyses on our present global situation. Critical questions posed include the following: “Has globalization enabled the production of postcolonialism or has it eroded its political purchase through incorporation and domestication within a centerless space of capital (Hardt and Negri 2000)? Is postcolonialism complicit with the forces of neoliberal globalism (Ahmad 1992) or a space for uninformed anticapitalist, antiglobalist sentiments (Bhagwati 2004)? Is globalization a euphemism for corporatization and imperial expansion (Brennan) or does it provide postcolonial subjects with a chance to create and inhabit alternative modernities (Appadurai 1996, Hall 2000, Gikandi 2001)? What would it mean to rethink the postcolonial in terms of ‘planetary’ rather than ‘globality’? (Spivak 2003, Gilroy 2005).” In Krishnaswamy, Revathi and John C. Hawley, eds. The Postcolonial and the Global. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 3. 92. Wilson, Janet, Cristina Sandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh, eds. Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millenium. London and New York: Routledge, 2010, 17. 93. Loomba, Ania, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty, eds. “Beyond What? An Introduction.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005, 1–40, 4. 94. Massimo Repetti, discussing contemporary African graphic writing, describes the regional or the diasporic comic text as an interventionist, popular “cosmopolitan cultural form, with no clearly defined territory, no cultural link to a country of origin, and thus closely conforming to Arjun Appadurai’s model for forms of

24  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji globalized culture. [It exists within] a transnational fluidity of people, images and ideas which are neither localized nor confined, made up as they are of fragments of B-movies, fotoromanzi, Brazilian telenovelas, Japanese manga, Hollywood films, glossy magazines, reproductions of classic art, street politics, and orality.” Repetti, Massimo. African Arts. Los Angeles, Summer 2007. Vol 40, 247. 95. Krishna, Shankaran. Globalization and Postcolonialism: Hegemony and Resistance in the Twenty-first Century. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009, 2.

References Aldama, Frederick Luis. Multicultural Comics: From “Zap” to “Blue Beetle.” Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. Globalization. Durham, NC. Duke University Press, 2001. Appadurai, Arjun and Carol A. Breckenridge. “Public Modernities in India.” Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 1–19. Appiah, Anthony Kwame. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Norton, 2007. Beaty, Bart H and Stephen Weiner, eds. Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: History, Theme and Technique. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013. Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: First Mariner Books, 2006. Brennan, Timothy. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. ———. “The Economic Image-Function of the Periphery.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, eds. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 101–124. Cazenave, Odile and Patricia Célérier. Contemporary Francophone African Writers and the Burden of Commitment. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Chute, Hilary and Marjorie Dekoven. “Comic Books and Graphic Novels.” The Cambridge Introduction to Popular Culture, eds. David Glover and Scott McCracken. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 187–94. Coopan, Vilashini. “The Ruins of Empire: The National and Global Politics of America’s Return to Rome.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, eds. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. 80–100. Coupe, W. A. “Observations on a Theory of Political Caricature.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 11.1 (Jan. 1969): 79–95. Print. Dalmia,Vasudha and Rashmi Sadana, eds. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 1–10. Denson, Shane, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein, eds. Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Delisle, Philippe. Bande dessinée et imaginaire colonial: Des années 1930 aux années 1980 Paris: Editions Karthala, 2008.

Introduction  25 ——— De “Tintin au Congo” à “Odilon Verjus”: Le missionnaire, héros de la BD belge. Paris: Editions Karthala, 2011. Dorfman, Ariel and Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in a Disney Comic. International General, 1984. Eisner, Will. Comics and Sequential Art. New York: Norton, 2008. Enwezar, Okwui. “Rapport des Force: African Comics and their Publics.” Africa Comics. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem. 17–23. Forsdick, Charles, Laurence Grove, and Libby McQuillan. The Francophone Bande Dessinée. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005. Foster III, William H. Looking for a Face Like Mine: The History of African Americans in Comics. Waterbury, CT: Fine Tooth Press, 2005. Freitag, Sandra B. “Visions of the Nation: Theorizing the Nexus between Creation, Consumption and Participation in the Public Sphere.” Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, eds. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 35–76. Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Trans. Bart Beatty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Glascock, Jack and Catherine Preston-Schreck. “Gender and Racial Stereotypes in Daily Newspaper Comics: A Time Honored Tradition?” Sex Roles. Vol. 51. Nos. 7/8 (October 2004): 423–431. Print. Gikandi, Simon. “Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality.” South Asian Quarterly. 100:3. 627–58. 2001. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2007. Grove, Laurence. Comics in French: the European Bande Dessinée in Context. London and New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Hall, Stuart. “Conclusion: The Multi-Cultural Question.” In Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entaglements, Transruptions, ed. Barnor Hesse. London: Zed, 2000. 209–41. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Harvey, Robert C. The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1996. Hinds, Harold, Marilyn F. Motz, and Angela Ms. S. Nelson, eds. Popular Culture: Theory and Methodology: A Basic Introduction. Madison WI: The University Press, 2006. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797. London, New York: Methuen, 1986. Jain, Kajri. “Mass Production and the Art of the Bazaar.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture, eds. Vasudha Dalmia and Rashmi Sadana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 184–205. Krishna, Shankaran. Globalization and Postcolonialism: Hegemony and Resistance in the Twenty-first Century. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009. Krishnaswamy, Revathi and John C. Hawley, eds. The Postcolonial and the Global. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Lent, John A. Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humor Magazines and Picture Books. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001. Loomba, Ania, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty, eds. “Beyond What? An Introduction.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 1–40.

26  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji Magnussen, Anne and Hans-Christian Christiansen, eds. “Introduction.” Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press University of Copenhagen, 2000. 7–29. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northhampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993. McKinney, Mark. History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels. University Press of Mississippi, 2008. ——— The Colonial Heritage of French Comics. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool ­University Press, 2011. ——— Redrawing French Empire in Comics. Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State ­University Press, 2013. Mukherjee, Ankhi. “Postcolonial Responses to the Western Canon.” The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature II, ed. Ato Qyuason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 771–801. Parker Royal, Derek. “Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative.” MELUS, 32.3 (2007): 7–22. Print. Petersen, Robert S. Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic ­Narratives. Santa Barbara, Denver, Oxford: Praeger, 2011. Pinney, Christopher. “Introduction: Public, Popular and Other Cultures. Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, eds. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 1–35. Poole, Deborah. Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Repetti, Massimo. African Arts. Los Angeles, Summer 2007. Vol. 40. ——— “New Comics from Africa.” Africa Comics. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem. 241–253. Print. ——— “African ‘Ligne Claire’: Comics of Francophone Africa.” IJOCA. 9.1: Spring 2007. 515–541. Print. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis 1 and 2. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003; 2004. Sheyahshe, Michael. A. Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company, 2008. Slemon, Stephen. “The Scramble for Postcolonialism.” De-Scribing Empire: PostColonialism and Textuality, eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson. London, New York: Routledge, 1994. 15–30. Spiegelman, Art. Maus I. A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. ——— Maus II. A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began. New York, ­Pantheon Books, 1991. Strömberg, Fredrik. Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History. Foreword by Charles Johnson. Korea: Fantagraphics Books, 2003. Tiffin, Chris and Alan Lawson, eds. “Introduction.” De-Scribing Empire: Post-­ Colonialism and Textuality. London, New York: Routledge, 1994. 1–13. Vessels, Joel E. Drawing France: French Comics and the Republic. Jackson, ­Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 2010. Weaver, John A. Popular Culture Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. Wilson, Janet, Cristina Sandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh, eds. Rerouting the ­Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millenium. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Zanettin, Frederico. Comics in Translation. St. Jerome Publishers, 2008.

Part I

Geographies of Contact Gibraltar/Malta/Asia-Pacific

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1 Plural Pathways, Plural Identities Jean-Philippe Stassen’s “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar”1 Michelle Bumatay

In the introduction to the first volume of the French periodical XXI, launched in January 2008, editors Laurent Beccaria and Patrick de Saint-Exupéry cite a return to in-depth reports and the pursuit of innovative approaches to journalism as their main goals. They go on to explain that XXI, as the subtitle “L’Information grand format” (large-format high-quality news) suggests, is committed to providing a high-quality product both at the level of format and content. Subsequently, in addition to a mix of various genres and a close attention to visual layout and design, each issue contains at least one reportage en BD2, starting with “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” (The Visitors of Gibraltar) by Belgian cartoonist Jean-Philippe Stassen, a report on global migration focusing on Gibraltar and the Mediterranean Sea. The report is told through Stassen’s round-trip journey from Belgium to Morocco and back to carry out interviews and to conduct research into the various policies that regulate the movement of people across borders. Like the editors of XXI, Stassen is equally committed to a high-quality product and “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” is simultaneously visually stunning and intellectually engaging. Stassen’s provocative exploration of bande dessinée as a form of expression parallels his philosophical approach to the content of “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar.” That is to say, he challenges existing discourses – mainly from countries in the European Union and in North Africa – used to describe global migration, discourses that generally seek to reduce the multifaceted reality of migration to renewed binaries inherited from the colonial era. In contrast, he offers a dense narrative that thrives on the tension between visual and verbal modes of representation just as it takes advantage of the inherently plural environment of the surface of the bande dessinée page to investigate the dynamic nature of identity in today’s world. Ultimately, he seeks to render the experience of migration as human by establishing a polyvalent narrative that seeks to alter readers’ perception. As with most journalistic bandes dessinées, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” raises awareness about a specific current event, in this case global migration. The underlying goal to humanize the migratory experience while challenging existing sociopolitical discourses at work to control, contain, and influence public opinion about migration and migrants themselves has become an important trend among artists, writers, and filmmakers the world over. In the recent book Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and

30  Michelle Bumatay Racism, Dominic Thomas singles out “the practice of humanizing complex economic, political, and social issues” as “one of the greatest challenges of twenty-first-century globalization.”3 Though Thomas’s book investigates the effect of contemporary global migration on specifically French and African cultures, embedded in such a task, as Thomas argues, is a larger inquiry into the far-reaching history of Europe’s involvement with Africa. Consequently, while “the lure of former colonial centers cannot be underestimated” and “transcolonial connectivity remains a powerful vector in determining the migratory objectives,” contemporary relationships between Europe and Africa have changed and “the Mediterranean has emerged as a privileged site for exploring global dynamics, containing both proximity and distance, constituting a link but also an obstacle and a barrier.”4 Stassen takes up this dual nature of the Mediterranean in “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” and uses it to reconfigure how contemporary migration is understood in Europe. Though “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” chronicles Stassen’s journey to learn more about migratory patterns from Africa to Europe, it is not presented as a first-person narrative. Rather, it is a dense and colorful report of the places ­Stassen visited and the people he met. Like all of his work, it centers on individual people, geographical locations, and the interactions between the two. In focusing on various important geographical locations along south to north migratory trajectories, it explores the range of diversity including but not limited to the experiences of locals, tourists, immigrants, both legal and illegal, and those in the interstices of such overdetermined categories. Using these disparate lived experiences as exemplars, Stassen seeks to alter readers’ points of view and expose them to the possibility of plurality – plural points of view, plural histories, plural cultures, and plural identities – as an alternative to international and national policies and discourses that seek to define and control boundaries and identities. He accomplishes this through strategies that exploit the visual-verbal nature of graphic narratives and by embracing a narrative framework akin to Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory. Throughout “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” Stassen dramatizes the longue durée or long-term nature of history and focuses on the vast range of lived experience in Europe and North Africa through geography and personal accounts. In what follows, I first look at how Stassen attempts to change the reader’s perception from the beginning of the text to allow for plural points of view. Then I focus on how framing informs Stassen’s spatiotemporal representation of the Mediterranean and his illustration of the relationship between barriers and identity. Wrapped up in Stassen’s approach is a correlation between framing and the controlling of borders of all kinds – m ­ etaphysical, historical, psychological, physical, and geographical – the underlying ­driving force for the patrolling of all such borders being one and the same, namely the power to control discourse and to select which narratives and identities are valid – and therefore grant access to unimpeded circulation – and which are not – and therefore deny access, resulting in exploitation, discrimination, persecution, and even loss of life.

Plural Pathways, Plural Identities  31

© Futuropolis/Dist. LA COLLECTION

Figure 1.1  The first page of “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar:” a map of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean Sea.5

Pointing to “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” as a prime example of the current trend to address global migratory patterns, Thomas cites the first page of Stassen’s reportage en BD as indicative of “the symbiotic levels of interpenetration between Africa in Europe and Europe in Africa” where “not only is history blurred and ambiguous, but so is geography, revealing complex colonial and postcolonial relations.”6 More than this, however, the first page also represents Stassen’s logic for the entire bande dessinée by establishing an alternative visual-verbal framework for understanding global migration, a framework very much in tune with Rothberg’s multidimensional memory and one that takes into account the long-term historical causes and effects of socioeconomic and political fluctuations on culture, lived experience, and identity formation. To do this, Stassen presents the reader with a splash page of an instantly recognizable yet skewed image of the Mediterranean Sea (Figure 1.1).7 The map of the Mediterranean appears skewed because it

32  Michelle Bumatay has been turned ninety degrees to the left of how maps are usually presented so that north, rather than being at the top, is now to the left and south to the right. This shift in representation forces readers to reorient themselves with regards to the region. Similarly, the overlaid text that accompanies this opening image purposefully foregrounds how one’s point of view informs one’s perception of the world: “Le détroit de Gibraltar, par lequel pénètre l’océan Atlantique dans la mer Méditerranée (ou qui ouvre la Méditerranée sur l’Atlantique), est l’endroit où l’Afrique et l’Europe sont les plus proches” (The Straits of Gibraltar, by which the Atlantic Ocean penetrates the Mediterranean (or that opens the Mediterranean to the Atlantic), is the point at which African and Europe are at their closest).8 The parenthetical ­alternative – where the Mediterranean penetrates the Atlantic – demonstrates that even geographical awareness is relative. Stassen immediately dispels the possibility and legitimacy of a singular, all-encompassing understanding of the geographic region, let alone of the contemporary political ramifications of boundaries both natural and manmade. Furthermore, that such discrepancies in understanding and representation exist where Africa and Europe are at their closest speaks to the vast gulf between competing discourses and the reality of everyday life. This first page stresses the importance of framing, the circulation of preconceived notions, and the ways in which meaning is produced and, as a kind of introduction, alerts the reader to the importance of such factors as they relate to migration. It also hints at the multifaceted relationship between space, discourse, migration, and identity. Bringing Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory into dialogue with “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” sheds light on Stassen’s visual and verbal approaches to such a dynamic relationship. In Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Rothberg, combining Holocaust studies and decolonization, rejects a zero-sum view of memory and offers in contrast the notion of multidirectional memory that takes into account plural and overlapping histories and identities. Central is the understanding that memory both mediates the past to serve the present and incorporates both individual and collective memories. Underlying Rothberg’s main argument is his rejection “that a straight line runs from memory to identity and that the only kinds of memories and identities that are therefore possible are ones that exclude elements of alterity and forms of commonality with others.”9 Rather, according to Rothberg, “pursuing memory’s multidirectionality encourages us to think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others; both the subjects and spaces of the public are open to continual reconstruction.”10 The surface of a bande dessinée page can be said to echo this view of the public sphere as a dynamic place and Rothberg makes this connection himself, citing as an example the tension of the multiple layers of representation at play in Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.11 This connection is especially keen in “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” for

Plural Pathways, Plural Identities  33 its preoccupation with geographical space and how it is represented reflects Rothberg’s model of public space as a continually changing discursive site that informs identity. The inventive approach to the visual layout of the page and its relationship to content demonstrated on the first page continues throughout Stassen’s round-trip journey in “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar.” Each geographical location is its own discursive site where the past and present collide. The fractured surface of the page is echoed by the layering effect of various historical facts and different trajectories onto the same physical landscape. Just as the reorientation of the map of the Mediterranean on the first page demands readers consider alternative perspectives, Stassen’s use of framing, visually and verbally, brings the notion of competing narratives into focus. The text itself is fittingly divided into sections that correspond to each of the locations Stassen visited. Each new section is introduced by a heading that usually takes up the horizontal top or bottom portion of the page and consists of two panels: one panel showing a small map of each location, consistently little more than solid green land masses with winding coastlines and the blue sea onto which Stassen provides the various names of each city or region, and one panel with factual information, mainly historical in nature, about the region. In these short headings Stassen draws out the polyvalence of overlapping narratives and histories to contextualize the representations of his encounters. For while each of the city maps lacks details, superimposed on the maps are numerous monikers for each city, often in different languages (French, Spanish, Arabic, and English) and sometimes consisting of alternate historical names, which foregrounds the plurality of competing linguistic and cultural value systems. The heading for Gibraltar, for example, lists the term in French, Arabic, and, in parentheses, the English term Mountain of Tarik. With just these three terms, Stassen alludes to Gibraltar’s long history and the various political entities responsible for maintaining power over such a strategically advantageous geographical location. The plurality inherent in the multiple monikers for each of the cities is further elaborated in the various facts Stassen chooses to accompany each new heading that frame key historical moments and socioeconomic and political information regarding each location. To be sure, framing is crucial in bandes dessinées and it is also important for Stassen’s representation of migration and migrants. Moreover, Stassen’s acute attention to framing in the headings to each geographical location has strong affinities with multidirectional memory. According to Rothberg, “framing entails decisions about who is permitted to claim the right to speak about issues of injustice affecting them.”12 Bringing together ostensibly disparate information, new understanding is possible, as Rothberg asserts: “although forms of anachronism constitute different types of ‘error’ when perceived from a historicist perspective, they can also be powerfully subversive and demystifying in the ways that they expose the ideological assumptions of historicist categorization.”13 In “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” the facts that accompany Gibraltar

34  Michelle Bumatay and Tarifa are particularly revealing of the power of such anachronisms. Stassen points out that Tarifa, in addition to being the most southern city on the European continent, was ruled by Muslims from 711 to 1292 when Christians took over, and that Muslims are responsible for constructing what is known today as the old city. For Gibraltar, Stassen adds a note on the etymology of the city’s name, explaining that the term Mountain of Tarik reminds us that at the beginning of the eighth century, Gibraltar was “le point de départ de l’expansion musulmane dans la peninsula ibérique” (the point of departure for Muslim expansion in the Iberian peninsula) and since the eighteenth century has been a British enclave in Spain.14 These historical facts serve as crucial moments that paradoxically seem to be forgotten but nevertheless continue to influence and resonate with contemporary geopolitics. Certainly Gibraltar, as a British enclave in Spain, is mirrored literally and figuratively by Ceuta, Spain’s enclave across the Mediterranean in Morocco. Stassen also applies this multilayered approach to the issue of immigration in Europe, using his home town of Liège and his own life as anecdotal evidence of a much more complex situation than that presented in the media and by conservative European politicians. Stassen alludes to his personal connection to the history of immigration in Belgium on the first page when, after describing Gibraltar’s unique geopolitical position, he explains that his oldest friend, Hafid, was born in Belgium to parents who came from Tangier in Morocco. He also points out the first time he ever set foot on the African continent long ago was in the port of Tangier with Hafid and his family. Later, to accompany the heading for Liège, Stassen provides a short history of immigration in Belgium since the middle of the twentieth century, using people from his own everyday life to demonstrate the shifts in official discourse regarding immigrants. He explains that the need for manual laborers in post-war Belgium led to a first wave of “chosen” immigrants from Italy and a second wave of “chosen” immigrants from Morocco, the included quotation marks around the word chosen ironically dispelling the positive connotations with being chosen. Stassen then explains that immigration policy in Belgium became stricter as a result of the economic crisis in Europe of 1974. This short history lesson on immigration necessarily stresses the already complex cultural pluralism in Belgium and hints at the inability of the blanket term “immigrant” to adequately reflect the sociopolitical reality in ­Belgium. It also echoes French historian Gérard Noiriel’s work demonstrating France’s long history of immigration dating back to before decolonization and highlighting France’s subsequent multiculturalism. The selected historical facts throughout “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” paint a much broader picture of the movement of people and fluctuation of border control based on shifts in political power. This larger historical angle encompasses an investigation of the contemporary moment to contest and question the ideological, sociopolitical, and physical violence of enforcing current borders, a violence that problematizes identity by assuming identity as singular, nationally defined, and, most importantly, visibly distinguishable.

Plural Pathways, Plural Identities  35 The main thrust of Stassen’s investigation hinges on an exploration of the discrepancies between various lived experiences in each location. In each section, he introduces various individuals who, when considered together, project an economic and ideological gulf between those who have the proper political status and, more importantly, the correct cultural background (including skin color) to benefit from unrestricted movement across borders and those who might or might not have the adequate political status but who nevertheless are physically marked as foreign, specifically nonwhite, and therefore subject to not only scrutiny but also the threat of death in attempting to pass through and across such borders. Ceuta, as a uniquely situated city, both geographically on the North African coast and politically as a Spanish enclave – it is covered as part of the Schengen Area – represents an extreme example of the discrepancies between the lived experience of individuals. Stassen visually marks the gulf separating the lived experiences of Europeans and those trying to gain entrance to the Schengen Area in a large panel at the bottom of the page adjacent to the heading for Ceuta. Even though this panel comes before the heading for Ceuta, the scene it depicts takes place in Ceuta and serves as the transition from the European continent to the African continent in the text. The large panel takes up the entire bottom half of the page. In the background is a depiction of the Mediterranean with a small coastline in the upper left-hand corner. In the foreground are three people: a European couple on the left and a young black man on the right. The couple on the left metonymically represent Spanish citizens who travel to Ceuta to take advantage of the climate and substantially lower-priced goods; the man has cartons of cigarettes under one arm and both he and the woman carry shopping bags. In direct contrast on the right is Yacouba, a young man from Mali with a Senegalese passport and a Schengen visa. While the couple complains about the heat, Yacouba is sweating, and as his crouched posture and anxious expression suggest, it is not solely due to the weather. Traveling to and, hopefully, passing through Ceuta for Yacouba is neither an easy experience nor a leisurely one. Indeed, Stassen’s comment on the following page elaborates on Yacouba’s nervous comportment: “Yacouba ne le dit pas, mais on sent bien que, pour lui, être un Noir ici, à Ceuta, ce n’est pas quelque chose de … naturel” (Yacouba doesn’t say it, but you get the feeling that, for him, being Black here, in Ceuta, it is not something … natural).15 This observation alludes to the culture of discrimination and prejudice that is part and parcel of the political and cultural backlash in Europe and North Africa against migrants. Stassen’s choice of the term “visitor” from the title is an ambiguous one. While it points to a transitory state and can refer to tourists and migrants alike, the term, with its positive connotations of financial gain as a result of the tourist industry, glosses over the hardships and discrimination faced by some visitors and not others while exposing questions of identity. To delve deeper into questions of discrimination and identity and to acquire a greater sense of the impact of migration on Ceuta, Stassen

36  Michelle Bumatay introduces a sinister-looking local taxi driver (according to Stassen’s description) and a local man named Mohammed who metonymically represent conflicting views regarding migration and identity. The differing opinions of these two men illustrates how “immigration today has come to concern both facets of the term, namely, the control of external factors (migration, border control, security) and the internal dynamic of ethnic and race relations, integration, and multiculturalism.”16 The nameless taxi driver embodies outright prejudice towards non-Europeans, locals and migrants alike. Though Stassen does not directly comment on the taxi driver’s systematic dismissal of everyone not of European origin, he counters this narrow point of view with the introduction of Mohammed, whose defining characteristic is precisely his plural identity. In his own words, Mohammed explains, “Je suis fier d’être marocain mais je suis bien content d’avoir un passeport espagnol. …” (I am proud to be Moroccan, but I am also very happy to have a Spanish passport)17 and again later, “mon passeport, il est espagnol, même si je suis marocain” (my passport, it is Spanish, even if I am Moroccan).18 Mohammed is acutely aware of the injustice and arbitrariness of such a position and in a sense becomes a surrogate for Stassen by questioning the validity of the injustices suffered by migrants asking: Tous ces gens-là, tu sais: les Indiens, les Ethiopiens et les gens de tous les pays comme ça, ils sont des êtres humains comme toi et moi, non? Alors, pourquoi, toi et moi, on peut passer les frontières alors que, eux, ils doivent ruser et voler pour le faire? Tu trouves ça juste que les Français, les Espagnols et les Belges, mêmes s’ils sont laids, même s’ils ne connaissent même pas l’histoire, ils puissent passer juste parce qu’ils ont un passeport particulier?19 (All those people, you know: the Indians, the Ethiopians, and the people from all those countries like that, they are human like you and me, no? So then, why, you and me, we can cross borders while they must use cunning and steal to do it? Do you find it just that the French, the Spanish, and the Belgians, even if they’re ugly, even if they don’t even know history, they can pass just because they have a specific passport?) The people to whom Mohammed refers are visually present though silent throughout the scene. Interspersed with images of the taxi driver and Mohammed are images of migrants – visibly not European through their skin color and their garments – either constantly in motion in search of a means of crossing the Mediterranean Sea or seated, waiting for an elusive opportunity. In both instances, the silent figures are also marked by their expressions of despair and resignation. Mohammed understands that official documentation is paradoxically vital and also arbitrary. At the same time, he is also acutely aware of the injustice of cultural discrimination that underlines the governing powers that regulate international travel. Indeed,

Plural Pathways, Plural Identities  37 his practicality regarding his own situation reflects the contentious nature of identity in today’s world that, through discrimination, prejudice, restriction, and persecution, effect vast differences in lived experiences. At the heart of such differences is the correlation between political borders and the active erection, enforcement, surveillance, and control of such boundaries. Dominic Thomas rightly contends: “if migration has emerged as a key geometric coordinate of globalization today, then so too has the concern with controlling the planetary circulation of human beings, particularly when it comes to the African continent.”20 Ceuta represents a particularly extreme example where geopolitical topographies collide violently with socioeconomic and cultural spaces, and Stassen provides an entire page to introduce this particular city and to emphasize the impact policing agencies have on individuals’ lives, as seen in Figure 1.2. Ceuta’s location in North

© Futuropolis/Dist. LA COLLECTION

Figure 1.2  Stassen’s depiction of Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in Morocco.21

38  Michelle Bumatay Africa coupled with its unique international status as part of the European Union make it a particularly important liminal, transitory place of privilege that is highly regulated. Consequently, Stassen’s visual treatment of Ceuta is telling regarding the palpable tension surrounding the city. In Figure 1.2, the second panel after the small map of the city and the last panel on the page, both show a barbed-wire fence. These book-ending panels enhance an awareness of man-made barriers while also drawing attention to what is ostensibly being protected. In the middle of the page is a horizontal panel that shows the beach at night with a sign in the foreground in Spanish that prohibits certain animals from the beach. With the inclusion of this sign, Stassen implies that the guiding logic of the policing forces in Ceuta posits African migrants in the same manner as unwanted animals on the beach. It is Stassen’s intention to draw out the rhetoric that strips migrants of their humanity and individuality. Similarly, this page demonstrates not only the desire to regulate the movement of bodies but also the desire to limit the enjoyment of leisure to a privileged few. With the last image of the fence, Stassen explains that since the end of the “modernization” of the barriers (the quotation marks around the word “modernization” belie potentially positive connotations associated with modernization), no clandestine immigrants have made it across. The book-ending of the images of the barbed wire fence in Figure 1.2 is doubly compounded and visually echoed a few pages later at the end of the section devoted to Ceuta when Stassen visually depicts the “modernization” of the barriers to illustrate how the increase in aggressive border control has greatly affected both the physical and psychological landscape in Morocco and Spain. The page consists of three horizontal panels. The first two are schematic representations of the barrier around Ceuta before and after modernization and the third shows a young Nigerian woman in front of the myriad fences who has been trying, unsuccessfully, to cross into Ceuta. The two panels that demonstrate the modernization of the barrier are more reminiscent of blueprints that policing entities might use. Accordingly, to demonstrate the emboldened efficacy of the modernized barrier, Stassen switches to using stick figures to represent migrants. This shift in visual verisimilitude brings to bear on the various political discourses that seek to dehumanize migrants, resonating with the sign on the beach in Ceuta in that the shift in visual register renders migrants as a faceless mass of hopeless figures. Stassen’s use of stick figures here is ironic when contrasted with the stunning depictions of the people he met and interviewed, including the Nigerian woman shown in the third panel. Stassen uses Yacouba’s journey towards France as a guiding thread to track the trajectory, both physical and psychological, of migrants who successfully cross the natural and man-made obstacles into Europe, meeting back up with him on a bus in El Ejido in Spain. Through the tension between the pristine images of El Ejido and the text surrounding them, ­Stassen exposes the dreary reality awaiting those such as Yacouba who risk

Plural Pathways, Plural Identities  39 everything, even their lives, to penetrate the Schengen Area in search of economic opportunities and a better life. The many shades of blue and white for the sky, sea, clean roads, and buildings in El Ejido and the prodigious use of straight lines and right angles connote a sense of order and tranquility but also sterility. In contrast, surrounding the images of El Ejido, Stassen provides written text of his conversations with Yacouba, pieces of overheard conversations among European tourists traveling through El Ejido, and a conversation with a local Moroccan man regarding African immigrants in Spain. Highlighted in these conversations are two interrelated phenomena. On the one hand, Yacouba’s struggle to get in contact with his friends (an intricate network of African immigrants in Europe) to find work underlines the precarious political and economic status of immigrants once inside the Schengen Area. On the other hand, the complaints of the European tourists that El Ejido lacks culture, coupled with the Moroccan man’s lament for the poor quality of life for immigrant workers from Eastern Europe and Africa, point to the new world order in which the economic gap and its attendant sociocultural consequences are worsening. Further emphasizing this gap, Stassen couples an image of neatly arranged produce with an explanation that the availability of such agricultural abundance is facilitated by the violent exploitation of local resources and the equally violent exploitation of undocumented workers: “La pleine forme économique d’El Ejido repose sur l’exploitation violente des ressources en eau de la région et sur l’exploitation tout aussi violente d’une main-d’œuvre sous-payée, en grande partie constituée d’immigrés sans papiers” (The whole economic system of El Ejido rests upon the violent exploitation of water resources in the region and upon the equally violent exploitation of underpaid labor, made up for the most part by undocumented immigrants).22 It is at this moment when, in an attempt to alleviate Yacouba’s worry, Stassen turns to the story of another trajectory mapped onto the same landscape, that of Walter Benjamin.23 The recourse to Benjamin’s tragic flight from Nazi persecution during World War II and his attempt to cross into Spain from France – the directly opposite trajectory of Yacouba – is a powerful moment in the text. It not only points to the fluctuating porousness of politically defined borders and their attendant operations of surveillance, it also exposes the palimpsestic nature of history. Furthermore, the particular choice of Benjamin’s flight is pertinent, considering Rothberg’s multidirectional memory. Indeed, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” functions as a kind Benjaminian constellation of history through the mapping of multiple narratives onto the same landscape, as seen with the city headings. Subsequently it problematizes contemporary depictions of migration. Benjamin’s attempted escape alludes directly to fascism, thus providing, as Rothberg puts it, “an image of encounter in which different temporalities collide and in which movement and stasis are held in tension.”24 The relationship established between the violence of World War II (through Benjamin’s trajectory) and the effects of decolonization (in the form of contemporary

40  Michelle Bumatay migrations) corresponds neatly to Rothberg’s underlying principle in Multidirectional Memory. That is to say, projecting Benjamin’s trajectory onto the same landscape as that of Yacouba, Stassen creates a productive palimpsest that, as with multidirectional memory, “allows the critic to grasp time as dense with overlapping possibilities and dangers”25 and therefore generate a new understanding of the present. By activating a broader understanding of the relationship between identity and discrimination, it challenges the authority of policing and surveillance entities, as well as calls into question the institutions that continue to fan the violence of a binary us/them logic carried over from European colonialism. Ultimately, Stassen’s palimpsest draws out parallels between fascist Spain that led to Benjamin’s suicide and the violence, prejudice, and discrimination in Europe today towards non-­ European migrants that have allowed, and continue to allow, for hundreds of thousands of migrants’ deaths in the Mediterranean Sea and the Sahara ­desert. For Rothberg, the possibility of multidirectionality “provides a way of coming to terms with political extremity because it does not assume that ‘civilization’ has left ‘barbarism’ behind.”26 Included in this comparison is a correlation between the barbarism of European colonialism and its renewed afterlife in the postcolonial era, as well as a condemnation of any and all entities that seek to strip individuals of their humanity and their life. The closing scene of “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” alludes to this tension between civilization and barbarism through the complex issue of identity. In the closing scene, Stassen’s return to an unnamed but nevertheless recognizable Liège is reminiscent of Marlow’s arrival in Belgium at the end of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.27 Though Stassen’s own journey to the heart of the unknown, in this case a kind of political unknown demarcated by the Schengen Agreement and unevenly policed at various geographic ­intervals, does not lead him to any singular Kurtz-like figure, it does bring him face to face with the horror of the mistreatment of others based on ideological and politically motivated stances. However, his subsequent return to Liège does echo Marlow’s in its sober tone and its focus on death. Whereas Kurtz dies far from home in Heart of Darkness, at the end of “Les Visiteurs de ­Gibraltar,” Stassen introduces two deaths – those of Hafid’s father and of the father of one of Hafid’s friends, Rachid – to call into question the notion of home itself. As this subdued end to Stassen’s journey highlights, the term visitor or guest, as in guest worker, is problematic and in tension with self-defined identities. The differing opinions between Hafid and his friend regarding the repatriation of their respective fathers imply that immigrant communities are not homogenized spaces. Whereas Rachid is trying to raise the funds to have his father’s body sent back to Algeria to be buried, Hafid states that his own father was buried in Liège next to his mother, explaining that “on n’allait pas l’envoyer là-bas [à Tanger]: on est tous ici, non?” (We weren’t going to send his body over there [to Tangier]: we’re all here, aren’t we?). As with most of Stassen’s work, local locales as indicators of identity supersede nationally aligned identities and he ends on this notion of ici or

Plural Pathways, Plural Identities  41 here – in this case Liège – as a driving force for self-identification and selfawareness. Though the choice to determine one’s definition of ici speaks of agency, the enormous sense of loss – of one’s parent, one’s potential homeland, and ultimately one’s origins – that saturates this final moment and, subsequently, the reality of migration presents the reader with the task of rethinking the broader impact of migration. This reportage en BD speaks to and enacts plurality on many levels. At the level of its publication in XXI and packaging as a reportage en BD, “Les  Visiteurs de Gibraltar” enacts a transgression of mainstream genre distinctions as a non-fiction bande dessinée. Similarly, Stassen is presented simultaneously as a cartoonist and journalist. Most importantly, however, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” makes use of the fragmented and plural nature of the surface of the page and the co-presence of verbal and visual modes of representation to engage readers in working through an understanding of contemporary migration. Applying specific framing techniques to the verbal and visual content, Stassen offers a plurality of different perceptions of the Mediterranean and of migrants that situates contemporary global migration in a broader framework informed by and in dialogue with the past. Through the generation of links across time and space, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” casts contemporary anti-immigrant discourses alongside European colonialism and imperialism, thus demonstrating the reconfiguration of prejudice and racism underlying the enhanced aggression of borderpatrol entities. Ultimately, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” is a call for justice at the personal, everyday level as Stassen seeks to humanize the migrant experience in an attempt to alter the social and cultural treatment of migrants in Europe and throughout the Mediterranean. Notes 1. Jean-Philippe Stassen, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” XXI (January-March 2008). 156–185. (The Visitors of Gibraltar). All translations are my own. 2. This term, translated loosely as “comics journalism” refers to an investigative journalistic bande dessinée. The term bande dessinée de reportage has also been in use in the French-speaking world for the last two decades to describe journalistic graphic narratives, Maltese-born American cartoonist Joe Sacco and Stassen being two of the most prominent cartoonists to produce such texts and influence the development of the genre. 3. Dominic Thomas, Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 168. 4. Thomas, Africa and France, 162. 5. Stassen, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” 157. The Straits of Gibraltar, by which the Atlantic Ocean penetrates the Mediterranean (or that opens the Mediterranean to the Atlantic), is the point at which African and Europe are at their closest; at its narrowest, only a small fifteen kilometers separates the Spanish and Moroccan banks. But everyone knows this, here and there, there and here. The parents of my oldest friend were born at the entrance to the straits of Gibraltar, on the

42  Michelle Bumatay Moroccan side, in Tangier. He was born in Belgium, in Liège, like me. It was with him long ago that I first stepped foot on the African continent, it was in the port of Tangier. He is my oldest friend and his name is Hafid. And that is to say, from now on, I will speak no more of myself (even if, in following scenes, I am always hidden in a corner drinking a glass of wine or smoking a cigarette). 6. Thomas, Africa and France, 163. 7. Stassen, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” 157. 8. Stassen, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” 157. 9. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 4–5. 10. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 5. 11. Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 10. 12. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 20. 13. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 25. 14. Stassen, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” 174. 15. Stassen, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” 165. 16. Thomas, Africa and France, 7. Italics in original. 17. Stassen, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” 167. 18. Stassen, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” 168. 19. Stassen, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” 168. 20. Thomas, Africa and France, 9. 21. Stassen, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” 165. (In Ceuta. Yacouba doesn’t say it, but you get the feeling that, for him, being Black here, in Ceuta, it is not something  … natural. Access to and the resting of certain types of animals on the beach are prohibited (article 18). “If I pass through here, it’s because it costs me less. Um…. First I took Moroccan Royal Air from Dakar to Casablanca, then the train for Tangier, and the bus to here. Now, all I have to do is cross the sea.” Yacouba must go to the ferry port. He takes leave under a large sign in four languages (Spanish, English, French, and German) upon which the authorities of the city of Ceuta welcome him (“Welcome to Ceuta, an Open City”). “Well, until we see each other again, God willing.” Since the end of construction to modernize the barrier separating the Moroccan and Spanish (the Fence) ­territories, the “assaults” of migrants hoping to penetrate the Schengen Area (to which Ceuta belongs) have become impossible. The last time someone successfully crossed this high-tech wire fence in secrecy, it was precisely because of the overly sophisticated new equipment installed. There was a storm that night….) 22. Stassen, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” 180. 23. The image of Yacouba with the Spanish countryside behind him is an exact replica of the image of Yacouba in Ceuta when he is first introduced to the reader. In both instances, Stassen positions Yacouba in the lower right-hand corner of the panel in the foreground with an anxious expression, sweat running down his face and holding open his Senegalese passport to demonstrate its validity. The repetition of the exact same image of Yacouba suggests that even though he has crossed the Mediterranean successfully, being in Europe and being black is just as difficult as in North Africa. In both instances, Yacouba is aware of the precariousness of his life and livelihood. 24. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 44. 25. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 80.

Plural Pathways, Plural Identities  43 26. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 80. 27. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness plays an influential role in Stassen’s work and Stassen has even published a French translation of Conrad’s text to which he added illustrations and, with French historian Sylvain Venayre, contextualizing articles that explore the relationship between Conrad’s quintessential colonialist text and the contemporary moment. See Joseph Conrad, Jean-Philippe Stassen, and Sylvain Venayre. Cœur des ténèbres: Précédé d’un avant-poste du Progrès (Paris: Futuropolis-Gallimard, 2006).

References Conrad, Joseph, Jean-Philippe Stassen, and Sylvain Venayre. Cœur des ténèbres: Précédé d’un avant-poste du Progrès. Paris: Futuropolis-Gallimard, 2006. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. ——— Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Stassen, Jean-Philippe. “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” XXI (January-March 2008): 156–185. Thomas, Dominic. Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013.

2 Joe Sacco’s “Prying Outsiders” Marginalization, Graphic Novel Form, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Representation Sam Knowles By combining eyewitness reportage with the political and philosophical perspectives of those he meets, Sacco tells stories in which the experiences, memories, and voices systematically excluded from mainstream news coverage – those pushed aside, to the margins of history – are recuperated.1

In 1999, the University at Buffalo Art Gallery, New York, hosted an exhibition of the work of “comics journalist” Joe Sacco.2 Curated by – and with the above catalogue introduction from – Lisa Fischman, the show, “War Junkie,” situated Sacco primarily as a visual artist. Although his work involves eyewitness reportage in presenting a series of anthropological interviews and stories from a variety of war zones – from World War II Malta to 1990s Eastern Europe via the twentieth-century Gaza Strip and the first war in the Persian Gulf – the exhibition was to be assessed in terms of the university art gallery. Sacco’s comics had become detached from the politically troubled arenas in which they were developed and from the war-torn landscapes – and consequently devastated personal narratives – on which they focused. Fischman acknowledged this: “the gallery installation of Sacco’s work changes its meaning, and trades some private pleasures for more public ones … replac[ing] the casual freedom of reading comics with a more formal visual encounter.”3 In presenting Sacco’s comics in this environment, the gallery provided a fascinating perspective on his work, exploring a duality that was recently addressed in an interview with Bart Beaty, author of Comics versus Art (2012): It is … easy to imagine a world in which some cartoonists are welcomed into the art world. … The obvious pitfall is that in an effort to avoid being absorbed into a larger art world, the comics world runs the risk of simply replicating the biases of what they’re trying to avoid.4 According to Beaty, the transferral of comics art into the arena of the art gallery paradoxically both promotes and undermines the artist’s creative purpose. In Sacco’s case, the implications of such a move are further complicated by the fact that this simultaneously supported and weakened creativity is also a form of ethical engagement with his subject matter.

Joe Sacco’s “Prying Outsiders”  45 In this chapter, I explore the ways in which Joe Sacco’s work negotiates various paradoxes, including those opened up in the Buffalo exhibition and developed by Beaty. Predominantly, I analyze Sacco’s comic “Kushinagar” (2012), which recounts his experiences in a poverty-stricken region of Uttar Pradesh, in northern India, an example of his work that, while eschewing the wartime settings of the comics in the Buffalo exhibition, demonstrates Sacco’s representation of, in Fischman’s words, “those pushed aside.”5 First, however, I provide a short introduction to Sacco’s life and work in order to trace the reasoning behind his focus on deprived circumstances in times of war and peace alike; as war reporter, cartoonist, and graphic author, Sacco has spent two decades immersed in the practical realities of postcolonial, marginalizing, other-ing politically oppressive situations. Then, focusing on “Kushinagar,” I look at various dismissals of Sacco’s enterprise. While his interactions with the locals in Gurumiha Mafitola hamlet, Kushinagar, are comparable to the empathetic, sensitive dialogues that have marked his career as an “eyewitness,”6 in Kushinagar his involvement is rejected as that of a “prying outsider”7 and the “insulting and injuring” Western creator of a “perverted cartoon.”8 These judgments are passed not only by some of those whose stories feature in the work but also by a vocally unappreciative member of the initial audience for “Kushinagar” in its incarnation as an online comic. In the course of the chapter, I follow the ways in which Sacco establishes himself, both generally and specifically as a character within his own comic, in opposition to the dissenting voices of those who feel “insult[ed]” by his work, and ask how this complicates a dichotomous presentation of Western observer/“subaltern” subject.9 Criticisms that place Sacco as a “prying outsider” are ironic, given the author’s history as a perennial migrant, a transnational individual, and in many ways not at all a stereotypical Westerner whose origins would seem to place him far from what Beaty describes, “simply replicating the biases of what [he is] trying to avoid.” Rachel Cooke’s Sacco interview starts by describing an “American cartoonist” but then makes explicit his numerous national affiliations: Joe Sacco was born in Malta in 1960. His family emigrated, first to Australia and then … to America when he was just a boy. … “In ­Australia, there were a lot of Europeans and they would all meet up and the commonality was the [Second World] war. … I guess I realised conflict was just a part of life.”10 Sacco makes reference to this in another comic in Journalism, “The Unwanted.” He begins “The Unwanted” in medias res, plunging into his ­subject – the migration of North African refugees across the Mediterranean via asylum on the Maltese archipelago – with a series of interviews conducted with those affected on Malta, from racist tradespeople to anxious parents. Only after several pages does Sacco, in his own words, “come clean”: the

46  Sam Knowles author “was born in Malta. [His] family immigrated [sic] to Australia when [he] was a baby ... and the Australian government, eager to populate its large continent with white-faced Europeans, paid most of [their] passage.”11 This is more than a declaration of interest. Sacco tacitly acknowledges the institutional racism in Australia that allowed the passage of his own family out of Malta, establishing the atmosphere of “The Unwanted” – and of his work as a whole – as one in which racial discrimination will be continually foregrounded and questioned. It is this acknowledgement of his own privilege, alongside an interrogation of the unfair, divisive treatment of others, that has driven Sacco’s engagement with racially motivated conflict throughout his career, from the early realization that “conflict was just a part of life”12 to later graphicnovel explorations of the narratives of “those pushed aside.”13 After ­studying journalism at college, Sacco was “unable to find ‘a job writing … hard-hitting, interesting pieces that would really make some sort of difference’,”14 and had a period of itinerancy, “criss-cross[ing] the globe” and publishing comics about his adventures.15 This culminated in a seminal visit to the Palestinian Occupied Territories in the early 1990s, which marked his first significant engagement with wartime racial injustices and led to the comic series Palestine (1993–95), “show[ing] the human effects of the Israeli occupation and subsequent intifada that [went] unreported in the mainstream media.”16 This “accessible, thoughtful, and moving book of Middle East political journalism … [presented] through the innovative use of the dynamic medium of comics”17 won the American Book Award in 1996, after which came War Junkie (1997, on which the Buffalo gallery exhibition was based) and then a series of works focusing on time spent by Sacco in Eastern Europe in the mid-1990s: Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95 (2000), The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo (2003), and War’s End: Profiles from Bosnia 1995–96 (2005). Sacco returned to Palestine for the 2009 work Footnotes in Gaza, and short pieces from throughout this twenty-year period of engagement with the marginalized and the suffering are included in regular collections like Journalism, which features the cartoonist’s trademark graphic-novel depictions of interviews with the inhabitants of the places he visits conducted by Sacco himself. The predominance of sites of conflict and hardship in Sacco’s comics, from the Middle East to Eastern Europe and Malta to India, led Lisa F ­ ischman to describe his work as “born of a compulsion to witness, to see firsthand and record a more fully complicated … history of the places, peoples, and events most global audiences encounter as flat shadows on a TV screen.”18 This drive towards global empathy is initially impressive, as Sacco’s rise to prominence has coincided with a period of ever-increasing media exposure to war that appears to have desensitized the consumers of narratives of ­conflict. By an interesting coincidence, Sacco’s career in comics journalism took a conflict-centered turn around the time that Jean B ­ audrillard was discussing the extent to which war was becoming a hyper-real, media-filtered

Joe Sacco’s “Prying Outsiders”  47 experience: “war is [no longer] measured by being unleashed but by its speculative unfolding in an abstract, electronic, and informational space.”19 There is, however, something problematic about this drive towards ­witnessing on Sacco’s part, and it is located in an intriguing parenthesis in F ­ ischman’s analysis. The self-portrait Sacco invariably presents in his comics is “a point of identification for the (presumably Western) reader, s­ upplying a familiar questioning voice in the situations he narrates.”20 This honest admission that Sacco’s target audience is, in all likelihood, made up of Westerners – those possessing a certain privileged detachment from the events narrated – introduces a voyeuristic tone to this assessment, reinforced in Buffalo by the presence of his work in the culturally highbrow art-gallery environment, that undermines the laudable empathy encoded in the author’s acts of witnessing and asks ethical questions of both artist and consumer. Such ethical ambivalence has long been a feature of cultural interactions taking place in what Mary Louise Pratt, in an important work of transcultural criticism, has described as “contact zones”; “contact zones” are “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination – such as colonialism and slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out across the globe today.”21 Edward Bruner’s work on one such cultural aftermath – studying varieties of contemporary tourism – takes this further: The touristic borderzone [is] a point of conjuncture, a behavioural field that I think of in spatial terms usually as a distinct meeting place between the tourists who come forth from their hotels and the local performers, the “natives.”22 This is an extreme example, but it demonstrates the terrain within which Sacco is working. The interviews with locals that dominate his narratives are located in just such a “borderzone.” Sacco’s work, though, is more than a presentation of the borderzone; it is an interrogation of the idea. One demonstration of this lies in Sacco’s aforementioned depiction of himself and is thus bound up in the graphic form of the narrative. Surveying the scene, Sacco the journalist is an always vulnerable character who often shies away from confrontation and remains silent in the face of a Maltese politician who describes African migrants “breeding furiously in our midst” leading to “the supplanting of our population by an invading, alien one”23 and a landowner who trumpets the improvements that have been made in North Indian society while ignoring the poverty around him.24 This moral ambiguity, which combines journalistic impartiality with a degree of ethical equivocation, has long been a feature of Sacco’s work. The comic “Kushinagar,” my focus in this chapter, displays his compulsion to depict the narratives of marginalized peoples while also highlighting the confusing racial politics circulating around such documentation. This

48  Sam Knowles confusion is exacerbated by the combination of class division and social deprivation in “Kushinagar,” in which the pressing concerns of poverty, malnutrition, and poor education are addressed alongside issues of caste and perceived racial superiority. A layer of chronological confusion is added to this from the outset, as the comic begins at the conclusion of Sacco’s time in the Gurumiha Mafitola hamlet: The opening frame reads “This is how our story ends.”25 In the next text box – still within the confines of the first panel – Sacco indicates the brevity of his visit, as he and his guide, the journalist Piyush Srivastava, are “sitting in a hut blackened by cooking smoke with two men [they] have gotten to know these last three days.” Finally, in a third text box in the same panel, the social context of the hardships in “Kushinagar” is revealed: They are Dalits, once called “Untouchables,” the people who perch on the bottommost rung of India’s caste system. The graphics mirror the cartoon’s subject matter, as this final box sits in the lap of Sacco’s main interlocutor, who is cross-legged on the floor of the hut. He and his companion – who has drawn his legs up in front of him and rests his face in his hand in despair – “perch” or squat in the dust, metaphorically and literally. The initial chronological confusion is not alleviated in the panels that follow, as another character enters the narrative and Sacco reveals that this brand of interference has already been encountered. “Green Shirt,” a local official who belongs to a disadvantaged caste but one that sees itself as superior to the Dalit villagers, intrudes without introduction and it is clear this is not the first time he has done so (“Green Shirt has been hounding us since our first visit”). Here, he attempts to force his way into the hut, crying: “is 26 that man going to show the poverty of India and defame my village?” There are several things to note, here. Firstly, the moniker “Green Shirt” presumably refers to the color of the man’s attire; however, as this is a blackand-white comic, the chromatic distinction is lost on the reader. Sacco is intentionally holding his readership at a distance, reminding us that there is an aspect of this experience that we are necessarily denied. Unlike in the case of the girl with the red coat in Stephen Spielberg’s otherwise almost entirely black-and-white film Schindler’s List – used to shock the viewer and draw attention to the individual miseries that were part of an often-undifferentiated mass of human suffering in the Nazi Holocaust, “living person[s] among thousands of names on endless lists … spell[ing] death”27 – there is no flash of green here, lending Sacco’s reference a tone of near-mockery. His description of color in a resolutely monochromatic text comes across as if the artist is chiding his audience for their inability to perceive the man’s difference. The implications of what “Green Shirt” is saying are also interesting. He does not deny that there are conditions of poverty in India, and specifically in Gurumiha Mafitola; what concerns him is that Sacco will reveal them to

Joe Sacco’s “Prying Outsiders”  49 a wider audience. The meaning of “defame” is twisted: No longer does it mean “untruly … wrongfully … dishonour[ing] by rumour or report”28 but broadcasting the reality of a situation in defiance of authority. “Green Shirt” is the first in a series of outside agents whose discouraging attitudes towards Sacco’s presence precipitate his departure. The second is a group of teenage boys whose social standing – like “Green Shirt,” they belong to a caste that looks down on Dalits – means they feel free to take a prominent, intrusive role in Sacco’s conversations with others. When they first appear, in a panel including figures both inside and outside the hut in which the comic begins, a trio of heads materializes – two smirking faces flanking one drawn into a serious, concentrated scowl – positioned above three emaciated, destitute, female Dalits who are squatting outside the hut, “listening in” on the interview.29

Figure 2.1

The two groups of three are shown together within the doorway of the hut, in a frame (the doorway) within a frame (the entire panel): The juxtaposition of healthy, self-confident, socially mobile youth with unwell, timid, socially oppressed age is a graphic realization of a contrast that runs throughout Sacco’s work. When Sacco and Piyush emerge from the hut, the Dalits fall back, the teenagers “close around,” and they are “escort[ed] back to [their] car.” The final panel of this opening scene is drawn from the perspective of those who remain in the hamlet and shows Sacco’s car disappearing into the distance as the boys stand, satisfied with their work: “They are victorious. They have chased the prying outsiders from their village.”30

50  Sam Knowles The most significant inducement to leave, however, comes not from the official, nor in the proddings of the higher-caste boys, but appears between these: When Sacco steps outside, and before the “escort” is effected, he is addressed by his host, Sib Charan, with whom he has been conversing inside the hut. While the Indian acknowledges that Sacco’s presence is well-intended, he explains it is detrimental to life in the hamlet for two reasons. Firstly, discussions take time away from looking for work or food. Sacco realizes that these interviews, which for him are a series of intellectual exercises by which he is able to appreciate life in Kushinagar, are a very real presence in the lives of the villagers, detracting from their ability to feed themselves: I’m taken aback. I hadn’t considered how our daily visits might be interfering with the grim business of survival here in the Kushinagar district of Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s poorest states.31 Moreover, the second reason quickly follows this realisation: the crowd of higher-caste teenagers are shown surrounding Sib Cheran and “he ­gestures as if indicating the boys among us. ‘you know the problem. big people will get ignored’.” Sacco immediately explains: “big ­people” is “a euphemism,” denoting “those who call the shots in the village, those who perhaps aren’t so much worried that we’ll glimpse the shameful poverty here as get an inkling into what a wonderful business it can be.” Sacco’s language is shocking, on two separate levels. The phrase “a wonderful business,” implying that the processes by which the villagers are kept in poverty by “those who call the shots” are economically profitable, is appalling in itself. What is even more worrying is the use of the indefinite article, as choosing the phrase “a wonderful business” over “wonderful business” means this sentence reaches towards the suggestion that poverty in the hamlet is a titillating, voyeuristic experience for those in power. The power relationships revealed by all three – “Green Shirt,” a representative of those in positions of oppression in the region; the teenagers, reinforcing social hierarchies through their attitudes towards both Sacco and the villagers; and Charan himself, who, although part of the oppressed minority, rejects the empathy offered by Sacco as a result of his fear of “big people” – play out in the rest of the comic, as Sacco presents vignettes from his time in the region. In his notes on the comic, the cartoonist explains his expulsion: As detailed in the story, after three visits to the same hamlet, Piyush and I were essentially chased out of the area by higher caste individuals who did not like us snooping around.32 The narrative importance of this is reinforced by the fact that not only does Sacco begin his comic with the eviction from the scene of his anthropological work, but it is repeated at the conclusion. It is only in the final pages that Sacco explains “what [they] were whispering in that cooking hut that last day,” as Charan details the violence that is a part of everyday interactions

Joe Sacco’s “Prying Outsiders”  51 between those of the hamlet and the ruling classes. In one text box, Sacco states: “Sib Charan fixed [him] with his jaundiced eyes,” and in the following panels the Indian man’s speech is presented in snippets attached to repeated, zoomed focuses on these very eyes until the bottom of the page is entirely taken up by the upper part of his face, with round speech bubbles like tears of anger.33 Here Sacco mimics the increasing image size of the cinematic zoom, lending the page the effect of existing in time as well as space: This is an evolving narrative that exists outside the boundaries of the text itself.34 The scene immediately following this continues the cinematic theme, offering a re-presentation of the opening from the reverse angle, with the previously documented expulsion presented in identical linguistic terms: Repeating the first words of the comic, Sacco explains “this is how our story ends.”35 This time, the varying attitudes towards Sacco’s work are represented through a change in graphical form. Rather than presenting the intruding faces of the teenagers as seen from within the hut, the panel is drawn from outside, with the back of the boys’ heads in the foreground and the faces of Sacco and his interlocutors, framed in the doorway, in the background.

Figure 2.2

This focus on the different ways in which Sacco’s presence in the village is seen – metaphorically and, in the opposite perspectives on the both – opening-and-closing interview, literally – underlines the atmosphere of ambiguity throughout Sacco’s comic. It also provides a reminder of the fact that the story of “Kushinagar” is not only the narrative of Dalit survival in this region, but also the meta-narrative of the suppression of communication around this existence: the hindrance of information encountered by Sacco. These two topics, ambiguity and interference, are especially evident in considering the various layers of authority behind the oppression of Sib Charan

52  Sam Knowles and his ilk: Quite apart from the intrusions of “Green Shirt,” the higher-caste teenagers, or the euphemistic “big people,” Sacco’s presence is resented by the Dalits themselves. The scene after Sacco’s expulsion from the hamlet is entitled “dalit pride,” and it presents conflict not simply between different sections of society, but within the Dalits: there is a startling contrast between the Dalit inhabitants of the hamlet, who belong to the “more than three-quarters of the [Indian] population … [who] live on less than half a dollar a day,” and the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati, who is a Dalit herself and yet who lives “on a scale and at an expense that would make a Pharaoh blush.”36 “Dalit Pride” is a slogan promoted by Mayawati, “champion of her downtrodden kind,” yet Sacco’s depiction of the shining, upstanding monuments she erects in recognition of historical Dalit worthies is juxtaposed with the huddled, hunger-stricken, desperate forms that squat in the present-day dust of Gurumiha Mafitola. The idea of “Dalit Pride” is all very well for one to advocate who has escaped poverty and no longer lives as a Dalit, the graphic form of Sacco’s narrative is saying, but what about those who remain “Untouchables?” Of what are they supposed to be proud? The phrase “Dalit Pride” involves a lexical contortion, like the previous use of “defame:” The idea of Dalit Pride involves an adherence to an illusory concept of what it means to be Dalit, and thus has no connection with the realities of Dalit existence. Sacco continues by addressing the poverty, lack of education, and devastating hunger (food is “the topic to end all topics!”37) overlooked by ­Mayawati’s administration, in spite of their “many schemes” for ­eradicating these problems.38 One official in charge of aid insists there is money available when none in fact exists, and throws solutions at an i­nnumerable list of difficulties such that he believes they no longer exist: “name any problem and he has a campaign, a loan, a subsidy, or an acronym that will make it go away.”39 In particular, Sacco dwells on the role played by other Dalitsin-name-only: the village chiefs, often themselves Dalits as a result of official quotas. This does not ensure fair treatment for the Dalit villagers, however, as explored by former Dalit activist Ashok Choudhary, the dialogue of whose interview with Sacco takes the place of most of the narration for several pages of the comic: [Just because] someone … is a Dalit and a village chief doesn’t mean he has Dalit concerns. In social and political terms, [the chiefs] have almost become the facilitators of the traditional rich.40 After detailing some of the effects of the village chiefs’ corruption – diverted food subsidies, malnourished villagers, necessary bribes, and absent ­administrators41 – Sacco focuses on some examples of Choudhary’s “traditional rich,” looking at the unjust disparity between living conditions in the hamlet and among the upper-caste rajas of the region, the self-styled “sons of vishnu.”42 In representing these social contrasts in graphic-novel form, Sacco is not fixating voyeuristically on Dalit poverty: His comics are helping to make clear the injustices present in contemporary Indian society.

Joe Sacco’s “Prying Outsiders”  53 This was not fully appreciated, however, in one environment. Exactly a month before the publication of “Kushinagar” in Journalism (19 June 2012), selections from the strip were released as a webcomic,43 the comments section under which presents various reactions to Sacco’s work – both hostile and laudatory. An exchange between three of those who left comments is revealing, epitomising the opposing positions with respect to the comic: rameshraghuvanshi:  [This

work is] ridiculing [the] extreme poverty of Indian society[:] scorning[,] disdaining, [and] contemplating extreme poverty [in] India. [The] intention of cartoonists is [to] entertain the western readers. … This is [an] insult. … Sarath:  How is this an insult to the poor? This is a mild depiction of the disgusting and dehumanizing casteism and feudalism [in India]. … rameshraghuvanshi:  [That] some Indians are suffering from extreme poverty is [a] fact but showing that poverty in [a] perverted cartoon is insulting and injuring to suffering people. … aminfidel:  [M]aybe you should acquaint yourself with Joe Sacco’s previous work, and you will see he is not a “cartoonist” of the Sunday comics variety, but a graphic journalist of the highest order. rameshraghuvanshi:  As [by] your definition Joe Sacco is not a cartoonist[,] why [does] he say his drawing[s] are comic? What is his intention [in] publish[ing these]? [Since] Colonial times western journalists [have] publish[ed] … disgraceful reportage on India[:] their intention is to entertain white people.44 The primary complaints of “rameshraghuvanshi” are twofold: Sacco’s work, in representing Indian poverty through his art, is highlighting these conditions through the use of demeaning, patronizing, neo-Imperialist “disgraceful reportage on India;” and he is doing so in a form – a “perverted cartoon” – that is “insulting and injuring” to those concerned. There are obvious rebuttals to both of these criticisms. Sacco’s history of engaged with “those pushed aside,”45 coupled with the personal history of migrancy that made him sharply aware of the realities of Maltese expatriate existence in Australia,46 both ensure that his reportage is sensitive rather than exploitative. Similarly, as explored at the beginning of this chapter,47 the label “comic” when applied to this form does not indicate a dismissive or lighthearted tone to Sacco’s treatment of the subject. As another contributor to the same online discussion explains: “the culture of comics is much broader than some commenters seem to be aware. These ‘cartoons’ are in no way funny and are clearly not intended to make us laugh … rather than being humorous, these are cartoons of despair.” There is, though, an interesting point underlying the complaints made by “rameshraghuvanshi,” which coalesce into two distinct problems: the difficulties arising from the representation by Westerners of experiences in, to use Edward Bruner’s formulation, the “borderzone;” and, also, the ethical implications of using the comic, cartoon, or graphic-novel form

54  Sam Knowles in doing this. After all, as Jeff Adams reminds us, “much comic production occurs on the margins of institutional practices:”48 The graphic novel has, even into the twenty-first century, been viewed as an inherently “marginal” form, “critical[ly] neglect[ed],”49 and one that can be said to “menace the purity of literature.”50 Also, by extension, I would argue that this is a literary and artistic form that is often seen to menace the purity of social constructions themselves, a tension that is brought to the fore by works such as “Kushinagar.” The online complaints, then, raise a similar paradox of the graphic-novel form to that put forward in my analysis of the difficulties of gallery exhibition. While Joe Sacco’s work attempts to broadcast the injustice of the conditions in which his subjects live – from refugee resettlement camps in Malta to povertystricken hamlets in Northern India – and to give a voice to “those pushed aside,” judging the reception of graphic novels and comic strips is a tricky proposition. In the case of “Kushinagar,” as is made clear by “Green Shirt” and the teenagers of Gurumiha Mafitola on the one hand and “rameshraghuvanshi” on the other, it is difficult to tread the line between helpful, socially responsible representation and patronizing, neo-Imperialist mis-presentation – although, to the author’s credit, Sacco’s use of the graphic-novel form shows his awareness of the semantic tightrope of cultural delicacy that he is treading. He is well aware that he and Piyush can be seen as interfering agents in the hamlet, as is seen if we revisit the form in which their expulsion is presented: The boys escort us back to the car. They are victorious. They have chased the prying outsiders from their village.51 Presented in three text boxes, across two pictures, this is both an expression of the teenagers’ attitude towards Sacco and an honest self-appraisal. Appended to the comic’s graphics using the typography and form often used for narrative exposition in “Kushinagar,” an ironic echoing of the escorting boys’ thoughts becomes indistinguishable from the author’s own concerns about the ethics of his representation of the villagers. Sacco, in a concern that resurfaces throughout his career as a journalist, sees himself as a prying outsider. In conclusion, I advance the idea that one of the most important things about using graphic novels to explore ideas about racial inequality and suffering is the fact such representations do evoke violent feelings like those seen in the online response to Sacco’s “insulting and injuring” comic. Graphic novels exist on a knife edge, both an incredibly evocative means of representation and one that is inevitably always rejected by some. Graphic novelist and author Denise Mina’s description of the physical act of reading is informative: In a comic, the way your eye moves across the page … it should come into an entry-point to the panel picture, move around the picture, go to the words, come back to the picture; they should all inform each other. Actually, you’re using both sides of your brain, so it’s a physically differentreading experience.52

Joe Sacco’s “Prying Outsiders”  55 The visual presentation of Sacco’s artwork in the “War Junkie” exhibition – while there are arguments to be made criticizing the lack of engagement of the gallery environment – acknowledges this physical difference between reading experiences while also highlighting the effectiveness of the genre in representing those from Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zones.” After a period of acclimatization to comics and graphic novels as subjects for academic consideration at the turn of the twenty-first century, there have been movements made towards recognizing “the significance of ethnic identity in comics,”53 the benefits of “using graphic novels [as] effective and valuable pedagogical tool[s] to enhance the teaching of international relations,”54 and even the ability of “the graphic novel … [to] generate a postcolonial critical literacy.”55 As this criticism acknowledges, the innovative and divisive narratives of comics like “Kushinagar” make graphic novels in general – and Joe Sacco’s work in particular – one of the most politically incisive, socially relevant representative forms in which to address the continuing injustices of so many postcolonial existences.

Acknowledgements This chapter was shaped from the outset by two sources of inspiration, for both of which I am most grateful: My thanks to Karen Emenhiser Harris for generously providing me with the “War Junkie” catalogue, and to Ernesto Priego for introducing me to the thoughts of Bart Beaty. I am also grateful to the editors of this volume, whose patient and insightful suggestions have helped guide this chapter into its present form.

Notes 1. Lisa Fischman, “Witnessing History in the Present Tense: Joe Sacco’s Comic Art.” University at Buffalo Art Gallery Overview. Ed. Karen Emenhiser, 2001, 18–20 (pp. 18–19). 2. The quoted description of Sacco as a “comics journalist” is his own, from an essay in which he describes his perspective reporting “on the side of those who suffer” (Journalism. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012, pp. ix–xii). The question of terminology needs addressing at the start of this piece. When it comes to the decision over whether to call pieces such as Sacco’s “comics” or “graphic novels” – not to mention other contentious classifications like “cartoons” – I side with author and artist Katie Green, creator of Lighter than My Shadow (2013), a graphic-novel treatment of her sufferings with anorexia: “I think we’re stuck with both terms [‘graphic novels’ and ‘comics’], and neither … really fit very well. I’ve told people I’m doing a graphic novel, and they say, ‘Oh, pornographic?’ Also, ‘novel’ doesn’t fit, because it’s non-fiction; and ‘comic’ has all these connotations of ‘Oh, is it funny?’ Well no, obviously it’s not funny. So none of them really fits, but I’m quite happy with using them interchangeably.” (“Justin Cartwright on his novel Lion Heart; Joe Sacco on his graphic novel of The Great War,” Open Book. BBC Radio 4. 31 Oct 2013.)

56  Sam Knowles 3. Fischman, “Witnessing History in the Present Tense,” 20. 4. Ernesto Priego, “Comics versus Art.” The Comics Grid online, 23 Aug. 2012, np. 5. The implications of the etymology of the village name in Sacco’s title – in Hindi, “khushi” is “happiness” and “nagar” is “place,” hence “Kushinagar” or “place of happiness” – and the irony embedded in this positive language, given the comic’s depressing subject matter, lie beyond the scope of this paper — and indeed beyond the bounds of my own linguistic frame of reference as a non-Hindi speaker. (My thanks to Binita Mehta, however, for drawing my attention to this.) 6. Fischman, “Witnessing History in the Present Tense,” 18. 7. Sacco, Journalism, 163. 8. Sacco, “Kushinagar | NYRBlog.” The New York Review of Books online, 19 May 2012, np. 9. The word “subaltern” was used most famously by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a prominent figure in the Subaltern Studies movement in 1980s South Asian studies, in her seminal piece “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988, 271–313. 10. Rachel Cooke, “Eyeless in Gaza.” The Observer online. 22 Nov 2009, np. 11. Sacco, Journalism, 113. 12. Cooke, “Eyeless in Gaza,” np. 13. Fischman, “Witnessing History in the Present Tense,” 18. 14. Paul Gravett, “Creator Profile: Joe Sacco.” Paul Gravett: Comics * Graphic ­Novels * Manga online, np. 15. Fantagraphics Books, “Artist Bio — Joe Sacco” online, np. 16. Gravett, “Creator Profile: Joe Sacco,” np. 17. Drawn & Quarterly, “Joe Sacco — Biography” online, np. 18. Fischman, “Witnessing History in the Present Tense,” 18. 19. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Translated and with an introduction by Paul Patton. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995 (first published 1991), 56. 20. Fischman, “Witnessing History in the Present Tense,” 19. 21. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes; Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and NY: Routledge, 1992, 7. 22. Edward M. Bruner, Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. London and ­Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005, 17. 23. Sacco, Journalism, 120, capitals original. Sacco, like most comics artists, pays particular attention to typography, here distinguishing between narrative and dialogue using roman type and small capitals. On other occasions, he uses boldface, ellipses, and italics to convey certain emotions or opinions. Throughout this chapter I copy these stylistic devices as closely as possible, preserving this important aspect of comics form. 24. Sacco, Journalism, 182. 25. Sacco, Journalism, 160. 26. Sacco, Journalism, 160. 27. Timothy R. White and Lewis Stiller, “Memories in Black and White: Style and Theme in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.” The Silent Word: Textual Meaning and the Unwritten. Eds. Robert J.C. Young, Ban Kah Choon, and Robbie B.H. Goh. Singapore: Singapore University Press and World Scientific Publishing, 1998, 79–86 (p. 80). 28. “Defame, v.,” John Simpson et al. (eds.), Oxford English Dictionary online, 2013.

Joe Sacco’s “Prying Outsiders”  57 29. Sacco, Journalism, 161. 30. Sacco, Journalism, 162–3. 31. Sacco, Journalism, 162. 32. Sacco, Journalism, 190. 33. Sacco, Journalism, 187. 34. This “zoom” has been used elsewhere by Sacco. In “Chechen War, Chechen Women,” also in Journalism, the narrative of a brutal series of personal traumas accompanies the same three-panel “zoom,” zeroing in on the eyes of the victim (57); for Sacco, this combination of words and images is associated with a repeated, traumatic violation of identity. 35. Sacco, Journalism, 188. 36. Sacco, Journalism, 163, 165. 37. Sacco, Journalism, 167. 38. Sacco, Journalism, 171. 39. Sacco, Journalism, 174. 40. Sacco, Journalism, 177. 41. Sacco, Journalism, 177–80. 42. Sacco, Journalism, 180–87. 43. In all, only twelve pages are excerpted: the first third of the comic and the closing scenes are absent, along with the section narrated by Ashok Choudary and the beginning of the “Sons of Vishnu” section. Enough remains, however, for the following charges of displaying India’s poverty to be accurate. 44. Sacco, “Kushinagar | NYRBlog,” np. 45. Fischman, “Witnessing History in the Present Tense,” 18. 46. Cooke, “Eyeless in Gaza,” np. 47. See n. 2. 48. Jeff Adams, Documentary Graphic Novels and Social Realism. Bern, CH: Peter Lang, 2008, 23. 49. Hugo Frey and Benjamin Noys, “Editorial: History in the Graphic Novel.” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 6:3, 2002, 255–60 (p. 255). 50. Jan Baetens, “Graphic Novels: Literature without Text?” English Language Notes, 46:2, 2008, 77–88 (p. 86). 51. Sacco, Journalism, 163. 52. “Justin Cartwright on his novel Lion Heart; Joe Sacco on his graphic novel of The Great War,” Open Book, 31 Oct. 2013. 53. Derek Parker Royal, “Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative.” MELUS, 32:3, 2007, 7–22 (p. 10). 54. Thomas Juneau and Mira Sucharov, “Narratives in Pencil: Using Graphic ­Novels to Teach Israeli–Palestinian Relations.” International Studies Perspectives, 11:2, 2010, 172–83 (p. 172). 55. Pramod K. Nayar, “Towards a Postcolonial Critical Literacy: Bhimayana and the Indian Graphic Novel.” Studies in South Asian Film and Media, 3:1, 2012, 3–22 (p. 3).

References Adams, Jeff. Documentary Graphic Novels and Social Realism. Bern, CH: Peter Lang, 2008.

58  Sam Knowles Baetens, Jan. “Graphic Novels: Literature without Text?” English Language Notes, 46:2, (2008): 77–88. Baudrillard, Jean. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Translated and with an introduction by Paul Patton. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995 (1991). Bruner, Edward M. Culture on Tour: Ethnographies of Travel. London and Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Cooke, Rachel. “Eyeless in Gaza.” The Observer online, 22 Nov. 2009. www.­ theguardian.com/books/2009/nov/22/joe-sacco-interview-rachel-cooke. Accessed 1 Oct. 2013. Drawn & Quarterly. “Joe Sacco – Biography” online.www.drawnandquarterly.com/ artBio.php?artist=a3dff7dd55575b. Accessed 1 Oct. 2013. Fantagraphics Books. “Artist Bio – Joe Sacco” online.www.fantagraphics.com/index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=267&Itemid=82. Accessed 1 Oct. 2013. Fischman, Lisa. “Witnessing History in the Present Tense: Joe Sacco’s Comic Art.” University at Buffalo Art Gallery Overview, 2001. Karen Emenhiser ed. 18–20. Frey, Hugo and Benjamin Noys. “Editorial: History in the Graphic Novel.” Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 6:3 (2002): 255–60. Gravett, Paul. “Creator Profile: Joe Sacco.” Paul Gravett: Comics * Graphic Novels * Manga. online, np. paulgravett.com/index.php/profiles/creator/joe_sacco. Accessed 1 Oct. 2013. Juneau, Thomas and Mira Sucharov. “Narratives in Pencil: Using Graphic Novels to Teach Israeli-Palestinian Relations.” International Studies Perspectives, 11:2 (2010): 172–83. “Justin Cartwright on his novel Lion Heart; Joe Sacco on his graphic novel of The Great War.” Open Book. BBC Radio 4. 31 Oct. 2013. Nayar, Pramod K. “Towards a Postcolonial Critical Literacy: Bhimayana and the Indian Graphic Novel.” Studies in South Asian Film and Media, 3:1 (2012: 3–22. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes; Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and NY: Routledge, 1992. Priego, Ernesto. “Comics versus Art.” The Comics Grid. 23 Aug. 2012. blog.comicsgrid.com/2012/08/comics-vs-art-interview-bart-beaty. Accessed 10 Sep. 2013. Royal, Derek Parker. “Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative.” MELUS, 32:3 ( 2007): 7–22. Sacco, Joe. Journalism. London: Jonathan Cape, 2012a. ——— “Kushinagar | NYRBlog.” The New York Review of Books. 19 May 2012b. www. nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/may/19/joe-sacco-kushinagar. Accessed 1 Oct. 2013. Simpson, John et al. (eds). Oxford English Dictionary 2013. oed.com. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988. 271–313. White, Timothy R. and Lewis Stiller. “Memories in Black and White: Style and Theme in Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.” The Silent Word: Textual Meaning and the Unwritten. Eds. Robert J.C. Young, Ban Kah Choon, and Robbie B.H. Goh. Singapore: Singapore University Press and World Scientific Publishing, 1998. 79–86.

3 Tezuka Asamu’s Postcolonial Discourse towards a Hybrid National Identity Roman Rosenbaum

Despite the popular use or abuse of “postcolonial” as both a descriptive and analytical category in Euro-American academe, the term has gained little currency in contemporary Japan. At first this indifference might seem odd, given Japan’s propensity for instantaneous commodification and consumption of knowledge, especially with theories and paradigms stemming from the West. The recent conferences and publications on poststructuralism and postmodernism are only the more prominent examples. This lack of circulation and sensitivity to postcolonialism is not necessarily a bad thing, given the growing criticism of the term’s theoretical diffusiveness and political conservatism by intellectuals in the Euro-American context? Postcolonialism’s lack of currency, however, is not only restricted to the discursive fields of Japan. South Korean intellectuals express strong reservations about and discomfort with the word as well. As Chungmoo Choi has argued, postcolonial South Korea is a space lying between the empty signifier, postcolonial, and the reality that it (mis)represents. Even French intellectuals generally shun the usage of postcolonial and opt for terms such as “créolité” or “francophonie.” What is evident from the examples cited above and remains unacknowledged by theorists such as Stuart Hall is that postcolonial is an exclusively Anglo-American construction and phenomenon.1 Recently I have drawn about the history of Shōwa in a work entitled Adolf ni tsugu [Tell Adolf]. Foremost in this narrative I wanted to record the memory of World War II as one who had experienced it, but more importantly I wanted to draw a message about the desperation where, despite the fact that the primary cause for the anxiety in contemporary society is the angst towards the sudden occurrence of war, the conditions are continuing to be swept in that direction.2 The Problematic of the Postcolonial Discourse in Graphic Narratives In light of several critical international events – such as the contemporary ryōdo mondai (領土問題, territorial dispute) between Korea, China, and Japan, marking a recrudescence of the tension that arose from Japan’s  imperialist

60  Roman Rosenbaum expansion into Asia,3 the vestiges of colonial exploitation in the comfortwomen4 rhetoric, and the colonial subject identities of zainichi Koreans, Ainu, and Okinawans – Leo Ching’s observation above, about the lack of postcolonial research in Japan, is surprising but also foregrounds the postcolonial as both a descriptive and analytical term within Euro-American academe. By way of responding to this provocative suggestion that Asian societies may eschew postcolonial discourse because of its Western ethnocentric assumptions, Tezuka Osamu’s Adolf ni tsugu (hereafter Adolf)5 is examined in this paper to investigate the supposed lack of postcolonial agency in Japanese popular culture. Despite unconditional defeat in the Asia-Pacific war and the period of occupation that followed, Japan has never been colonized per se. Yet upon closer observation it is clear that the lack of postcoloniality in Japanese academic discourse has been filled by a plethora of alternative terms such as ­datsu-shokuminchi-ka (脱植民地化), usually translated as “decolonization,” with its contingent problematics of the native dai-tō-a kyōeiken (大東亜共栄 圏) discourse on the construction of a hypothetical Greater East Asia-Pacific co-­ prosperity sphere. Other related terms, such as the famous kindai no chōkoku (近代の超克, “overcoming modernity”) and datsu-a nyū-ō (脱亜入欧, “escaping Asia and entering Europe”), as well as datsuyo-roppa-ka (脱ヨーロッパ化, “de-Europeanization”), all suggest a versatile vocabulary that reflects the ­ ­Japanese status quo much more succinctly than the all-encompassing postcolonial paradigm of Western discourse. Japan, it appears, is adamant to historically redefine the postcolonial by its political role and involvement in the Asia-Pacific war and its aftermath, and also by the creation of its own distinct academic vocabulary vis-à-vis Western-centric academic discourse in which postcoloniality as a disciplinary category could be regarded as undesirable due to its ­Western as well as conservative assumptions. Several attempts have been made to investigate Tezuka’s graphic sense of postcoloniality; for instance, in ­ “Tezuka’s Postcolonial Conundrum” Michele M. Mason investigates the postcolonial ambience of Shumari (1973), one of Tezuka’s long-story manga on colonial Hokkaido.6 Yet another persuasive argument is made by Rachel Hutchinson in her analysis of Phoenix (1967–1988) in “Sabotaging the Rising Sun,” where she suggests that Tezuka’s “genealogy” of history reveals “in the Foucauldian sense of deconstructing historical narratives” some kind of discursive practice that enables us to recognize the constructed nature of history, nation, and imperial iconography.7 In other words, a sense of the postcolonial seems to be readily available in discussions of Tezuka’s manga and the reimagining of historical narratives, even as established academic discourse seems to reject this category. Graphic Novel Story-telling: Towards an Intertextuality of Graphic Novels Adolf is arguably Tezuka’s most penetrating work, largely because of his uncompromising depiction of the clash between the diametrically opposed

Tezuka Asamu’s Postcolonial Discourse  61 modernities of Germany and Japan throughout the Asia-Pacific War and into the postwar years. Tezuka’s vision suggests that, as a consequence of the identity crisis sparked by this clash, Japan has been unable to create a stable Asian identity some forty years after the Asia-Pacific War put an end to its imperial ambitions. Tezuka wrote of his motivation for creating Adolf: ... because I am part of the inter-war generation, I feel that I have to leave behind a record of my own war experience. After more than forty years have passed, the impressions of war begin to fade. I won’t be able to continue to work forever and that’s why it is time for me to paint my recollections.8 Thus Adolf is Tezuka’s philosophical discourse on a decadent Japanese society that is at the height of economic growth in the eighties but is still plagued by unresolved accountability issues that are the legacy of the Asia-Pacific war. Nowadays reading Adolf meaningfully is difficult, not only because of its length but also because the narrative is in dialogue with other educational graphic novels such as Mizuki Shigeru’s Hitler (1990), Eric Heuvel’s Die Entdeckung (The Discovery), and Art Spiegelman’s anthropomorphic Maus (1991), all of which deal with the contemporary legacy of World War II.9 These intertextualities are a key issue when looking at the postcolonial assumptions of graphic narratives. Not only does history become a playground for reconsidering supposedly truthful and factual historical events but, more importantly, formerly simplistic comic-book formats are redesigned and elevated to hybrid graphic novels, which also presume to teach us about history. In Japan this well-established genre is referred to as gakushū or “educational manga,” but such hybrid literary tools are also employed in Germany and the United States to teach, via comics, complex events like the holocaust and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.10 In this cross-cultural context it is important to note that Tezuka’s Adolf pioneered the representation of characters transgressing socially constructed and stereotyped categories of identity in the course of the formation of their own hybrid identities. For instance, Adolf Kaufman’s transformation from the impartial Japanese-German hyphenated identity towards an anti-Semitic German-Japanese one is triggered by exposure to the ultra-national state ideology in Germany. The transgression of boundaries has a negative effect on Kaufman, which is juxtaposed with the Jewish-German hybrid identity of Adolf Kamil, whose Japanese lifestyle enables him to thrive in Japan’s cosmopolitan environment. A forerunner to such highly acclaimed works as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000), the narrative of the formation of the narrator’s hybrid identity between Western and Eastern (Japanese or Iranian cultures) and an implicit postcolonial critique of Western representations of either religious or feminist values is amplified through the comics/manga medium in Tezuka’s text.

62  Roman Rosenbaum This postcolonial cultural, ethnic, and social sense of hybridity can thus be manifested in many ways. In graphic-novel discourse such as Adolf, identities are constantly negotiated across the boundaries of East and West and hybridization challenges notions of identities and cultures as fixed, stable, or bounded entities that exist in isolation, emphasizing instead the interactions and exchanges that take place and have taken place across cultures. Tezuka’s portrayal of hybrid identities, superimposed on an us-versus-them worldview, functions politically as a challenge to binaries between East/ West or colonizer/colonized that are often used to enforce and justify imperial and colonial politics.11 Many other theorists, like Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, and Paul Gilroy, have written about the notion of hybridity and developed a succinct vocabulary that is readily visible in Adolf. Key terms like “diaspora” are the axis around which Adolf unfolds. Essentially the story suggests a simple murder mystery involving a prototypical Jewish diaspora located in Germany and Japan during the height of World War II. Creolization between the German, Jewish, and ­Japanese languages, illustrated by a mix of scripts in the graphic novel, as well as confounding Western characters that speak in local Japanese dialects, highlight the discourse of postcolonial hybridity present in the graphic narrative. Yet the story becomes more complicated with the bricolage of Adolf Hitler’s Jewish birth certificate, which serves as the central absurdist plot device. In addition, a variety of culinary and cultural syncretisms, displayed for instance by the fusion of cuisine in the German bakery Blumen in Kobe, all add to the cosmopolitan flair of the graphic novel. Tezuka’s eclectic gekiga (劇画)12 technique adopts features common to postcolonial and border societies where cultures directly interact, combine, and hybridize across nationally constructed boundaries. Theory in Practice: Tezuka’s Hybridity in Adolf This postcolonial ethos is presented in Tezuka’s graphic discourse through thematic, formal, and ideological features that portray hybridity as a diasporic context of postcoloniality. Adolf begins in 1936, before the outbreak of World War II, when the narrator, Tōge Sōhei, a reporter covering the Berlin Olympics, is suddenly confronted by his brother’s death over a secret document. Instead of a singular, omnipotent narrative voice, there are in the tale three protagonists, all named Adolf, who engage in an apocalyptic struggle between German, Japanese, and Jewish worldviews. First there is Jewish-German Adolf Kamil, living in Japan, who becomes best friends with his cultural alter-ego Adolf Kaufmann, the son of a Japanese mother and a German father. Both are offset by the historical figure of Adolf Hitler, who completes a triangular configuration of hyphenated identities that transcends facile binary oppositions and reveals a tapestry of postcolonial complexities.

Tezuka Asamu’s Postcolonial Discourse  63

© Tezuka Productions

Figure 3.1  The first meeting of the two Adolfs. Tezuka Osamu, Message to Adolf, trans. Kumar Sivasubramanian (New York: Vertical, 2012), 1: 115.

In an ironic reversal of stereotypes, the young Adolf Kaufmann is bullied with racial slurs by Japanese children who call him “White Boy” and “foreigner” but is rescued by the street-smart Adolf Kamil (Fig. 3.1). The multitude of split personalities in Adolf range from these major characters to many minor characters, like the love interest Eliza Gerd Hymer, whose Chinese-Jewish heritage creates an additional rift that tears apart the friendship between the two main hyphenated protagonists, Adolf Kaufman and Adolf Kamil. As one of the main love interests, Eliza is rescued by the indoctrinated Kaufman in Germany and flees to Japan only to fall in love with Kamil. Her rape by Kaufman after his return to Japan further deepens the divide between the former friends, whose ideological rivalry continues all the way to the postwar establishment of the Jewish state, where the climactic conclusion of the narrative takes place. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is

64  Roman Rosenbaum Tezuka’s metaphor for the schizophrenic postwar worldview, where former ultranationalists and war criminals quickly converted into loud supporters of democracy. This controversial apostasy is generally critiqued in Japan as tenkō (転向, “ideological conversion”),13 which has seen the socio-political disillusion of a generation of traumatized adolescents whose former teachers seamlessly converted from anti-American fanaticism to preaching postwar democracy.

© Tezuka Productions

Figure 3.2  Adolf Kaufmann questions his identity. Tezuka, Message to Adolf, 1: 399.

After orders from his German father, Adolf Kaufmann leaves for Germany to enroll in an elite Adolf Hitler school, where the reader becomes witness to his gradual ideological conversion. Here, Adolf Kaufmann questions his identity: “Mama, am I Japanese? Am I German?” (Fig. 3.2). In Adolf, Tezuka demonstrates that the postcolonial perception is richly prevalent in the cultural discourse of Japan, and that the shift from colonial discursive

Tezuka Asamu’s Postcolonial Discourse  65 formations such as homogeneity, ethnocentrism, and hegemony into the postwar world of decolonization was brought about locally by Japan’s defeat in the Asia-Pacific amphitheatre. In Japan this postwar shift began the long road towards repatriation and the end of the American occupation of Japan. Towards a Graphic Critique of Adolf Despite Leo Ching’s argument that “the inability to establish postcolonialism as a discourse and problematic on both general and intellectual levels in Japan represents less a critical distance from a contentious theoretical debate than the continuing ambivalence toward historical memories of war and colonization,”14 the ambiguity of a postcoloniality –both as kagaisha (加害者, “colonial aggressor”) and, after the defeat, as higaisha (被害者, “victimised”) – has haunted Japanese graphic art to the extent that a disclaimer has been inserted in the final pages of every single volume of Tezuka Osamu’s four-hundred-odd-volume complete works. In this “note to the readers” the publishers apologize for Tezuka’s racial typecasting and his exaggeration of African and South-East Asian foreigners as primitive and underdeveloped, which, despite being one of the central aspects of humor in Tezuka’s manga, may nowadays be perceived as racial prejudice in the depiction of Asian characters. This disclaimer about racial stereotypes also surfaces in Sheng-Mei Ma’s critique of Adolf, where he suggests a reading in terms of a “highly improbable plot” with the “anti-Semitic drift of Tezuka’s text.” Ma goes as far as equating the suggestion of the first English translator, Yuji Oniki, that “mixed circumstances” be used rather than particular “race and nationalities” as the translator’s “fashionable discourse of universalism [which] obfuscates historical responsibility and collective memory.”15 Such a reading in Ma’s terms constitutes the “promotion of a global village of mixed races and cultures [that] makes possible amnesia over past traumas and contributes to ever-increasing racial and ethnic strifes.”16 Ma does provide a persuasive argument on the ability of texts to be (mis)interpreted from a variety of subject positions, but the suggestion of bias appears somewhat extreme in a work where German fascism is juxtaposed with Japanese ultranationalism and where the persecution of the Jewish diaspora culminates in an unflinching depiction in a graphic novel of the genocide of the Israelites. Never mind the simplistic plot of Hitler’s Jewish ancestry, Tezuka’s message is one of hybridity, identity formation in a globalized world, and the wholesome possibility of human nature in the pursuit of justice. Sander Gilman’s rhetorical question “Can the Shoah be funny?”, for instance, stands in stark opposition to Ma’s critique.17 Although primarily a study of filmic representation of the holocaust, Gilman mentions Tezuka’s Adolf as an example of visual art that transcends “unimaginable” horror

66  Roman Rosenbaum and, by depicting it, situates the human element of the Shoah between the comic and the tragic. In Nietzschean terms, Tezuka’s postcolonial rendition of the holocaust in Adolf becomes an example of art as an artifice that enables us not to succumb to the beguiling desire towards absolute truth. The relationship of terms like truth, justice, originality, and the reality of history is debunked through the graphism of the text as relativistic through the polyphonic voices of the narrative. Postcolonial Accessibility Most reviews limit the main plot of Adolf to the fictitious secret of Hitler’s Jewish ancestry, yet Adolf’s main achievement is the careful interlacing of several subplots into a Dostoyevskian polyphony in which the dozens of characters create a sense of historical intertextuality whose synergy outpaces the limitations of traditional manga. Tezuka’s convoluted plot structure spans some twelve hundred pages in its latest English rendition, published as two brick-sized hard-cover volumes. It is no surprise that Tezuka had to remind readers frequently about the reappearance of characters mentioned several hundred pages before. For instance, shortly after the narrative opens with the death of Tōge Sōhei’s brother during the Berlin Olympics in August 1939, the subplot of a young geisha’s death in Japan is introduced but does not reappear until several hundred pages later.18 Tezuka reminds us of his primary objective of verisimilitude in a public lecture on manga: When we talk about forty years of postwar, the war period has already become distant history. If we take critics who are below forty years of age then they can no longer write about war based on actual war experience. War experiences continue to be eroded and the dread of war transmitted to children by adults has perhaps been turned into narrative and become stereotypical. I have drawn Adolf ni tsugu because I wanted to create a candid record of these events. Amongst them, I wanted to emphasize how totalitarianism suppresses public debate as well as thought and how the violence disseminated by the authority of the state is unchallenged as a kind of justice.19 Tezuka’s Adolf has enjoyed a long and illustrious publication history. It was originally serialised from June 1983 to May 1985 in the weekly Shūkan bunshun and won the Kodansha Manga Award for general manga upon its completion in 1986. It is fitting that yet another English translation of Adolf is becoming available in bookstores the world over. This latest version is markedly different in several senses. First is the postcolonial hybrid identity of translator Kumar Sivasubramanian, a native Canadian who has moved to Australia. Then there is the new packaging as a hardcover two-volume graphic novel. Finally, there is the long publication history

Tezuka Asamu’s Postcolonial Discourse  67 in English, from being the first of Tezuka’s manga stories to being published in the United States at the end of 1995 by Cadence Books and later by VIZ Media. The English manga has also been Westernized by flipping the images from left to right to conform to Western reading practices. The newer two-volume release of Adolf from Vertical, Inc. is also flipped and is published under the title Message to Adolf. The worldwide retranslation of this Japanese manga is another example of reverse acculturation, in the sense that Japanese manga enable a postcolonial view of the hidden aspects of World War II from the perspective of an Asian nation intricately involved in the Asia-Pacific War, its repercussions, and aftermath. The new Message to Adolf destabilizes the centrality of European and American postcolonial discourse by narrating the European history of the war from a Japanese perspective. With this continuing rebranding and repackaging of Adolf, the long graphic-story narrative is shifting increasingly into the realm of academic discourse, where its rewriting has become a palimpsest of discursive associations. Counter-cultural hybridity, hyphenated identities, cross-cultural politics, defamiliarization, and the role of literature in the narration of history are only some of the postcolonial aspects rendered in the archetypal carnivalesque play on simulacra formation. In the Baudrillardian sense, Tezuka’s graphic narrative becomes a mere representation of the history surrounding the Asia-Pacific war, mocking the very idea of originality while toying with the verisimilitude of historical representation. Throughout Japanese history, manga have been utilized as a medium for disseminating ideology, following Rei Okamoto Inouye’s observation that in the prewar period, “by defining manga as an ideal medium for conveying nationalism, cartoonists played an active role as agents of the war.”20 Conversely we can observe the tenkō of manga in the postwar period as an agent for antiwar humanism and world pacifism. Thus Tezuka’s message in Adolf is clearly still a prerogative for the contemporary world in Japan some six decades after the implosion of the Asia-Pacific War, where the ideal of the Asia-Pacific co-prosperity sphere implanted angst about potential wars that continues to haunt Japanese society to the present day, via the Korean War and North Korean military escalation. The specter of territorial disputes and the rise of nationalism is as prevalent as ever in contemporary Japan. In the final analysis, the dissonant voices of Adolf’s vast cast of interstitial diasporic characters speaking against the hegemony of the nation-state and its shaping and distortion of individual identity mark the work with what Ato Quayson has referred to as a sense of “postcolonialism and the diasporic imaginary” that foregrounds the hegemonic and disenfranchising forces exerted by the nation on heterogeneous groups of people towards assumptions of nationalistic unity.21 Montage is also adopted for the display of polyphony in Tezuka’s Adolf to juxtapose a variety of transcultural perspectives and conflicting historical periods, seeking to generate a creative set of relations between them in a surprisingly grotesque display of postcolonial tensions.22

68  Roman Rosenbaum Tezuka Osamu and Postcoloniality Tezuka Osamu is a formidable presence in the pantheon of Japanese postwar graphic art. His pseudonym, manga no kamisama (“the god of comics”). arose from the fact that he is often credited with single-handedly pioneering the postwar Japanese graphic renaissance from comics to manga and animé. In this transition from one media to another he also triggered a genre revolution from the funnies to more serious gekiga, adult-oriented manga while also being involved in the gakushū educational manga revolution. Needless to say, this singular myth of the god of comics is mired in superlatives and sometimes shadows the talent of a plethora of like-minded individuals, including ­Tatsumi Yoshihiro, Ishinomori Shōtarō, Mizuki Shigeru, and Shirato Sanpei. Primarily as a response to the growing influence of his rivals, who had developed gekiga to distance themselves from the stigma of drawing only childish, anthropomorphic, Disneyesque characters and themes and moved towards a more adult-oriented dramatic realism, Tezuka created Adolf. Here we see graphic art employed to display the historicity of a pacifist manga discourse, which turns on the fulcrum of postcoloniality. Tezuka satirizes the demise of Japan’s old world that saw an economic phoenix rise from the ashes of the postwar that virtually reset Japanese history after its defeat in the Asia-Pacific War. Tezuka’s historical narrative in Adolf transitions from the pre-war to the postwar paradigm and, more fundamentally, depicts the transition in mindscape towards a postmodern and ultimately postcolonial Zeitgeist. Tezuka focuses on highlighting the alterity of the postcolonial identity where coming to terms with one’s own otherness is one of the defining elements in his graphic discourse. This becomes apparent through the carefully crafted oscillation between literary fiction and realistic historical perspectives that rivals serious history textbooks in its verisimilitude, besides which the tragi-comic appearance of Hitler himself, a panopticon of historical persona, thickens the plot. From a vignette about Soviet master spy Richard Sorge to the aftermath of World War II in Europe and Japan, the roman-fleuve long-story manga stretches all the way to the Israeli-­Palestinian crisis. In this sense Adolf teases us with the interstice between fact and fiction, truth and happenstance. Although the premise of the graphic novel is purely fictional, it is wrapped in a plausible what-if scenario that is thrown to voracious readers for consumption and pop-cultural deliberation. Adolf is full of historical vignettes that anchor the story in time. For instance, a famous communist spy incident plays a pivotal role in the conclusion of the story. Richard Sorge is the German communist master spy who directs a net of informants to supply highly classified information to Russia.23 His link to the son of Colonel Honda – a key military figure – sparks an intense subplot that ends when the general kills his own son after discovering that he is supplying documents to the spy. Here Tezuka probes

Tezuka Asamu’s Postcolonial Discourse  69 the boundary between national allegiances by playing patriotism against ultranationalism. In Adolf, spies like Richard Sorge breach the nationalcultural boundary in particularly audacious ways and assume multiple identities on purpose. They are Tezuka’s counter-cultural trickster figures, who are able to breach our assumptions of stable shibbolethic identities. Images of alterity, diasporas, and hyphenated identities loom large in all of Tezuka’s stories and range from the grotesque outcast physician Black Jack to the machine-human dichotomy of Astro Boy. Tezuka, who grew up in the ultranationalistic interwar era, had to undergo a transformation from an instilled belief in Japan’s superiority and uniqueness to a recognition of cultural heterogeneity and hybridity. It is this transformation that is clearly evident in Adolf, which foregrounds a debate about the relationship between the hegemony of Western discourses and the possibilities of resistance, and about the formation of colonial and postcolonial hybrid subjects, emerging from the superimposition of conflicting languages and cultures. While Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which examined the construction of the oriental other by European discourses of knowledge, helped to establish the field of representation, in Adolf Tezuka superimposes this struggle to name the Orient on the tripartite structure of German-Japan and Jewish history in an attempt to intervene in the construction of Japanese culture and knowledge and write his way back into a history that others have written.24 Adolf is a tour-de-force of humane agency juxtaposed with the disenfranchising power of the nation-state in the global amphitheatre of colonialist expansion in the Asia-Pacific region and Europe. Adolf’s protagonists mimic the author’s struggle with the postcolonial conundrum of our own agency. It raises questions about how far we can be subjects responsible for our actions and how far our apparent choices are constrained by forces we do not control. Tezuka’s central metaphor is that of a tidal wave of history that appears to sweep up everything in its path, threatening to subsume our human agency. In Adolf, humans are depicted as mere flotsam in the powerful historical current against which resistance appears futile. Yet Tezuka’s characters continue to struggle against powerful undercurrents that transform them into something new at the end of a protracted war that reveals the postcolonial light at the end of a long dark tunnel. This new formation is the postwar Japanese identity in its postcolonial context. Conclusion The above discourse analysis of Adolf demonstrates how Tezuka represents the nation as a set of narratives, as outlined, for example, by the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha and thus reveals the layers of ­postcolonial discourse within Japan’s graphic-novel tradition. Bhabha’s suggestion that “it is in the emergence of the interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains of difference – that the intersubjective and collective experiences

70  Roman Rosenbaum of nationness, community interest, or cultural values are negotiated” is played out in the hybridity and interstitial elements of Adolf.25 The graphic novel reveals repeatedly that supposedly stable entities like nation, culture, and identity are volatile and, through giving voice to those absent from these narratives, like women, war orphans, and migrants, Tezuka challenges officially sanctioned national history. Tezuka dismantles the victimizer-victimized dichotomy by depicting both the suffering of the Japanese people and the disenfranchised, ostracized Jewish community in Japan. By focusing on subaltern groups outside the hegemonic discourse of the Japanese nation, Tezuka also avails himself of concepts pioneered by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.26 Thus a postcolonial reading of Tezuka’s Adolf is plausible and highlights the vital contribution of the literary discourse of Tezuka’s graphic novels to the study of diasporic cultures during the Asia-Pacific War and, in particular, their cultural contextualization during the postwar era. Such a reading of Adolf also highlights the legacy of Japanese colonialist expansion in relation to its European counterpart. The work critically re-enacts the ideological underpinnings of the scientific and aesthetic representations of alterity in the Japanese imagination during and after the Asia-Pacific conflict, and demonstrates how Japanese graphic art was implicated in socio-political relations of power. Adolf cannot and should not be read as a history. Rather, it incorporates a liberal dose of playful antiquarianism to debunk allegedly stable narrations of histories. The difference is subtle yet important, since the ideological underpinnings of any narration – a key component highlighted in Adolf – dismantles the fait accompli of accurate historical representation. In this sense Adolf, the first English translation of a long historical Japanese graphic novel, was also instrumental in reconfiguring the Western literary canon towards the integration of alternative counter-cultural discourses and genres. Not only was manga kept in the literature section in Japanese bookstores but, more importantly, it added the rhetoric of Japanese voices to the cacophony of minority voices in the pursuit of cultural hybridity in the discussion of the postcolonial age. Thus, love them or loathe them, Tezuka’s long-story manga portray history in controversial ways that elicit strong emotional responses from his readership, and now that his graphic discourse is more readily available across cultural, national, and ethnic boundaries, debates about the validity of his comic discourse are becoming more urgent than ever. Tezuka’s introduction of relativism into the stable sense of Japanese identity was also instrumental in promulgating hybridity as a counter-cultural discourse during the prevailing Nihonjinron debate. Counteracting this “discourse of Japanese uniqueness,” Tezuka’s depiction of pairs of hyphenated identities permeating national boundaries portrays the machinations of cultural determinism in the process of identity-formation.

Tezuka Asamu’s Postcolonial Discourse  71 NOTES 1. Leo Ching, “‘Give Me Japan and Nothing Else!’: Postcoloniality, Identity, and the Traces of Colonialism,” in Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present, ed. Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 145–46. 2. Tezuka Osamu, Tezuka Osamu kōenshū (手塚治虫講演集, Collection of Public Lectures by Tezuka Osamu) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1997), 400: 132–33. 3. See, for example, the increased tension between China and Japan over the Dokdo Islands. 4. The controversial term “comfort women” is a direct translation of the Japanese phrase ianfu (慰安婦) or those women, who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. 5. Tezuka’s five-volume Adolf was serialised in the Japanese magazine Shūkan bunshun from 1983 to 1985 and was the first of Tezuka’s manga to be translated into English. Adolf ni tsugu has been translated variously as “Telling Adolf,” “Reporting to Adolf,” and, most recently, “Message to Adolf.” The ambiguity of the verb tsugu with its literary version tsugeru connotes “to tell” or “to announce” but may also suggest “to reveal” and “to inform,” which renders the verb difficult to translate into English. 6. Michele M. Mason, Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan: Envisioning the Periphery and the Modern Nation-State (New York: ­Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 168–76. 7. Rachel Hutchinson, “Sabotaging the Rising Sun,” in Manga and the Representation of Japanese History, ed. Roman Rosenbaum (London: Routledge, 2013), 18–39. 8. Tezuka Osamu, “Chosha intabyū” (著者インタビュー, author interview), in Tezuka Osamu, Adorufu ni tsugu, in Tezuka Osamu manga zenshū (手塚治虫漫 画全集, The Complete Works of Tezuka Osamu) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1996), 5: 260. 9. There are many other valid examples of postcolonial graphic histories that are not limited to World War II, such as the 2008 graphic adaptation of Howard Zinn’s classic counter-cultural A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper and Row, 1980) repackaged as A People’s History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008). 10. The graphic-novel medium is increasingly being used in the teaching of complex socio-historical and political issues. Die Entdeckung (The Discovery) and Die Suche (The Search, 2008), for example, have been pioneered as educational teaching tools by the Anne Frank Zentrum in Berlin for the purpose of rendering difficult historical subjects. See Franz, Julia and Patrick Siegele (eds).  Holocaust im Comic – Tabubruch oder Chance?: Geschichtscomics für den Unterricht am Beispiel der Graphic Novel “Die Suche”  (Holocaust in comics – taboo break or chance? Historical comics for the classroom through the example of “The Search”). Berlin: Anne Frank Zentrum, 2008. 11. Kelly Chien-Hui Kuo, for instance, explains: “The politics of hybridity is to overcome cultural unevenness and to challenge binary divisions – between upper and lower, Western and Eastern, White and Black, Occident and Orient, etc.” Kelly Chien-Hui Kuo, “A Euphoria of Transcultural Hybridity: Is Multiculturalism Possible?” Postcolonial Studies 6.2 (2003): 234.

72  Roman Rosenbaum 12. Formulated by Tatsumi Yoshihiro and referring literally to “dramatic pictures,” gekiga also represents a comics movement that attempted to depart from Tezuka’s childish depictions towards a more serious adult-oriented graphic medium. See Philip Brophy, “Osamu Tezuka’s gekiga: Behind the Mask of Manga,” in Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Toni JohnsonWoods (New York: Continuum, 2010), 128–36. 13. A detailed discussion of tenkō and its implication as a fulcrum whereupon human agency may pivot is beyond the scope of this research, but suffice to say that it remains a controversial term whose socio-political implications include a radical change of standpoint or direction, conversion, and thought reform. See Tsurumi Shunsuke, An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan 1931-1945 ­(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 2. 14. Ching, “Give Me Japan and Nothing Else!”, 145–47. 15. Sheng-Mei Ma, “Three Views of the Rising Sun, Obliquely: Keiji Nakazawa’s A-bomb, Osamu Tezuka’s Adolf, and Yoshinori Kobayashi’s Apologia,” Mechademia 4 (2009): 187–92. 16. Ma, “Three Views of the Rising Sun,” 190. 17. Sander L. Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny? Some Thoughts on Recent and Older Films,” Critical Inquiry 26:2 (2000): 280, 308. 18. Tezuka, Message to Adolf, 1: 22 (Chapter 1); 2: 139 (Chapter 21). 19. Tezuka, Tezuka Osamu kōenshū, 400: 132–33. 20. Rei Okamoto Inouye, “Theorizing Manga: Nationalism and Discourse on the Role of Wartime Manga,” Mechademia 4 (2009): 21. 21. Ato Quayson, “Postcolonialism and the Diasporic Imaginary,” in A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, eds. Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 139–59. 22. On montage and postcoloniality, see, for example, Robert Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 7. 23. The Richard Sorge spy affair has been dealt with repeatedly in graphic-novel narratives, most recently in the dedicated graphic monograph by Isabel Kreitz, Die Sache mit Sorge (The Sorge Affair) (Hamburg: Carlsen, 2008), which also deals with the Japanese dimensions of the affair. 24. See Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 130. 25. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 2. 26. See the discussion in Benjamin Evan Whaley, “Drawing the Self: Race and Identity in the Manga of Tezuka Osamu,” Master of Arts dissertation, the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 2012, 36, 85.

References Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Franz, Julia and Patrick Siegele, eds.  Holocaust im Comic – Tabubruch oder Chance?: Geschichtscomics für den Unterricht am Beispiel der Graphic Novel “Die Suche” (Holocaust in comics – taboo break or chance? Historical comics

Tezuka Asamu’s Postcolonial Discourse  73 for the classroom through the example of “The Search”). Berlin: Anne Frank Zentrum, 2008. Gilman, Sander L. “Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny? Some Thoughts on Recent and Older Films.” Critical Inquiry. 26. 2 (2000): 279–308. Johnson-Woods, Toni, ed. Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives. New York: Continuum, 2010. Kreitz, Isabel. Die Sache mit Sorge (The Sorge Affair). Hamburg: Carlsen, 2008. Kuo, Kelly Chien-Hui. “A Euphoria of Transcultural Hybridity: Is Multiculturalism Possible?” Postcolonial Studies 6.2 (2003): 223–235. Mason, Michele, M. Dominant Narratives of Colonial Hokkaido and Imperial Japan: Envisioning the Periphery and the Modern Nation-State. New York: ­Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Quayson, Ato and Girish Daswani, eds. A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism. London: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. Rei, Okamoto Inouye. “Theorizing Manga: Nationalism and Discourse on the Role of Wartime Manga,” Mechademia 4 (2009): 21. Rosenbaum, Roman, ed. Manga and the Representation of Japanese History. ­London: Routledge, 2013. Sheng-Mei Ma. “Three Views of the Rising Sun, Obliquely: Keiji Nakazawa’s A-bomb, Osamu Tezuka’s Adolf, and Yoshinori Kobayashi’s Apologia.” Mechademia 4 (2009): 183–196. Tezuka, Osamu. Tezuka Osamu manga zenshū (手塚治虫漫画全集, The Complete Works of Tezuka Osamu). Tokyo: Kodansha, 1996. ——— Tezuka Osamu kōenshū (手塚治虫講演集, Collection of public lectures by Tezuka Osamu, Volume 400). Tokyo: Kodansha, 1997. ——— Message to Adolf. Translated by Kumar Sivasubramanian. New York: ­Vertical, 2012. ——— Adorufu ni tsugu (アドルフに告ぐ; Telling Adolf). Tezuka Osamu Manga Zenshū (The Complete Works of Tezuka Osamu). No. 372–376. Tokyo: ­Kodansha, 1996. Tsurumi Shunsuke (鶴見 俊輔). An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan 1931– 1945. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul lnc., 1982. Whaley, Evan Benjamin. “Drawing the self: Race and identity in the manga of Tezuka Osamu.” Master of Arts, Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2012. Yoda, Tomiko and Harry Harootunian, eds. Japan after Japan: Social and Cultural Life from the Recessionary 1990s to the Present. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Young, Robert. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford ­University Press, 2003.

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Part II

Francophone Post-Histories Algeria/Congo/Gabon

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4 Memory and Postmemory in Morvandiau’s D’Algérie Ann Miller

On the cover of Morvandiau’s 2007 book D’Algérie1 is an image of a man holding a small child. A family photograph, we assume, redrawn in a clear line style and reframed by two additional circles. Below it, the ­ambiguous title, D’Algérie, meaning both “from” and “about” Algeria. As Mark M ­ cKinney has suggested, the family album can serve as “a chronotope for representing an intimate, familial, and ethnic connection to the colonial past.”2 In Morvandiau’s case, those familial connections are to the European settlers in Algeria, known as Pieds-Noirs, most of whose descendants resettled in France during or after the war of independence (1954–1962), and the project of situating himself in relation to them will involve the uncovering of “a genealogy of violence and counter-violence, whose erasures still weigh on the present.”3 We are not immediately plunged into that part of the past. We find ourselves instead at a family gathering deep in rural France, regaled with poems declaimed by the author’s uncle4 in Berrichon dialect. At the end of the second page, the reader’s direct access to the scene is obstructed, as the uncle’s speech balloons are banished outside the frame, only their tails visible, and the panels are partially blanked out by caption boxes in which a verbal text tells us that the village of Prissac was part of the family “prehistory, before Anjou and before Algeria.” The “soundtrack” comes up again as the uncle’s speech balloons return, but Morvandiau indicates in a caption box that these are not his own memories. He can only recall his father’s recitations “in B ­ errichon and Pied-Noir patois.” What we have seen, it seems, is part of the family mythology, events to which the narrator’s access is no more direct than ours. The term “Pied-Noir,” once mentioned, is immediately repeated but this time against the background of a completely black panel. This recurring device in comics can be interpreted in differing ways according to context. Thierry Groensteen has discussed it in relation to the activity of the “monstrator,” the graphic enunciating instance that operates in conjunction with (or, often in D’Algérie, in disjunction with) the verbal enunciator or “reciter.” Such a “blind panel” may represent darkness or the subjective view of a character afflicted, for example, by loss of consciousness. Alternatively, it may amount to a refusal on the part of the monstrator

78  Ann Miller to perform its function of showing.5 In autobiographical comics it has, however, become associated not with the refusal but rather the inability to show. Most famously, the blind panel used by Marjane Satrapi in Persepolis 2 suggests the impossibility of representing trauma after her teenaged self glimpses part of the body of her friend who has been killed in an explosion during the Iran/Iraq war.6 This blind panel in D’Algérie serves to foreshadow traumatic events to be recounted subsequently, but on a first reading the failure of the monstrating instance seems to correspond to the difficulty experienced by Morvandiau’s childhood self, Luc, in attaching a referent to Pied-Noir, so far removed from the Prissac branch of the family and from his everyday life in Brittany. It is, though, linked to its surround in an unexpected way. Unlike Satrapi’s black panel, which temporarily obliterates the visual narrative, this one can simultaneously be read both as a break in narrative progression and as a continuing representation of the diegetic world, since it is revealed by the panels in the perifield to be part of the uncle’s jacket. However, those panels in their turn work to disrupt our view of the scene being portrayed. The monstrator frustrates us, as the uncle keeps slipping oddly out of frame and the irregularly shaped areas of black never allow us to see the jacket as whole. The personal bewilderment implied by the blind panel is thereby connected with the fragmented family history Morvandiau will go on to reconstruct. The sequence ends on a meta-image of the artist at his drawing board. The final frame, which contains the grand finale of his uncle’s recitation, is given the shape of a speech balloon, its tail emanating from the pot of pens. Morvandiau thus proclaims himself as the overall enunciator, both visual and ­verbal, of this family story. At this stage, though, it lacks the historical context that would enable him, and us, to make sense of it. That context is illustrated in its spatial dimension on the facing page by a map of the Mediterranean and its peripheral countries. Its association with the family story is evoked by the selective labeling of towns and, more subtly, by the circle within which the map appears. The wider historical setting is hinted at by the impression that France, Algeria, and the sea itself, all colored white against the black of the other countries, form a single mass, exemplifying Edward Said’s chapter title “Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories.”7 The space between France and Algeria will be traversed many times in both directions in the course of the comic, but the first voyage recounted by Morvandiau is a visit to Algeria that he and his parents and siblings made when he was thirteen. This journey is depicted over the next three pages, the inter-frame space eliding the progression from familiar French pavillon to Moorish architecture. It recalls the cinematic genre of the return road movie, a group of films prevalent since the 1990s in which the French-born descendants of mostly Maghrebi immigrants travel “back” to the ancestral homeland. According to Michael Gott, these films “reveal the process of rediscovery or reconciliation of ‘return’ protagonists within

Memory and Postmemory in Morvandiau’s D’Algérie  79 their family history.”8 However, as in Tony Gatlif’s 2006 film Exils, discussed by Will Higbee, the protagonist of Pied-Noir heritage will find only traces of a lost past.9 For the adolescent Luc Cotinat, the trip feels like a holiday, and certain images redrawn from home-movie footage, such as his dive into a sea so warm that “on dirait [s]a baignoire” (it feels like [his] bathtub), curiously evoke the sensuality of the Pied-Noir “nostalgeric” photo-documents produced by Marie Cardinal, Elisabeth Fechner, and others.10 A few icons of the colonial presence, such as Notre Dame d’Afrique in Algiers, are still standing, but of the house where his father was born only the balustrade remains, an absence doubly emphasized by the redrawn photograph of his father as a toddler that has to stand in for the demolished building. The balustrade can be seen but the house itself is out of the frame. An image of the tomb of the artist’s great-grandfather is a further inscription of loss. As Amy L. Hubbell has remarked: “Cemeteries represent what was essentially lost in Algeria. They hold the ghosts of the unsalvageable past and they are key pilgrimage sites during the return voyage of the Pied-Noir community.”11 An encounter with another ghost will be considerably more disturbing. The family goes to Tizi Ouzo to visit the brother of Morvandiau’s mother. Uncle Jean is a worker priest who had chosen to stay on in post-independence Algeria, where he continues to offer his services to the local community as a scribe. He tells them that the previous inhabitants of his house had been murdered. Morvandiau draws the room where he and his brother sleep with bloodstains on the wall, remembered or fantasized, less a trace of a lost past than an intimation that the violence repressed by Pied-Noir nostalgia may erupt, in displaced form, in the present. The final images of the trip (Figs. 4.1a and 4.1b) show the beginning of the journey back to France, a car park in Ceuta with a palm tree in the background, drawn as if from the camping-car window and thus surrounded by a thick black frame, suggesting the author’s inability to penetrate “the complex legacy of France’s colonial presence in North Africa.”12 Some of those complexities are hinted at by the queue of heavily loaded Peugeots, testimony to other return journeys made by economic migrants. More explicitly, a text in a narrative box poses the question of the relationship between public and private histories. How can nostalgia, memories, and fantasies of childhood be reconciled with the history of a place that no longer exists, the three French departments of colonial Algeria? On the facing page, such detachment is banished as the narration leaps forward six years to 1994 and to Rennes, in Brittany. The trope of the black panel returns, but this time it is more obviously and immediately to be read as the unrepresentability of trauma, the effect of whatever news has been conveyed by the telephone with its receiver off that appears in the bottom panel. We will have to wait until the next page to discover that the phone call has reported the murder of Uncle Jean, along with three other priests, in Tizi Ouzo.

80  Ann Miller

(a)

(b)

Figure 4.1a and b

Trauma is a “wound inflicted on the mind,” in Cathy Caruth’s muchquoted definition. Following Freud, Caruth explains that the traumatic event is not assimilated at the time that it occurs and returns through flashbacks, nightmares, and other symptoms to “haunt” the survivor.13 This raises the question of how an event unavailable to consciousness can be represented, as well as that of the relationship, if any, between a work of art based on a traumatic event and the therapeutic process. Anne Whitehead notes in her discussion of trauma fiction that novelists have often found that the impact of trauma can only be represented by mimicking its forms and symptoms, such as the collapse of temporality and chronology, repetition, and indirection.14 For the psychotherapist Dori Laub, the artwork itself can have a therapeutic function. He stresses the importance for the survivor of constructing a narrative and of doing so in the presence of an empathetic witness.15 This function, he argues, can be performed by the reader of an artwork whose implicit presence can create the equivalent of the protected space needed to allow remembrance of the traumatic experience and recovery by the victim.16 Other theorists have been skeptical about both of these assumptions. Jill Bennett rejects arguments that have regarded artworks as simply bearing the imprint of trauma, as registering subjective processes that exceed the capacity to represent them. The artwork is not, she insists, a symptomology or deposit of primary experience. Traumatic symptoms are not simply

Memory and Postmemory in Morvandiau’s D’Algérie  81 registered but restaged .17 Moreover, what is needed is not simple testimony by survivors but “a politics of testimony.” She calls upon art “to exploit its own unique capacities to contribute actively to this politics.”18 Drawing on a Deleuzian framework that links art’s formal properties with its ethicopolitical functions, she asserts that the aim is not to reproduce the past but to achieve negotiation of the past with the present.19 Hillary Chute asserts the suitability of comics as an art form that can perform a “work of retracing – materially reimagining trauma.”20 This claim is borne out by a number of comics acknowledged to be masterpieces, of which the best known are Art Spegelman’s Maus,21 in which he elicits from his father the story of his experience in a concentration camp, and Satrapi’s Persepolis,22 in which she recounts the stories of relatives and family friends who were imprisoned, and in some cases executed, for their opposition to the totalitarian regime of the Shah and subsequently to the fundamentalist regime of the Ayatollahs. Chute stresses that the life narratives of Spiegelman, Satrapi, and others are not “cathartic or didactic.” It is not an “emotional recuperation” that they achieve “but a textual, material one.”23 Like Bennett, Chute regards the work of bearing witness as both an aesthetic and a political undertaking, and claims that the “rich narrative texture” of the medium of comics enables it to do so to powerful effect.24 The determination to favor “a politics of testimony” over a simple registering of symptoms is evinced in Morvandiau’s treatment of the trauma of his uncle’s murder, which offers a remarkable demonstration of the “rich narrative texture” of the medium. The blind panel is followed by a panel that offers the view through the partially covered eyes of the twenty-yearold Luc Cotinat as he sits on the stairs, enabling us to reread the first panel as the co-existence of the suspension of monstration (the impossibility of representing the shocking news) and its continuation (the subjective view of the character during the initial complete covering of his eyes), repeating the move effected by the earlier blind panel at the family party. And again the second explanatory panel has a metaphorical, but this time political, resonance of its own. The pattern formed by the white gaps between the black fingers offers an inverted version of the palm tree on the facing page, which now stands as a generic orientalized image, a tressage25 effect that links this family drama with the colonial conquest and the fantasies of exoticism that underpinned it. For Luc Cotinat as protagonist in 1994, though, there can only be unanswerable questions. On the following page, the house in Rennes appears as a white triangle against the blackness of the night outside, a pattern reversed in the panel beneath, in which a black triangular shape, the sides formed by his arms, eclipses Cotinat’s face and body as he sits on the stairs. The safety of home has been invaded by trauma that has its origins in the imbroglio of postcolonial politics referred to by the headlines of newspapers reproduced on the facing page. The affair seems to have been

82  Ann Miller a revenge attack for the shooting by police in Marseille of hostage-takers belonging to the Groupe Islamique Armée. In a further instance of tressage, the phone reappears, its receiver now back on. The family must live with the fact that the affair is unresolved. The verbal narrating instance reports Cotinat’s thoughts at the time: “Que dire? Que penser?” (What can we say? Or think?) The next page sees another shift forward to a meta-image of bande dessinée magazines from the small-press comics scene that emerged in the 1990s, offering the possibility of recounting stories that would never have been published before. Morvandiau inserts a four-page comic strip that he had published in Stereoscomic in 2001 about a trip to New York. It is a witty piece consisting of a cacophony of signs, warnings, and exclusions, with a scathing verbal narrative in text boxes detailing the effects of ultra-liberal politics. Its inclusion here illustrates his search for the right “tonality” with which to recount his uncle’s story. A second traumatic event is about to erupt in the author’s life, however, and its treatment in comics format will demand an altogether different tonality. But first, a brief episode demonstrates a disastrous failure to hit the right note. It is now 2002. In a double-page strip with no voiceover, we see the twenty-six-year old Luc Cotinat aggressively demanding a deposit back on a gas canister, importuning the startled and decidedly non-empathetic salesman with the information that this was the canister his father had used to try to kill himself. The last panel shows Cotinat sitting in his car with a bitter smirk of triumph. Morvandiau as artist seems to be silently judging his textual self for having chosen not only the wrong narratee for his trauma story but the wrong story. What is needed, in Chute’s terms, is a “work of retracing” that will be both an aesthetic and a political project. A panel in exactly the same position as the grinning self-portrait appears on the next double page. It contains a second meta-image of the artist at his drawing board, inset into a larger panel showing a street scene in which people walk across a bridge and down a long road that disappears to a vanishing point in the middle of the page, a metaphor for the journey back to the past on which he is about to embark. This will be, then, an attempt to get to grips with postmemory, the term coined by Marianne Hirsch in relation to Maus and defined as “the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their births, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic experiences that can neither be understood nor recreated.”26 Intergenerational stories are also at the heart of Persepolis but in this case, as Kimberley Wedeven Segall has argued, the family’s loss becomes an emotional bond of identification for the autobiographical protagonist.27 When the adolescent Marjane is sent for her own safety to Austria during the Iran/Iraq war, her displacement is redoubled by her internalization of European misconceptions about Iranians. She reclaims her Persian heritage by considering herself within a larger intergenerational

Memory and Postmemory in Morvandiau’s D’Algérie  83 frame and relocates her identity along the line of her relatives who died for their beliefs.28 The telling of Morvandiau’s intergenerational story is clearly a very different endeavour from that of Spiegelman or Satrapi. As French colonial settlers, his grandparents and great-grandparents were not on the side of the victims, like the relatives of Spiegelman or Satrapi, but on that of the perpetrators, even if he is at pains to emphasize the honorable role played by his Uncle Jean. There is no question for Morvandiau of celebrating a Pied-Noir heritage in the way that Satrapi celebrates a Persian heritage, but he must nonetheless belatedly claim this story as his own. He sets out, then, to investigate the “narratives that preceded [his] birth” and that have come through to him only in the form of fragments, blind spots, and his father’s psychic distress. He will now disappear as a protagonist in the story and not reappear until a coda on the final page. The remainder of the book is taken up with his ancestors’ settlement, their lives in Algeria, and their ultimate return, intertwined with the colonization process, the independence movement, the Algerian war, and its aftermath. This is a quite literal “work of retracing,” as archival documents including family photographs, historical photographs (some iconic and some long out of circulation), postcards, and news cuttings are filtered through Morvandiau’s graphic line. It is also, importantly, a work of reframing. Frances Guérin and Roger Hallas describe the “appropriation and re-use of archival images” as a way of “critically interrogating or challenging the meaning of the image in its own context” and of foregrounding acts of framing, then and now.29 Images and documents are carefully juxtaposed to each other and often to a verbal narrative text. However, the public and private narratives are not presented as complementary; the latter is not used to exemplify and personalize the wider historical canvas of the former. Instead, they jolt and jar uncomfortably against each other, making connections that force the reader’s attention onto the gaps and silences of what has been repressed, within the family and by the collective unconscious. Neither do the images illustrate the texts or the texts explain the images. Visual and verbal tracks, monstrating and reciting functions, co-exist on the page, with words and images in a “high-tension” relationship.30 Jacques Rancière has used the term “phrase-image” (image-­sentence) to denote the operation of “grand parataxis” through which verbal sequences and visual forms can be linked together with disruptive potential, through a rhythm that avoids both the “meaninglessness of ­schizophrenic explosion” and the “torpor of consensus.” These links do not have to be between words and images. They can operate between sentences, between images, or within a single image – for example, the relationship of the said and the unsaid in a photograph.31 There are two kinds of links, he suggests: dialectical and symbolic. The former bring together heterogeneous elements with a clash, organizing a shock, while

84  Ann Miller the latter establish an analogy between them, often based on the mysterious continuity of formal elements. In fact, they frequently work together, he says, and the space of the shocks and the continuum has a name. It is History.32 The first clash, albeit a muted one, takes place across the first double page of this second part of the book. A postcard shows a prosperous-­ looking P ­ érigueux in 1905, the year and place of birth of M ­ orvandiau’s grandmother, Suzanne. On the facing page, a poster announces the arrival in the city of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, a displaced allusion to France’s own exploits on a different frontier, the colonial adventure that underpinned the sedate affluence of bourgeois cities on the mainland. The layout of the following pages produces a series of shocks and analogies. Redrawn photographs of Morvandiau’s great grandparents, ­Antoinette and ­Clément, and of General Bugeaud, leader of the conquest of Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s, sit opposite each other on facing pages. ­Bugeaud’s feet, however, are cut off by the frame at the bottom of the page and appear overleaf, in the top panel of the left-hand page (Figs. 4.2a and 4.2b). They bestride Algeria, metonymically represented in the panels beneath by redrawn extracts from Le Monde illustré of 1932, which allude to the idyllic weather in Algeria, referred to as an “Éden hivernal” (Winter Eden), and to the prestige and noble ideals of the colonial project. This discourse conflicts with the text in two narrative boxes that cut across the page, spelling out the ruthlessness of Bugeaud’s slash-and-burn methods. The Le Monde text is thereby confronted with the violence that is occluded by its paean to the “génie civilisateur” (civilizing genius) of the French colonial mission. The content of a third narrative box runs on into the first box on the facing page, a frequent device used by Morvandiau to disrupt any impression that the narrative texts work as captions to the images. The text gives information about Antoinette and C ­ lément’s departure for Algeria, motivated by Antoinette’s desire to continue her career as a teacher in the colonies, a possibility not open to a married woman in France. The image in this top panel shows a couple, whom we may presume to be Antoinette and Clément, in a car, enjoying the Edenic colonial lifestyle. Underneath, a number of smaller panels portray Algiers, including three in which local people can be seen. There is an unmistakable formal parallel between the two top facing panels across this double page, the left-hand one containing Bugeaud’s feet, bearing down on the country that he has subdued, and the right-hand one the motoring couple, positioned on the page above the everyday life of the city and its native inhabitants. The visual link is further emphasized by the strong diagonals in each. To the dialectic of the clashing texts, countering the official colonial discourse, is added the symbolism created by the formal resemblance of the layout, associating Morvandiau’s seemingly oblivious great grandparents with Bugeaud’s activity of stamping out resistance. This, we understand, was the price paid for Antoinette’s freedom of choice.

Memory and Postmemory in Morvandiau’s D’Algérie  85

(a)

(b)

Figure 4.2a and b

There will be many more shocks and continuities, including some that exemplify Rancière’s point about the said and unsaid within an image. Three nearidentical pages, forming a striking tressage series, appear at intervals over the section of the book that covers the period from the first stirrings of independence to the outbreak of the war in 1954. On the first, a splash panel portrays a tranquil village by a river, complete with mosque, palm trees, and Arabic-style houses, evoking the timelessness attributed to the colonized space in Orientalist discourse. The inverted reflection of the sleepy village in the river is blurred and may be read as the unsayable of the colonization process, buried deep beneath the surface of everyday life. The text box beneath makes no reference to this image, recounting instead the founding in Paris of the Étoile nord-africaine (North African Star), which was demanding independence from France. These far-off events, unportrayed, do not impinge, it seems, on the consciousness of the colonizers. On the next page, celebrations of the centenary of the conquest in 1930 are juxtaposed with a picture of the pharmacy opened by ­Morvandiau’s grandmother, Suzanne, after the successful outcome of her studies. The image of the village reflected in the oued will recur twice more with the insistence of a repressed memory that returns, but it will become increasingly fragmented. Time is now built into it by the division into four panels, as the texts announce the decision of Suzanne’s brother, his Spanish wife, and their children to leave Algeria for France, a decision attributed to anti-Spanish racism among the Europeans and not explicitly related to the

86  Ann Miller Sétif massacre, recounted on an intervening page, in which fifteen thousand Algerians had been killed as a reprisal for the murder of one hundred Europeans after police had fired on a demonstration. In its final appearance, the image of the village is split into thirty-six panels, after the November 1954 insurrection by the Front de Libération Nationale. There is no text, just an equally silent image on the facing page of an oil drum turned into a bomb. The colonial idyll and its shattering are brought into direct relation, both with the expropriation of mineral resources by the colonial power and with the opposition that finally expresses itself with explosive violence. The last part of the book concerns the war and its aftermath. As Mark McKinney points out, the Algerian War was for a long time “referred to mainly through euphemisms – as ‘pacification,’ ‘troubles,’ ‘événements’ [events] – that masked its violence and nationalist character.”33 In Morvandiau’s portrayal of this period, images that are part of the collective memory jostle up against others that have never appeared in the history books, the continuities among them disturbing. De Gaulle addresses the crowd of European settlers in Algiers, uttering his famously misleading “Je vous ai compris” (I have understood you). The V shape formed by his arms raised high in the air is a visual echo of the downturned V on the facing page, formed by the arms and handcuffed hands of Larbi Ben M’Hidi, one of the leaders of the FLN murdered while in police custody, a victim of the systematic torture denied by the French government. The iconic figure of the former French president reappears on a double page, set against a political activist of an altogether different tendency whose photograph is no more likely than that of Ben M’Hidi to be familiar to readers. Jo Ortiz was a partisan of French Algeria and future member of the Organisation Armée Secrète, formed in 1961 by settlers and French army colonels who rejected the independence agreement that de Gaulle had negotiated. The layout of both pages is identical. In each case, a large image in the centre is surrounded by twenty smaller images disposed around the edges. On the left-hand page, de Gaulle not only occupies the middle panel, pronouncing his decision that self-determination for Algeria was the way forward, but also all the small panels, in which he can be seen speaking and gesticulating. On the right-hand page, Ortiz is framed in the middle panel while the panels around the edges contain drawings taken from archival footage of the violence of this desperate rearguard action. The very unusual layout cannot help but recall the Magritte portrayal of unconscious fantasy and censorship – “Je ne vois pas [image of a woman] cachée dans la forêt” (I can’t see … hidden in the forest) – published in André Breton’s surrealist review in 1929,34 particularly since Breton himself features on the next double page, his speech balloons displaying the text of a manifesto denouncing torture and demanding the right for soldiers to refuse the draft. The visual echo of the Magritte drawing evokes the willful blindness of official historical accounts in which the ubiquitous image of de Gaulle, towering figure and wily politician, has overlaid the memory of the violent death throes of French Algeria.

Memory and Postmemory in Morvandiau’s D’Algérie  87 Morvandiau’s grandparents had moved to France in 1950 with their five children, including his father, so were neither part of the crowd addressed by de Gaulle nor involved with the French Algeria activists. They do, though, partake in the selective amnesia that surrounds the period. Morvandiau redraws a photograph by Élie Kagan of an Algerian being rounded up in Paris on the night of October 17, 1961, almost certainly about to die along with over two hundred of his compatriots in the massacre organized by the Parisian chief of police, Maurice Papon. The narrative text does not describe the image but refers instead to Morvandiau’s father’s inability to recollect this event. This failure, or refusal, of memory is decisively countered by Morvandiau’s rendering of the photograph, perhaps the most memorable image in the book (Fig. 4.3).

Figure 4.3

88  Ann Miller One might have expected that in this instance, he would depart from his rule of always redrawing documents, in order to achieve the impact that Hirsch ascribes to the three actual photographs included by Spiegelman in Maus. Following Roland Barthes, she associates their indexical status with their role as “harbingers of death.”35 For Barthes, the “punctum,” or affective power, of certain photographs resides in the viewer’s sense of the impending death of their subject: “Il est mort et il va mourir” (He is dead and he is going to die).36 Rancière maintains that the “studium,” Barthes’s term for the encoded social meaning of the photograph, and the punctum are in fact based on the same principle. Both conceive of the image as speech that is silent, the former as discourse that encodes history, the latter as raw sensory presence.37 The face of anonymous subjects speaks twice, he says: as mute witnesses of the condition inscribed on their clothes and in the background, and as holders of a secret that the image will not yield up.38 Arguably, in a redrawn photograph, the studium is retained and even clarified. Here salient details such as the cigarette casually dangling from the policeman’s mouth are highly informative. But is the “raw sensory presence” of the punctum, and our horrified awareness of the forthcoming “catastrophe that has already happened”39 sacrificed by the loss of indexicality? In fact, the impression of frozen immobility that results from the redrawing of the photograph of this anonymous Algerian – contrasted with the sense of movement conveyed by episodes elsewhere that take the form of strip cartoons, such as the gas-canister fiasco – is arresting. The strangely static quality of this panel seems to magnify its capacity for “the immobilization of Time,”40 and gives Morvandiau’s memorializing impulse its power. The end of the book offers no ultimate resolution to either family or colonial narrative. Some journalists publish a book in which they claim that Uncle Jean’s murder may have been part of a strategy of infiltration of the GIA. The picture of a tight-lipped Jacques Chirac on the cover points to the impossibility that anyone will be held accountable. The final two-page spread brings together the political and personal legacy of colonialism. On the left-hand page, a close-up of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s gaping mouth represents the open wound, the traumatic symptom that cannot heal. Speech balloons enclose his 1962 affirmation of pride in his record of torturing FLN suspects, while the narrative text makes reference to the 2005 law obliging teachers to expound the “positive role” of colonization41 and the indemnity offered to former OAS officers in the same year. The wound, it seems, has festered on into the present. On the right-hand page is a redrawn, deceptively smiling, circle-shaped photograph of Morvandiau’s paternal grandparents, Paul and Suzanne. The embittered Paul had become a Front National supporter and Suzanne had committed suicide by starving herself after her husband’s death in 1986. Lives bound up with the colonial project leave only a “souvenir désenchanté” (disillusioned memory). In contrast, Morvandiau’s artistic achievement, through retracing and reframing the traces of those lives, is to narrate a trauma story that invites us to create political meanings from its collisions and formal continuities. The result is not disillusion but agency.

Memory and Postmemory in Morvandiau’s D’Algérie  89 The invisible can be made visible, the silent can be made to speak, and, in Bennett’s term, the past can be made to negotiate with the present. The final page offers us a coda and a Utopian ending. At primary school, in 1984, young Luc had responded to a racist remark about Arabs made by one of his classmates by insisting that his own father was an Arab. In the face of the boy’s incredulous response, he asks: “T’es quoi quand tu viens d’Algérie?” (“What are you when you come from Algeria?”), claiming for himself a very different lineage and perhaps offering his adult self the whatif fantasy of being on a different side of history. Notes 1. Morvandiau, D’Algérie (Rennes: Maison rouge/L’œil électrique, 2007). The publisher has ceased operating, but copies of the book can be obtained from the author. See http://dalgerie.over-blog.com. 2. Mark McKinney, Redrawing French Empire in Comics (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), 173. 3. Ibid., 14. 4. Surnames are not attributed to the family members, and Morvandiau is in any case a pen name for Luc Cotinat. However, there is evidence from the book’s epitext, notably the author’s website, that author, narrator (verbal and visual), and character coincide. We refer to the character as ‘Luc Cotinat’. 5. Thierry Groensteen, Bande dessinée et narration (Comics and Narration) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011), 98–101. See also Steven Surdiacourt “Blacks and blanks. On Empty Panels,” Image [&] Narrative 4 (2012) http:// comicsforum.org/2012/05/25/image-narrative-4-blacks-and-blanks-on-emptypanels-by-steven-surdiacourt/. Accessed 9 October 2013. 6. Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 2 (Paris: L’Association, 2001), unpaginated. 7. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London, Vintage, 1994), 1–72. 8. Michael Gott, “Reframing European Diasporas in Contemporary France,” European Comic Art 6.2 (Winter 2013), 95–125. 9. Will Higbee, “‘Et si on allait en Algérie?’ Home, Displacement and the Myth of Return” in Sylvie Durmelat and Vinay Sway (eds), Screening Integration: Recasting Maghrebi Immigration in Contemporary France (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 2012), 58–76 (71). 10. See Amy L. Hubbell, “Viewing the Past through a ‘Nostalgeric’ Lens: Pied-Noir Photodocumentaries,” in Natalie Edwards, Amy L. Hubbell, and Ann Miller (eds), Textual and Visual Selves (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 167–187. 11. Ibid., 177. 12. Higbee, op. cit., 70. 13. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996), 4. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1971) 6–7. 14. Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh UP, 2004), 3. 15. Dori Laub, “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995), 61–75 (69).

90  Ann Miller 16. Dori Laub and Daniel Podell, “Art and Trauma,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76 (1995), 991–1005 (995). 17. Jill Bennett, Empathetic Vision (Palo Alto: Stanford UP: 2005), 23–24. 18. Ibid., 3. 19. Ibid., 16, 3. 20. Hillary L. Chute, Graphic Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 2. 21. Art Spiegelman, Maus (2 vols.) (New York: Random House, 1986/1991). 22. Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis (4 vols) (Paris: L’Association, 2000–2003). 23. Chute, 3. 24. Ibid., 4. 25. Thierry Groensteen uses this term to refer to links woven through a comic, overlaying the narrative. See Système de la bande dessinée (The System of Comics) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999), 174. 26. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997), 22. See also Marianne Hirsch, “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning and Postmemory,” Discourse 15.3 (Winter 1992–1993), 3–29. 27. Kimberley Wedeven Segall, “Melancholy Ties: Intergenerational Loss and exile in Persepolis,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 28.1 (2008), 38–49 (38). 28. Ibid., 44–46. 29. Frances Guérin and Roger Hallas, The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London: Wallflower, 2007), 15–16. 30. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 91. Mitchell describes the image-text relationship in film and theatre as “a site of conflict, a nexus where political, institutional and social antagonisms play themselves out in the materiality of representation.” He uses comic strips, however, as an example of a form where word and image normally exist in a relationship of subordination, although he allows that the comics form is capable of experimentation, citing Maus. 31. Jacques Rancière, Le Destin des images (The Future of the Image) (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003), 55–56. 32. Ibid., 66–68. 33. McKinney, op. cit., 146. 34. The image from La Révolution surréaliste 12 (1929): http://www.musee-magritte-museum.be/Typo3/index.php?id=66 35. Hirsch, op. cit., 6. 36. Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire (Camera Lucida) (Paris: Gallimard Seuil 1980), 149. 37. Rancière, op. cit., 19. 38. Ibid., 22. 39. Barthes, op. cit., 150. 40. Ibid., 142. 41. This clause was removed the following year, after protests.

References Barthes, Roland. La Chambre Claire (Camera Lucida). Paris: Gallimard Seuil 1980. 149. Bennett, Jill. Empathetic Vision. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2005.

Memory and Postmemory in Morvandiau’s D’Algérie  91 Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996. Chute, Hillary L. Graphic Women. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1971. Gott, Michael. “Reframing European Diasporas in Contemporary France,” European Comic Art 6.2 (Winter 2013): 95–125. Groensteen, Thierry. Système de la bande dessinée (The System of Comics). Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999. ——— Bande dessinée et narration (Comics and Narration). Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2011. Guérin, Frances and Roger Hallas. The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture. London: Wallflower, 2007. Higbee, Will. “‘Et si on allait en Algérie?’ Home, Displacement and the Myth of Return.” Screening Integration: Recasting Maghrebi Immigration in Contemporary France. Sylvie Durmelat and Vinay Swamy, eds. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 2012. 58–76. Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning and Postmemory.” Discourse 15.3 (Winter 1992–1993): 3–29. ——— Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. Hubbell, Amy L. “Viewing the Past through a ‘Nostalgeric’ Lens: Pied-Noir Photodocumentaries,” in Natalie Edwards, Amy L. Hubbell, and Ann Miller, eds. Textual and Visual Selves. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. 167–187. Laub, Dori. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle’,” Cathy Caruth ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1995. 61–75 (69). Laub, Dori and Daniel Podell. “Art and Trauma,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 76 (1995): 991–1005. McKinney, Mark. Redrawing French Empire in Comics. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Morvandiau. D’Algérie. Rennes: Maison rouge/L’œil électrique, 2007. Rancière, Jacques. Le Destin des images (The Future of the Image). Paris: La Fabrique, 2003. 55–56. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London, Vintage, 1994. Satrapi, Marianne. Persepolis (4 vols.). Paris: L’Association, 2000–2003. Spiegelman, Art. Maus (2 vols.). New York: Random House, 1986/1991. Surdiacourt, Steven. “Blacks and blanks. On Empty Panels,” Image [&] Narrative 4 (2012), http://comicsforum.org/2012/05/25/image-narrative-4-blacks-and-blankson-empty-panels-by-steven-surdiacourt/. Accessed 9 Oct. 2013. Wedeven Segall, Kimberley. “Melancholy Ties: Intergenerational Loss and Exile in Persepolis,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 28.1 (2008): 38–49. Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh UP, 2004.

5 Melancholia and Memorial Work Representing the Congolese Past in Comics Véronique Bragard

Introduction The image of the Congolese Democratic Republic remains for many ­Belgians associated with its depiction in Hergé’s controversial Tintin au Congo (1931). This comic book continues to be read as an important representation emblematic of 1930s ideology as it depicts Tintin as the embodiment of the enlightened ideals of a dominant and technologically advanced West teaching the lazy, backward, simple, and savage Congolese who can hardly express themselves. What is striking today, as Bernard Spee observes, is that Tintin au Congo remains on airport shelves but is never critically addressed, a symptom, perhaps, of repressed national memories. This dichotomy raises the following question: how can children in Belgium fill the gaps between the humorous, racialized Tintin au Congo and the horrible images of violence in RDC they see on television? This gap and refusal to confront the past unveil, as Sarah De Mul observes, Belgium’s “absence of a collective post-imperial memory discourse,”1 an absence that conceals silences, guilt, and complex feelings towards Belgium’s former colony but also towards the contemporary cashing in on the country’s resources without which the West cannot finance its developing technologies. Many contemporary comics, as this article will show, are haunted by King Leopold’s system, a system based on Western greed, terror tactics, and colonial heroism as described in Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. Hochschild’s study condemns the system that turned the history of the Congo into what he considers a Holocaust story epitomizing the worst-case scenario of the damaging colonial plundering of the African continent. The indictment of this colonial system and the violent images of severed hands associated with it, as De Mul further argues in her article “The Holocaust as a Paradigm for the Congo what he considers Atrocities: Adam Hochschild’s Leopold’s Ghost,” resurge on a regular basis and are associated with and indirectly legitimize the ideals of Western humanitarianism, an enlightened ethic of compassion and improved social change that fought against colonialism but was in several ways complicit with the colonial system and its political agendas. This article examines the postcolonial memory discourse that is at work in a number of early twenty-first-century comics featuring the Congo,

Melancholia and Memorial Work  93 manifested variously as denunciations of atrocities, silences, or disillusions. Such memorial work reveals how the colonial past continues to spill over into the present and most likely determines or unveils the thorny relations between Belgium and the Congo and between Belgian citizens and the ­Congolese diasporic community. Belgium remains haunted by Hochschild’s actual accusations of genocide as expressed in Leopold’s Ghost (2006), a study that is “informed by the paradigm of the Jewish Holocaust”2 and “a  pre-Auschwitz ethical discourse and its clear-cut moral categories” in which accusatory comparisons perhaps need to be read within a larger imperial framework whereby several nations competed to establish control over the Congo. Belgium has in many ways kept silent about its colonial past, a past that has also been shadowed by civil unrest, mass murder, and the public plundering of resources. A small nation torn between strong ones, internally divided between two communities, Belgium has sometimes been compared with the figure of Tintin himself – and Tintin has no real family, no clear-cut proud national identity, and most prominently, no past. In his Histoire de la BD Congolaise, Christophe Cassiau-Haurie shows how the Congolese landscape, constituted as a decor in a large number of European comics such as Warnauts and Raives3, Herman, and others, has been primarily associated with adventure and exoticism. It is only in the very last decade that comics have been engaged in a reassessment of the colonial and postcolonial periods and have addressed postcolonial issues. As such, new graphic approaches to the Congolese colonial past, as well as to its contemporary postcolonial/neocolonial situation, have recently appeared. ­However, while Belgian readers are witnessing these changes, they remain, for the most part, less informed about the numerous Congolese comics voices like Kash, ­Monbili, Masioni, Diantantu, Fuilu, Paluku, and many others who often remain relegated to the margins of mainstream comics production.4 If Belgians and Belgian academics have neglected analyzing Tintin au Congo, it could be argued that they have paid even less attention to its counterpart, Bingo en Belgique (1983)5 by the Congolese Mongo Sisé, a narrative that can be considered a first postcolonial response and rewriting of the former text. Adopting Hergé’s famous “Ligne Claire” (Sisé spent time in Hergé’s workshops) and gags, Bingo en Belgique tells the story of Bingo who, on arrival in a cold Belgium, is confronted with his host’s (the boss of a copper factory) despair at learning that African workers are on strike as they have not been paid for months. Bingo soon learns of the imbalance in equitable trade relations between north and south. While Sisé’s story was well aware of the European exploitative violence directed at Congo’s resources, many Congolese comics published in the 1980s did not fictionalize this neocolonial exploitation of the country and have focused on social themes or caricatures. The silence around Bingo en Belgique and the textual scheme that simultaneously connects yet distances the latter from Tintin au Congo are illustrative of the paradigm of the present study, which attempts to show three graphic approaches in the memorial work related to (post)colonial

94  Véronique Bragard Congo: guilt and the endorsement/critique of the humanitarian ideal in revisions of Leopoldian-period histories, guilty nostalgia and the representation of post-independence-period histories, and inversions of and resistance to these themes in works by contemporary Congolese graphic writers. In his key text After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (2004), Paul Gilroy diagnoses how British society is marked by a mood of regressive nostalgia exemplified in its obsession with World War II, a cultural hostility towards strangers, or a nationalistic defensiveness about the British Empire. For Gilroy, a future free of racial hierarchies can only be achieved via a “remaking of the nation’s relationship with its imperial past”6 as well as an engagement with the “spontaneous tolerance and openness evident in the underworld of Britain’s convivial culture.”7 For him, British national identity remains trapped within a pathology of postcolonial melancholia that arises from the sense of shame at recalling colonial atrocities. Gilroy here uses the stronger term “melancholia” to address a nostalgic gesture that is unable to mourn these memories and take responsibility for its colonial past. Drawing from Gilroy’s insightful work, this essay studies how the colonial past of the Congo is represented in recent European and Congolese comics to expose the postcolonial relationship between Belgium and its former colony, a relationship infiltrated by guilt, nostalgic specters, or a wish to move forward and rewrite history. Consonant with Sara De Mul’s observations, the first section highlights how several graphic texts (Africa Dreams,8 Kongo: le ténébreux voyage de Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski,9 Au Coeur des Ténèbres,10 Retour au Congo11) engage with the colonial era associated with Leopold’s ghosts and the atrocious exploitation of his colony that is linked to imperial rivalries, often stressing a parallel context of humanitarian struggle. But how does this detour via the brutality of the past engage with later and contemporary American, European, and Chinese plunders of RDC’s mineral resources? The second part of this paper shows how Pitz’s Jardins du Congo (2013) confronts yet another period: the experience of Belgians in the Congo between 1945–1960, an experience filled with nostalgia yet not emptied of guilt. The third and last part of this paper explores Congolese intermedial approaches to such material: Diantantu’s Simon Kimbangu (Vol.I),12 which denounces the colonial past of the nation while constantly reviewing colonial and postcolonial brutality from a Congolese perspective, and Barly Baruti and Cassiau-Haurie’s Madame Livingstone (2014), which revisits Congolese participation in World War I using a hybrid and epic representational mode. Guilt and the Humanitarian Ideal: the Heart of Darkness Paradigm One of the first texts to denounce imperialism in the Congo was indisputably Joseph Conrad’s nebulous Heart of Darkness (1899), a novella13 that

Melancholia and Memorial Work  95 has more recently been appropriated by graphic artists who, not unlike its narrator, Marlow, seem compelled to repeat the narrative of disorientation and disillusionment that plays out on the Congo river. The first part of this section compares three recent comics adaptations of this metatext: Anyango and Mairowiotz’s Heart of Darkness (2010), Christian Perrissin and Tom Tirabosco’s Kongo: Le ténébreux voyage de Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (2013), and Miquel and Godart’s Au Coeur des Ténèbres (2014). It then focuses on the Heart of Darkness paradigm in the trilogy Africa Dreams. As analyzed in another study,14 Anyango and Mairowiotz’s adaptation of Heart of Darkness (2010) interweaves parts of the original Conrad novella with several entries from Conrad’s Congo Diary (1890), a series of trivial and everyday notations he wrote down when visiting the Congo in 1890. These references create a sense of enforced intimacy while Belgianizing and Africanizing the famous Conradian text. The heterogeneous and obscurantist graphic style, as well as the intermediality created by the image-text-diary, expose the alterity and ambivalence within the Conrad character himself, who is seen, in this version, as Marlow’s older self, remembering his Congo trip. While the expressionistic images of starving Africans or chained Congolese workers more directly indict acts of exploitation and foreground an anticolonial stance, the diary entries, preoccupied with bodily details, offer another counterbalancing image of Conrad as a man who was part of the colonial mission and believed in it before his illusions were shattered. The immediacy and accessibility of the diary form provide us with Conrad’s raw material and reaction to an environment that was extremely foreign and destabilizing. This cross-discursive adaptation attempts to reveal the limits of Conrad’s critical mind when he spent time in Congo where, it is documented, he was mostly concerned with his own basic needs and developed a critical stance only later, after he returned from his last seafaring trip.15 Kongo: Le ténébreux voyage de Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski bears many resemblances to the Anyango and Mayrovitz adaptation presented above. A complex textual composition, it interweaves Conrad’s Congo Diary with accounts of encounters with several historical figures like Stanley, Freiesleben, Thys, Belgian and African historical references, as well as letters to his idealized aunt. The graphic production in black and white charcoal conveys the wet, foggy mangrove jungle landscape, using the monotype to create a stifling atmosphere of oppression. The ambivalence that marks the European expedition is epitomized in its struggle against the labyrinthine curves of the Congo River itself and the protagonist’s desperate attempts to find people to trust and values to adhere to. One is struck by the contrasted forms of visual representations in this piece. Congolese natives are graphically poignant and superb; the grotesque, sweating, plump figures of the colonials suggest the avarice they practice, and contrast with the serious, slim, bearded, clever figures of Casement and Conrad.

96  Véronique Bragard The Kongo, which refers to both the RDC’s original name and the native people of the region, is alluded to in the title but hardly given a voice. The graphic novel opens with an image of a European contemplating the map of Africa. This man is Conrad, who is introduced as he meets the businessman M. Thys to be hired as an agent in the Belgian Congo Free State. As he begins his journey into Africa, the Congo River becomes a central metaphor that epitomizes a nostalgic view of the peaceful Congolese landscape. Black and white images paradoxically enhance the beauty, luxuriousness, and scale of the scenery. As the journey proceeds, however, Conrad is shown meeting colonial traders, as well as an old man who believes in the humanity of Congolese people, and these encounters lead him to slowly question the violent attitude of the colonials he encounters. What is revealed are the effects of violence, while the acts themselves remain implied. The only episode of visual violence depicts the killing of a small dog whose howling, the reader gradually realizes, would draw attention to the mass grave of murdered villagers hidden in the forest.

Figure 5.1  Christian Perrissin and Tom Tirabosco. Kongo: Le ténébreux voyage de Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. (Futuropolis 2013), p. 140.

The scene and the genocidal images that accompany it unveil a sense of horror without an explicit depiction of colonial atrocities. By extensively mixing biography (Conrad is named Korz, short for Korzeniowski, but also a clear allusion to Kurtz) and fiction, the authors of this text seem to run counter to recent Conradian criticism that has increasingly attempted to disentangle these two categories in their analyses.16 What is most noticeable is the influence of Hochschild’s work in the unveiling of mass murders and the reference to Klein (and not Kurtz) that Hochschild makes in his piece.17 Closing with an image of a guilty and disillusioned Conrad

Melancholia and Memorial Work  97 realizing he has been lying to himself as he completes his journey, and with Casement’s proclamation “We’ll have to bear witness” (my translation), this creative adaptation offers a strong graphic version of Conrad’s African experience, denouncing the atrocities of the period but also highlighting humanitarian ideals and people who struggled to indict colonial crimes as part of a discourse of redemption around which representations of the Congo have been structured since the publication of the Congo Reform Association reports.18 Miquel and Godart’s 2014 Au Coeur des ténèbres uses similar ­techniques – sepia colors, black and white imagery, caricature, expressionistic/gothic ­figures, biographical elements (in the reference to Klein), a frame ­narrative to convey multidimensionality, and Belgian references – to expose the deep disillusion of a man lost in nightmarish solitude when faced with his scattered illusions. Marlow emerges again as Conrad’s double, meeting his own dark self in the figure of Klein. The narrative also establishes a link with the metaphor of the “severed hands,” thereby revealing specters of genocide but also identifying links between different systems of exploitation, a comparison that is unfortunately not extended to the present but clearly indicts a brutal system exploiting emaciated, colonized, and chained bodies. More than the two other adaptations, this one ponders the disillusion, hallucinations, and nightmares of Marlow’s experience, conveyed in several pages in which the protagonist struggles against ghosts in a surreal and shifting forest. The possibility of an ethical alternative present in the humanitarian ideal in the other adaptations is hardly consonant with ­Conrad’s text here. The booklet at the end, “Konrad à Conrad,” is an epitome of the fictionalized biography at the center of this piece, and it unveils an authentication process at work that is central to the three adaptations considered here. The comics series Africa Dreams, first published in 2009 by Jean-­ François and Maryse Charles and Frédéric Bihel, is not a rewriting of Conrad’s famous novella but follows an obvious Heart of Darkness paradigm. After an introductory epigraph from Heart of Darkness referring to the snake-like shape of the fascinating Congo River, the volume opens in 1960 with a little boy visiting the now infamous stuffed animals of the Tervuren museum, and then being transported to the late nineteenth century to meet a young seminarian, Paul, travelling through the Congo to join a mission and also to look for his absent father, Augustin Delisle. The latter, presented as a prosperous and misanthropic planter, resembles Conrad’s Kurtz in many ways. He is close to the Congolese population, has the bad reputation of an alcoholic, immoral figure who is trigger-happy, and refuses to collaborate with official forces. When Paul arrives, he first discovers the presence of his stepmother and several African stepbrothers and then quickly observes the violence and the horrors perpetrated in the heart of the forest as he sees his stepmother strike a black servant who has lost a hand in the rubber extraction.

98  Véronique Bragard

© Casterman. Reprinted with kind permission from Casterman.

Figure 5.2  Jean-François Charles, Maryse Charles, and Frédéric Bihel. Africa Dreams: L’ombre du Roi (Casterman, 2010), p. 23.

This vignette – which portrays the white woman who becomes in her turn aggressive against an African victim of the rubber system – brings together several forms of colonial violence in the same scene, epitomizing a double violence, systemic and domestic, with shocking images of perpetuated brutality in sensationalist visual terms. The subsequent flashback brings the reader back to Leopold II’s office where he receives/deceives Stanley and designs the future of his personal colony and African museum. This long flashback constitutes the core of the first volume, the subtitle of which is The King’s Shadow, featuring a king who is portrayed as casting “a dark and devouring shadow on the Congo” (51, my translation). Entering the intimacy of the royal palace, this section depicts in a grotesque, ironical fashion a king arbitrarily defining the borders of his future possessions without ever visiting the country he wants to organize and dominate. This volume follows in many ways in the footsteps of Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost in that it indicts the Congo’s “politics of

Melancholia and Memorial Work  99 forgetting,” which, according to Hoschchild, attempted to “erase potentially incriminating evidence from the historical record.”19 The very last pages of the first volume give the reader more historical information and highlight the ambivalence around the figure of Leopold II, still perceived in Belgium as “roi batisseur, colonisateur” and who, in this series, is pictured as haunted by his own self-centered Africa dreams. The documents at the close of the volume suggest that Leopold II did not intend to eliminate African populations but was fascinated by his large capitalistic enterprise. The significance of the practice of cutting hands, which was imposed to limit the number of bullets used to subjugate the Africans, is also explained. The painting of Leopold II displayed at the end of the narrative contrasts with official ones still found in a number of public places and museums in Belgium. The king’s paternal face registers a somber, ambiguous, and cruel look. In the second volume of this trilogy (Africa Dreams: dix volontaires sont arrivés enchaînés), Paul is urgently asked to leave for the interior and rescue his father, who is seriously ill. He leaves with a Congolese man and discovers a wasteland of skulls, emptiness, and dangers conveyed by the black-and-white pages that forcefully differ from the warm water-colored landscape of the opening pages. Again, the Conradian paradigm reappears in the motif of skulls mounted on sticks, reminiscent of the darkest image of Kurtz’s brutality. After having helped remove the arrow in his father’s back, Paul is told the story of atrocious reprisals on the part of the public force. The latter set fire to the villagers’ houses because they had failed to collect sufficient rubber. The cut-hands nightmare is openly evoked and the whole volume indicts the King’s scheme as well as capitalism’s forceful exploitation of Congolese native villagers. Ashamed of his country and of his robe, the young protagonist Paul Deslisle finds out the devil is not his father but the system behind which emerges the shadow of Leopold II. In an ironical fashion, this second volume ends with the arrival of Stanley in Matadi to participate in the project for more rubber exploitation. Eventually, Paul arrives in the prosperous mission of Kibanga where he is accused of criticizing the “Force Publique.”20 He witnesses children being stolen as labor for the ongoing railway construction project. The authors here point an accusing finger at the capitalist enterprise in all its complex dimensions, since even colonial Belgians, perpetrators of the system, are depicted as too impoverished and unable to return home (20). The graphic composition emphasizes that while Africans are killed by the infamous chicotte (whip), the king is portrayed basking in luxury, surrounded by women in well-appointed rooms in Oostende, a city his money has helped to build. Although the text does not borrow from Hochschild’s genocidal images, as does King Leopold’s Ghost, it engages closely with Hochschild’s work in that, to borrow Sarah Demul’s words “it serves to commemorate and celebrate the actions and commitments of the late-­nineteenthcentury humanitarians who mounted resistance against ­Leopold’s regime” (164). Central to this work is the depiction of a king constantly struggling

100  Véronique Bragard to silence the humanitarian voices: Reverend ­Sheppard, who publicized the atrocities committed, and Edmund Morel (31), who is introduced as the first to report on the horrors perpetrated. Even Mark Twain’s Leopold’s Soliloquy, a provocative imaginary monologue expressing the king’s greedy and cruel attitude, appears as an intertexual illustration on page 35. The diegesis also becomes part of this dichotomous and humanitarian vision as Paul quickly understands the significance of his father’s words, which have become “truth.” Unlike Conrad’s ambivalent characters, Paul’s father becomes a heroic resistance figure who fights a hypocritical system he is not part of. He remains, however, a flat character whose idealism is consonant with a recuperated civilizing mission. In many ways, as the authors confirm, the comics series emerges as a counter-discourse that is in line with Hochschild’s attempts to compensate for Belgium’s silence on its colonial past but falls in many ways into the trap of recreating dichotomies of the victim-savior paradigm. The third and last volume devoted to “ce bon monsieur Stanley” opens with Conrad’s words “The horror, the horror” and the appearance of a young Tintin-like reporter who records Henry Morton Stanley’s memories in Surrey. As the narrative proceeds, the lake of his villa transforms into the peaceful landscape of Stanley Pool and the Congo River. But the bright colors of the landscape soon darken with the violence and the hard shadows of the brutal and deadly Emin Pacha expeditions Stanley remembers. To save the famous German doctor, following Livingstone’s disappearance in 1871, the record shows how Stanley did not hesitate to threaten, kidnap women, and even kill Congolese people to survive. Leopold’s presence shadows this expedition as a figure depicted in his tropical gardens who would even collaborate with slavers like Tippo Tip to acquire his territories. To counterbalance this violent setting, the authors present Paul abandoning his missionary robes, (“toi pas robe blanche toi pas méchant,” 23) and losing his virginity with an attractive African woman. He later becomes a farmer who employs Congolese workers to save them from the rubber industry and meets the African-American Reverend William Henry Sheppard who photographs maimed and handless people and publicizes the atrocities committed against them by King Leopold II’s Public Force.21 The strength of this narrative lies in its denunciation of colonial power relations and the king’s corrupt ambitions. However, the narrative remains centered on a celebration of humanitarian ideals, evading a critique of what De Mul has observed as “the limits and contradictions of humanitarianism” (171). Moreover, though the narrative movement follows the Heart of Darkness pattern of progression into the interior, obscurity, mystery, and secrecy of the land, it fails to engage with Conrad’s deep textual ambivalences regarding European “civilizing missions.” But if the element of nostalgia is present in the idealisation of life in the Congo and the struggles of humanitarian figures, the spectres of guilt haunt all the works presented above. I have emphasized some nostalgic

Melancholia and Memorial Work  101 approaches to a guilt-ridden past. However, other recent graphic depictions offer a somewhat different perspective. Yves Hermann’s 2013 Retour au Congo is a case in point. A pastiche of elements from 1950s adventure comics, it features the journey of a Tintin-like detective – ironically called Rémy Georget, a name close to Hergé’s birth name Georges Prosper Remi – to the colony to find his uncle, Célestin, who might have connections to the murder of Évariste Brancard. The year is 1928, and the fictional journey takes place at a moment when Prince Albert, accompanied by his wife Queen Elisabeth, traveled to the Congo to inaugurate the Leopold II monument (contrary to misinformation on the Internet, this was not the year of ­Leopold II’s journey to the Congo, where, in fact he never set foot). The young reporter becomes witness to murders and settling of accounts in the Congo of 1920s. He is accused of murder, escapes, and eventually discovers that the successive murders are connected to the violence perpetrated by the Belgian pioneers sent by Leopold II, and that the King’s visit is threatened by a planned act of vengeance on the part of Blom, who was possibly betrayed by Leopold II. Hermann’s journey is to a distant Congo, where characters still wear colonial helmets and the Congolese landscape is only a sinister backdrop for manhunts, gangster wars, and exotica in the form of African giraffes and rhinoceros. If Mick Léonard considers this comic as “a satire of the Belgian Colonial society under Leopold II’s rule”22 (my translation), one must acknowledge that it fails in many respects. As Léonard himself argues, it is “an attempt to step back, [remains] too light, not enough developed” and where the slight references to Tintin (a single, drunken character reminiscent of Haddock, a Castafiore figure, the image of a car) do not bring anything to the story. Maybe what this distant and parodic text suggests is that the consequences of colonization remain for Belgians a matter of a long-standing grudge, a desire for vengeance among the few. However, one can also see in this story of conflicts and quarrels the emergence of a national mood of guilt positioned next to Leopold II’s ghost. The last vignette of a young street boy shouting, “Remy Georget, le sauveur du roi, est décoré de l’ordre de L ­ éopold” (55) is a parodic reference that muddles allusions to King ­Leopold I and II. What is clear is that the question of the colonial past is here displaced in a distant adventure story divested of the presence and concerns of the Congolese people. Guilty Nostalgia and Post-Independence Congo If all the examples above are permeated with a guilt-ridden anxiety towards the legacy of Belgium’s violence in the Congo, Pitz’s Les Jardins du Congo (2013) reveals another spectre: Belgium’s exploitation of the Congo in the years following Leopold’s reign. But if guilt filters through this piece, the tone of the album is nostalgic in the remembrance of a past, beautiful, idealized Congo. After starving in the woods of Chimay for four years during

102  Véronique Bragard World World II, the protagonist Yvon escapes Europe by leaving for the Congo. The Congo reads like a new Eldorado for Yvon, offering the promise of a new life and opportunities for prosperity, the place where he, o ­ therwise rejected by his father, rapidly finds his fortune, thanks to his employment with a company that trades in wood and exploits Congolese labor. His social status, conveyed by the pastel colors of the panels, soon grants him access to a wealthy members-only club and a young Belgian woman whom he marries. As his exploited workers grow lucid, Yvon is haunted by nightmarish scenes of hunting. The author, whose own past is tied to this history (his grandfather travelled and worked in the Congo), here pays homage to the ambivalent experience of Belgians during this period. He repeats his family’s past complicity in the violence depicted towards his workers by his own acceptance of racial discrimination and his paternalistic attitude towards Congolese culture, and also records socio-economic benefits gained from his situation in the colony as he proceeds to become the owner of a glassware industry in Chimay. As the story progresses, pages 110–11523 show Yvon’s family unable to return from Paris to the Congo, as the newly elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba is presented delivering his famous independence speech on 30 June 1960. His words, denouncing a history of insults, exploitation, and hierarchies, dialogue with a jumble of images of markets, radios, Belgian flags, a scene symbolizing the ongoing experiences of survival and trauma for the Congolese population. His inspiring words end a continuing colonial system but, alongside, they also end Yvon’s private, paradise-like world, which is destroyed by atrocious brutality. The chaos of the situation is conveyed by the image of Yvon’s colonial mansion in flames and corpses littering the ground. Private history and official history are here conjoined. Yvon is portrayed as unable to imagine the possible independence of the Congo while the latter becomes a site of civil war (117) and chaos. This image of the mansion in flames follows an image of Yvon anxious about the fate of his servants, friends, and workers as his paradise world transforms into nightmarish scenes of massacres. The book closes with historical documents, here the photographs of the author’s grandfather in the Congo in 1946–47. Although nostalgia seems to dominate the tone of this work, the mood of guilt shadowing the narrative might be associated with an aposteriori reflection on the part of the author himself, who is privy to his own family’s inheritance of the alternative versions of Congo’s past. Intertwined in this comic book are the foreshadows and hidden specters of the independence of the country and Lumumba’s assassination, two events that symbolize the hopeful dreams of decolonization and the post-independence years of disillusion the country experienced. The graphics highlight how nostalgia for a time and a place of deceptive happiness, conveyed by the warm colors of a luxuriant Congo and rich mansions, still inhabits a great number of Belgians minds. The hallucinatory images that transform animals and humans into frightful creatures that

Melancholia and Memorial Work  103 trouble the protagonist enable the reader to understand the protagonist’s complex feelings of positivity, hope, and success but also the experience of guilt following a historical ethical dilemma. The strange hybrid creatures that haunt the protagonist embody the demons of his experiences of the war and the terrors within the Congo, representing similar traumas in different contexts of victimization. The author’s private history of involvement in the Congo suggests a form of postmemory whereby family demons are acknowledged and eventually addressed. Yvon returns to a dark Belgium, surrounded by his Congolese artifacts and haunted by the past as he confuses a black man at his door with his former Congolese servant, whom he addresses, not without guilty nostalgia, “What do you want from me? I have nothing left out there” (128). The singularity of experience, the metaphors of personal trauma, the absence of sensational visual violence, and the comics’s engagement with Congolese realities suggest a counter-discourse that moves beyond a general narrative of collective accusations and guilt. Congolese Inversions and Memorial Work in Diantantu’s Simon Kimbangu and Baruti and Cassiau-Haurie’s Madame Livingstone If you really want to thank us, lieutenant, there is only one thing you should do: never come back!24 If most Congolese comics concentrate on ordinary heroes, one often ignored in the West but important to the history of the Congo is Kimbangu. Serge Diantantu’s comic Simon Kimbangu (2002)25 foregrounds and celebrates this resistance figure in a memorial work that points to the interconnections between colonial and postcolonial situations. Simon Kimbangu opens with Simon Kimbangu’s release being signed by Mobutu in 1991 after forty-one years of imprisonment, a plight that has made him a “Congolese Mandela” figure symbolizing non-violence. The narrative then returns to the scene of his birth and childhood but with a first reference to the Berlin conference that “redesigns Africa’s borders.”26 King Leopold II is named and referred to in the setting of a small village in South West Congo where Kimbangu was born in 1887. The villagers shout at Kinzembo, Kimbangu’s aunt and surrogate mother, because she has welcomed and trusted the white missionary, Reverend Comber. Diantantu reminds us here that the white man was associated with projects of religious proselytizing and colonization and underlines how difficult it was for Congolese people to avoid amalgamating the two roles: “He is preaching? Do you know his peers beat us with whips and crop? That they are threatening us by force to join their religion?”27 Diantantu’s account does not provide a narrative of exploitation and victimization directly but makes clear reference to the difficult work conditions involved in colonial enterprises that used the Congolese people.

104  Véronique Bragard As an example, Diantantu describes, at the completion of the Thys train28 construction project, the relief experienced from the “pain of thousands of Congolese carriers and workers requisitioned for this purpose.”29 Diantantu’s approach, which is mostly a celebration of the Congolese people’s strength, determination, and resistance, is therefore an indirect denunciation of colonial systems. The text above the portraits of Leopold II and Stanley indict the coercive laws of the system: the colonial rules imposed concerning deportation, exile and racial separation in cities. King Albert is also referred to in the context of Belgium’s economic involvement in Congolese oil mills (huileries du congo belge) and mines (union minière). We read the irony in the discrepancies and establish cross-discursive contrasts as Diantantu juxtaposes semi-mythical images of the two famous Europeans and the textual denunciation of the brutal impact of their enterprise in this composition. Diantantu’s work is Congolese-centered and inverts Western paradigms. The significant year 1914 is not associated with World War I but with ­Kimbangu’s extraordinary work in the palm fields, for which he is regarded as a miracle worker. Kimbangu’s story is one of travels, petty jobs, and rejection by his own people and eventually by the colonial rule. The author explains the deification of Kimbangu by his own people by foregrounding the monotheism of the Congolese people and their veneration for centuries of the same god Nzambi-a-Mapungu (10). Filled with idealized images of great solidarity among Congolese people set against their antagonism towards the missionaries, the narrative presents how Kimbangu becomes a Christ-like figure who unites peoples, incites rebellion while also rejecting African customs (41). Kimbangu becomes an enemy of the church as he amasses followers and an enemy of the administration since he incites the Congolese people to refuse to pay taxes. Diantantu refrains from direct attacks against the colonial establishment. In fact, white colonizers are portrayed as kind and respectful towards Congolese workers. For example, when Kimbangu is accused of claiming his salary twice, the factory boss trusts that Kimbangu is sincere when he claims he has not received any. However, Diantantu does indict the foreigners on the charge of attempting to “falsify history” (43). The figure of the “humanitarian” Morel is demystified as he is portrayed as unable to connect with the Congolese narrative of Kimbangu or to understand Kimbangu’s behavior. A grotesque image of Leopold II hangs in his office. As critic Tshitungu affirms, Diantantu avoids propaganda and focuses on Kimbangu’s struggle in a realistic style, using an aesthetic that draws from Congolese painting-style drawings. The humanitarian figures are here the Congolese themselves. Similar in many ways to Diantantu’s text is Baruti and Cassiau-Haurie’s Madame Livingstone (2014), which returns to this period in history with another perspective from the Congolese diaspora. Set in the 1914–1918 war-time years in Tanganyika, the story follows the Belgian aviator Gaston Mercier who, in the course of his mission to sink a German battleship, meets

Melancholia and Memorial Work  105 the mysterious Mrs. Livingstone. The ironic and yet subversive title used by Baruti points to his own imagined ancestry – he was called Livingstone Alexis before the Mobutu years – as he creates the legend of Mrs. Livingstone. Because Livingstone sometimes wears a kilt he exchanged for the purchase of a case of beer, he is called Mme Livingstone in an added dimension of role-playing grafted onto his identity as the son of the renowned Scottish explorer and a Congolese woman. Livingstone becomes here a Congolese man who is intimate with the vast African territory and emerges as a counterpart to the historical Livingstone, possessed with a hybrid identity and capacity to adapt to several cultures. Mrs. Livingstone becomes the hero who helps the Belgians sink the German boat “Graf Von Gotzen.” Baruti, in this fiction, reminds us of an unknown episode in World War I, an intervention into European history when the Congo Force Publique challenged the Germans. Yet, in contrast to the texts analyzed in the first section of this essay, this narrative does not aim at authenticity and historical veracity. On the contrary, as the figure of Mrs. Livingstone illustrates, the text is anchored in a mythic construction and clearly acknowledges the imaginative force that characterizes this story. Two important aspects of this composition need to be highlighted. First, the diegesis remains central and supersedes the historical, informative background of the account. Here, Livingstone is eventually believed to be a traitor and is killed next to his mother’s grave, who was herself murdered by the Germans. Second, and quite importantly, the historical background is approached from a Congolese perspective, which emphasizes intercultural encounters and hybridity, simultaneously and parodically moving away from the dominant epic narratives of European explorations. The text strongly denounces how Europeans carried and spread their wars and rivalries into the African continent. Baruti’s hybrid identity as an artist who travels between Kinshasa and Brussels frames the new cross-cultural possibilities inaugurated in this graphic narrative. Conclusion It is clear from the above study that both Belgian and Congolese comics productions have evolved within distinct ideological traditions and national cultures of remembrance. My comparative reading has shown that the obsession with the nebulous colonial past remains a European fixation, one that results from colonial guilt and and seems deeply influenced by the paradigm of Hochschild’s accusatory work that is rarely questioned in this corpus. Of course, in a historical context of quasi-denial or silence about the Belgian King’s system, the fictionalization and indictment of the atrocities perpetrated are necessary and resonate for many in the present climate of neo-imperial plundering of Congolese resources taking place in plain view.

106  Véronique Bragard Many of the graphic narratives analyzed here seem to extend a dominant reading still attached to Hergé’s Tintin au Congo and its “humanitarian scenario,”30 whereby the European mission is understood as bringing light, civilization, and redemption to the Africans. In other words, Leopold II’s ghost resurges in transformed spectral forms and, as De Mul argues, is repeatedly evoked “to re-enact the exploratory (and redemptive) role of Morel,”31 to further the contemporary agendas of “humanitarian” ideologies and institutions, and, consequently, to negate a history of Congolese resistance. De Mul asserts that the main ambition of Hochschild’s work is “to reconstruct Leopold’s Congo in order to recover a humanitarian tradition leading towards contemporary human-rights organizations in a teleological fashion.”32 The model of Paul Delisle’s farm as the location of an organic community in Africa Dreams closely resembles humanitarian projects that attempt to teach African people how they should improve their living conditions using local resources. In oblique ways, it preserves the humanitarian ideals of the Congo reform association while evading a response to the system that created these oppressive conditions. In this context, Bauman wonders “whether the humanitarian worker is not … a device designed to unload and dissipate the anxiety of the rest of the world, to absolve the guilty, and placate the scruples, as well as defuse a sense of urgency and the fear of contingency.”33 Many of the graphic texts analyzed here concern themselves with denunciations of or resistance to colonial violence by a few enlightened Europeans but not with the invisible violence of a destructive system and its victims, namely the Congolese people. Contemporary European comics about the Congo unveil Belgium’s national condition as one haunted by the specters of past colonial violence but unable to find a progressive link between this past and the present. Todorov, in his work on the politics of memory, points out: “Commemorating past victims is gratifying, doing something about those of today is disturbing.”34 In the context of the Congo, his observation emphasizes the need to take responsibility for the humanitarian failure to cope with the contemporary chaos of the country that is more than ever the prey of neocolonial exploitation. In this sense, spectral returns filled with the guilt of the Leopoldian period are to be read with Congolese historian Nziem’s words in mind as a “belgo-belgian” concern that unveils the paralyzing effects of melancholia and commemoration, and indicts the present political culture of post-imperial evasion. However, Martin Scorsese and Harry Belafonte’s recent plans to produce a miniseries that takes on Leopold II’s notoriously brutal rule reveals that the phenomena of spectral returns may not be confined to a Belgian theatre after all but might participate in furthering media interests. The reworking of the Conradian paradigm and the celebration of interventionist figures can be read with De Mul’s interpretation in mind as resurrections of the humanitarian ideal filled with guilt and nostalgia for a past of greatness, but also one where ethical action was still perceived as possible.

Melancholia and Memorial Work  107 But what the creative work of Congolese artists suggests is a need to “provincialize Europe,” to use the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, to decenter cross-cultural narratives and to articulate plural histories from a distance liberated from guilt, nostalgia, and grudge. The uneven, two-speed production of European and Congolese comics (the European comics market continues a high volume of production while most Congolese comics are no longer in print) reflects inequalities in the platforms of expression available to both, with Congolese writers often relegated to the margins and their voices yet unrecognized. Baruti’s recent publication with Glénat hopefully announces the possibility that new approaches and a new hybrid era of remembrance and graphic dialogue might find wider visibility and a larger reading public. Notes 1. Sarah De Mul, “The Holocaust as a Paradigm for the Congo Atrocities: Adam Hochschild’s Leopold’s Ghost,” in Elleke Boehmer & Sarah De Mul (eds.), The Postcolonial Low Countries: Literature, Colonialism, Multiculturalism. (­Lexington Books, 2012), 173. 2. Sarah De Mul, “The Holocaust as a Paradigm for the Congo Atrocities,” op. cit., 169. 3. Warnaut-Raives, Congo 4.. (Casterman, 1988). 4. Although Belgium has not encouraged literary productions in RDC, the influence of comics used by missionaries, for instance, has resulted in the emergence of a number of graphic Congolese artists who have appropriated and opened up the medium to alternative epistemologies and graphic approaches such as the influence of African popular painting. 5. Mongo Sisé, Bingo en Belgique. (Service Information et Relations Publiques de l’Administration Générale de la Coopération au développement. Bruxelles, 1983). 6. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), xii. 7. Paul Gilroy, After Empire, op. cit. 131. 8. Jean-François & Maryse Charles, Frederic Bihel, I. Africa Dreams: L’ombre du Roi (Casterman, 2010), II Africa Dreams: Dix volontaires sont arrivés enchaînés (­Casterman: 2012), III Africa Dreams: ce bon Monsieur Stanley. (Casterman, 2013). 9. Tirabosco, Tom & Christian Perrissin, Kongo: Le ténébreux voyage de Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. (Futuropolis, 2013). 10. Miquel Stéphane & Loic Godart, Au coeur des ténèbres: librement adapté du roman de Joseph Conrad. (Paris: Noctambule, 2014). 11. Yves H. Hermann, Retour au Congo (Paris: Glénat, 2013). 12. Serge Diantantu, Simon Kimbangu (Mandala Editions: Amfreville-la-Mivoie, 2002). My translation. 13. In his 2006 illustrated edition, the Belgian graphic artist Stassen uses, as Laurent Demoulin observes, a detail to deal with the horror of the story. His six illustrations become oblique and free interpretations of Marlow’s ambiguous experience in the Congolese interior. A detail such as the bloodstain on Marlow’s shoe stresses and intensifies this ambivalence.

108  Véronique Bragard 14. Véronique Bragard, “Conrad’s Two Visions: Intermedial Transgenericity in Anyango and Mairowitz’s Graphic Adaptation of Heart of Darkness” In European Comic Art, Vol. 6, No. 1(Spring 2013), p. 45–65. 15. Jean-François Chanson and Yannick Deubou Sikoue’s adaptation of Conrad’s An Outpost of Progress (in French, 2010) shows how the traditional ligne claire is not suitable in the context of the devastating colonial enterprise. Central to the story are Kayerts and Carlier, who are assigned to a trading post in a remote part of the African jungle to collect ivory. The two men’s racist attitude is stressed as they are portrayed as looking down on Africans but also as heavily disoriented, having landed in this enterprise for family or money reasons. Sticking to their moral principles within the context of exploitation turns out to be impossible. Their relationship with natives and the land aggravates as both become increasingly isolated, hungry, demoralized, and eventually violent. The episode in which Carlier eats sugar sparks an irrational, uncontrolled conflict that ends disastrously as Kayerts shoots and kills Carlier. The graphic version doesn’t make it an accident but a voluntary act for fear of becoming the other’s slave (52). At the end of the story, just when the company steamboat approaches the station two months later than it should have, Kayerts hangs himself out of desperation. The voice and angered faces whose fears are stressed in realist expressions contrast with the other Conradian adaptations presented here where characters emerge with more abstract contours. None of the colonials and colonized remains morally neutral. Although the foreground uses very sharp lines, the African backdrop and landscape remain fuzzy, always foggy, and nebulous, a technique that discloses the character’s lack of understanding of the moral situation. The very last image of the colonials arriving with supplies shows a man exclaiming: “Konrad, que s’est-il passé ici?” again reiterating the wish to merge biography with fiction.
 16. See for instance White, Harry and Irving L. Finston, “The Two River Narratives in Heart of Darkness,” Conradiana, 42.1–2 (Spring/Summer 2010), 1–43. 17. “Mr. Kurtz was clearly inspired by several real people, among them George Antoine Klein” (144). The use of the name Klein contradicts Hochschild’s assertion, which insists on “inspiration” and “several people.” 18. Founded in 1904 by Guinness, Morel, and Casement a.o., the Congo Reform Association exposed the abuses of the Leopoldian system in the Congo to mobilize political support. 19. Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (London: Pan Books, 2006), p. 294. 20. Created in 1885 by the Belgians, it was a military force whose role was first to control the territory and later to impose forced labor. 21. We can here observe the authors’ determination to pack a maximum of historical references in this piece to show how the Congo was not only Leopold’s dream garden but also the site of imperial rivalries. One example is the episode that follows, in which a young boy is reading the bulletin mensuel de colonisation comparée devoted to “la vérité sur le Congo.” This report, published in 1907, defended the Belgian enterprise, which, in this occurrence, is being contrasted with the atrocities committed by the English, for instance “de tous les colonisateurs, les Anglais sont les plus cruels” (40), a reference that foregrounds the many national rivalries around the Congo. Helped by Alfred Jones, Leopold II is again portrayed as engineering evil schemes to hide the horrors perpetrated in his Congo: showing journalists only what they need to

Melancholia and Memorial Work  109 see, temporarily turning prisons into vegetable gardens, and supposedly bribing people as Morel and Casement make clear in the following panel. The last scene shows Casement condemning the “roi des bêtes” (a pun on “roi des belges”) and Charles Stokes hanged by the Public Force because of his relationship with a Congolese woman. 22. See Mick Léonard’s review of Retour au Congo: http://www.planetebd.com/bd/ glenat/retour-au-congo/-/21063.html. Accessed May 2014. 23. Nicolas Pitz, Les Jardins du Congo. La boite a Bulles, 2013. 24. Barly Baruti and Christophe Cassiau-Haurie, Madame Livingstone. Congo, la grande guerre. (Grenoble: Glénat, 2014), p. 61. 25. Serge Diantantu, Simon Kimbangu. Mandala Editions: Amfreville-la-Mivoie, 2002. 26. Ibid., 5. 27. Ibid., 7. 28. Emmanuel Dongala reminds us in Le feu des origines that the number of masts equals the number of Congolese workers who died to build it. 29. Serge Diantantu, Simon Kimbangu (Mandala Editions: Amfreville-la-Mivoie, 2002), 8. 30. Pascal Lefèvre, “The Congo Drawn in Belgium,” History and Politics in FrenchLanguage Comics and Graphic Novels, ed. Mark McKinney. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 171. 31. Op. cit. 172. 32. Op. cit. 170. 33. Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (Cambridge : Polity press, 2004), 77. 34. Todorov, Les Abus de la Mémoire. (Arléa: 2004), 54. My translation.

References Baruti, Barly and Christophe Cassiau-Haurie. Madame Livingstone. Congo, la grande guerre. Grenoble: Glénat, 2014. Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. Bragard, Véronique. “Conrad’s Two Visions: Intermedial Transgenericity in Anyango and Mairowitz’s Graphic Adaptation of Heart of Darkness” In: European Comic Art, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Spring 2013): 45–65. Cassiau-Haurie, Christophe. Histoire de la bande dessinée congolaise: Congo belgeZaïre-République démocratique du Congo. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, 2007. Charles, Jean-François, Maryse Charles, and Frédéric Bihel. I. Africa Dreams: L’ombre du Roi. Casterman, 2010. II Africa Dreams: Dix volontaires sont arrivés enchaînés. Casterman: 2012. III Africa Dreams: ce bon Monsieur Stanley. Casterman: 2013. Demoulin, Laurent. “Du Rwanda au Coeur des ténèbres: Jean-Philippe Stassen illustre Conrad,” Textyles: Revue des Lettres Belges de Langue Française 36–37 (2010): 107. De Mul, Sarah. “The Holocaust as a Paradigm for the Congo Atrocities: Adam Hochschild’s Leopold’s Ghost.” The Postcolonial Low Countries: Literature,

110  Véronique Bragard Colonialism, Multiculturalism, Elleke Boehmer and Sarah De Mul, eds. Lexington Books, 2012. 163–183. Diantantu, Serge. Simon Kimbangu. Mandala Editions: Amfreville-la-Mivoie, 2002. Gilroy, Paul. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Herbez, Ariel. “Le fabuleux voyage de Tom Tirabosco sur les traces de l’écrivain Joseph Conrad.” Le Temps. http://www.letemps.ch/Page/Uuid/b355b67e-930e11e2-a4ba-4ec24fb4b947|0#.UpdWTo1cdmA. Accessed 23 Mar. 2013. Hermann, Yves H. Retour au Congo. Paris: Glénat, 2013. Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. London: Pan Books, 2006. Hunt, Nancy Rose. “Comics and the Belgian Congo.” A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empires. Prem Poddar, Rajeev Shridhar Patke, and Lars Jensen, eds. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. 23–24. Lefèvre, Pascal. “The Congo Drawn in Belgium.” History and Politics in FrenchLanguage Comics and Graphic Novels, Mark McKinney ed. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. 166–185. Léonard, Mike. “Une Saison au Congo.” http://www.planetebd.com/bd/glenat/ retour-au-congo/-/21063.html. Accessed Aug. 2014. Miquel, Stéphane and Loice Godart. Au Coeur des ténèbres: librement adapté du roman de Joseph Conrad. Paris: Noctambule, 2014. Perrissin, Christian and Tom Tirabosco. Kongo: Le ténébreux voyage de Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. Futuropolis, 2013. Pitz, Nicolas. Les Jardins du Congo. La boite a Bulles, 2013. Stassen, Jean-Philippe and Sylvain Vernayre. Coeur des tenèbres. Paris: Gallimard, 2006. Spee, Bernard. “Lire Tintin au Congo ou Les murmures des fantômes d’un petit belge L’enfance d’un art et l’art d’une enfance ou L’innocence retrouvée?” http://www. onehope.be/Essai%20RG/PEH6intro.pdf. Accessed Aug. 2014. Taugis, David. “Les Jardins du Congo – Par Nicolas Pitz – La boîte à bulles” http:// www.actuabd.com/Les-Jardins-du-Congo-Par-Nicolas. Accessed Aug. 2014. Todorov, Tzvetan. Les abus de la mémoire. Arléa: 2004. Tirabosco, Tom and Christian Perrissin. Kongo: Le ténébreux voyage de Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. Futuropolis, 2013. Tshitungu, Antoine. “Serge Diantantu: Bande dessinée et histoire.” http://feuillesvolantes.blogs.lalibre.be/archive/2010/05/02/serge-diantantu-bandedessinee-et-histoire.html. Accessed 3 May 2010. White, Harry and Irving L. Finston. “The Two River Narratives in Heart of Darkness.” Conradiana, 42.1–2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 1–43.

6 Visualizing Postcolonial Africa in La vie de Pahé1 Binita Mehta

In the introduction to his edited volume Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels (2011), Michael Chaney points out that when life stories are accompanied by pictures as in autobiographical comic strips, they “produce new structures for the self to inhabit and through which to be expressed.”2 He comments that graphic narratives rely on “stylized” iconography that results in an explicit “departure from the ‘seemingly substantial’ effects of realism that traditional autobiographies presume.” Thus, the “I” of such an autobiography becomes an even more “substantial” presence. Chaney adds: The larger consequences of this tension between objective and subjective truths in creating realistic fictions of the self prod us to reconsider what is at stake in telling our life stories in pictures and how it is that we have come to visualize identity in particular ways and according to particular sociohistorical contexts.3 Following Chaney’s argument, this essay will discuss two volumes of the French comic book, or bande dessinée, La vie de Pahé, written by Pahé, an alias for the Gabonese comic-book writer Patrick Essono Nkouna. In his autobiographical comic books, Pahé uses text and image to tell his personal narrative within the context of postcolonial Africa. This essay will answer the following questions based on Pahé’s comic books: how does Pahé wed his own narrative, his coming-of-age as a writer and artist, with that of postcolonial Africa? In what way does he recount the story of immigration and the treatment of black Africans in France? How does his rhetorical style, as both narrator and commentator of his text, and his use of the bande dessinée format, enhance his narrative? This essay will also analyze how autobiography in drawn comic books makes the “I” of Pahé an “even more ‘substantial’” presence and how, in a very self-reflexive fashion, Pahé is the protagonist of his story, the “narrated I” in the speech bubbles, to borrow from Chaney, and also author of his story, Chaney’s the “narrating I” in the recitatives.4 In the two volumes of La vie de Pahé – Volume 1, entitled Bitam, was published in 2006 and Volume 2, Paname, in 2008 – Pahé writes about family life, schooling, and the challenges of being a writer and illustrator of

112  Binita Mehta comic books. Born in the city of Bitam in the northern part of Gabon, Pahé shuttled between France and Gabon during his elementary, middle, and high-school years. When in France, he stayed with his older sister, Rose, who was a medical student in Paris. He later studied art in Paris then worked as a cartoonist for several journals in Gabon such as La Griffe, La Moustik and La Cigale enchantée. He currently lives in Gabon. The Franco-Belgo book editor Pierre Paquet became a fan of Pahé’s work and, intrigued by his life story, asked him to illustrate it for his publishing company Editions Paquet, based in Geneva, Switzerland. Pahé accepted and is both writer and illustrator of these volumes, while Christophe Bouchard did the color work. The two volumes deal largely with the two cities in which Pahé spent a large part of his life, his birthplace, Bitam, in the north of Gabon and Paname or Paris.5 At first, Pahé had agreed to write a third volume that was going to discuss his relationships with women but then decided not to write it for personal reasons – this is summarized on p. 50 of Volume 1. Most recently, however, in his blog dated February 4, 2013, Pahé announced that he is currently working on Volume 3: “Ma vie à moi, le 3. Ca y est c’est reparti, bien chaud, bien décidé, de terminer mon dernier opus de la vie qui raconte ma life à moi, en BD. D’ici 6 mois. Aux Éditions Paquet” (My very own life in Volume 3. That’s it. Here we go again. Ready and determined to complete the last life-work that tells my life-story in comic-book form. Editions Paquet will publish it 6 months from now).6 Both volumes have been well received in the Francophone Europe and in some African countries. In 2009, they were turned into a serialized cartoon for the French television channel France 3 entitled Le Monde de Pahé (The World of Pahé). The show can be seen on television screens in France, Belgium, and Switzerland. Pahé’s blog announces that this serialized cartoon is screened in many African countries, including Tchad, Congo, and Cameroon. However, it cannot be viewed on Gabonese television. In an appearance in a program Emission plurielle on the Gabonese television station RTG 1, Radiodiffusion Télévision gabonaise, on December 10, 2011, Pahé challenges the Gabonese government, questioning why his comic book had not been published in Gabon nor his cartoon spinoff aired on Gabonese television. Although he acknowledges that the Gabonese prefer watching Brazilian soap operas, he asks ironically if his show was not being aired because of his bald head, his stupid mug (gueule de con), or because his text and illustrations are critical of the Gabonese government. He also registers his unhappiness that the Gabonese publishers who had agreed to publish his comic books in Gabon, with the preface written by the current president of Gabon, Ali Bongo, had not yet done so. Comics in Africa: A Brief Summary Before entering into a discussion of the two comic books themselves, a brief overview of the history of the comic books in Africa is in order.

Visualizing Postcolonial Africa in La vie de Pahé  113 French-language comic books in Africa are not a contemporary phenomenon. They have existed since colonial times. European missionaries wrote some of the first comic books in Africa. After the independence of many African nations during the late 1950s and 1960s, African comics appeared in different forms – as political cartoons, as comic strips in newspapers, and published in specialized journals. In the 1970s, as dictatorships consolidated their rule in many African countries, government censorship of writers and the press suppressed the publication of comics. The 1980s and 1990s saw a proliferation of comic-book magazines and some individual comic books or albums. Madagascar and Senegal were the leaders in the publication of comic books or strips during these decades. The democratization of many African countries saw the flourishing of comic strips in newspapers and the satirical press. Other comic strips were published by non-governmental organizations, with the help of African writers and illustrators, to educate people about sanitary and health issues. Starting in the 1980s, African artists joined together in associations with the aim of promoting their art. Several associations were formed in Africa and two in Europe: L’Afrique dessinée in Paris, run by the comic-book artist Christophe N’Galle Edimo, and Afro-Bulles in Belgium. These associations organized comic-book fairs and exhibitions all over Africa. As publishing opportunities in Africa slowly dried up, the first decade of the twenty-first century saw the migration of several African comic-book writers and illustrators to France and Belgium, either encouraged by NGOs, who used the comic-book format to educate people about public-health issues such as AIDS, or by European comic-book editors. Although some African comic-book artists continue to self-publish in Africa, publishing is still a challenge and many African comic-book writers rely on European publishers.7 In their book Contemporary Francophone Writers and the Burden of Commitment (2011), Odile Casenave and Patricia Célérier lament the fact that the African visual arts are generally ignored in the West and have suffered because of lack of funding and “cultural stereotyping” (139). They point out the success of the comic book Aya de Yopougon by the Franco-Ivorian writer Marguerite Abouet and her French illustrator, Clément Oubrerie, that was awarded the 2006 Prix du premier album at the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée at Angoulême: “… Aya was applauded for breaking away from the usual clichés associating the continent with war and famine” and portrays a nineteen-year-old girl living a normal life in Abidjan. They compare this success to the positive reception of the Iranian-French writer and illustrator Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel, Persepolis. Despite Marguerite Abouet’s success, ­however, others such as Senegalese cartoonist T.T. Fons’s (real name Alphonse Mendy) cartoon character Goorgoorlou, which has been a regular feature of the Senegalese satirical magazine le cafard libéré and also been made into a popular television series, has not received much

114  Binita Mehta attention outside the African continent, while the more recent Malamine, un Africain à Paris (2009) by Edimo and Simon-Pierre Mbembo has received critical but not commercial success in France.8 Breaking Away from Stereotypes Pahé’s autobiographical tale, told and illustrated in a non-linear fashion, breaks through spatio-temporal and geographical barriers that often shift from frame to frame. Although his narrative follows a chronologically linear trajectory in the telling of his life story, it is interspersed with vignettes dealing with various subjects related to African colonial and postcolonial history. Consequently, he frames his own search for identity as a man, a comic-book writer, an African, and a world citizen within the socio-political context of twentieth and twenty-first century Africa. The notion of the merging of the narrated I with the narrating I, as explained by Chaney above, is demonstrated on the first page of the first volume. It opens in twenty-first century Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon. On the first page and second frame of the album, Pahé is informed by a friend that “y a un blanc bizzaroide qui veut te voir”9 (there’s a crazy white guy who wants to see you). A couple of frames later he meets the editor, Pierre Paquet, and two frames later we see Pahé working at his desk, stating the aim of the project in the recitative: “Le deal était simple: Pierre voulait que je lui raconte en 3 tomes de B.D ma vie de merde. J’ai accepté ce défi fou, histoire de voir ce que cela donnerait par la suite!!!” (The deal was simple: Pierre wanted me to tell him the story of my shitty life in 3 comic book volumes. I accepted this challenge, in order to see what that would bring about!!!). In the speech bubble he states: “Et voilà! Me voici sur ma table à dessin, mon cul bien calé sur une chaise prêt à vous raconter une partie de moi … un peu de ma vie, la Vie de Pahé! Attention … Action!” (1.1) (And voilà! Here I am at my drawing table, my ass well settled on a chair ready to tell you a part of myself … a little bit about my life, la Vie de Pahé! Attention … Action!). In this frame, Pahé reveals a part, a “little bit” of his life as one would in a film. By introducing his life story using cinematic vocabulary, he is emphasizing the visual over the textual. He is the director and actor of the film about his life that he is about to screen for his readers/viewers. This essay will focus on three thematic issues Pahé discusses in his life story – schooling and education, both in France and Gabon, his critique of the governments in Congo and Gabon, and his portrait of France and especially its treatment of black African immigrants – to demonstrate how his personal story/history (histoire) told in text and image reflects his experiences in postcolonial Africa and contemporary France. Pahé’s life writing thus becomes a forum for the critique of civic, social, and political issues, mainly in postcolonial Africa but also periodically discussing

Visualizing Postcolonial Africa in La vie de Pahé  115 Africa’s colonial period to show how it connects to the challenges the African continent continues to face today. Schooling in Gabon and France In his two volumes, Pahé turns a critical eye towards schooling, both in Gabon and in France, and uses it to discuss questions of identity and place. It takes up a large part of his narrative. Interestingly, one of the justifications the French used to colonize countries especially in Africa was the mission civilisatrice or the civilizing mission. One of the ways they did this was by imposing the French educational system in the countries they colonized to such an extent that African children recited lines like “Nos ancêtres les Gaulois” (Our ancestors the Gauls) from French textbooks that had no connection to their own experiences growing up in Africa. Pahé comments on his own education as he moves back and forth between Gabon and France during his primary and middle-school years, attending public, private, and Catholic schools in both countries. A bright and independent child, Pahé found his teachers rigid and uninspiring, as the examples below will demonstrate. The first school Pahé attends is kindergarten in his hometown of Bitam. He has a difficult time adjusting because he does not speak French. He is critical of the curriculum, especially the silly, childish songs the students are forced to sing, preferring to spend his time drawing on the walls, his first attempts of what was to be his future career as an illustrator and cartoonist. Although his classmates admire his drawings the teacher is not pleased. She tells him: “Répète après-moi 8 fois, je ne dessinerai plus” (Repeat after me 8 times, I will not draw again), which he ignores, answering with the word “mouf” (that he explains at the bottom of the frame is a synonym for “mon oeil”) (1.9), indicating that he could not care less about the teacher’s reaction.10 The primary school he attends in France is no better than the one in Gabon. In this school, Pahé stands out because he is black. The students had not seen a black African before: “Il est tout noir!” (He is completely black!), they exclaim incredulously and mouth stereotypical views of Africans as savages (“sauvages”), Tarzan, and cannibals (“cannibales”) (1. 32). On his return to Libreville, the capital of Gabon, Pahé is placed in a public school. Both teacher and students mock him, suggesting that his stay in France had tainted his African identity. Pahé’s sarcastic condemnation of the teacher is clear when he states in the recitative: “Le maître, en bon pédagogue, m’aide beaucoup pour que je m’intègre” (The teacher, as a good pedagogue, helps me a lot to fit in). In the speech bubble we read how the teacher introduces Pahé to the class: “Je vous présente le petit Français Gabonais” (I present to you the little French Gabonese boy). The classmates respond with a chant: “le Blanc, le blanc, le blanc …” (1.36) (The white one, the white one, the white one …). Given his bi-cultural identity, Pahé finds that he is a misfit in schools both in France and Gabon.

116  Binita Mehta

Figure 6.1

As Pahé argues with his teachers and fights with his classmates, his grades suffer and he is placed in another school, an “école mixte,” a “mixed” school that had originally been reserved for whites only but later admitted blacks from well-to-do families. The school had more white students than black and all the teachers were white. However, the teachers still said ridiculous things. One white teacher tells him his black ancestors were Gauls: “Vos ancêtres les noirs … ce sont aussi les gaulois” (Your black ancestors … they are also Gauls). In the next frame, Pahé draws the picture of Astérix and Obélix, the protagonists from the French cartoonists René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s popular comic book series about the inhabitants of the only village in Gaul (as France was known at the time) that had resisted Roman occupation. The speech bubble states ironically: “Super!! je suis le petits-fils d’Astérix.”(1.42) (Great! I am the grandson of Astérix).

Visualizing Postcolonial Africa in La vie de Pahé  117

Figure 6.2

In this frame, Pahé makes several points visually without the need for text. The first and most obvious one shows that Pahé is clearly not the descendent of Astérix or Obélix. As a black African, he does not physically resemble the comic-book characters who are white. The second shows his awareness of the genealogy of comic books. He is paying homage to the comic-book writers who preceded him and whom he admires, in this instance, Goscinny and Uderzo. A third reason for bringing Astérix and Obélix into the picture could be to show his resistance to continued French influence and imperialist presence in Africa. However, above and beyond the points mentioned above, Pahé’s critique is directed towards the inconsistencies inherent in the educational systems in France and Gabon. To prove that point, in the very next frame he draws a picture of a black African public-school teacher who, Pahé remarks, may have been drunk at the time, informing his class that their ancestors are Bantous. Thus, in the following frame, like he did with Astérix and Obélix earlier, Pahé conjures up an image of the great African warrior Shaka Zulu (1.43).

118  Binita Mehta

Figure 6.3

Neither the image of Astérix nor the one of Shaka Zulu mirrors Pahé’s experience. As someone who had spent time in Gabon and France, his identity is considerably more complex. It is a composite of his Gabonese heritage, influenced by his extended stay in France, and he is critical of the educators in the different schools who perpetuate simplistic notions of identity. Views on Africa and Africans Pahé’s critique of the educational system in Gabon is merely one aspect of his broader socio-political critique of postcolonial Africa. Most of his views on Africa are shown in a series of vignettes that move back and forth in time

Visualizing Postcolonial Africa in La vie de Pahé  119 and between the colonial and the postcolonial period and interrupt the telling of his life story. His first critique is directed towards the practice of polygamy and, as we see in the early pages of Volume 1, the object of his ridicule is his own father who had several wives. In one of those frames we see an image of his father and his ten wives who are raising their fists at him stating: “Un vrai polygame” (A real polygamist). In the next frame we see Pahé’s father unsuccessfully trying to spend equal time with his wives. Here, however, the text and image convey contradictory messages, clearly showing Pahé’s condemnation of polygamy. While the recitative reads: “… la cohabitation entre co-épouses se passait à merveille” (1.4) (….cohabitation between co-spouses went wonderfully well), the accompanying image shows the opposite: two of the wives are trading insults. The children too do not get along well with each other. Pahé’s mother finally leaves his father with her four daughters from a previous marriage and returns to her own home, taking up a job as a saleswoman. We hear very little of the father in the rest of the comic book and, not surprisingly, Pahé’s main influences and support system are the women in his family, his mother and older sisters, Florence and Rose. Pahé’s critique of colonial and postcolonial African politics is written and drawn as digressions from his autobiographical narrative. Thus in Volume 1, we see Pahé the adult cartoonist trying to explain Gabonese politics to his editor, Pierre Paquet. He explains the absolute power of the Gabonese president, Omar Bongo, and his one-party rule. The PDG (Parti Démocratique Gabonais) and Omar Bongo had ruled Gabon since its independence in the 1967. He was feted every March 12 with parades and hymn and did not tolerate any opposition.11 In Volume 2, Pahé draws images of the strikes in the 1990s that opposed Bongo’s dictatorship and shut down the entire town, including the schools. Pahé is fired by magazines for which he works for drawing cartoons that are critical of Bongo and his regime and condemn the lack of freedom of speech in Gabon. As he writes in the recitative: “Au Gabon, quand on est dessinateur, prière de ne jamais faire de dessin outrageant à l’encontre de Papa Bongo” (2.65) (In Gabon, when one is an artist, it is important not to ever draw offensive cartoons against Papa Bongo). Pahé also highlights disparities of income between the rich and poor in postcolonial Gabon, observing satirically: “le Gabon est un pays riche en pétrole, c’est pour ça qu’il y a encore beaucoup de bidonvilles …” (1.35) (Gabon is an oil-rich country; it is for that reason that there are still many slums). The very presence of a natural resource such as oil creates social disparities, and money is made by those few who control its production and distribution. To illustrate those disparities, in the next frame Pahé draws a portly, wealthy man standing near his car, his fists full of money, looking down on a skinny, poor compatriot. Pahé shows other social inequalities when, on his first visit to Libreville, he stays with an uncle in a bidonville or slum in the outskirts of town and not in one of the lovely oceanfront homes in the capital city.

120  Binita Mehta The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) becomes an object of Pahé’s critique when he travels to Kinshasa, the capital, for a comic-book festival to which he is invited in the 1990s. To get to Kinshasa, he has to pass through Congo-Brazzaville. He has no trouble crossing this border because, as a Gabonese citizen, he is a “bokilo” or brother-in-law since Omar Bongo, the President of Gabon, had married the daughter of Denis Sassou, the President of Congo-Brazzaville. He has more trouble entering Kinshasa and is forced to bribe an official who insists that he needs a vaccination to cross the border. Pahé observes sarcastically in the recitative: “Le problème de vaccin est réglé avec un billet de 1000F que sa main avale aussitôt. Deux secondes plus tard, je suis vacciné à coups de tampons!!” (1.58) (The vaccination problem was settled with a 1000 franc bill that his hand quickly devours. Two seconds later, I am immunized with stamps). Both the image and text, the pun on the word vacciner and the officer rubber-stamping his passport, make a strong impact on the reader. By highlighting the corrupt immigration official in the DRC, Pahé is pointing to the general culture of corruption among government officials in African countries. Later, in a narrative within a narrative, Pahé meets a young lady in ­Kinshasa who recounts the history of Congo, including its colonial past. In the next couple of pages, in a kind of flashback, Pahé illustrates the Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s ascent to power. Mobutu ruled Congo, which he renamed Zaire, with an iron fist from independence until his death. In one frame we see Mobutu humbly asking a Belgian officer for a job at the Office National pour l’Emploi (National Employment Office). The officer asks him: “Président à vie, ça te dit?” (2.7) (President for life, how does that sound?). The recitative in the next frame reads: “Mobutu dirigea le pays d’une main de fer, imposant sa loi” (2.7) (Mobutu ran the country with a firm hand, imposing his law). In order to consolidate his power and to enhance the myth of his god-like status, he has planes shower down manioc (cassava) to his starving people, who thought that the food was falling from the heavens. Pahé draws Mobuto complete with his trademark leopard-skin hat and his throne covered in a leopard skin. The caption reads: “Mobutu, Roi du Zaire” (2.8) (Mobutu, king of Zaire). Pahé critique of Mobotu’s despotic rule and Congo’s Belgian colonizers who put him there are made forcefully in both text and image. Both volumes also stress inter-African rivalries, mainly between Malians and Gabonese, and we see instances of this in Gabon and in France. In ­Volume 1, when little Pahé is living at his uncle’s home in a poorer section of town, the children trick the local Malian grocer into giving them free food. Later, in Paris, Pahé is critical of a Malian immigrant, Mamadou. He meets Mamadou in a dormitory for international residents where he, his wife, and two daughters live in single room. Mamadou, who has lived in France for many years, considers himself French and is offended if he is addressed as a Malian. As Pahé writes in the recitative: “Mamadou est français depuis qu’à

Visualizing Postcolonial Africa in La vie de Pahé  121 la préfecture il a appris que tous ceux qui sont nés avant les indépendances sont français” (2.47) (Mamadou is French ever since he learned at the police station that all those born before independence were French). Working as a security guard at the French store Prisunic, he proudly sends home pictures of himself in a security-guard uniform and considers himself a success story. Pahé is critical of Mamadou’s behavior and his abuse of France’s socialsecurity system. In one frame we see Mamadou gleefully encouraging his wife to have a child every year so they could receive the special stipend, or allocation familiale, that families receive from the French government to take care of their children. He is equally critical of some of his Gabonese compatriots who live in the residence. They have no scruples about consuming food that Pahé buys and places in their refrigerator because he does not own one. The majority are students or interns who have been sent to France by the Gabonese government and have no intention of returning to Gabon. As Pahé comments in a recitative: “Ils sont sympas mes grands-frères mais il va falloir rapidement … que je me paie mon frigo!!” (2.49) (My big brothers are nice but I will have to quickly buy myself a fridge). Other incidents include the hostility Pahé faces at the French embassy in Libreville, which he visits to pick up his invitation to attend the comic-book festival, or salon du livre de la BD de Kin, that was to be held in Kinshasa. He meets a rather rude compatriot here. Pahé comments: “C’est bizarre mais j’ai remarqué qu’à chaque consulat ou ambassade de France, il y a toujours un petit négro hyper arrogant, sans doute payé pour nous foutre la merde quand vous osez venir demander un renseignment fut-il le plus simple au monde” (1.52) (It is bizarre but I have observed that in every French consulate or embassy there is always a little hyper-arrogant negro, obviously paid to make things difficult when one dares to make even the simplest of inquiries). Pahé’s critique here is directed towards the officials and bureaucrats in postcolonial Africa who mimic the behavior of their colonial masters. While Pahé directs a critical eye at African society and politics in his text, he uses images in his comic book very adroitly to do the same, while simultaneously critiquing representations of blacks by white artists. When in the DRC to participate in a comic-book festival, Congolese soldiers enter Pahé’s hotel room and accuse him of spying, especially when they see the collection of drawings he has made of the airport, the beach, and the soldiers. Among his possessions they see a copy of the comic book Tintin au Congo by the Belgian artist Hergé that has been recently criticized as a racist, stereotypical portrayal of the Congolese people.12 While the officer in charge angrily stamps on the comic book, calling it nonsense (âneries), a soldier laughs out loud as he flips through the comic book, disparaging Hergé for exaggerating the facial features of black Africans: “On voit bien que le Moundélé qui fait ce livre n’est jamais venu en Afrique” (It is clear that the white man who wrote this book has never been to Africa). In the next frame he asks: “Est-ce qu’on a des lèvres rouges comme ça?” (2.12) (Do we have red lips like that?).

122  Binita Mehta

Figure 6.4

Not surprisingly, and here we have an instance of the image adding to the text, we see the lips of the man on the cover of Tintin au Congo resemble those of the soldier. In the next frame, we see the officer beating up the soldier with the comic book. Pahé’s deconstruction of caricature and stereotypes in the above-­ mentioned frame has to be read in the larger context of the role of ­caricature itself. Discussing the purpose of caricature through history, the critic W. A. Coupe tells us that it has generally been seen as a way to emphasize the negative.13 Yet, adds Coupe, “Most artists tend simply to draw an amusing distorted likeness, rather than to interpret the character of their victims negatively.”14 Caricature can also be equated with satire, according to Coupe,

Visualizing Postcolonial Africa in La vie de Pahé  123 and, quoting the German poet-philosopher Friedrich Schiller, he states that satire can be expressed in both a “punitive” or a serious way or in a “laughing” or “playful” way.15 In a more recent essay, the critic Derek Parker Royal quotes the American cartoonist Will Eisner, who claims that comic-book writers “rely” on stereotypes “as a way to concentrate narrative effectiveness.” Royal asserts, however, that 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 dehumanizes by means of reductive iconography,” quoting examples such as Tintin in the Congo (1931) and the more recent editorial cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published in 2005 in the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten.16 Stereotypes are also the subject of discussion in Fredrik Strömberg’s Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History (2003), in which he states that stereotypical images of blacks did not necessarily show that the cartoonists were racist but were symbolic of the fact they reflected the social mores of the time and the artist’s inability to “differentiate between persons from a national group other than one’s own.”17 The black cartoonist and scholar Charles Johnson disagrees, claiming stereotypes in the representation of blacks by white artists shows “intellectual and creative laziness” on the part of the artist who is “content to uncritically work with received, pre-­fabricated imagery and ideas minted in the minds of others.”18 Jack Glascock and Catherine Preston-Schreck suggest that white cartoonists are hesitant to include non-white minorities in their work because they are not sure about “what might be acceptable.”19 By exaggerating the facial features of the soldier in a few frames of his comic book to resemble those of the Congolese natives, Pahé is trying to present both sides of satire as expressed by Schiller. He is critiquing Hergé for his drawings that exaggerate the facial features of the black Congolese in Tintin au Congo, thus dehumanizing them, while telling his compatriots they should retain the ability to laugh at themselves. He is also making the case that artists should have the freedom to express themselves, and censorship of any kind, even self-censorship, should not be the norm. Moreover, by exaggerating the facial features of the Congolese soldier in a few frames of La vie de Pahé, Pahé confronts the issue of racist stereotypes head on, thus helping mitigate some of its harmful effects. We can further argue that Pahé’s use of a stereotypical image of an African soldier with thick red lips is deliberately ironic. As a contemporary black African cartoonist, Pahé is clearly aware of the history of stereotypical iconography of non-white characters as well as how the white gaze constructs black characters. His stereotyping of the facial features of that one solider, for example, stands in sharp contrast to the variety of facial features he gives other black African characters as well as the white characters in both volumes of his bande dessinée, clearly individuating them and thus making the point that cartoonists do not have to resort to stereotypes to tell their stories. Pahé’s inclusion of ­Hergé’s Tintin au Congo, his reproduction of a racist trope, and the controversy

124  Binita Mehta surrounding it within his narrative highlight Hergé’s “intellectual laziness” while also criticizing other comic-book artists who are unwilling to include black characters in their comic books because they are unsure of “what might be acceptable.” It also demonstrates that Pahé is not afraid to tackle delicate issues of racism and ethnic stereotyping in his work. Views on France Pahé’s description of his schooling in France and Gabon takes up a large part of this coming-of-age narrative. We have seen above his condemnation of the rigid and unenlightened French schooling system. However, his multiple visits to France as a child and as an adult also allow him to observe French popular culture, French consumer culture, and the treatment of black Africans by French authorities. He does this with irony and wit. In Volume 1, he views France as an outsider and a child and is fascinated by the modern amenities of Western living – running hot water, toilets that flush, breakfast, “le petit déj’ une superbe invention! Fallait bien manger en France chaque matin. C’était la coutume laissé par leurs ancêtres Astérix et Obélix” (1.23) (Breakfast, a superb invention. You had to eat well in France every morning. It was a custom passed on by their ancestors Astérix and Obélix). He comments on French popular culture: food and the packaging of food, television, cartoons, advertising, video games, and super and hypermarkets. He illustrates his visits to Mammouth and Auchan, two French hypermarkets. Other cultural differences include the French treatment of pets and the concept of public parks. In France, Pahé is also introduced to American television shows such as Starsky and Hutch and American pop stars like Michael Jackson. Yet although his first encounter with racism is in the classroom, Pahé’s harshest critique is directed at the immigration officers at airports who consistently pick on black visitors for searches and interrogations. When he arrives in Paris to study art at the Insitut supérieur d’art et de publicité, he states ironically in the recitative: “Fait étrange, à la sortie du tunnel seuls les noirs étaient les plus visés par le contrôles. Une habitude du pays certainement” (2.34) (Strange fact. At the tunnel’s exit, only the blacks were targeted for checks. A custom of the country surely). Other comments directed at black passengers by the police at passport controls included “Où avezvous trouvé ce visa?” (Where did you find this visa?) and “Z’êtes sûr que c’est vous sur la photo? Les noirs se ressemblent tellement” (2:35) (Are you sure this is you in the photo? Black people look so much alike). Pahé also recounts an incident when a black French national is stopped by authorities and asked to prove his citizenship. When it came to Pahé’s turn, he mentions in the recitative that the officer resembled an old school friend from his school in Tours. Pahé wonders if he would recognize him but the officer does not, asking him a series of impersonal questions instead, including what he

Visualizing Postcolonial Africa in La vie de Pahé  125 was doing in France and if he smoked drugs. To the first question, Pahé provocatively answers, “To fuck your women” (Pour baiser vos femmes), which could have landed him in trouble. However, the officer does not appear to hear it. He is busy examining Pahé’s paperwork, which appears to be in order, and he lets him through with the following greeting: “Bon séjour en France et j’espère que vous n’allez pas y rester longtemps” (2.35) (Have a good stay in France and I hope that you will not stay here long). It was clear that the French airport authorities were not very welcoming to non-white visitors or even to its non-white citizens. Conclusion In Pahé’s personal story, or the part he chooses to discuss in his graphic narrative, the “I” becomes a “substantial presence,” to use Chaney’s words, and consequently part of the collective story of postcolonial Africa. The comic-book mode, the use of text and image, as well as the autobiographical nature of the main narrative allow for the coming together of subjective and objective truths. Pahé is not afraid to criticize himself – he is after all discussing his “shitty life,” as he states at the beginning – but is equally critical of the dishonesty, self-delusion, despotism, corruption, and racism in Africa and in France. At the same time he does not flinch from condemning the ineffectual schooling systems in France and Gabon, the racism of the French immigration officials, the corruption of African authorities, the brutal dictatorial regimes in African countries, and the dishonesty of certain immigrant African families in France. Although Pahé tells his story within the context of twentieth and twentyfirst century France and Africa, the final page of the second volume of La vie de Pahé positions him on the world stage. We see a group of glum-faced Gabonese in a market square in Libreville in a single frame that takes up an entire page. While the speech bubble announces the death of his beloved sister, Florence, the recitative reads: “Libreville, le 10 septembre 2001. … C’est ce jour-là que pour moi, le monde s’effondra!!!” (2.71) (Libreville, September 10, 2001. … It is on that very day that the world fell apart for me!!!). This premonitory cartoon announcing the collapse of Pahé, the author’s world, foreshadows the events of the following day, September 11, 2001, a historical moment that had global reverberations. Pahé’s autobiographical bande dessinée paints a critical and complex picture of postcolonial Africa. His views on schooling in Gabon and France, his critique of contemporary Africa and Africans, both in France and in Africa, and his portrayal of France’s consumerist society and poor treatment of black Africans by French authorities provide a subjective view of these societies. What does Pahé achieve by telling his life story in graphic form? What conclusions can we draw from his bande dessinée? One possible conclusion is that, as Chaney suggests, our lives make sense if we “visualize

126  Binita Mehta identity” according to “particular sociohistorical contexts.” Pahé demonstrates that an artist does not work in a vacuum but needs to be engaged in the socio-political realities of the world around him. Consequently, we can also conclude that Pahé’s critical reflections on the socio-political culture of twentieth and twenty-first century Africa and France, told in a graphic form and in the guise of his personal story/history, serve the higher purpose of effecting social and political change.

Notes 1. An earlier version of this paper appeared in a Canadian online journal, alternative francophone, 1.6 (2013). https://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/af/ issue/view/1413/showToc. 2. Michael Chaney, ed. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press), 2011, 6. 3. Chaney, 7. 4. Chaney, 3. I will be using some of the terminology of comic books – framepanel/une case-une vignette, un récitatif/recitative (found in rectangular boxes on top of or below the frame), and speech bubble/balloon/une bulle. 5. “Paname” was a nineteenth-century slang term for Paris that has regained popularity today. 6. http://pahebd.blogspot.com/2013/02/la-vie-de-pahe-le-3.html, np. All translations are my own. 7. This brief summary has been gleaned from Christophe Cassiau-Haurie and Christophe Meunier’s Cinquante années de bandes dessinées en Afrique francophone and Massimo Repetti’s article “African ‘ligne claire’: The Comics of Francophone Africa.” For more information, please consult these texts. There are several books, articles, and blogs, too numerous to list, that discuss the Francophone-African graphic narrative. Pahé’s blog is one among several blogs on the African BD. John A Lent’s Cartooning in Africa (2009) and Comic Art in Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America: A Comprehensive, International Biography (1996) are examples of books on the subject. There are also books that deal with comic-book writing in specific African countries such as Christophe CassiauHaurie’s Histoire de la BD congolaise (L’Harmattan, 2010). From November 15, 2006 - March 18, 2007, the Studio Museum of Harlem in New York City organized a first-ever exhibit in the United States on comic art from Africa called Africa Comics. The works of thirty-two African artists from all over Africa were exhibited. A two-hundred-page catalogue accompanied the exhibition. http:// www.studiomuseum.org/exhibition/africa-comics. 8. Odile Casenave and Patricia Célérier. Contemporary Francophone Writers and the Burden of Commitment (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 140. 9. Citations from the comic book will be following by volume and page number in parentheses within the text. 10.  Pahé could be using “mon oeil,” literally “my eye” (“my foot” in English), as a pun since the teacher, the authority figure here, is telling him not to draw any more pictures, thus discouraging Pahé the artist’s visual skills.

Visualizing Postcolonial Africa in La vie de Pahé  127 11. Pahé’s volumes of la vie de Pahé were published in 2006 and 2008 respectively, when the Gabonese dictator, Omar Bongo, was still in power. He died in 2009 and was succeeded by his son Ali Bongo, the current President of Gabon. 12. Mark McKinney in History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2008) discusses how Herge’s Tintin in the Congo has been recently criticized as racist by the British Commission on Racial Equality and moved by Borders bookstores in the U.K. and the U.S. from the children’s section to the adult one (4–5). 13. W. A. Coupe, “Observations on a Theory of Political Caricature,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 11.1 (Jan. 1969), 86. 14. Coupe, 88. 15. Coupe, 89. 16. Derek Parker Royal, “Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative.” MELUS, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Fall 1997), 7–8. 17. Fredrik Strömberg, Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History. Foreword by Charles Johnson (Korea: Fantagraphics Books), 2003, 23. 18. Strömberg, 12. 19. Jack Glascock and Catherine Preston-Schreck, “Gender and Racial Stereotypes in Daily Newspaper Comics: A Time-Honored Tradition?” Sex Roles, Vol. 51, Nos. 7/8 (October 2004), 429.

References Abouet, Marguerite and Clément Oubrerie. Aya de Yopougon. 6 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 2005–2010. Cazanave, Odile and Patricia Celerier. Contemporary Francophone Writers and the Burden of Commitment. University of Virginia Press, 2011. Cassiau-Haurie, Christophe and Christophe Meunier. Cinquante années de bandes dessinées en Afrique francophone. L’Harmattan, 2010. Chaney, Michael, ed. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. Coupe, W. A. “Observations on a Theory of Political Caricature.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 11.1 (Jan. 1969): 79–95. Edmino, Christophe N’galle and Simon-Pierre Mbumbo. Malamine: un Africain à Paris. Paris: Les Enfants rouges, 2009. Glascock, Jack and Catherine Preston-Schreck. “Gender and Racial Stereotypes in Daily Newspaper Comics: A Time Honored Tradition?” Sex Roles. Vol. 51. Nos. 7/8 (October 2004): 423–431. McKinney, Mark. History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. Pahé. La vie de Pahé. Tome 1 Bitam, Tome 2 Paname. Editions Paquet, 2006; 2008. ———“Le Blog de Pahé.” 4 Feb 2013. Accessed 28 Sep. 2013. http://pahebd. blogspot.com/2013/02/la-vie-de-pahe-le-3.html. ———“Emission pluriel.” RTG1, Gabon. 10 Dec. 2011. Accessed 28 Sept. 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oeTQWWpbsw. Repetti, Massimo. “African ‘ligne claire’: The Comics of Francophone Africa.” International Journal of Comic Art (IJOCA) (Spring 2007): 515–541.

128  Binita Mehta Royal, Derek Parker. “Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative.” MELUS, Vol 32. No. 3 (Fall 2997): 7–22. Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. 2 vols. Paris: L’Association, 2000; 2001. Strömberg, Fredrik. Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History. Foreword by Charles Johnson. Korea: Fantagraphics Book, 2003.

Part III

Postcolonial Politics India

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7 Postcolonial Demo-graphics Traumatic Realism in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm Pramod K.Nayar

In the opening pages of Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm (2010), a graphic novel on the Indian Emergency of 1975–77 when citizen’s rights were suspended and oppressive laws instituted by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, we meet a striking visual. Slogans and propaganda – “be vigilant,” “security in peril,” “rights suspended,” and “situation peaceful” – hang in speech balloons suspended in the skyline as Vibhuti Prasad (VP), the protagonist, opens his window and looks down at the city. In the visual representing the city-as-palimpsest we see inscribed all over, including the background and foreground, the slogan/news: “Emergency Declared.”1 The visual is particularly powerful because it is suggestive of an atmosphere of conflict and tension, an atmosphere that is inescapable and all-pervasive. Rather than attribute these slogans and warnings to individuals, Ghosh makes them a part of the white noise surrounding everybody and seeping in everywhere. A little later VP notes: “I am surrounded by invisible eyes, watching only me. Trailing me, step by step,” thus emphasizing the all-pervasive nature of the events and terror effects of the events.2 Delhi Calm is in the tradition of Maus, Persepolis, Palestine, and other instances of graphic memoirs and comics journalism. In India it is situated within a history of comic books.3 It has been argued that non-fictional and thinly fictionalized works like Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand’s ­Bhimayana – a graphic novel about one of modern India’s great social reformers, a ­Constitutionalist, and icon of the so-called lower castes, B.R. Ambedkar – call for a critical literacy that links personal experiences with s­ ocio-historical and institutional power relations and alerts us to reflect on issues of otherness in the text.4 It might be characterized as a graphic novel where graphic novels are stand-alone stories in the format of a comic book but not necessarily only “funnies.” Lila Christensen has argued that, “in contrast to superhero comic books, graphic novels are more serious, often nonfiction, full-length, sequential art novels that explore the issues of race, social justice, global conflict, and war with intelligence and humor.”5 This essay on Delhi Calm treats Ghosh’s work as an instance of what Paul Williams and James Lyons call “demo-graphics” to illustrate the link between graphic novels and democracy/politics. The graphic novel as a

132  Pramod K.Nayar medium, the essay demonstrates, is apposite for capturing the horrors of political oppression and the decay of democracy.6 A graphic novel is particularly suited, as Spiegelman so wonderfully demonstrated, to depictions of such oppression and suffering in the everyday. I propose that the panels of Delhi Calm might be treated as “barbaric space.” Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi argues that “barbarism” is not only about the cruelties of the Nazis but also of “acts of representation that take place beyond the consensual boundaries – acts that in fact test and challenge the parameters of collective identification.”7 Barbaric, which etymologically signifies “uncivilized,” refers here to those lacking the accepted or dominant language or those who could not speak. The testimony in newspapers, the visuals of massacres, or the TV screen might be seen as the making of a barbaric space where the victims who cannot speak appear to us. Their presence in the panel illustrates how we cannot have a collective identification as all humans because the representation of suffering, mutilated bodies takes place beyond boundaries of the acceptable. Barbaric spaces constitute us as spectators through the arrival of the barbaric, speaking a language of suffering and torture. In Ghosh, the barbaric space within/of a panel is constituted by a particular dynamic. The space of “demos,” or the “public” is the space of the everyday and the nation. The silencing, the oppression, and the t­otalitarianism in the same panel, sitting beside, alongside, and even inside the everyday is the state. The barbaric space of Delhi Calm emerges in the dynamics between state and nation, each with its own visual rhetoric captured within the frames of one panel. The panel itself therefore is to be seen as a slice of and window into Emergency India’s everyday urban space of those who cannot speak, who suffer, and who are tortured. In the space of the graphic novel’s panels, the extreme and the everyday coexist, just as they did in the Emergency era when the extreme was in the everyday. This barbaric space of panels, with the tensions of the extreme and the everyday that generate the demo-graphics of the graphic novel, has its own aesthetic of “traumatic realism” (Michael Rothberg’s term for the aesthetics of Holocaust representation). It is the constituents of this aesthetic that the essay examines. A study of the trauma aesthetic, Rothberg argues, is necessary in cultural studies because “the extreme is implicated in the everyday as a nonintegrated presence, and that this implication constitutes the traumatic.”8 Traumatic realism serves Ghosh’s purpose well because he shows how the excesses of the Emergency were not out there. Rather, the Emergency affected daily lives and routine social interactions. The extremes – censorship, silencing, suspicion, police presence, arrests – are incorporated into the everyday so the everyday becomes the domain of the political. Ghosh’s traumatic realism has three main components: the mixing of the everyday/nation with the extreme/state, caricature and grotesquerie, and mimetic approximation.

Postcolonial Demo-graphics  133 The Extreme and the Everyday Traumatic realism is constituted mainly by the mixing and blurring of the everyday and the extreme. The trauma of a political situation is captured in the detailing of everyday life, and Ghosh pays as much attention to the quotidian as he does to political debates and developments. He does this by capitalizing on the characteristics of the medium itself. Indian urban space is almost everywhere populated with signage – ­slogans, speeches, banners, and posters. Such signage constitutes what might be called the unobtrusively intrusive genre – essentially the white noise we are used to in India. It organizes our spaces for us in silent but effective ways. Ghosh makes use of this feature of Indian everyday public space in a very effective manner in Delhi Calm. Just as the signage of urban space organizes our experience of that space, the signage in Ghosh organizes the space of that panel. Ghosh’s barbaric spaces – the panels – have numerous signs from the Emergency that seem to form the backdrop to the experience of everyday life in New Delhi. My argument here is that the signage of the state, embodied in the visual rhetorics of Emergency regulations, informs not only the experience of the urban space for the nation/people (demos) in the panels but also our readerly experience and cognition of the panel when we see the dynamics of the visual elements of state and nation. That is, the signage of the nation or everyday exists in tension with the signage of the state or the extreme within the panel and renders it a barbaric space. This signage of the state that seems to organize the lives of the demos around it is what I shall term “call-ins.” I derived this term from the “callouts” of comic books. Callouts are paratextual features, according to Gerard Genette, and use systems like numbers, letters, or symbols within the text to designate information presented extratextually, such as statistics, tables, or figures.9 Notes, which rely on such callouts, “extend, ramif[y], and modulate rather than comment on” the main text.10 By intruding into the panels and the lives of the people depicted therein, they modulate and amplify the semantic scope of the everyday so the extreme is made visible. In Ghosh, the call-ins embody the visual rhetoric of the state. Taking the form of banners, slogans, notices, posters, and speeches, they are instantiations of the dictatorship and authoritarian regime. When travelling on public transport, VP wonders why a fellow passenger stares at him.11 Roads, buses, and coffee houses have new decor: signs announcing silence and conformity.12 Intruding into public spaces is the regulatory, regimenting, and disciplining call-ins such as “do not guess,” “do not think,” “punctuality is next to spirituality,” “an ideal family is made of four, don’t even think of more,” “no bargain in the times of emergency,” “no talking politics.”13 There are a few representations of the violence perpetrated upon the people, including symbols and instruments of torture such as the policeman’s stick and the blade used for vasectomy and family-planning programs.14 But

134  Pramod K.Nayar the kind of dismembered bodies we see in Joe Sacco’s memoirs of Palestine and Bosnia (Palestine, Safe Area Goražde) or even in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis are missing in Ghosh’s work. What, however, arrests us about Ghosh’s visual language is the persistence of imminent violence on almost every page in the form of the call-ins. The central text in the visuals – depicting crowds, ordinary people, urban spaces – becomes signifiers for the nation. The paratextual apparatus is, however, a signifier of the state. The paratextual apparatus consisting of the call-ins speak the language of law, uniformity, and conformity. Ghosh sets up the tension between the nation and the state in terms of the dynamics between the ordinary lives of people in public spaces depicted in the text and/versus the disciplining slogans and speeches depicted in the call-ins.15 They incorporate the excesses into the everyday and constitute the paratextual apparatus that contextualizes and frames the events going on within the particular visual. I propose that the paratextual apparatus is what drives home the horror of a political crisis in Indian democracy that then affected the lives of thousands of people. Ghosh’s work is essentially about the tension between the state and the demos/nation, where the nation is assumed to be subordinate to the state and its machinery. The nation is the general populace depicted in the panels. The call-ins organize the people and spaces into a frightening conformism in the barbaric space of the panels and thus subsume the demos under the state. I suggest that Ghosh uses the rhetoric of disciplining and conformism, encoding the discourse of fear in the form of the visual rhetoric of paratexts in his panels. Seemingly unobtrusive and a part of the everyday, these paratexts, announcing the birth of a new society, of progress, and of efficiency, constitute the extreme in the everyday by never appearing extreme. The horror of the events of the Emergency in Ghosh lies in the banality and innocuousness of the signage that capitalizes on an already existing visual and aural culture: the banners, fliers, and speeches that, as I said, constitute the backdrop to the Indian everyday. It is in Ghosh’s detailing of everyday life and routineness – tea-drinking, romances, personal crises – against the backdrop of the call-ins, not just politics and political debates, that the horror emerges. In other words, I am suggesting that Delhi Calm’s utilization of the medium’s property of the text-paratext visual dynamics enables him to demonstrate how the nightmarish quality of a totalitarian regime intrudes into the everyday so that the extreme and the quotidian coexist, as Michael Rothberg would expect of the aesthetic of traumatic realism. Caricature and Grotesquerie Ghosh’s traumatic realism takes recourse to caricature. On the one hand, his technique mocks the political protests of the people when he reduces them to mere caricatures (the masks people wear in the text are reminiscent of Frank

Postcolonial Demo-graphics  135 Miller’s V for Vendetta, 1988). On the other hand, this caricaturing and grotesquerie serve to illustrate the dehumanization of the people and a distortion of their visages under oppressive political conditions. Ghosh’s caricaturing might be read as a critique of the dehumanizing effect of political trauma. Caricature, I propose, is an important mode of producing a critique of cultural trauma. Jeffrey Alexander in his study of cultural trauma speaks of “carriers” of trauma, which include popular representations.16 Yoking together Alexander’s notion of cultural trauma with Thomas Doherty’s analysis of Maus, I propose that Ghosh’s caricature and self-conscious grotesquerie serve the purpose of developing a popular narrative around the trauma of the Emergency’s excesses. Thomas Doherty suggests that by delivering the Holocaust in the form of an everyday medium like comics, Spiegelman brings the Holocaust closer to the people.17 Since the graphic novel is, finally, “populist art,”18 Ghosh, by caricaturing the personages – Indira Gandhi as “Mother Moon,” Sanjay Gandhi as “Prince,” and Rajiv Gandhi as “Pilot” – develops, in my view, a new mode of documenting history. The demonization and dehumanization of the dramatis personae that Ghosh engages in, especially with the theatrical language of masks, voiceovers, and obscene – literally ob-scene, off the scene, and again reminiscent of V for Vendetta – offer a new approach to history. In Ghosh’s narratives, there are no heroes or villains. Ghosh makes sure that the caricaturing and grotesquerie includes the political activists (Parvez, Vibhuti Prasad, Tara Devi and Malini, a.ka. Mala). By making, for instance, Mala a conformist after a career as political activist and depicting her with the appurtenances of a married life,19 Ghosh ensures her aura of an activist is diminished. Ghosh’s caricature, let me emphasize, is not cartoonish, although definitely satirical. Satire, as W.A. Coupe argues in his early essay on political caricature, often takes recourse to caricature. Coupe, speaking of the evolution of the genre, writes that caricature was the “paradoxical culmination of the realistic portraiture of the Renaissance which, because of the amusement produced by the distortion, was debased from the high purpose envisaged by its originators.”20 By seizing on the essence of an individual, the caricaturist seems to peel away the persona or mask worn by the individual portrayed. Coupe notes that the “emotive value of a political cartoon, however, is not to be determined simply by the fact of caricature, but by the manner and context in which that distortion appears” (88). Let me turn to the most significant caricaturing in Delhi Calm: the mouthpiece worn by people in authority, government servants, and by members of the general public. The distortion of a physiognomic feature must be read in a specific context. The Emergency was notorious for the state-speak of development and efficiency, the manipulation of statistics, and severe censorship. The first occurrence of this distorted visage occurs on page 5 where people on a bus, headed for a destination labelled “daftar,” office, are all wearing gags. The bus is inscribed with a legend: “keep distance, keep quiet.” As the tale proceeds we discover censorship. Take the incident where

136  Pramod K.Nayar VP has submitted an article to his newspaper’s editor.21 The fact that the editor wears a small mask/gag over the mouth is a distortion of his facial feature but also a symbol of distorted reportage. It is only in the context of censorship – often called gag orders – as well as propaganda and misdirected reportage that we see the distortion of a human facial feature for what it is. Thus the caricaturing of physiognomy, I would think, is essential for the critique Ghosh makes. I take my cue for this reading of caricature’s political potential from Adam Rosenblatt and Andrea Lunsford’s comment on Joe Sacco’s comics journalism, where they propose that the caricature “allow[s] him to evoke a sense of seething rage, adding more emotional depth to this event.”22 The Emergency was a grotesque violation of fundamental rights, ethics, and principles of law, democracy, and media coverage, and Ghosh’s grotesque and caricatured depiction of people with gagged mouths therefore fits right into the new ethos of the dictatorship. The book itself opens with a distortion, an unusual version of the statutory publisher-author disclaimer. It states: Nothing like this ever happened. If it did, it doesn’t matter any more, for it was of no interest or relevance even while it was happening. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. This is a work of fiction. Self-censored.23 This statement does not make sense unless we have read the blurb, which tells us the book is about the Emergency when everything was censored, or until after we have read the first pages of the book itself. The distorted statutory declaration, concluding with “self-censored,” draws attention to the events of the Emergency and its severe censorship, and the self-­consciousness of the text continues to ponder about what could be said even now, decades after the Emergency. This last is brought home to us in the final panel. Delhi has supposedly returned to normalcy. The visual consists of a crowded Delhi street. Silhouetted are Delhi’s iconic monuments. But looming over all this is a signboard with “Welcome to New Delhi” inscribed on it. What is ironic is the list of things inscribed under the welcome sign: Do not talk about: 1) Emergency 2) ’84 Delhi riots 3) Babri demolition 4) ’02 Gujarat riots As the letters fade, the last line springs up clear: “Have a pleasant stay!”24 This panel clearly shows the distortion of a welcome sign, but a distortion that inserts other stories and histories into the dominant one of “welcome.” This call-in is a cultural memory device for contemporary India, tracing a lineage of horrific events from 1975 to 2002 and after. It recalls

Postcolonial Demo-graphics  137 the censorship of the Emergency era but by prohibiting certain topics as subjects of conversation, the final sign seems to imply a continuity of that age and thereby makes an adverse comment on the nature of Indian democracy itself. A welcome sign that is, because of its conditionals, not really a welcome sign. What Ghosh caricatures with his most consistent trope – the gag – is the idea of freedom itself, and thus offers a major political critique of democracy. The second most frequent trope, the laughing mask, dehumanizes the perpetrators of violence in Ghosh’s tale. The masks are more to do with the inauthenticity of what is going on, of behavior and official responses, than mere caricature. I shall return to this in the next section. Mimetic Approximation Traumatic realism seeks what Andreas Huyssen calls “mimetic approximation” rather than mimesis. Huyssen, writing about Maus, has argued that Spiegelman’s text embodies not mimesis but mimetic approximation. Readers have to get past the ciphers (mice and cats) to the people behind (the Nazis and the Jews). Huyssen is interested in the traditional debate: how best to ­present/represent historical nightmares such as the Holocaust? As Huyssen sees it: “although there is widespread agreement that, politically, the genocide of the Jews must be remembered … by as large a public as possible, mass cultural representations are not considered proper or correct.”25 This rejection of mass cultural forms, argues Huyssen, is because of the dichotomy of high art versus mass art, where the former is seen as the appropriate vehicle for conveying historical trauma but the latter is not.26 It is precisely this dichotomy that Maus undercuts, according to Huyssen, through its strategy of mimetic approximation. Ghosh’s text relies on other texts such as newspapers, broadcasts, pamphlets, slogans (the call-ins I examined earlier), and familiar historical figures and makes a larger theoretical-narrative claim: all history is mediated. Relatedly, through this mimetic approximation, we have a text where authentication rather than authenticity is sought. The montaging of various intertexts in Delhi Calm is an instance of this process of authentication. This also quietly but effectively erases the visual estrangement that might be produced by the caricature mode. The smiling masks worn by politicians and Emergency activists throughout the text serve to illustrate the point that we are looking at mediated history and extended role-playing by the individuals concerned. By drawing on a traditional theatrical device, Ghosh underscores the dramatic nature of the events and the people concerned. Delhi Calm is thus a dramatic text interested in the drama of Indian history, with all the role-playing, pretences, and staged action. We recognize several of the call-ins as platitudes towards development, progress, nationalism, and national identity in the sloganeering, all of which are now a part of our cultural memory even as we see how these became

138  Pramod K.Nayar subverted within the processes of the Emergency. What, in short, I am proposing is that Ghosh draws attention to the use of media, representations, and rhetoric within the machinery of the Emergency while simultaneously telling us that we cannot know the events of history outside the mediated representations. When he exposes the hollowness of the representations through irony or even crude symbolism – the blade, representing vasectomy procedure – he is offering a mimetic approximation of what happened during the period. The masks are also excellent examples of such a process of mimetic approximation. For readers of graphic novels they immediately recall the masks of V for Vendetta. For others they convey the staging of normalcy in the midst of crisis as well as the staging of hypocrisy, cowardice, and conformism. People in Delhi Calm’s barbaric spaces wear the smiley mask to pretend there is nothing wrong, either in the everyday or in the nation. The smiley mask conceals the horrors being perpetrated on a regular basis. The masks are state features imposed upon the physiognomy of the nation in Ghosh’s caricature. That all masks look alike also serves as an ironic take on the all-people-are-equal ideal of democracy. That is, the masks that distort physiognomies are mimetic approximations of the distortion of democracy. They capture the myth of a happy nation under the Emergency and at the same time draw the readers’ attention to the masking of a deeper malaise. They simultaneously approximate conditions of normalcy and the make-believe world of efficiency that the Emergency was known for. Ghosh, as noted before, shows how the Emergency pitted the state against the nation. This state/nation dichotomy is visually reinforced for us through the speeches and slogans. I have already argued that these speeches, banners, and slogans situated in the corners of panels (paratexts) intrude into the everyday and bring home to readers the conditions under which daily life was led then. I would like to elaborate this argument now by way of addressing its technique of mimetic approximation. The speeches and slogans inscribed across Delhi and the everyday lives of its subjects all claim greatness for the nation even as they issue orders for curbing speech and fundamental freedoms. The state, supposedly speaking for the people who constitute the nation, claims that the oppressive rules are essential for the nation’s well-being. In other words, what we see in Ghosh’s narrative strategy of introducing paratextual elements symbolizing the state is a mimetic approximation where the speeches are authentic enough – as Indian readers would know from their cultural literacy of political rhetoric – for us to recognize the state’s voice. Moving on from this recognition of the state voice, we also recognize the contradiction where the rhetoric of national greatness is contingent on curbs on the nation and where the price of freedom is freedom itself. Mimetic approximation here is the authentication of a political rhetoric that posited the greatness of the nation but masked the state’s antagonistic relation with the nation/people. The historical trauma of the Emergency can only be conveyed through such strategies of mimetic approximation where popular, everyday forms such as slogans and political propaganda speeches call attention to the darkness at the heart of state political rhetoric. That the caricature and the

Postcolonial Demo-graphics  139 mimetic approximation lend a certain unreal air to the telling is itself a critical comment, for it seems unbelievable now, in retrospect, that India went through such a crisis of democracy.27

Conclusion: Postcolonial Demo-graphics Modernity in South Asia has been dominated by the visual and the acoustic.28 Thus a varied visual culture, what I term here a postcolonial demo-graphics, has an important role to play in the reconfiguring of Indian modernity and a critical literacy about the evolution of India’s political modernity. Let me conclude by offering a few pointers on this theme. The Emergency was characterized by newer manifestations of a consumer modernity such as the Maruti car, touted as the People’s Car, and a project in which Sanjay Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s son, was depicted in Delhi Calm as “Prince.” It also emphasized efficiency, categorization, and organization, taking a Weberian rationalizing modernity to an extreme with harsh measures for the punctual running of trains (signifying a rationalization of time) and family planning (signifying a rationalization of populations and the intimate sphere). But the events also forced a re-evaluation of India’s political modernity with debates on the nature of the state, of citizenship, and of democratic processes. In what could be read as an extended illustration of Freitag’s argument about the visual cultures of modernity, Emergency modernity developed a visual culture consisting almost entirely of the Prime Minister and her cohorts. Delhi Calm satirizes this Emergency modernity’s visual culture by having cut-outs, banners, photographs, and other visual texts scattered through the pages in order to show how an entire cult/ure of the cohort, called “caucus” in Ghosh, dotted the landscape of Indian politics and modernity. If, as Freitag proposes, civil society’s informal activities, as opposed to the state’s, especially in the realm of popular visual culture, often challenge the actions of the nation state,29 then we need to see Delhi Calm’s traumatic realism as a visualization of this challenge. A postcolonial demo-graphics, as I see it manifest in Ghosh, is a hard rethinking via a multimodal text of the dark hour of Indian political modernity. By satirizing the visual culture of those moments within the medium of the graphic novel, Ghosh exploits the medium to the hilt. The cultural work of political critique, Ghosh’s demo-graphics show, necessitates the utilization of a specific medium. The graphic novel serves this purpose admirably in Ghosh by being at once demo-tic about demo-cracy.

Notes 1. Ghosh, 4. 2. Ghosh, 9. 3. Chandra, 2008.

140  Pramod K.Nayar 4. Nayar, 2012. 5. Christensen, 227. 6. There has been considerable recent work on comics and trauma. See, for instance, Huyssen, Hirsch, Whitlock, among others. 7. Ezrahi, 18. 8. Rothberg, 137. 9. Genette, 321. 10. Genette, 328. 11. Ghosh, 8. 12. Ghosh, 209. 13. Ghosh, 99, 151, 181, 207. 14. Ghosh, 70, 197, 149, 172. 15. However I must add that Ghosh also uses a similar strategy of paratextuality to suggest resistance to the totalitarianism of the Emergency. Thus the songs and slogans of the Naya Savera Band also occur as paratexts to the main text in several visuals. They offer commentaries as well, calling on us to reflect on the events unfolding. A set of visuals on page 102 shows a political leader protesting the Emergency by delivering speeches. We are only shown the leader with a mike in front – he does not seem to be speaking. But standing aloft in the crowd are banners declaring: “For a new India join the movt.” On the same page in a different panel we have a speech broadcast from large speakers: “This is not Pakistan. This is not Bangladesh. This is a democracy.” Ghosh, 102. 16. Alexander, 15–16. 17. Doherty, 1996. 18. Wolk, 23. 19. Ghosh, 87. 20. Coupe, 87. 21. Ghosh, 145–6. 22. Rosenblatt and Lunsford, 77–8. 23. Ghosh, unpaginated. 24. Ghosh, 246. 25. Huyssen, 60. 26. Huyssen, 69. 27. Ian Gordon cites Adam Gopnik on Maus: “He [Gopnik] argued that Maus drew ‘its power not from its visual style alone, but rather from the tension between the detail of its narration and dialogue and the hallucinatory fantasy of its images.’” Gordon, 184. 28. Freitag, 394. 29. Freitag, 389.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. Trauma: A Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity, 2012. Chandra, Nandini. The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha, 1967–2007. New Delhi: Yoda, 2008. Christensen, Lila L. “Graphic Global Conflict: Graphic Novels in the High School Social Studies Classroom.” Social Studies 97 (2006): 227–30. Coupe, WA. “Observations on a Theory of Political Caricature.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 11.1 (1969): 79–95.

Postcolonial Demo-graphics  141 Doherty, Thomas. “Art Spiegelman’s Maus: Graphic art and the Holocaust.” American Literature 68.1 (1996): 69–84. Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven. “Acts of Impersonation: Barbaric Spaces asTheatre.” Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art, Norman L. Kleeblatt ed. New York and New Brunswick: The Jewish Museum and Rutgers UP, 2002.17–38. Freitag, Sandria B. “The Realm of the Visual: Agency and Modern Civil Society.” Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India, Sumathi Ramaswamy ed. New Delhi: Sage, 2003. 365–97. Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Ghosh, Vishwajyoti. Delhi Calm. New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2010. Gordon, Ian. “Making Comics Respectable: How Maus Helped Redefine a Medium.” The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts, Paul Williams and James Lyons, eds. Jackson: UP of Mississippi 2010. 179–193. Hirsch, Marianne. “Editor’s Column: Collateral Damage.” PMLA 119 (2004): 1209–15. Huyssen, Andreas. “Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno.” New German Critique 81 (2000): 65–82. Moore, Alan and David Lloyd. V for Vendetta. 1988. London: DC, 2005. Natarajan, S., S. Anand, D. Vyam, and S. Vyam. Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability. New Delhi: Navayana, 2011. Nayar, Pramod K. “Toward a Postcolonial Critical Literacy: Bhimayana and the Indian Graphic Novel.” Studies in South Asian Film and Media 3.1 (2012): 3–21. Rosenblatt, Adam and Andrea Lunsford. “Critique, Caricature, and Compulsion in Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism.” The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts, Paul Williams and James Lyons eds. Jackson: UP of Mississippi 2010. 68–87. Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota UP, 2000. Spiegelman, Art. Maus, A Survivor’s Tale I: My Father Bleeds History. New York: Pantheon, 1986. ——— Maus, A Survivor’s Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began. New York: Pantheon, 1991. Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of Comics.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (2006): 965–979. Williams, Paul and James Lyons eds. The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi 2010. Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Cambridge, MA: DaCapo, 2007.

8 Graphics of Freedom Colonial Terrorists and Postcolonial Revolutionaries in Indian Comics Harleen Singh

In colonial India, the fashioning of native terror relied on the nuanced distinction between state-controlled brutalities – the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre for example – and violence directed against the state by Indian revolutionaries such as Bhagat Singh, who was executed for an attack on parliament, or Subhash Chandra Bose, the founder of the Indian National Army. In a parallel, yet dissimilar, trajectory, postcolonial historiography pays less attention to the mass adulation garnered by these radical figures, relegating them to the historical archives, and focuses instead on the nonviolent struggle of the Indian Congress, dominated by Gandhi’s Ahimsa (the principle of non-violence) and Satyagraha (passive political resistance).1 The disruptive nature of these virile rebels, in stark contrast to the frail, spiritual ethos symbolized by Gandhi, is effectively subsumed under the mantle of the nation by shifting the focus from violence to freedom.2 The forceful acts perpetrated by Bagha Jatin (1879–1915) and Chandrashekar Azad (1906–1931), two young men whose insurrectionary activities against the British state led to their dramatic deaths, are effectively neutralized through a strategic historical, cultural, and popular representation and thus assimilated within national resistance to avert the formation of an oppositional narrative in the postcolonial state. Gandhi’s shrewd deployment of passive suffering, a particularly feminized narrative of political activism in the Indian cultural context, is writ large over India’s anti-colonial struggle, but much before Gandhi became visible on the national and international stage, Bagha Jatin (Jatindranath Mukherjee from Bengal) and Chandra Shekhar Azad (Chandra Shekhar from the Central Provinces) defied colonial authority through strategic acts of militancy. Unlike the Mahatma, who gained beatification due to an avowed aversion to violence, Jatin and Azad were known as active agents of terror in the colonial parlance.3 This essay traces the mutation of colonial terrorist to postcolonial revolutionary as part of a collective and public refashioning of history, with emphasis on the nature of the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) comic series as an educational tool for the nation’s children. “India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru … stressed that India’s progress was dependent upon the youth of India, and his administration undertook the establishment of numerous village schools and urban institutes of science, technology, medicine, and management in

Graphics of Freedom  143 an effort to modernize and solve the nation’s problems.”4 This postcolonial emphasis on creating a modern literate, innovative populace was tempered, however, by the need to mobilize the sense of an ancient, historical identity, as evident in Nehru’s own Discovery of India, published at the cusp of independence in 1946. Similarly, ACK comics gained popularity and validation by juxtaposing modern political identity and a traditional sense of history in a graphic form. The ACK comic-book avatars, specifically Chandra Shekhar Azad, Freedom was his Mission (1977) and Bagha Jatin, The Tiger Revolutionary (1978), are read here as active participants in a postcolonial mythology of revolution, masculinity, and youth. I have chosen to focus on these two figures since their representations remain comparatively unexplored in historical, literary, or cultural scholarship, and these comic books, published in the years following the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi from 1975 to 1977, reflect, albeit unintentionally, the fraught nature of post-independence governance in India.5 The euphoric idealism of the Nehru years, with their focus on development and education, had given way to a dictatorial vision of politics by 1975 in which singular personalities dominated the national stage, a strain reflected in ACK to exemplify what John A. Lent has called the “great man bent.”6 These years also represent the heydays of ACK publication, when as many as three titles were released in the same month and were subject to less criticism and regulation than in the following years, when charges of historical inaccuracy and misogyny were levied by scholars, educationists, and women’s groups.7 Azad and Jatin are simultaneously marginal and yet central to the cultural history of Indian independence. Both belong to the highest caste in Hindu society, the Brahmins, whose privileges survived even in the creation of a modern state, but as proponents of violence they remained on the fringes of the nationalist movement. Though they did not overlap chronologically in any meaningful way, both figures form an undertheorized trajectory of India’s past where hegemonic national narrative, built on particular exclusions of gender, caste, sexuality, and politics, is rearticulated and perhaps even contested in popular representation. These comics, I suggest, form significant contemporary representations of colonial and postcolonial politics, even in an informal, non-institutional engagement with historiography. For most English-speaking, middle-class children in India, who form what I term the Doordarshan generation, born in the seventies and growing up before the advent of cable television in 1991, history was a three-tiered construct: a subject of study at school; an amalgamation of familial, religious, and mythological stories; and what they had read in the Amar Chitra Katha comics.8 Coincidentally, 1991 also marked the last year in which new ACK titles were issued in the original series. A decade-long hiatus was broken by new titles in 2001. These comics were integral not simply to a repository of historical, religious, and cultural tales but also to a sense of history for India’s urban elite. Anant Pai, the founder and editor of the comic series, was

144  Harleen Singh inspired to begin this retelling of Indian tales when he found himself faced with an increasingly Westernized reading public, which he felt was losing touch with its culture.9 ACK positions itself as a solution to the rootlessness of modern living and resurrects an ancient civilizational paradigm through the technological advances of mass-produced print culture, representing the past as an interpretive paradigm for the present and as a potential catalyst for the future. Even as the series is imbued with a sense of national sentiment, the comics pursue individual biographies of Gods and Goddesses, Kings and Queens, Religious Saints, National heroes and heroines: “Hero worship, an integral part of children’s literature, is then put into the service of the lifenarrative designed to foster national feeling.”10 This hagiographic model is illustrated through graphics reminiscent of poster and calendar art. The ACK team was directed by Pai to model its graphics on the art of renowned Indian painters such as Raja Ravi Varma but this “kind of academic realism served to provide only a set of principles and an overarching vision to the ACK artists. Their individual visual vocabularies were shaped much more by the wide variety of performative and cinematic images circulating in the city of Bombay in the 1950s and 1960s, encompassing Hindi cinema’s poster art as much as the avant-garde experimentation of the Progressive Artists Group (PAG).”11 The Sanskrit literary tradition of itihasa, as M ­ eenaskshi Mukherjee and other critics have pointed out, combines both history and fiction. In Pai’s vision, the graphic aspects of the comic form build on the historical narrative to provide a particularly indelible medium of harking back to the ancient through the use of modernity’s devices.12 While the intersection of a Western format with an Indian narrative tradition may seem evident to most readers of ACK, Pai insisted that only the “speech balloons are alien” and sidestepped this question by indicating instead an indigenous tradition of depiction, such as frescoes in the Ajanta and Ellora caves, from which he drew inspiration.13 In truth, Pai is accurate since “graphic narration in a general sense has a long and rich tradition in India,” but “so far as the comic strip is concerned, it made its appearance in India in the middle or late 1950s, inspired and influenced by Britain, France, Italy, Germany, the U.S.A., and Japan.”14 In many titles, ACK emphasized footnotes and bibliographic references to reinforce a notion of scholarly vigor.15 While international characters and publication companies now offer many alternatives to ACK in India, the comic series has found new life as television cartoons, repackaged anthologies, and has become a topic of research and inquiry itself, exemplifying Nandini Chandra’s assertion that “the classical became the source of the popular” and the popular, I suggest, has now transmuted into a publishing institution that is considered a classic.16 Divided into five streams – Epics and Mythology, Indian Classics, Fables and Humor, Bravehearts, and Visionaries – ACK has over four hundred titles and the foreword in the recent reprints states: “over 90 million copies have been sold worldwide.” The phrase “The route to your roots” under the Amar Chitra Katha logo unabashedly proclaims its historical presence: “When they look back at their formative years, many Indians nostalgically

Graphics of Freedom  145 recall the vital part Amar Chitra Katha picture books have played in their lives. It was ACK—Amar Chitra Katha—that first gave them a glimpse of their glorious heritage.” This editorial commentary is a nod to the changed readership of the series. When it was first established, the series was a staple in urban middle-class homes in the seventies and eighties, but that changed with the advent of cable television and the opening up of the Indian market to foreign publications and goods. However, the increasingly visible ties of the Indian diaspora to the homeland have created a “worldwide” readership for which “the route to [its] roots” is more apt a description.17 The assertion that “Indians nostalgically recall the vital part” these comic series “played in their lives” signals a newfound global confidence that now posits Amar Chitra Katha not simply as a narrative of “glorious heritage” but rather as the heritage itself.18 Thus a consideration of these stories engages with what it means to depict a national history while continuing to narrate a mythological and historical tradition interpreted by the highest echelon of India’s Hindu structure. Except for a handful of issues that narrate the stories of a few Sikh Gurus, the Buddha, the Mahavira, and some Muslim protagonists, the series showcases a generally Hindu and, more specifically, Brahmin culture.19 Amar Chitra Katha is particularly effective, especially for young readers, as it parleys the past into a visual narrative, making history visible, communicative. Thus the image-text bridges the abstract constructs of scripture and mythology with the depiction of characters, a phenomenon particularly relevant to South Asian traditions of religion, culture, and representation where the material embodiments of the gods serve as a conduit to the divine. But ACK also offers an alternative, perhaps even subaltern, methodology that overcomes an elitist reaction dismissive of comics and makes history accessible, readable.20 Concomitantly, “the memory of reading ACK during one’s childhood intimately connects to an acknowledgement of its role as a form and source of knowledge.”21 Thus the “memory of reading” is complicit in this production of knowledge. In a moment of postcolonial splitting, when “proper” education was imparted in British-style schooling but the domain of the popular (films, music) resonated in the vernacular, a powerful desire exists to see oneself depicted, identified in the apotheosized frames of the past.22 However, modulating an approach to this particular past is complicated by the differential access that is available to the citizenry. Region, language, literacy, caste, religion are just a few of the categories that must be negotiated in reading history, literally and figuratively. I approach these comic books as text, as literature that has a story to tell, and tells it to great effect. Bagha Jatin, the “Tiger” Revolutionary (Amar Chitra Katha, Vol. 724) As is the norm in ACK, the story begins in chronological order with a vignette from Jatin’s life. The opening panel on the first page shows a young boy clad in a dhoti and kurta running away from a dog. But the following

146  Harleen Singh panel is dominated by the figure of his mother who says: “Don’t be afraid! Face him.” Jatin turns around and “glares at the dog,” who cowers away. The hunched-over, scared boy transforms into an upright and resolute figure who vows: “Henceforth, I’ll never run away from danger. I will stop and fight.” The text then affirms: “The little boy, Jatin Mukherjee, was destined to become one of the greatest revolutionaries of India.” It is a characteristic first page of the series and of Indian storytelling as well. Most Indian legends and stories tend to begin with an incident that foretells and foregrounds the protagonist’s future. This opening sequence underlay’s Jatin’s resolve against injustice and also resurrects the mother figure (and thus the nation) as the giver of Shakti (strength), a fact reiterated in the narrative: “He was brought up by his mother. A remarkably strong woman” (2). One finds this strong mother figure in many historical stories from India, for example ­Shivaji’s mother, Jijabai, is accorded a place of honor in the series with a comic book of her own.23 The following pages detail more instructive incidents through which Jatin, inspired by his mother, commits himself to fight the British. This confluence of maternal instruction and national imperative is illustrated even as the mother lies dying: nation, grief, and maternity overlap as she narrates a story of colonial atrocity on her deathbed. Terror for Jatin, at this formative stage of childhood, is not the death of the mother but rather the possibility of continued colonial rule. Orphaned, Jatin moves to Calcutta and the narrative follows a series of incidents that demonstrate the full onslaught of British imperiousness and Jatin’s resolve, as a young man, to oppose it: an arrogant Englishman who insists on taking a census by hitting people with a stick; uncouth British louts who tease young Indian women in a carriage. The enmeshing of the feminine, the maternal, and the national is emphasized again when Jatin comes to the rescue of a young Indian woman who is being molested by British serviceman in a train. The young woman’s father thanks Jatin: “We are grateful to you, my son. You have saved our honour.” To which Jatin, in a continued conflation of femininity and nation, replies: “But the honour of Mother India will be safe only when we’ve thrown off the yoke of British rule” (9). But the greatest episode to cement Jatin’s bravery comes with the killing of a tiger (Bagh). One would imagine it a fictive aspect of the story were it not so extensively documented, including medical records. On his way to his village, Jatin and his cousin are accosted by a tiger. While the cousin runs for help, Jatin grapples with the tiger and manages to kill it with a decisive plunge of his knife into the tiger’s neck, prompting a villager to remark: “Is it Jatin who needs help or the tiger?” (11). Thus the name Bagha Jatin. These pointed but rather harmless confrontations with authority and dangers are significant not only in setting up the fearless protagonist but also because they craft a narrative of violent acts that gain approval in the service of womanhood, community, and nation. Jatin repeatedly gets into physical altercations rather than turning to the concerned authorities. This defiance, however, highlights the unjust and illegal nature of colonial authority rather

Graphics of Freedom  147 than the protagonist’s aggression. Thus these early skirmishes indicate what is to follow: violent acts of rebellion against the state. The narrative remains unconcerned with his development from spirited youth to committed revolutionary, a large distance covered quickly in two pages from the incident in the train to the training of young militants and the making of bombs. The depiction of these terrorist/revolutionary acts is worthy of discussion itself. One panel shows a car that has been bombed by Jatin’s cadre but with no British body in it, another panel shows the assassination of a government lawyer and a police officer but their bullet wounds seep no blood. The only visible signs of injury appear on Indian bodies. It is revolutionary blood that is spilled on the comic’s cover and in its final pages. It is a subtle graphic trick that removes the gory side of bombings and assassinations. Terror, in this instance, is the visible colonial disregard for Indian life rather than the unpredictability of revolutionary violence. Though Jatin is arrested after a series of attacks on British authority, he is released for lack of evidence. It is an intriguing but unremarked upon circumstance that demonstrates the availability of legal apparatus for Indians but also a lack of justice. Jatin is released but his compatriots in Punjab are hanged simply for plotting against the British. In the years that followed, Jatin reorganized the armed resistance in Bengal and became a part of what historians have termed “The Indo-German conspiracy” in World War I. But these less spectacular years are not given much dimension in the comic as it quickly moves to Jatin’s last encounter with colonial authority. Betrayed by one of “the revolutionaries turned traitor,” Jatin is pursued by the police (21). He is finally tracked down to a training camp in the countryside, but only after many pages have portrayed him in the role of a guerilla fighter: fleeing from the police by climbing mountains, swimming through a river with his gun held aloft, fighting his way through village policeman. His debonair, Westernized Calcutta clothes are discarded for simple Indian attire and his face sports a scruffy beard, the unkemptness indicating Jatin’s disregard for the self in the service of the nation. Bagha Jatin’s last skirmish with the police takes the form of a protracted gun battle. Several panels describe the overwhelming numbers of the police party and the minuscule but committed number of revolutionaries. In the iconic Amar Chitra Katha cover, Jatin fires at the British troops while his comrade Chittapriya lies dead next to him. The quest for independence remains the dominant thematic in this comicbook version of Bagha Jatin’s life. The story is told to remind and inspire a new generation to similar selflessness, and the nationalist impulse rides roughshod over the details of Jatin’s existence. Bereft of conflict or complexity, the narrative posits national feeling as an ever-present feature, a fully formed political impulse inherent to the citizen. Jatin’s ideological journey is entirely absent. As his biographical details indicate, Jatin, an ardent follower of Swami Vivekananda, took to wrestling and other strenuous ­physical activities in an effort to overcome his libido. His following amongst the Bengali militants was also due in part to his reputation as a Brahamchari

148  Harleen Singh (celibate). However, a few years later he married and had four children, and even undertook a religious pilgrimage after the death of his first child unsettled him deeply. The tiger killing happened after all this.24 Thus, the ACK chronology takes liberties to shore up a repository of bravery and gallantry to foreshadow what is to follow. Neither Yugantar, the political party of the Bengal revolutionaries, nor the Anushilan Samiti, a militant movement for independence in Bengal, is mentioned in the story.25 It is a strangely apolitical narrative that places greatness and revolution within the individual rather than the collective, an astute move that dismantles any scope of emulating or apotheosizing an armed rebellion and thus allows for the seamless dissemination of a Gandhian ethos, one that eschews any celebration of organized violence as anti-colonial struggle. Bagha Jatin’s life, as told through the Amar Chitra Katha book, is not a challenge to the dominance of the non-violent script but rather a device to unify the readership in a sustained observance of national sentiment. The only women who make an appearance in this comic are Jatin’s mother, from whom he derives his strength, the damsels he rescues, and the nurse who hovers in the background of the panel as he lies breathing his last. The absence of his wife, his daughter, or his sister from the narrative emphasizes the Brahamchari aspect of his life, but it is a particular formation of masculinity within the Hindu tradition that is taken for granted in the narrative. The story remains driven by action, as is the wont of “real” men, and does not falter by digressing into such domains as ideology, religion, or emotion. Feelings are expressed only towards the nation, and the words “terrorist” or “militant” do not find their way into the descriptive process, even through the British perspective. I trace this reluctance against these supposedly atavistic words as a result of the post-Emergency political climate in India. The armed Naxalite movements across the country and the student unrest created an environment in which the euphoria of the post-independence state was quickly dissipating under the strain of economic woes, governmental high-handedness, and peasant and student insurrection.26 Even as Bengali anarchists like Jatin found renown in history, the late sixties and early seventies witnessed a brutal suppression of revolutionary fervor in Bengal under the Indian government. Thus Jatin’s terrorism against colonial authority is repackaged in popular culture and in official history to form a just rebellion in the same period in which radical politics of the Naxalites are quashed as a civil insurgency by an authoritarian postcolonial government. Chandra Shekhar Azad, Freedom was His Mission (Amar Chitra Katha, Vol. 686) In a characteristic three-panel format, the first page of this comic opens with yet another interaction between a young protagonist and his mother. ­Chandra Shekhar’s mother exerts a disciplinary presence, cautioning the

Graphics of Freedom  149 reckless boy against playing with matches. In the metaphoric exchange, a harbinger of what is to come, the mother scolds the child: “Haven’t I told you that fire is dangerous?” and the child retorts: “But it is also useful mother. It chases away darkness.” It is a carefully worded homily on the duality of armed struggle, an endeavor not without danger but one that can become the path to independence. The next two pages are able to compress the diversity of the years between childhood and youth into twelve panels, an astonishing amount of information in a dozen images. Chandra Shekhar is trained in archery by members of the Bhil tribe, he meets a trader from Bombay and decides to run away from his home, finds a job at the docks in Bombay, then finally decides to go to Varanasi to study Sanskrit, and once there he dutifully writes to his father. The remaining twenty-eight pages are devoid of personal accounts and concern only the revolutionary in action. The usual tropes of masculinity demarcate the freedom fighter from the youth: celibacy, commitment, and physical training. However, unlike Bagha Jatin who gets his name by killing a tiger, Chandra Shekhar takes on the name Azad (free) after his first encounter with British authority. Arrested in a protest march, Chandra Shekhar is sentenced to a public lashing. The ensuing panel shows him stripped to his underwear, standing with his arms and legs spread apart and tied to poles on each side. As they begin to cane him, Azad, as yet dwarfed by the policeman, begins to shout “Inquilab Zindabad! Bharat Mata ki Jai” (Long live the revolution! Glory to Mother India!). Given a rousing reception on his release, Chandra Shekhar vows: “The police will never take me alive! I will always remain free. I am Azad” (5). The spectacle of punishment, as many scholars of colonial history have demonstrated rather vividly, was a widely and effectively used colonial ploy. But the shaming device becomes an initiation to the manly ranks of the revolutionaries, and the images of Azad grow in proportion not only to other characters but also to the panel. Azad is depicted as a broad-shouldered, hefty man with a twirled, insouciant moustache who remains at the forefront of every daring enterprise against the British colonialists. He is seen in disguise first as a priest, then an auto mechanic, and finally a wandering mendicant. In perhaps the most striking of these images, Azad stands at the center of a panel surrounded by followers who are slight in stature, his heft emphasized by his bare chest, his daring by a gun in his right hand and a cartridge belt around his waist. The protests against the Simon Commission and Lala Lajpat Rai’s death in 1928 are described as pivotal events that urge Azad and the Punjabi revolutionary Bhagat Singh to violence. The Kakori train robbery of 1925 and the killing of the police officer, Saunders, are etched in grave detail. Violent acts perpetrated by the revolutionaries remain precise and result in “bloodless” injuries on the colonial bodies, whereas British force is always excessive, brutal, and undiscriminating. While the revolutionaries’ bullets and bombs always find their mark, the police batons rain blows on the old, young, women, and men alike. When the accused are sentenced to death in

150  Harleen Singh the Kakori train robbery, groups of newspaper-reading men are outraged at the disproportionate punishment. This back and forth between colonial and revolutionary violence casts these acts of revolutionary terror or armed resistance as just, even Karmically ordained, while British oppression remains an unabated monstrous force. Unlike Bagha Jatin, whose Brahmin antecedents are not mentioned in the narrative, Azad, who was also known affectionately as Panditji due to his Brahmin background, is frequently seen taking refuge in temples and disguising himself as a priest or a traveling monk. His celibacy, Brahmachariya, is not overtly mentioned but Azad passes as a disciple of the God ­Hanuman, and these devotees, by default, are celibate. Even a passing policeman addresses him as “Brahmachariyaji” (12). While the nation is continually personified as the suffering mother, her rescuer, nay her salvation itself (freedom) is masculine and celibate. This asexual depiction of masculine youth sidesteps any hint of heterosexual relationships. These men are always sons to the nation, never husbands, fathers, or brothers to its women. The mostly homosocial environments of revolutionary activities are depicted as normative behavior of the masculine public sphere. These ACK titles understand the modern, presentist construct of the national as masculine, even as the nation is depicted as maternal and feminine. Thus deriving Shakti, the feminine linguistic marker of strength, from the nation as mother is readily showcased, but the wielders of such power in the parlance of nationalized history remain decidedly masculine. In a departure from the ideological barrenness of the Bagha Jatin story, Azad’s narrative has countless references to the creation of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association in 1928. Conversations between the militants are peppered with words such as “exploitation,” “revolution,” “capitalism,” and “class difference.” The reckless child of the beginning is transformed into a judicious master of armed sedition who is ideologically sound and theoretically well informed. The assassinations and bombings perpetrated by HSRA are manifestations of a socialist philosophy. A panel focused on pamphlets distributed by the revolutionaries explains: “Why Bombs? Revolution alone will wipe out capitalism and class differences. It will help establish a new nation and a free people” (24). This principled form of violent protest deflects descriptions such as terrorism, criminal violence, or murder. There is a cautious undertone to the celebration of these acts of revolt, which is presented without fail as a part of the larger nationalist struggle rather than a fringe or oppositional impulse. This manifesto is also recast as a particularly Indian blend of political ideology, armed rebellion, and colonial injustice. Class difference is understood primarily as the divide between the colonial rulers and the colonized while internal class divisions, as well as feudal and caste domination, are glossed over. The last four pages of the comic book detail the circumstances surrounding Azad’s death in Allahabad. In a curious omission, the narrative fails to mention, as some other biographies have contended, that Azad met with

Graphics of Freedom  151 Jawaharlal Nehru that same day to urge the Congress leader to seek clemency on Bhagat Singh’s behalf. The story simply states: “Headquarters were now shifted to Allahabad” (28). This particular choice in the narrative is rife with political implications. Azad and Nehru did not have an amicable meeting as Nehru is supposed to have categorically denied political support. Many sources contend that the unnamed informer noticed and identified Azad on his way back from this meeting. The exclusion of this anecdote from Azad’s story allows, once again, for an unproblematic national account that brokers no discontent between its leaders nor any discrepancies in its past. India’s first Prime Minister, Nehru, occupies an iconic status in Indian history, and the lack of compatibility between him and Azad cannot enter the domain of mainstream historical knowledge.27 The narrative sutures such ideological rifts to craft a cohesive Indian history, religion, and culture, one that offers a model for the future rather than a view of limitations in the past. The police, acting on a tip from an unnamed source, a figure the reader can view only from the back, surround Azad in Alfred Park in Allahabad. As Azad and his comrade stroll peaceably, “eighty men in four vans sped to Alfred Park” and Azad is shot in the thigh. A protracted and uneven battle continues with “Azad surrounded by forty armed policeman who were showering bullets at him” (29). The panels alternate between the swarming soldiers and the lone Azad. While he looms large over each panel depicting him, the soldiers are nondescript khaki-clad figures identified only with the word “BANG” in front of their rifles. Azad keeps them at bay for “thirtytwo” minutes but he is eventually left with his last bullet. The emphasis in these last pages is on a glorious death rather than a realistic portrayal. Unwilling to be taken alive, Azad lifts his pistol to his forehead and kills himself. The word “suicide” does not appear in any of the panels. In fact, the image and narrative synchronize to show Azad holding the gun to his head while the text states: “He raised his Mauser to his temple and pressed the trigger” (31). His death is the supreme sacrifice to the nation and in defiance of the colonial state, which gains authority only over a corpse. The story ends emphatically: “Azad was only twenty-five when he became a martyr in the cause of Indian independence” (31). Visual Representations and Historical Insurrections There is a striking similarity in the covers of both comics. The protagonists, clad in white clothes, with bright red blood seeping through their wounds, dominate the image even as they are besieged by scores of khaki-clad policeman. Bagha Jatin, behind a boulder, and Azad, behind a tree, resolutely hold their weapons and fire on the police, and each scene has a fallen policeman or two. The unevenness of the encounters is highlighted further through the incongruous placement of Azad’s bicycle, which stands as a symbol of

152  Harleen Singh resistance and affordability for the colonial subject while the British police lay siege in armored trucks and jeeps. Even though Anant Pai is quoted as saying: “Children should not be exposed to scenes of violence, prejudice, sexual violence, or superstition,” the covers for these two titles are etched primarily along the lines of violent encounters. There is no ambiguity here about violence, killing, or resistance (Hawley 128). As an editor, it seems, Pai draws a clear distinction between crime and violence, and conflict that arises from national service. A discussion of the Bagha Jatin and Chandra Shekhar Azad titles in the Amar Chitra Katha series provides disjunctive and contrasting images with manifold ideological resonances: socialist philosophy and armed revolution, masculinity and the nation, youth and a mythology of death, and an assumed absence of sexuality for the characters and their readers. The young age of the two title characters provides a template for the young people of the nation. Unlike the wizened old visages of Gandhi and other national leaders, whose wisdom and import come from an accumulation of experience and years, Jatin and Azad are examples of the ever-present potential in the nation’s children. Thus the text exhorts its consumer to be both reader and potential activist, ingraining nationalist pride in the past through its consumption in the present. These depictions, however, also typify the expected reader: male, English-speaking, upper caste. This is a particularly masculine sort of nationalism, which is rendered effective precisely because the nation is symbolized as the mother. The Brahmachari aspects are the paramount characterizations of the heroes; neither comic entertains any departures from that strict path. Popular culture, in this respect, has immense viability in retelling history. However, it too is beholden to the deep-rooted gendered divisions of the culture. The significant presence of mothers, as personifications of strength and perseverance, goes beyond the tropes of maternal femininity and nation. While the condition of India’s women remained a large part of the pre-independence reformist agenda, the nurturance and education of children formed the national rhetoric after independence. Thus mothers in these particular stories, even in their short appearance, signify a complex gendered agenda, a nation in need of rescue but also the source of spiritual and ideological sustenance for the nation’s children. But the absence of other women in the narrative situates a particular kind of danger in the feminine: a seductive and debilitating force best avoided by the nation’s warriors. The anarchy of terror and of disorderly sexuality are disciplined by a nationalist masculine celibacy and render the emergence of a modern masculine citizenship in opposition to oppression. The violence is a product of externalized forces, a response to the exploitation of the body national and never an inherent patriarchal impulse. As Deepa Sreenivas has shown in her book, this “ideological reading” took on a specifically Hindu, upper-caste, upper-class, and masculine visage, contributing in no small measure to the identity of the Indian urban elite in a “powerful drive to cohere the nation in the unbroken narrative of cultural unity.”28

Graphics of Freedom  153 Fraught with frustration and disenchantment with the state, the seventies saw the Emergency of 1975 and increasing Naxalite movements across India as visible effects of the ways in which the Indian state had taken on draconian powers and marginalized a large part of the population in caste, class, and regional discrimination. The revolutionary fervor of the decade provides a subtext for these two Amar Chitra Katha titles. The overtly anti-state activities of the revolutionaries and the terror of bombings and assassinations are modulated to form a nationalist investment in independent India. Hindi films, for example Sholay and Deewar, are two other striking illustrations of the politics of that decade in which the emergence of the individual is concomitant with the rise of a rebellious, vociferous, and demanding national populace. However, unlike the cinematic medium, which targeted a more diverse audience, the Amar Chitra Katha series carried from the onset an explicit agenda to educate children in morals, history, culture, and religion. “This system hinges on lacunae and the strategic abridgement of historical and mythical narratives in order to produce a particular ideological reading.”29 Indian comic books, in the era of one television channel, restricted availability of foreign media and publications, and the emergence of the modern Indian nation-state in the epoch of the Non-Aligned Movement, were a dominant feature “at an intersection of history, popular culture, and ideology.”30 However, the nostalgic impulse cannot become the overarching thematic of such analysis, as “nostalgia left unattended often leads to the collective consciousness to create ‘classics’ out of popular forms, where history is scripted out of communal and caste stereotypes.”31 Representations of the national past must be negotiated instead in a critically aware framework of economic conditions, sociological reality, religious fundamentalism, and radical politics. Though the move from colonial terrorist to postcolonial revolutionary may seem natural, even anticipated, the act of violence itself is a contradictory signifier, one through which lives may be taken and yet paradoxically saved. While the colonial and postcolonial state may abrogate to itself the authority to define terror and its affects, national stories meant to shore up the mythological and historical precedence of the country often challenge the foundational aspects of the state. Popular culture, in this respect, can reshape the terrorist or the revolutionary in contemporary debates and offer insights into non-institutional historical methods, and is especially pertinent, as ACK has now become an institution of the Indian past. Thus these graphic and textual renderings of Bagha Jatin and Chandra Shekhar Azad can be simply relegated to the ranks of India’s “glorious heritage” or they can become, as I suggest, reminders that this “heritage” is first and foremost a site of perpetual contestation.

Notes 1. Ahimsa (non-violence) and Satyagraha (the true struggle) are two terms that signified the nationalist movement led by Gandhi.

154  Harleen Singh 2. In a curious inversion of Gandhi’s non-violent movement, the appellate freedom “fighters” is indiscriminately applied to all those who participated in India’s anti-colonial struggle. 3. The title Mahatama (great soul) was bestowed on Gandhi by India’s Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. 4. Karline Mclain, India’s Immortal comic books: gods, kings, and other heroes, 8. 5. In 1975, the Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, invoked article 352(1) of the constitution to suspend civil liberties and curb political activity after she was convicted of election fraud by a high court. The Emergency lasted for twentyone months. During this time Indira Gandhi abrogated vast powers to herself, and her son, Sanjay Gandhi, played a pivotal role in the country’s cultural and governmental policies. 6. John Lent, “India’s Amar Chitra Katha: ‘Fictionalized’ History or the Real Story?,” 72. 7. In 1976, all ACK titles sold five million copies or more. By the early eighties, charges of historical inaccuracy and misogyny were levied and ACK came under the scrutiny of academic and political groups. A more detailed explanation of the events appears in John A. Lent’s work. 8. Until 1991, India only had one national television channel, Doordarshan, that came under governmental purview and whose programming was supplemented by similar official, regional channels in the state. I focus here on English-speaking readership even though ACK was available in a few regional languages as well. However, reprints and issues after 2001 have only been published in English, a nod both to the changing environment of the readership in India and to the diaspora. 9. “Ramayana is part of India’s heritage. It has gives us role models and taught us values of life. So I felt unhappy. I felt more unhappy when these children could answer correctly questions on the gods on Mount Olympus – the Greek gods. That hurt me much more.” Quoted by Deepa Sreenivas, p. 12. 10. Nandini Chandra, The Classic Popular, Amar Chitra Katha, 5. 11. Ibid., 88. 12. Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India, 41. 13. This insistence on the “Indianness” of ACK and its contents takes on a rather fundamentalist visage when faced with the issue based on Jesus Christ. It is the only issue that does not carry the phrase “the glorious heritage of India.” Anant. Pai, “Comics as a Vehicle of Education and Culture,” 108. For more on this see Munnar. 14. Dipavali Debroy, “The Graphic Novel in India: East Transforms West,” 33. 15. Nandini Chandra, The Classic Popular, Amar Chitra Katha, 38. 16. Ibid., 3. 17. The Hindu Students Council in the United States gives Amar Chitra Katha a place of pride on its website, linking a vision of India as a Hindu nation to the contemporary moment. 18. Two recent monographs, India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings, and Other Heroes (2009) and Sculpting a Middle Class: History, Masculinity and the Amar Chitra Katha in India (2010) by Karline McLain and Deepa Sreenivas respectively, are further proof of the centrality of these series in crafting a particular national identity. 19. Anita Mannur, “‘The Glorious Heritage of India’: Notes on the politics of Amar Chitra. Katha,” 32.

Graphics of Freedom  155 20. W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, 95. 21. Rita Khanduri, “Comicology: comic books as culture in India,” 178. 22. Homi Bhabha addresses aspects of this phenomenon in what he terms the “discourse of splitting … signified by the diference in being English and being Anglicized” (Bhabha, 90). 23. A Maratha warrior, Shivaji (c. 1630) led many campaigns against the Mughals in the Deccan and was celebrated for his guerilla warfare. He is celebrated in Indian history and revered in the state of Maharashtra in India. 24. Bhupendrakumar Datta, “Mukherjee, Jatindranath (1879–1915)” in Dictionary of National Biography. 25. See Amit Kumar Gupta’s “Defying Death: Nationalist Revolution in India, 1897–1938,” Social Scientist, Vol. 25, No. 9/10, (Sep.-Oct., 1997), 3–27. 26. Naxalite comes from the name of the village Naxal Bari in West Bengal, where a cadre of the Communist party initiated an armed rebellion in 1967. The following years in Bengal were marked by revolutionary fervor and turbulence as students, intellectuals, and the poor revolted against governmental authority. The movement was brutally struck down with extra-judicial killings, forced incarceration, and general oppression. For an informative, but cursory, account: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite. 27. For a discussion of Jawahar Lal Nehru’s portrayal in ACK, see Sailaja Krishnamurti. 28. Deepa Sreenivas, Sculpting a Middle Class: History, Masculinity, and the Amar Chitra Katha in India, 7. 29. Sailaja Krishnamurthi, “Constructing ‘The Glorious Heritage of India’: Popular Culture and Nationalist Ideology in Indian Biographical Comics,” 2. 30. Ibid., 3. 31. Rupleena Bose, “Amar Chitra Katha and Its Cultural Ideology,” 35.

References Bhabha, H. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004. Bose, R. “Amar Chitra Katha and Its Cultural Ideology.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 44, No. 21 (May 23–29, 2009): 33–35. Chandra, N. The Classic Popular, Amar Chitra Katha, 1967–2007. Delhi: Yoda Press, 2008. Debroy, D. “The Graphic Novel in India: East Transforms West.” Bookbird: World of Children’s Books, 49 (4) (2000): 32–39. Datta, B. Mukherjee, Jatindranath (1879–1915). Dictionary of National Biography Vol. 3, S.P. Sen ed. Calcutta: Institute of Historical Studies, 1974: 162–165. Gordon, L. A. Bengal: The Nationalist Movement, 1876–1940. ———“Portrait of a Bengal Revolutionary.” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Feb. 1968): 197–216. Khanduri, R. “Comicology: comic books as culture in India.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2010), 1 (2): 171–191. Krishnamurti, Sailaja. “Constructing ‘The Glorious Heritage of India’: Popular Culture and Nationalist Ideology in Indian Biographical Comics.” Nationalisms, 112–125. Edmonton, AB: CRC Humanities Studio, 2003. MLA International Bibliography, EBSCOhost. Accessed 21 Mar. 2014.

156  Harleen Singh Lent, John A. “India’s Amar Chitra Katha: ‘Fictionalized’ History or the Real Story?” International Journal Of Comic Art 6, No. 1 (Spring 2004): 56–76. MLA International Bibliography, EBSCOhost. Accessed 21 Mar. 2014. Mannur, A. “‘The Glorious Heritage of India’: Notes on the politics of Amar Chitra Katha.” Bookbird: World of Children’s Books (2000): 38 (4), 32–33. Mclain, Karline. India’s Immortal comic books: gods, kings, and other heroes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Mitchell, W.J.T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, 95. ­Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985. Pai, A. “Comics as a Vehicle of Education and Culture.” Telling Tales: Children’s Literature in India (1995), Amit Dasgupta ed. New Delhi: Indian Council for Cultural relations/ New Age International Publisher. Rao, S., 2000. “Amar Chitra Katha Comics: A Quick-Fix Culture Course for Kids.” Bookbird:World of Children’s Books, 38 (4): 33–35. Sarita, G. “Remembering the Relics: Study of Select Comic Books that Trace the Roots of India’s Cultural Inheritance.” International Journal Of Comic Art 12, No. 1 (Spring 2010): 215–242. MLA International Bibliography, EBSCOhost. Accessed 21 Mar., 2014. Sheoran, Kamal. “Contemporary Children’s Literature in India.” Children’s Literature: Annual of the Children’s Literature Association and the Modern Language Association Division on Children’s Literature 4, (1975): 127–137. MLA International Bibliography, EBSCOhost. Accessed 21 Mar., 2014 Sircar, S. “Amar Chitra Katha: Western Forms, Indian Contents.” Bookbird: World of Children’s Books (2000), 38 (4): 33–35. Sreenivas, Deepa. Sculpting a Middle Class: History, Masculinity, and the Amar Chitra Katha in India. New Delhi: Routledge, 2010.

9 Graphic Écriture Gender and Magic Iconography in Kari Pia Mukherji

In 1939, following her separation from Diego Rivera, Mexican artist Frida Kahlo painted the enigmatic The Two Fridas, an extraordinary composition that partitioned her iconic and private self, her intact and her damaged heart, her colonized identity as both “Mestiza and Criolla.”1 The textured body in all of Kahlo’s autobiographical work, expressing a life marked by surgical injuries and emotional pain, is often framed within a post-revolutionary landscape of “new technology and urban space”2 and yet dramatized by a visual lexicon of pre-Colombian myth, magic, masque, and performance.3 Frida’s Frida remains a paradigmatic icon in feminist discourse, bearing witness to a moment of “radical modernity in the Americas” and produced by an aesthetic that projected notions of trauma, ritualized mutilations, and the erotic on the “self-referenced” and decorated female form.4

Figure 9.1

158  Pia Mukherji I wish to begin my reading of Amruta Patil’s graphic novel Kari (2008) by noticing this borrowed and reworked first image that introduces Kari’s life as a twenty-something in present-day Mumbai as intimately tied to the spectral presence of Ruth. The love story featuring Ruth and Kari has just ended as the narrative starts, and the telling portrait of their separation revisits the themes of loss and sharply felt absences that shadowed modernist aesthetics and self-consciousness. But, as is appropriate in a contemporary re-­enactment, the repetition of Frida’s mirrored portrait as Ruth-and-Kari conjoined also foregrounds issues of textuality, postmodern fantasy, and semiotic desire. It may be interesting to note, in passing, that the Kahlo painting is itself a revision of a modernist Spanish pretext. Angeles y Fuensanta, painted in 1909 by Julio Romero de Torres, is well known in Mexico as a numinous comparison of profane and sacred love, mirrored in the matching yet contrasted figures in the composition. A miniature (self) portrait of the artist appears in both Kahlo’s and de Torres’s texts, held by Angeles and Frida-on- the-right. This essay will study the painterly, iconic, and magical intertexts whose idioms create a pictured story world in Patil’s graphic novel, primarily to think about the notion of postmodern intertextuality in relation to feminist identity politics. Often speaking from fantastic and uncommon textual places, the narrative voice presents a performative self-image that emphasizes how subjectivity is constituted within and via language. Kari, in this sense, shifts the focus from the story of its protagonist to the texts she writes or inhabits and thus replaces “the very notion of [modern] consciousness with that of [postmodern] difference/differance, the illusory status of identity that is constantly deferred in relation to that which is not itself.”5 However, even as motivated language structures (dis)assemble gendered subjectivity, there remains the difficult project of political reconstruction, of finding a voice that expresses prohibited desires and excluded stories within such processes. In her contemporary retelling of a coming-of-age theme, Patil relies on fairytale references, mythic subversions, and revisions of surreal art to describe the everyday alienations experienced by Kari’s protean identity in a hyper-real metropolis. Mumbai is a crafted space here, marked by hectic routines of global information flows, consumer markets, and entertainment industries. Its crowded interiors are pictured as shared apartment spaces, tight agency cubicles, and bars filled with media people, M(umbai)ad Men, single and working women. The streets presents a darker aspect, staging scenes of provincial migrations, exploited labor, postindustrial environmental dangers, and the persistence of colonial memories. In fact, graphic Mumbai may be usefully read here using frames suggested by a recent critical discourse that examines the notion of the modern city in relation to the history and aesthetic of the graphic novel.6 For example, the silhouettes, rhythms, and atmosphere of New York City have long been ­mythologized – in early newspaper strips (Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley, Dirk’s Hans and Fritz,

Graphic Écriture  159 Herriman’s Krazy Kat), as well as in later superhero traditions where the cityscape is often visually read, flâneur-like, in “panoptic and projective views.”7 And more recently, vividly futuristic postmodern cities feature substantially in American and Franco-Belgian graphic texts: Frank Miller (Sin City), Alan Moore (V for Vendetta), Dean Motter (Electropolis), Enki Bilal (Nikopol), Mobeius (La Cinqième Essence), Marc Antoine Mathieu (Acquefacques). Fast, tall, and visually read in “blocks, grids, and … panoptic views,”8 Mumbai city is also a deep space here, a vast and layered archive of (post) colonial references and, more strangely yet, a fabled island. Mysterious alleyways become visible on the map, leading Kari to find places, perhaps in the city’s past or in her own memory, which she would walk by every morning to work but would never see. The lost, magic spaces within the cityscape appear and disappear and turn into talismans: small blue things, a bead, a bauble, a marble, an egg. In this fabulous smog city, Kari herself sometimes inhabits an old myth as her namesake Charon (kair uhn) of the fiery gaze, ferryman to dead souls in Hades, now drifting past urban underpassages, sewage rivers, monsoon-drowned streets, and the encircling Arabian seas. At her day job, however, Kari writes copy to market a beauty product, Fairy Tale Hair, a project already in its thirty-seventh rewrite before she composes an award-winning advertisement short. The unsettling detail of the spreading stain on Ruth’s white dress in the opening image of Kari’s own story connects to the later marvelous graphics she creates, in her life and in her art, using motifs of snow, blood, roses, sex, and death found in remembered romances: Briar Rose, East o’ the Sun West o’ the Moon, the Twelve Dancing Princesses, Into the Woods. Kari spins fairytale copy and art, choosing versions of familiar tale types: lost princesses, beastly lovers, the secret of the midnight dance, a sleeping maiden on the red-stained snow. These beautiful tableaux trace compelling plots on a Klimtian canvas of jeweled and erotic subjects that, at the end, always “cut to a shot of the princess with the flowing hair, and the Super Fairytale Hair!” legend.9 Kari’s campaign eventually becomes a commercial success and, in a Cinderella reference, she wins first prize at the most glamorous media event in town. However, the incorporated tale types, fables that reclaim at-risk fairytale women within celebratory marriage plots and princely protections, seem to turn strangely unreadable in Kari’s drawings, haunted by secret lovers, illicit desires, and oblique evocations of deathly sleep and endless waiting. The uncanny figure of Ruth moves through every story and, as the snow-bound girl in a frozen world where “not a gust of breeze may ruffle her skirt,” Kari wonders if the only way out is by “shattering the glass dome that is the sky.” 10 Fairytale intertexts have been recognized as an important trope in postmodern fiction, found, for example, in the work of Carter, Atwood, Rushdie, Byatt, and Winterson.11 The practice of postmodern adaptation has long been theorized within a debate that is attentive to the various phases and aspects of postmodern writing, both early and advanced. Patricia Waugh,

160  Pia Mukherji

Figure 9.2

for example, describes postmodern parody as a continuing trope in “a range of aesthetic practices involving playful irony, parody, parataxis” within late twentieth-century consumerist cultures.12 The many available forms and effects of contemporary intertextual referencing remind us that, perhaps, “telling is now become compulsorily belated, inextricably bound up with retelling in all its idioms of translation, adaptation, imitation, forgery, plagiarism, parody, pastiche”13 or “the strategy [of] inducing polyphony is typical of postmodern fiction.”14 Postmodern retelling in these several forms has also been theorized, from several standpoints, in relation to the politics of power and resistance. For example, Jameson’s early claim that postmodern intertextuality is merely a “pastiche, a blank parody,” in fact, a “nostalgic art” signaling emptiness and exhaustion,15 has been variously revised and contested. Alternative versions of political postmodernisms have been proposed – for example, in Hal Foster’s idea of an aesthetic concerned with a “critical deconstruction of tradition” and with a “critique of origins”16 or Linda Hutcheon’s description of a politically engaged, critical form of parodic adaptation she calls historiographic metafiction.17 In extending further the terms of this debate, the work of fairytale theorists – for example, Lorna Sage and Lucie Armitt – examines idioms of postmodern imitation, plagiarism, and parody that circulate in such literature,18 and describes particularly how the marvelous and the fantastic in rewritten texts are venues for the exhibition of marginalized or excluded subjects, particularly, as Hutcheon notes, for feminist and

Graphic Écriture  161 19

postcolonial voices. “The parodic [magical intertext] is a privileged mode for postmodern self reflexivity because the incorporation of past [material] in its very structure often points to their ideological contexts somewhat more obviously.”20 Here, Hutcheon’s proposal that magical parody speaks to the structure from both within/without introduces her claim that, as such, it becomes a particularly appropriate narrative for the excentric presence.21 This analysis helps frame a revisionary approach to the fairytale, alwaysalready available for deconstructive readings of feminine passivity and patriarchal social patterns, and now seen as suitable material for skeptical postmodern revisions that designate texts as layered and (literary) representations as unoriginal and performative.22 In the context of this debate, to return to the question of how to think usefully about iconic and marvelous intertextualities in Kari, perhaps we might also look more closely at the larger postcolonial turn to magic realism. Amruta Patil’s aesthetic works differently from the documentary graphic realism of recent (auto)biographies memorializing concealed t­raumas in postcolonial spaces, as, for example, in Satrapi’s Persepolis, Didier Lefevre’s The Photographer, or Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir. Choosing instead to reflect interior aspects of a self-conscious identity, Kari is magically realistic, employing a post-expressionistic technique that describes the aesthetic coincidence of everyday time and place with strangeness, carnival, and mystery.23 Hutcheon has observed that the symbolic forms of the magical-realistic narrative indicate “the point of conjunction of postmodernism and postcolonialism”24 in that they occupy a space of “doubled identity and history.”25 By presenting two systems of possibilities, the permitted and the real alongside the excluded and the enchanted, these fictions crucially enable significant practices common to both postmodern and postcolonial projects: the historical or textual reconstruction of the idioms of a significant past, and “a shared concern with the state of ex-centricity.”26 Accordingly, the double magical template in Kari, the embedded fairytale and the framing navigation myth, may be read as readapting the originary elements of each – that is, the familiar tale and the classical legend – to serve revisionary agendas. Both intertexts reference an unspeakable and absent love story. Kari’s past with Ruth-from-across-the-street is a secret, opaque affair in an otherwise vivid and graphic narrative. Their encounters in an empty flat are never witnessed, and Ruth remains strangely invisible in Kari’s daytime world. “Did she ever really even exist?” wonder Kari’s friends. Now, missing from Kari’s present life, Ruth’s image is everywhere: as the poster girl in a Bollywood romance pictured on a subway wall, the protagonist of the super fairytale hair copy, or living a parallel life, as Kari imagines, in a country painted with a clearer, brighter palette. Repeating the theme of the divided and mirrored self earlier evoked via The Two Fridas, Kari still insists: “there are two of us, not one. Despite a slipshod surgical procedure, we are here joined still.”27 These uncanny recurrences are revelatory, emphasizing, most strikingly, how “fantasy [initiates] a textual uncovering of cultural loss and absence,

162  Pia Mukherji particularly in its articulation of gendered absences from cultural space. Fantasy opens up for a brief moment onto disorder, onto illegality, onto that which lies outside the law … that which is silenced, made invisible, made absent.”28 In this sense, fantasy becomes ultimately a consolatory project, one that counters happy fairytale endings “structured, [as these are], upon lack rather than consolation [so that] behind them lurk a series of uncanny confrontations … a gothic disease.” Fanatasy offers, in contrast, “a form of authenticity, [a forum for] excentric, excluded voices to find voice and currency within dominant cultures.”29 Rosemary Jackson prescribes, therefore, “Kristevan readings” of the uncanny of the fantastic text, as instantiations of “repressed pleasures of the female body” and “shifts away from psychic truth to semiotic codes or symbolism of the unknown.”30 Such graphic écriture also evokes French feminist notions of scripting erotic difference while making visible feminine articulations that are erased within systems of patriarchal language. Irigiray’s work, in this context, most directly describes strategies of mimicking conventional signs of femininity, as, for example, in tactics used pathologically by the hysteric, to disclose prohibited erotic substance. “To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, [a] means to resubmit herself … to received ideas, and, by the unveiling of erotic pleasure, to make visible the possibility of the feminine within the language that writes, conceals and misrepresents her.”31 The translations of painterly and narrative traditions in Patil’s adapted aesthetics may also be read in terms of a second important late-feminist project: the difficult recovery of deconstructed heroism as (postmodern) textual practice. Significantly, the theme of doubled identity reappears in the narrative as the (super)heroic persona Kari assumes, that of the mythic boatman. The identity alteration follows the enigmatic incident of a suicide pact, a self-contained episode that both introduces and concludes the main narrative. These frame panels contain graphic echoes from a second Frida Kahlo hypertext, her painting The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1939), commissioned in same year as The Two Fridas. In another case of serial revisions, Kahlo’s canvas appropriates the Mexican retablo form, a popular votive folk genre. The retablo traditionally combines graphic hand-lettered narrative texts and supporting illustrations while describing magical or miraculous interventions that offer protection at moments of danger or death.32 In a graphic reversal, Kahlo’s painting ironically commemorates the scandalous death of a young city socialite in an accompanying text: “In the city of New York on the 21st of the month of October 1938 at six in the morning, Miss Dorothy Hale committed suicide by throwing herself out of a very high window of the Hampstead House.”33 Kahlo’s contemporary retablo presents an unredeemed urban scene, even as it features traditional formal elements: “a surreal use of space, segmentation of time, highlighted action, and a blurring of borders between life and death.”34 In Patil’s text, the scene of this pictured tragedy becomes a formal template for an uncanny and parodic prologue that describes a suicide pact

Graphic Écriture  163 gone absurdly wrong. In the tableau, Ruth and Kari jump, each for the other, survive the fall, and then proceed towards separate lives marked by navigations, crossings, and passages. Ruth, “saved by a safety net, got into a plane and she left. Her last memory of the city was an aerial one, dark with fistfuls of light. The airport was a ford and she crossed over.”35 Kari, whose fall is improbably broken by a neighborhood sewer, is compelled to return to the city streets and to promise the water to return her favor, “to unclog the city sewers when she cannot breathe.”36 While navigating the shadowed metropolis as Charon, Kari finds that “as a boatman, you learn how to clean through the darkest water.”37 Patil’s graphics script striking scenes of the darkened, postindustrial city; toxins and wastes poison the water passages Kari drifts by, dressed, ironically, in a “polyvinyl Trinity style”38 superhero outfit. As she watches the immersion rites of the painted Gods in Mumbai’s largest festival, Kari observes: “plaster limbs have clogged the beachfront and pipelines with silt and toxic paint. The Gods are poisoning the waters here.”39 In daytime versions of her mythic navigations, Kari participates heroically in the many connected lives within the work, domestic, and public communities that she inhabits in the city and, appropriate to the miraculous narrative demands of the retablo, she bears responsibility as witness to dangerous urban stories of malignant illness, abuse, infections and epidemics, surgical and psychological traumas. In a sense, the reconstruction of semimythic heroism in these cases may be read in terms of relational storytelling as a theoretical model of identity and ethical practice, found particularly in the work of feminist philosophers Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler. “Who somebody is, or was, we can only know by knowing the story of which he is himself the hero, his biography, in other words.”40 Drawing on Arendt’s singular notion that we find ourselves only in stories (already) told by others, Cavarero describes the “narratable” self in relation both to the “biographical tale of my story, told by another, [that properly answers] the question ‘who am I?’,”41 as well its exposure to an entire scene of life stories told by such an-other(s). “As in the Arabian Nights, the stories intersect with each other. Never isolated in the chimerical total completion of its sense, one cannot be there without the other.”42 This “constitutive dependency” within language, a radical implication in the lives and legends of others, is read as an ethical imperative by Judith Butler: “the account we give of one-self” is necessarily marked by an ethical responsibility towards the condition of the other.43 The unresolved story of Ruth and Kari dramatizes a necessary event within this paradigm: “the scene of the address” within which the account of the self must play, where “the ‘you’ is a necessary condition of ‘I’ since there can be no account of self that can exist outside the structure of an address” even if to an unnamed other.44 Butler describes the obligations of the interlocutory setting: “An account of oneself is always given to another, whether conjured or existing, and this other establishes the scene of the address as a primary ethical relation.…”45 In short, the address articulates

164  Pia Mukherji the impossibility of establishing an “interior subject, solipsistic, closed upon myself [because] I must exist for you and by virtue of you. If I have no you to address, then I have lost myself. … [and since] one can tell an autobiography only to another, one can reference an ‘I’ only in relation to a ‘you,’ [then] without the you, my own story becomes impossible.”46 In this sense, of course, Amruta Patil’s story may be read precisely as “the delineation of identity by way of alterity,” that is, by way of “stories that have been already told, of other voices that haunt identity narrative, of the rejection of the mirror image.”47 These proliferations point to how comic-book heroism, cast as an ethical relationality, becomes an unavoidable condition of scandalous feminist desire, even as the very conditions of dependence within the address to the other ensures that there can be no original narrative of the heroic self. Butler concludes: “one can tell one’s story best by becoming disoriented or rerouting oneself,” and by learning that “we are not constituted by our relations, but rather, are dispossessed by them.”48 As such, the very texture of Kari’s multiple intertextual selves, presented in relation to a series of so many stories already told, illustrated and lost, safeguard the ironic conditions of her heroic identity. It is this very excess or, in fact, abdication of self-narration that underwrites the sutured image of Ruth-and-Kari as a revisionary tableau of ethical engagements and difficult desires. Notes 1. Claudia Schaefer. “Frida Kahlo’s Cult of the Body: Self Portrait, Magical Realism, and the Cult of the Cosmic Race.” In Textured Lives: Women, Art and Representation in Modern Mexico. (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1992). 3–37. 11. 2. Ibid., 11. 3. See as examples The Broken Column (1944), Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Dr. Farill (1951), The Flying Bed (1932), Self Portrait with Thorns (1940). 4. From the discussion of Kahlo’s visual lexicon in Claudia Schaefer’s “Frida ­Kahlo’s Cult of the Body: Self Portrait, Magical Realism, and the Cult of the Cosmic Race.” In Textured Lives: Women, Art and Representation in Modern Mexico. (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1992). 3–37. 11. 5. Kari Weil. “French Feminism’s Écriture Feminine.” The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, ed. Ellen Rooney. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 153–171. 158. 6. See, for example, Ahrens, Jorn, and Arno Mettling. “Introduction.” Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence. (New York: Continuum, 2010). 1–19. 7. Ibid., 7. 8. Ibid., 7. 9. Amruta Patil. Kari. (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2008). 13. 10. Ibid., 48. 11. For discussions on aspects of postmodernism and the fairytale, see the collection of essays in Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale, ed. Stephen Benson.

Graphic Écriture  165 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008); in particular, Merja Makinen’s “Theorizing Fairy-Tale Fiction, Reading Jeanette Winterson.” 144–177. 12. Quoted in Merja Makinen’s “Theorizing Fairy-Tale Fiction.” 145. 13. Stephen Connor. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). 166. 14. Brian McHale. Postmodernist Fiction. (London, New York: Routledge, 1987). 167–168. 15. Fredric Jameson. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster. (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983). 111–125. 114. 16. Hal Foster. “Postmodernism: A Preface.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983). ix–xvi. xii. 17. See, for example, discussions on parody and metafiction in Hutcheon’s The Poetics of Postmodernism (1988) and The Politics of Postmodernism (1989). 18. See, for example, discussions of fairytale (per)versions in Lorna Sage’s Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter (1994) and Lucie Armitt’s Contemporary Women’s Fiction and the Fantastic (2000). 19. See Linda Hutcheon. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. (London, New York: Routledge, 2003). 35. 20. Ibid., 35. 21. Ibid., 35. 22. See, for example, how “Ruth Bottigheimer and Jack Zipes complicate the oral to literary trajectory of the fairy tale,” and how Christina Bacchilega argues for the “many voices of the folk” as a “parallel, malleable, contaminated narrative tradition, and the provisional genesis and the multilayered, performative nature of their literary versions.” From Merja Makinen’s “Theorizing Fairy-Tale Fiction.” 150. 23. A term first used by Franz Roh, the German art critic, in 1925. 24. Linda Hutcheon. Circling the Downspout of Empire:Post-colonialism and Postmodernism. Ariel 20, No. 4, 1989. 151. 25. Ibid., 154. 26. See Circling the Downspout of Empire. 151 -153. Hutcheon observes the twosystem paradigm has been variously theorized, for example, by Robert Wilson and Stephen Slemon. 27. Kari 3. 28. Rosemary Jackson. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. (London, New York: Routledge, 1981). 4. 29. Ibid., 4. 30. Ibid., 42. 31. Luce Irigaray. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 198. 32. For a study of folk contexts in Kahlo’s art, see the chapter “Cultural Objects, Personal Images: Frida Kahlo, Clarence John Laughlin, and Folklore” in ­Re-Situating Folklore. Folk Contexts and Twentieth-Century Literature and Art. Frank de Caro and Rosan Augusta Jordan. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004). 183–217. 33. The Hampstead House still stands on 59th St in New York City. Dorothy Hale’s life and death were an interesting scandal of the times, and bear analyses as a darker, retrospective version of the single girl in the city . 34. Frank De Karo and Rosan August Jordan’s “Cultural Objects, Personal Images: Frida Kahlo, Clarence John Laughlin, and Folklore.” 197.

166  Pia Mukherji 35. Kari 31. 36. The image used to present Kari’s return is, again, an iconic and parodic revision, this time of the frame painting Christina’s World (Wyeth). 37. Kari 31. 38. Ibid., 8. 39. Ibid., 93. 40. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958). 186. 41. Cavarero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 45. 42. Ibid., 87. 43. “Giving an account of oneself” takes a narrative form that “accepts the presumption that the self has a causal relation to the suffering of others.” Judith Butler. Giving an Account of Oneself. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 12. 44. Linda Anderson. “Autobiography and the Feminist Subject.” The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, ed Ellen Rooney. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 119–136. 125. 45. Judith Butler. Giving an Account of Oneself. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 21. 46. Ibid., 40. 47. Anderson 125. 48. Judith Butler. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. (London: Verso, 2004). 24.

References Ahrens, Jorn and Arno Mettling. “Introduction.” Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture and Sequence. New York: Continuum, 2010: 1–19. Anderson, Linda. “Autobiography and the Feminist Subject.” The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, Ellen Rooney ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006: 119–136. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1958. Armitt, Lucie. Contemporary Women’s Fiction and the Fantastic. Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Benson, Stephen, ed. Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008. Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Cavarero, Adriana. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. London, New York: Routledge, 2000. Connor, Stephen. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. De Caro, Frank and Rosan Augusta Jordan. Re-Situating Folklore. Folk Contexts and Twentieth-Century Literature and Art.. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004.

Graphic Écriture  167 Foster. Hal. “Postmodernism: A Preface.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983: ix–xvi. Hutcheon, Linda. Circling the Downspout of Empire:Post-colonialism and Postmodernism. Ariel 20, No. 4, 1989: 149–175. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (1988). London, New York: Routledge, 2003. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism (1989). London, New York: Routledge, 2002. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London, New York: Routledge, 1981. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Hal Foster ed. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983: 111–125. Makinen, Merja. “Theorizing Fairy-Tale Fiction, Reading Jeanette Winterson.” Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale, Stephen Benson ed. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008: 144–177. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London, New York: Routledge, 1987. Patil, Amruta. Kari. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2008. Sage, Lorna. Flesh and the Mirror: Essays on the Art of Angela Carter. London: Virago Press, 1994. Schaefer, Claudia. Textured Lives: Women, Art and Representation in Modern Mexico. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1992. Weil, Kari. “French Feminism’s Écriture Feminine.” The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, Ellen Rooney ed. Cambridge University Press, 2006: 153–171.

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Part IV

War, Nationhood, and Transnationalism The Middle East

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10 Visualizing the Emerging Nation Jewish and Arab Editorial Cartoons in Palestine, 1939–48 Jeffrey John Barnes

Introduction The period between the 1936–39 Arab Revolt in Palestine1 and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 represented a seismic shift in power in the Middle East when Great Britain abruptly terminated its colonial rule in Palestine as a result of the high costs of combating armed Jewish resistance. The decolonization process for Palestinian Arabs was largely unique for peoples of the former British Empire as another actor, the newly formed state of Israel, assumed power as the new “colonial” authority.2 Historians treat the conclusion of the Arab Revolt in 1939 as the end of Palestinian chances at statehood and define the 1940s as the beginning of this “re-colonization” process influenced by larger global events such as World War II and the postwar efforts to rebuild Europe along the nation-state model.3 The present paper does not overturn or challenge this body of scholarship but employs editorial cartoons from the contemporary Arab and Jewish press to elaborate on the contingencies that led to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, an event that was never predetermined. Editorial cartoons in both the Jewish and Arab press in Palestine during the period in question highlight the contentious debate between Palestinian nationalism and Zionism and illuminate the contingencies surrounding the creation of the state of Israel. Most scholars assume that during World War II, Jews and Arabs in Palestine expressed relatively little desire to contest the future status of Palestine and the pause in physical conflict in the region following the revolt resulted from both groups being more concerned with events in Europe.4 However, when they address World War II, both Jewish and Palestinian cartoonists demonstrate that commentary on the global was a critique of the local, thus nuancing our understanding of Palestine during the war by demonstrating that both groups still found ways to challenge each other’s legitimacy. Further, postwar cartoons that directly address the future status of Palestine demonstrate the uncertainty surrounding the final status of the Holy Land. Editorial cartoons, though few in number, especially in the Arab press, provide valuable insight into the period in question, though scholars have yet to take them into consideration.5 From 1939 through 1945, editorialists

172  Jeffrey John Barnes largely focused on the ills of the Third Reich. The Jewish press did so to advocate for the necessity of Allied intervention to save European Jews as well as to visually present the Jewish nation as culturally and morally part of Europe. The Arab press during the same time stressed the brutality of Hitler’s imperial ambitions in northern and eastern Europe, offering a veiled critique of Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine. Following the war, both nations’ presses began to directly address the local conflict. In the context of increased Jewish demands for the departure of Great Britain and for selfdetermination for the Yishuv, Jewish cartoonists visualized the international community as inept at handling the growing hostilities and presented the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine as inevitable. Palestinian cartoonists called for international aid for their cause, yet remained skeptical that the emerging superpowers could overcome their differences and push for a just settlement to the Palestine question. Editorial cartoons provide excellent source material for historians for, as Charles Press cogently observes, they merge classic political history through their critique of state institutions and through being produced by elites, and cultural history through being consumed by the often illiterate masses.6 Cartoons offer a veiled critique of those in power when governments suppress the written word and have the ability resonate and be internalized in a way text does not. It is, however, difficult if not impossible to sort out whether these images produce or reflect public opinion, as the subject – in this case, the idea the cartoonist is trying to convey – is both producing opinion and a product of the cultural forces surrounding it.7 For this reason I give scant attention to the production of these cartoons. Rather, I read them as a means for understanding the contentious debates between Zionist and Palestinian nationalist discourses, as readers during the period in question would have viewed them. Editorial cartoons had played a role in the press in the Middle East since the  nineteenth century, and cartoons in the Arab and Jewish press in ­Palestine from 1939–1948 drew heavily on that legacy. Fatma Müge Göçek links the emergence of editorial cartoons in the Ottoman Empire in the mid-nineteenth century to the rise of Western influence.8 Palmira Brummett demonstrates that political cartoons in the Ottoman satirical press offered a medium for negotiating discourses of modernity versus tradition, Western versus Eastern, and corrupted versus authentic during the early twentieth century.9 While editorial cartoons played a minor role in the Palestinian press in the first three decades of the twentieth century and were absent from any Yishuv publications, editorial cartoons exploded in number in both presses during the years of the Arab Revolt of 1936–39. S. Sufian, the only scholar to treat Palestinian editorial cartoons from both presses in any depth, compares Arab and Jewish cartoons in Palestine during this period and traces how both communities “utilized visual markers of the body based in the [Western-originated] pseudosciences of physiognomy and phrenology” to establish the racial superiority of each community.10 The present paper builds on this scholarship, using it as a starting reference and

Visualizing the Emerging Nation  173 expands it by analyzing previously ignored cartoons, emphasizing how they address the conflict between the two communities rather than how each community represented the other. The Jewish and Arab Press in Mandatory Palestine The Jewish press in Palestine advanced Zionist principles both among the Yishuv and among British officials serving in the region. The two Jewish newspapers surveyed for the present paper reflected these trends and were chosen since they both enjoyed a wide, varied circulation in the mandate. The ­Palestine Post (present-day Jerusalem Post) was published in English by Zionist backers with the intention of it being read both by the Yishuv and by British diplomats in Palestine in the hope of influencing British policy. While The Post featured many cartoons drawn by international cartoonists, they were indeed selected by Jewish editorialists and were read by a Jewish audience mostly through a Zionist lens. The Hebrew-language newspaper Davar served as the mouthpiece for the Labor party during and after the British Mandate in Palestine and enjoyed a widespread readership among the Yishuv.11 The Arab press in Palestine, which emerged as part of the nineteenthcentury Arab cultural revival known as the Nahda, became a key medium of Palestinian nationalism during the British Mandate.12 By the 1930s, the Palestinian press was closely linked with notables and enjoyed a wide readership, as literate persons read the papers out loud to those who could not read.13 Additionally, editorial cartoons provided a visual text that could be “read” by the mostly illiterate fellahin.14 Though many of the newspaper editors and publishers benefited from the sale of Arab lands to Jewish immigrants,15 most passionately argued against Zionist territorial expansion in Palestine. Filastin, the first periodical considered for the present paper, was perhaps the most widely circulated Arabic-language daily in Palestine during the mandate.16 Filastin’s editor, ‘Issa al-‘Issa – and his son, Raja, during and after World War II – “performed an ‘agenda-setting function’ for the larger national movement” and powerfully shaped Palestinian nationalist discourse.17 Since none of the major Arabic language periodicals, such as al-Diffa’ or Filastin, contained editorial cartoons following World War II, I examine cartoons from al-Wahda,18 a small periodical operated by the Husayni family and edited by Emil al-Ghouri in the 1940s,19 which is representative of the smaller-circulation press of the time. Editorial Cartoons in the Jewish Press in Mandatory Palestine, 1939–45 The first selection of cartoons considered was published during the years between the close of the Arab Revolt in 1939 and the end of World War II, and used the status of Jews under the Third Reich to make the case for the

174  Jeffrey John Barnes Zionist cause. The Yishuv press closely watched events unfold in Europe, and cartoons in both The Palestine Post and Davar focused exclusively on the war and neglected parochial issues. However, commentary on the global had strong implications for the local. Condemnations of Hitler’s ruthless treatment of European Jews provided firm moral legitimacy for the Zionist project in Palestine. Additionally, these cartoons linked the plight of European Jews to the perils that would face the rest of Europe in the event of a German victory. Finally, they advocated for greater Allied intervention against Hitler as a means for saving the Jews. In doing so, they not only advocated for practical help for the victims of the Third Reich but additionally imagined the emerging Jewish nation in Palestine as European. In summary, Jewish editorial cartoons in Palestine from 1939–1945 served as part of the process of creating a new Jewish national identity in Palestine.

Figure 10.1 Untitled, Davar, 9 January, 1939, 3.

An untitled Davar cartoon from early 1939 aptly demonstrates Jewish attempts to depict the horrors of the Third Reich and the necessity of world intervention.20 The cartoonist renders Hitler as a panther devouring a helpless victim. The victim pleads for help from his neighbor, who must decide between providing aid and opening himself to harm or retreating to the temporal safety of his abode. Hope and peril coexist as Hitler the beast appears exhausted from his unending quest to conquer. The trail of the dictator’s prior destruction hints that the neighbor will soon be devoured himself

Visualizing the Emerging Nation  175 should he not provide aid. A British declaration of war against Germany is still eight months away at this point and the image captures and simultaneously feeds Yishuv angst at the plight of European Jews. Further, it hints at the shared fate of free Europeans and the victimized Jews that, when read in the Palestinian context, can be understood as spatially and ideologically situating the emerging Jewish nation as European. A cartoon in The Palestine Post from the same year echoes the theme of Western and specifically British ambivalence in the face of the suffering of Jews under the Third Reich.21 British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who would become known as the Great Appeaser after the signing of the Munich agreements in September 1939, stands alone in Parliament assuring himself that he has averted catastrophe. Addressing an empty chamber, he mentions that all other persons in the room concur with him. This insinuates not only that public opinion is against the Prime Minister but also suggests that should Britain abandon the Jews to Hitler’s whims, it will become isolated and alone. As members of the British government working in the mandate administration, many of whom were appointed by and had direct access to Chamberlain, took in this image, the message could not be clearer: the free world, which is assumed here to include the Jewish nation, needs to act and not fill itself with false confidence. Later in the war, The Post makes an explicit connection between Jews under the Third Reich and the fate of Europe.22 Hitler strikes an ape-like pose and grimaces in front of a mass of Jews ready to be sent to concentration camps. The accompanying caption, which reads “I’ve settled the fate of Jews and of Germans,” hints at their imminent destruction, yet the ­Führer remains unwavering. Nemesis, the Greek goddess of divine retribution, stands watch, keeping record of Hitler’s hubris and cruelty. She records his actions as “horrors to be repaid.” Here the cartoonist implicates the whole of Germany, embodied in Hitler, in the destruction of the Jews and the subsequent alienation from other nations that will ultimately result from this. The cartoonist draws the dictator in an animal-like position, representing the lack of humanity in the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Those who oppose Hitler, a group that obviously includes the Yishuv, are constructed to be part of a diametrically different world order than that of the tyranny of the Third Reich. Similar to previous images, this cartoon imagines a future Jewish state as a free state and part of the European order. Editorial Cartoons in the Arab Press in Mandatory Palestine, 1939–45 In a similar manner to the Yishuv press, editorial cartoons in the Arab press in Palestine from 1939–45 avoided directly addressing local concerns and focused instead on the war. In spite of a disintegrating economy,23 continued Jewish immigration, and the usurpation of Arab land, cartoons in Filastin – the

176  Jeffrey John Barnes only Arab periodical featuring cartoons during this period – focused on the ills of Hitler’s attempt at creating a continental empire in northern and eastern Europe. Reminiscent of Jewish cartoons at the same time, these images addressed global concerns yet offer commentary on the worsening situation in Palestine. In condemning Hitler’s imperial ambitions in the east, ­Palestinian cartoonists drew an implicit parallel between these actions and those of ­Zionist-settler colonialism in the Holy Land. With a fractured leadership and inability to mount any meaningful armed resistance against the British, such subtle critiques were one of the few war-time means available for Palestinians to express critical commentary.

Figure 10.2  “Best Friend,” Filastin, 1 January, 1940, 2.

A pair of cartoons in Filastin on New Year’s Day, 1940 best illustrates the trend of focusing on Hitler’s continental empire in that paper. The first features an unforgettable depiction of Hitler as a wolf consuming territory in Europe.24 The dictator’s facial features match those of Jewish characters in cartoons in Filastin over the previous decade, revealing that the cartoonist purposefully depicts the Führer in a Jewish body. This demonstrates that she intentionally wishes to establish a parallel between Hitler’s imperial ambitions and those of the Zionist project in Palestine. The villainous dictator is armed with two revolvers and is in hot pursuit of about a dozen fleeing individuals. The editorialist labels these individuals as areas falling under the control of the Third Reich, such as Holland and the Balkans. In contrast with Hitler, the fleeing nations are not wearing military garb and hence are

Visualizing the Emerging Nation  177 presumably innocent. Hitler, who in reality advocated for German settlement in his newly acquired territories, is thus guilty of the same crimes as the Zionist colonists descending on Palestine and violently dispossessing its previous inhabitants, a link made clear by the depiction of Hitler as ­Jewish. Additionally, through condemning Hitler, Filastin distances itself from Haj Amin al-Husayni, the former Mufti of Jerusalem who fell out of favor with the British during the revolt and who spent much of the war in exile in ­Germany. This cartoon then remains above the charge of antisemitism, allowing for the imagining of a pluralistic, modern nation while still criticizing Zionist colonialism at the expense of the Arab population of Palestine. The second cartoon calls further attention to the imperial nature of the Third Reich and the inherent violence of its continental empire.25 Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe and one of Hitler’s right-hand men, violently enters a room in which Hitler is. The general walks over bodies, each of which is labeled as a nation occupied by the Third Reich, such as Czechoslovakia and Poland. Two of the bodies have their hands shackled. This not only signifies bondage but also denotes that these nations cannot act to save themselves. Similarly, the Palestinian Arabs cry for international aid to prevent their own colonization. None of the faces of the victims is visible; each is pushed into the ground, signifying the dehumanization of the countries involved. Additionally, this renders these prisoners faceless to observers, just as the victims of the Zionist project in Palestine are invisible to the rest of the world. Outside, the viewer can see bodies hanging from the trees, further testifying to the violence of German colonialism. Both Palestinian and Zionist nationalist discourses present trees as symbolic of rootedness in the land.26 Thus these victims are massacred on their own territory, which they have possessed for ages, reinforcing the editorialist’s implicit critique of colonialism in Palestine. Editorial Cartoons in the Jewish Press in Mandatory Palestine, 1945–48 The end of World War II caused a seismic shift in the dynamics of the Palestine question. Evidence of these changes could be seen in editorial cartoons in the Yishuv press and reflected the uncertain future of the region. Revelations about the absolute depravity of the Holocaust and war-time Allied indifference to the Final Solution provided moral legitimacy to the Zionist claim for a national homeland where Jews could be forever free from persecution. Western powers, who largely refused to open their borders to a significant number of Jews fleeing the Third Reich, became staunch advocates of the Zionist project as an attempt to absolve their guilt and construct a new memory of the war.27 The shaky war-time alliance between the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union rapidly gave way to a polarized world with the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. seeking to spread their influence to

178  Jeffrey John Barnes every corner of the globe. Nowhere was this more true than the Middle East, home of the world’s largest oil reserves, especially since World War II demonstrated the absolute strategic necessity of controlling that resource for military purposes. In 1947 the newly minted United Nations, born out of the failures of the defunct League of Nations, advocated the partition of Palestine,28 a move cautiously embraced by Zionists as being favorable to their goals but vehemently opposed by Palestinian-Arabs, who viewed partition as surrendering land that historically belonged to them. During these tumultuous three years, editorial cartoons in the Yishuv press increasingly targeted outside influence in the future status of the area and advocated decolonization from the British.29 A cartoon in The Palestine Post in the waning days of World War II reflects the trend of directly addressing local issues and critiques the newly created United Nations.30 Stalin, Churchill, Truman, and de Gaulle, leaders of the four most powerful countries in the postwar world, each play a different game representing their specific national interests. The caption describes the necessity of playing together but the rules prohibit cramping any other player’s style. The cartoon and caption clearly bring attention to the perceived ineffectiveness of the new organization in handling international affairs. Of particular interest is the emphasis on the increased division between the United States and the Soviet Union, who were war-time allies but returned to hostile relations following the war.31 The cartoonist wishes to inform the viewer that such a polarized milieu of great powers would never reach a reasonable solution to the Palestine question. Rather, the fate of the Holy Land needs to be left to its inhabitants, including the Yishuv, rather than other powers. French president Charles de Gaulle, long enamored with the Zionist cause, stands taller than the rest of the players, signifying his moral superiority. While Stalin, Churchill, and Truman smile as they play their games, de Gaulle glares at his teammates in condemnation, signaling his disgust with their ignoring of the Jewish plight. Further, it is a small child watching the games who provides the caption. The child represents the Jewish nation, which has been persecuted for millennia. Additionally, this situates the Jewish nation as being small and inconsequential next to so-called adult nations and thus vulnerable, echoing Jewish nationalist discourse that focuses on the need for the creation of a Jewish state in order to protect Jews from the discrimination they have historically experienced. In addition to its condemnation of Western powers intervening in J­ ewish affairs, editorial cartoonists in Davar criticize what they consider to be Arab domination of world opinion.32 A heavily gendered cartoon dated 14 May, 1947 contains a stereotypical Arab playing a song to Lady Liberty and Athena, who together represent the democracies of the world. Both appear to be wooed by the performance. In the background, a dancer bearing the communist symbol of the sickle and hammer dances to the tune, obviously taken in by the music, implying that the Soviet Union – the only other world

Visualizing the Emerging Nation  179 power other than Great Britain and the United States to which the Zionists could turn for support – also easily falls under the spell of the Arab. The cartoon illuminates the Zionist perspective on the Cold War as it was waged in the Middle East. At this point the special relationship between the United States and Israel33 did not exist and Arabs and Palestinians in particular still held hope that the United States would intervene on their behalf and bring about the creation of an Arab-majority state in historic Palestine, a proposition that terrified Zionists.34 Additionally, the Arab’s skin is purposefully colored dark, suggesting that unlike the Jews, Arabs are not European. This insinuates that it would be logical for European states and America to support the creation of a Jewish nation in Palestine as an extension of their principles and racial identity.

Figure 10.3  “Made in England,” Davar, 21 May, 1948, 2.

180  Jeffrey John Barnes A week after the Zionist leadership under David Ben Gurion proclaimed the state of Israel, Davar continued to critique British involvement in the region as being sympathetic to the Palestinians and even hostile to Israelis.35 The cartoon from 21 May, 1948 features John Bull, the enduring caricature of the British Empire, carrying a hostile Palestinian on his back. Bull gives a menacing stare at an Israeli soldier. The soldier is defensively positioned, whereas Bull and his Arab companion are clearly on the offense. The cartoonist depicts the Palestinian in stereotypical Arab garb and raises his sword at the soldier. The sword is labeled “Made in England,” strengthening the cartoonist’s message that although the British have abandoned the colonialism of the mandate system in Palestine, they still peddled influence among Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbors in a manner that was threatening the young Jewish state. As Israel solidified its newly gained sovereignty and warded off military actions from its Arab neighbors, it sought to reduce what it perceived to be British support for Arab interests in the Middle East. Editorial Cartoons in the Arab Press in Mandatory Palestine, 1945–48 The contents of the few editorial cartoons in the Palestinian press in the years immediately following World War II demonstrate the Palestinian hope for foreign intervention to prevent the realization of the Zionist goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The British response to the 1936–39 revolt devastated the Palestinian national movement that now required ­outside assistance to achieve its goals.36 Cartoons in the small-circulation al-Wahda represented this trend and also echoed the Yishuv press’s charge that the international community was too divided to accomplish anything in Palestine. Al-Wahda was not part of the mainstream Palestinian press37 but it was a mouthpiece for the powerful Husayni family38 and did not always represent public opinion as a whole, although the paper was careful to not offend Husayni’s constituents. It did, however, offer important insights into the postwar conflict in Palestine. An early 1946 cartoon in al-Wahda directly addresses the question of Jewish immigration, land usurpation, and the British role in the region.39 The focus of the image is a bag of grain labeled “British Grain Promises to the Arabs.” A scarecrow with a hat that features the Union Jack guards the grain. A bird with a human face, who exhibits a number of stereotypically Jewish features including the prominent nose, perches on the scarecrow. An Arab peasant couple walks away from the bag empty-handed. A flock of crows, representing Zionist settlers, descend on the bag ready to devour its contents. The dialogue, which is between John Bull and Fuad the Arab farmer, reveals that the British are offering free plots of land. The British scarecrow fends off the Arab peasants but not the Jewish settlers, who are the real threat, and represents unfulfilled British promises to Palestine. The

Visualizing the Emerging Nation  181

Figure 10.4  “British Grain Promises to the Arabs,” al-Wahda, 2 February, 1946, 1.

editorialist highlights the British role in the dispossession of Arab peasants in Palestine and in doing so appeals for a change of heart for British policymakers that would result in the fellahin staying on their land. The editorial cartoonist in al-Wahda also echoes Jewish concerns about the ability of the world community to co-operate in handling the Palestine question in the context of the Cold War.40 In an April 1947 feature, Uncle Sam and John Bull lock in a heated debate with Joseph Stalin. Uncle Sam and John Bull appear united in their condemnation of Stalin as they point accusatory fingers at him. This, together with Stalin’s mirrored response, represents an accusation of guilt or the passing of responsibility in global issues such as the Palestine conflict. No nation is willing to take up the Palestinian cause. Unlike their Zionist counterparts, however, the Palestinian national movement desperately needs international help in the wake of the destruction visited on it during the 1936–39 Revolt. In the context of the Cold War, the United States would ultimately recognize the Jewish state, forcing elements of the Palestinian movement to ally with the Soviets, though no nation would ever adopt the Palestinian cause as strongly as the United States did Israel, sealing the fate of the region for the next half-century.41

182  Jeffrey John Barnes Conclusion Editorial cartoons provided a unique visual window into public opinion in the two different communities campaigning for control of Palestine in the years between the Palestinian Revolt of 1936–39 and the Nakba. Both Palestinians and Jews were in the process of imagining and reimagining their respective nations, a drama that unfolded in each group’s press, especially through the medium of editorial cartoons. While World War II brought about a proliferation of depictions of Hitler and the dangers of fascism, commentary on the Third Reich by both nations served as veiled interpretation of the situation in Palestine. Editorial cartoons in the Yishuv press during World War II focused on the plight of Jews at the hands of Hitler and advocated for greater Allied intervention for their protection. They linked the fate of the Jews to the fate of free peoples everywhere, establishing the Jewish nation as part of the community of democratic nations. Cartoons in the Arab press during this time illuminated the atrocities of Hitler’s establishment of a continental empire, which needs to be read as a critique of Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine. Following the war, both communities directly addressed the Palestine question. The Jewish press passionately argued for British decolonization and for the Jewish people to be left to determine their own destiny. Postwar Palestinian editorial cartoons, though few in number, also addressed international involvement in the region, concluding that while the differences between the world’s superpowers meant there was little chance of international co-operation in favor of the Palestinians, foreign intervention was necessary to prevent a Jewish takeover of more than half of historic Palestine. Cartoons, through representing and producing public opinion, provide a visual glimpse into the contingencies that characterized this period. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from within its borders were never predestined. Of course, the crushing defeat of the Palestinians during the 1936–39 revolt and the wave of decolonization that swept across the postwar world worked in the Jews’ favor and contributed to Israel’s creation. However, Cold War dynamics and the desire to spread their respective influences into the Middle East forced the United States to take a side in the worsening conflict. Looking at these cartoons and the contingencies of the period reveals that the Nakba should not be considered an inevitable conclusion to the Arab “defeat” in 1939, offering hope that the contemporary situation should not be viewed as a finality. Notes 1. Admittedly, using the terms “Arab Revolt” or “Arab Rebellion” to describe the events in Palestine from 1936–39 is problematic and reproduces the colonial narrative through presenting the Palestinians as taking up arms against a

Visualizing the Emerging Nation  183 l­egitimate ruler. Perhaps terming the events an uprising similar to later episodes of Palestinian resistance, as Kenneth W. Stein suggests in “The Intifada and the 1936–39 Uprising: A Comparison,” in Journal of Palestine Studies 19, No. 4 (Summer 1990), would be more helpful; however, the author retains the use of “Revolt” and “Rebellion” to avoid confusion. 2. Perhaps the only other large-scale case of this in the British Empire was the Kurds in Iraq and Iran. 3. For examples, see Rashid Khalidi’s “The Palestinians and 1948: The Underlying Cause of Failure,” in The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, eds. Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), the relevant sections of Khalidi’s seminal Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), and Issa Khalaf’s Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939–1948 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991). 4. See for instance Saleh Abdel Jawad, “The Arab and Palestinian Narratives of the 1948 War,” in Israeli and Palestinian Narratives of Conflict: History’s Double Helix, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 81. 5. When speaking to others about this project, they often told me that editorial cartoons were only prevalent in the mandate-era Palestinian press during the 1936–39 rebellion. Many made this assumption since the major P ­ alestinian periodicals used by scholars, such as Filastin and al-Diffa’, either did not contain editorial cartoons at all or stopped using them shortly after the outbreak of World War II. As will be shown, however, smaller-circulation papers that targeted specific political constituencies still employed editorial cartoons, thus opening up the opportunity to utilize these sources as a means for understanding the period between the close of the rebellion and the Nakba. 6. Charles Press, The Political Cartoon (London: Associate University Press, 1981), 11. 7. However, as Benedict Anderson points out in Imagined Communities: Reflections and on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 190, the act of viewing an image in a newspaper itself constitutes a constructive act. Anderson asserts newspapers (and by extension the editorial cartoons in them) offer not only a nationalist interpretation of the news but also allow the reader to understand that she is not alone in the act of reading. Rather, she is part of a community (the nation), all of whom are reading the paper in the same language, understanding the same cultural cues in the text and images, and absorbing events at the same approximate time, which internalizes the notion of the shared nation. 8. Fatma Müge Göçek, “Political Cartoons as a Site of Representation and Resistance in the Middle East,” in Political Cartoons in the Middle East, ed. Fatma Müge Göçek (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1998), 6. 9. Palmira Brummett, “Dogs, Women, Cholera, and Other Menaces in the Streets: Cartoon Satire in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908–11,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies 27, Issue 4 (November 1995). 10. S. Sufian, “Anatomy of the 1936–39 Revolt: Images of the Body in Political Cartoons of Mandatory Palestine,” in Journal of Palestinian Studies 37, No. 2 (Winter 2008): 24.

184  Jeffrey John Barnes 11. Both The Palestine Post and Davar are available digitally as part of the Historic Jewish Press project in conjunction with the National Library of Israel at . The author utilized the microfilm copies at the National Library of Israel at the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University as they are of better quality. 12. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 53. 13. Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for ­Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 39. 14. Khalidi, Iron Cage, 26. 15. Mustafa Kabha, Writing up a Storm: The Palestinian Press as Shaper of Public Opinion, 1929–1939 (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2007), 3. 16. The author consulted the collection of Filastin at the National Library of Israel at the Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University. 17. Mark LeVine, “The Palestinian Press in Mandatory Jaffa: Advertising, Nationalism, and the Public Sphere,” in Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Public Culture, eds. Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 55–56. 18. Portions of al-Wahda, along with other Palestinian periodicals, are available at the Givat Haviva Educational Institute in Menashe, Israel. The author consulted their digitized collection at . 19. Kabha, 263. Other small newspapers sponsored by the Husayni family include al-Wahda al-’Arabiyya, al-Liwa, and al-Shabab. 20. Untitled, Davar, 9 January, 1939, 3. 21. “Democracy goes on Holiday,” The Palestine Post, 18 August, 1939, 8. 22. “I’ve Settled the Fate of Jews and of Germans,” The Palestine Post, 25 February, 1943, 4. 23. This was a result of the British response to the 1936–39 Rebellion. 24. “Best Friend,” Filastin, 1 January, 1940, 2. 25. “Hitler and Göring,” Filastin, 1 January, 1940, 3. 26. Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Fayetteville, AR: The University of Arkansas Press, 2003), 55–64. 27. This memory conceives of the war as a great moral crusade, pitting good against evil, in which the Western nations liberated European Jews. In reality, the Allied powers did little to stop the Holocaust (including taking in Jewish refugees) until late in the war. 28. The British developed the concept of partition in 1937 in response to the Arab Revolt; the idea continues to have a powerful hold on policy-makers today. 29. The gentle persuasion of the press was accompanied by violent Jewish paramilitary attacks on British and Arab installations in Palestine, including the King David Hotel bombing on 22 July, 1946, as debates about decolonization and the establishment of a Jewish state intensified. 30. “The United Nations Club,” The Palestine Post, 13 July, 1945, 5. 31. Although the Cold War is often considered to have started in 1945, the alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States during World War II was an aberration from strained relations between the two empires since 1918. 32. Untitled, Davar, 14 May, 1947, 3. 33. The Special Relationship is a concept that emerged after the creation of the state of Israel that denotes the depth to which the United States and Israel support

Visualizing the Emerging Nation  185 each other’s goals. U.S. foreign policy since Harry S. Truman (with minor exceptions under Dwight Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush) has given Israel a blank check, hence a special relationship exists between the two. 34. For an excellent exposition of shifting Arab attitudes towards the United States vis-à-vis the Palestine question, see Ussama Makdisi’s Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820–2001 (New York: Public Affairs, 2010). 35. “Made in England,” Davar, 21 May, 1948, 2. 36. Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 190. 37. None of the main Palestinian papers from this time (such as Filastin and alDiffa’) contained editorial cartoons and are thus not included in the present paper. 38. The Husayni family was one of the two primary political dynasties in Jerusalem, together with the rival Nashashibi family. Traditionally, a member of the Husayni family held the position of Mufti of Jerusalem, which gave the family considerable political and religious power. 39. “British Grain Promises to the Arabs,” al-Wahda, 2 February, 1946, 1. 40. Untitled, al-Wahda, 26 April, 1947, 4. 41. While other factors also played a significant role, Truman’s advisors urged him to recognize the Israeli state before the Soviet Union did in order to gain a crucial foothold in the Middle East and preempt Soviet recognition.

References

Cartoons Untitled, Davar, 9 Jan. 1939, 3. “Democracy Goes on Holiday,” The Palestine Post, 18 Aug. 1939, 8. “I’ve Settled the Fate of Jews and of Germans,” The Palestine Post, 25 Feb. 1943, 4. “Best Friend,” Filastin, 1 Jan. 1940, 2. “Hitler and Göring,” Filastin, 1 Jan. 1940, 3. “The United Nations Club,” The Palestine Post, 13 Jul. 1945, 5. Untitled, Davar, 14 May 1947, 3. “Made in England,” Davar, 14 May 1947, 3. “British Grain Promises to the Arabs,” al-Wahda, 2 Feb. 1946, 1. Untitled, al-Wahda, 26 Apr. 1942, 4.

Other Sources Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Brummett, Palmira. “Dogs, Women, Cholera, and Other Menaces in the Streets: ­Cartoon Satire in the Ottoman Revolutionary Press, 1908–11.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27, Issue 4 (November 1995): 433–460. Göçek, Fatma Müge. “Political Cartoons as a Site of Representation and Resistance in the Middle East.” Political Cartoons in the Middle East, Fatma Müge Göçek ed. 1–11. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1998.

186  Jeffrey John Barnes Jawad, Saleh Abdel. “The Arab and Palestinian Narratives of the 1948 War.” Israeli and Palestinian Narratives of Conflict: History’s Double Helix, Robert I. Rotberg ed. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006. Kabha, Mustafa. The Palestinian Press as Shaper of Public Opinion 1929–39: Writing up a Storm. London: Valentine Mitchell, 2007. Khalaf, Issa. Politics in Palestine: Arab Factionalism and Social Disintegration, 1939–1948. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991. Khalidi, Rashid. Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Khalidi, Rashid. The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Khalidi, Rashid. “The Palestinians and 1948: The Underlying Causes of Failure.” In The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim eds., 12–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. LeVine, Mark. “The Palestinian Press in Mandatory Jaffa: Advertising, Nationalism, and the Public Sphere.” In Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Public Culture, Rebecca L. Stein and Ted Swedenburg eds., 51–76. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Makdisi, Ussama. Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820–2001. New York: Public Affairs, 2010. Press, Charles. The Political Cartoon. London: Associated University Press, 1981. Stein, Kenneth W. “The Intifada and the 1936–39 Uprising: A Comparison.” Journal of Palestine Studies 19, No. 4 (Summer 1990): 64–85. Sufian, Sandy. “Anatomy of the 1936–39 Revolt: Images of the Body in Political Cartoons of Mandatory Palestine.” Journal of Palestine Studies 37, No. 2 (Winter 2008): 23–42. Swedenburg, Ted. Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. Fayetteville, AR: The University of Arkansas Press, 2003.

11 Drawing for a New Public Middle Eastern 9th Art and the Emergence of a Transnational Graphic Movement Massimo di Ricco Introduction In a bookstore in the northern Colombian city of Barranquilla, a small shelf displays the graphic novels and illustrated memoirs of Lebanese authors Zeina Abirached and Lamia Ziadé, translated by two different Spanish publishing houses. This unexpected find suggests that comic artists from the Middle East have now managed to reach the global market and gain a worldwide visibility. Indeed, in the past years, Arab comic artists have been invited to several festivals in Europe: the Swiss Fumetto Festival in Lucerne, Lucca Comics in Italy, and the Angoulême Festival in France. However, we must remember that participants in international festivals represent a small part of the multitude of graphic comic artists active in the region. These individuals are all part of a recent but still rather informal graphic movement that has emerged in the past decade throughout different locations in the Arab Middle East area. Lamia Ziadé’s book Bye Bye Babylon, with its peculiar sketchbook style distinct from ordinary comics, is emblematic of the blurred genenric and stylistic boundaries that characterize comics production and genres within the regional comics scene. It seems necessary, however, to think about the subtexts in the work of these two Lebanese artists who write mainly about war and autobiographical memoirs. The singular focus on these topics seems to characterize a recently established transnational comics culture, perhaps best exemplified by the enormous success of works like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, David B.’s Epileptic, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Considering that the work of both Abirached and Ziadé seem to focus on these particular graphic themes as well, it appears necessary to raise some questions on the relation between the dynamics of the global market and the regional production and internal sustainability of local comics cultures. Considering also that these two graphic novels were first published in French by European publishing houses, it is perhaps necessary to examine the significance of multiple languages operating within the region, especially in terms of comics production. At present, a complex comics industry exists within the Arab Middle East region that includes different genres, publics, targets, and means of

188  Massimo di Ricco productions. This article only focuses on a part of the scene, defined here as a graphic movement. This definition takes into account the personal and artistic backgrounds of the individuals who comprise this generation of comic artists, and is used to blur the boundaries between comics art and other graphic genres and artistic fields. The movement’s prominent features include the attempt to draw for an adult public and to emphasize the social function of the medium. While recognizing the variety of terms used to define the medium – graphic illustrations, bande dessinée, visual art or illustrated stories1 – this essay will use the term “comics” as an all-­ inclusive form, touching on the definitions provided by comics theorists such as Groesnell and McCloud (2007; 1994). The artists considered here belong to the Arabic-speaking countries of the Middle East, where writers, artists, and collaborations in different parts of the region simultaneously started building the basis of this movement. The objective of this article is to outline the emergence of this movement and to analyze the different forms and branches of a transnational and evolving graphic scene the epicenters of which are in Beirut, Cairo, and Algiers. A first look at these developments will introduce questions related to its transnational character, issues of local and regional sustainability, and the role of popular cultures and global markets in postcolonial societies. Reconnecting with the Recent Past: Previous Explorations in Comics Art for Adults Historically, various comics traditions were present in the region whose features and targets were distinct from the present movement under analysis. Comic strips, magazines for children, and foreign publications have been present since the late 1950s through to the 1980s.2 Superhero comics, translated from English or locally written in Arabic, was another popular genre available during these decades.3 Cartoons and caricatures meant for an adult public have had a long history in the region and have maintained a mainstream profile due to their partnership with daily newspapers.4 By the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, it becomes possible to more specifically identify the vanguard of the present scene, primarily marked by the artists’ interest in addressing an adult public and raising the status of comics to art within the Arab region. Comics for adults were mainly found in Lebanon during the 1980s. George Khoury, alias JAD, introduced the comic-strip genre in daily national newspapers and published some graphic novels during the period. In the mid-1980s, he established the Mouhtaraf JAD (JAD Workshop), along with Edgar Aho, Lina Ghaibeh, Wissam Beydoun, May Ghaibeh, and Shoghig Der-Ghogassian, but the experience ended in 1989 with the final publication in the series, Min Beirut (From Beirut).5 At the same time illustrator Michèle Standjofski started publishing comic strips in a local Lebanese newspaper and in magazines. In 1986 in Algeria, the 1er festival de la BD et de la caricature de Bordj

Drawing for a New Public  189 EL Kiffan was launched. Its legacy was interrupted by the civil war in the 1990s, which would have important repercussions on the subsequent scene. For the same reason, the Algerian magazine El Manchar, launched in 1990, soon stopped publication. Apart from the usual difficulties in the areas of funding, publishing, and distribution, the discontinuity between the work of the 1980s and that of the current generation is due to the consequences of civil wars and their aftermath on both Lebanese and Algerian societies, as well as the climate of political intimidation that disrupted production and sometimes threatened the lives of authors, especially in Algeria. Both these conditions constrained efforts to establish and expand a medium that, by definition, expressed social critique from a generically irreverent perspective. Most authors left the comic scene or moved to other graphic fields due also to artistic frustrations related to difficult socio-political conditions for creative and independent work.6 Between the end of the 1980s and the year 2000, only a few festivals and magazines managed to keep the comic scene alive within the region: the Tunisian festival, Salon de la Bande Dessinée of Tazarka (1997), and the Festival Méditerranéen de BD et de l’image de Tunis in 2000 (Cassiau-Haurie, 2011). The magazine Zerooo, founded in Beirut in 2000, was an exploration at the edge of the genre, mixing comic strips with satirical cartoons. Regardless of its underground success, it ceased to exist due to internal problems and the lack of funds to print continuing editions. In 2003 in Egypt, Magdy El Shafee started publishing the comics series Yasmin & Amina in the weekly magazine Alaa`Eddin. Lebanese graphic artist Mazen Kerbaj should be considered as one of the few authors who attempted, almost single-handedly, to keep the medium alive within the region during this period. Kerbaj, whose mother is Laure Ghorayeb, a recognized painter and poet, self-published several comic books for adults and illustrations in local magazines in the 1990s. His first book was published with the help of the Academie Libanaise de Beaux Arts of the University of Balamand (ALBA), which also published Zeina Abirached’s first graphic novel, Beyrouth-Catharsis (2002), in French. Abirached’s novel deals with the life of a young girl from the neighborhood in which Abirached lived during the civil war, introducing perhaps elements of memoir and autobiography to contemporary comics culture. Both artists have expressed how difficult it was to find comic books in Beirut at the time, thus emphasizing the inconsistent popularity of the medium in the area during that period.7 Kerbaj’s moment came a few years later in 2007 with the publication of the book Beyrouth, juillet-août 2006 (Beirut, July-August 2006) by French publishing house L’Association. The book is a recollection of the daily strips Kerbaj self-published on his blog during the 2006 war in Lebanon. The published collection is representative of a renewed interest from foreign ­publishers on themes related to war and personal memoirs from the region, but also an initial recognition of the maturity achieved by the medium in the region and its potential to move forward as an established industry.

190  Massimo di Ricco Fanzines, Magazines, Blogs, Graphic Novels, and Festivals: the Rise of an Informal Graphic Movement A thin-lined web of relations connects Beirut, Cairo, and Algiers, the epicenters where the informal comics movement laid its foundations. After the 2006 war in Lebanon, a group of friends and colleagues in Beirut launched Samandal, the first adult comic magazine in the region, in 2007. The name, meaning salamander, reflects the hybrid concept of the art form moving between the worlds of images and words. In 2008 Delila Nadjem attempted to raise and promote the 9th art both in Algeria and on the international scene. With a group of Algerian artists, she launched the first edition of the Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Alger (FIBDA). Also in 2008, Magdy El Shafee and the small Egyptian publishing house Dar el Malameh published the Egyptian Arabic graphic novel Metro, a thriller depicting the political and social problems that disturb daily life in Cairo. These almost simultaneous landmarks had a snowball effect, introducing a host of new graphic novels and magazines, comic books, and festivals to the region. The spread of magazines and fanzines became the most effective way of creating a company of contributors and readers within these new graphic cultures. Samandal, created by Omar Khouri, Hatem Imam, Tarek Nabaa, Léna Merhej, and Fadi Baqi (the fdz), stated its agenda: “to lift the stature of comics to that of a mature art form capable of tackling issues beyond superheroes and their baffling hairdos.”8 Later, the magazine reshaped its editorial structure to include artists like Ghadi Ghosn, Mazen Kerbaj, Joseph Kai, and Barrack Rima in their editorial committee. The 18+ pointer on each issue cover is a good indicator of the magazine’s target audience. Samandal is a Beirut-based magazine and offers a platform for graphic artists and illustrators from the region to present their work while also receiving contributions from around the world. The trimestral publication, which in its first editions mainly focused on serialized stories presented in different issues, rapidly assumed a more arty orientation and limited the space allotted to narrative pieces.9 Examples of the early serialized stories include “Salon Tareq el Khurafi” by Omar Khouri and “The Educator” by Fouad Mezher, which ran from the first issue till the eighth in Samandal. Both stories deal indirectly with issues related to forms of control on individual free expression. While Mezher’s story focuses on the life of two students in a totalitarian state and their meeting with the anti-establishment superhero The Educator, Khouri describes a society controlled by police officers wearing masks with interrogative marks and other repressive signs. Also based in Beirut, two graduates from ALBA, Zeina Bassil and ­Wissam Eid, launched the fanzine La Furie des Glandeurs in 2011. La Furie is an independent fanzine that focuses, in each edition, on a specific topic that addresses issues that concern Lebanese society: for example, the side effects of the urban development and architectural transformations of the city or

Drawing for a New Public  191 the infamous living conditions of foreign domestic workers in Lebanon. In the few numbers issued since 2011, the fanzine has managed to attract several artists to collaborate and contribute their work: Zeina Abirached, Ghadi Ghosn, Lamia Ziadé, Alex Baladi, Fouad Mezher, Ralph Doumit, and even Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury.10 In 2011, Egypt launched several magazines dedicated to comics and illustrated stories, of which the most significant is perhaps Tok Tok. Founded by a group of young people, Tok Tok is co-ordinated by Mohammed Shennawy and includes, among others, Andeel, Hicham Rahma, Abdallah, Tawfiq, and Makhlouf, who together developed the idea in 2010. Since its launch at the Townhouse Gallery in downtown Cairo in January 2011, the magazine has rapidly gained a wide readership. The name of the magazine is in itself a statement. The rickshaw, typical of the poorest areas of Cairo, symbolizes the magazine’s affordability for all.11 The content relates to the daily life of the Egyptian people, depicting society and its characters in a satirical way. Shennawy’s strip regularly appears on the magazine’s second page and features a folksy man wearing a galabieh, the cotton men’s dress that distinguishes the fellahin, the Egyptian farmers. In the strips, the everyman character solves daily problems with astute and humble solutions even as he is usually being scolded by higher-class, professional, or educated men. Following the ousting of Hosni Mubarak in 2011, a climate of revolution initiated a new culture of comics production. An important publication was Autostrade, which was launched by Division Publishing, a publishing house dedicated to comics. Another comic magazine published the same year was the bi-monthly Al-Doshma, a project managed by Magdy El Shafee. The outcome of several workshops, the magazine mostly focuses on human-rights issues.12 In late 2011, visual artist Ganzeer launched Zine el Arab, an online publication available free to download. The zine, which mixes text, drawings, and graphics, aims to be a regional platform for visual communication and for transnational contributions. On the wave of this expanding movement, a group of Tunisian comics aficionados with different backgrounds in graphics and informatics released the magazine Lab619 in 2013 with the goal of spreading comics as an artistic expression.13 Graphic novels from the Middle East were initially more oriented towards European publishers and the global market, as in the case of K ­ erbaj and Abirached, but more recently they have established a significant presence in the region. The interest in the genre is best exemplified by the recent publication of several graphic novels in Arabic or French by local publishers.14 Magdy El Shafee’s graphic novel Metro was published in 2008 and was available at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo before being banned for violations of “public decency.” The censorship of El Shafee’s novel was, in fact, a reaction to its critique of Mubarak-era political corruption and state repressions. The novel depicts the work of the baltageya, violent thugs enlisted from poorer neighborhoods by the authorities in order to disrupt political demonstrations in the streets.

192  Massimo di Ricco

Figure 11.1  The fdz, Samandal issue 0.

The same year, Mohamad Famy, alias Ganzeer, along with Jordanian stand-up comedian George Azmy published the Arabic sci-fi graphic novel Atlal Al Mustaqbal (Ruins of the Future). The work was produced by the art space The Contemporary Image Collective, “which only made the book available through its space but never retailed it via bookshops, which seriously limited the availability of the graphic novel for a very, very small art crowd.”15 Lena Merhej’s graphic novel Mrabba Wa Laban (Jam and Yogurt) was published in Lebanon in 2011 by Samandal. In 2012, Dar Onboz published Jorg Abu Mhaya’s Madinah Mujawirah Lil-Ard (A City Closed to the Earth) in Beirut. The Maghreb’s most significant graphic novels have been published in French: Les Vêpres Algériennes by Nawal Louerrad in 2012; 17

Drawing for a New Public  193 Octobre 1961, 17 Bulles by Abbas Kebir Benyoucef in 2011; La Revanche du Phénix by Tunisian Gihen Ben Mahmoud in 2008; and Les Passants by Moroccan author Brahim Rais. The majority of the novels from the Maghreb deal with political issues such as war, gender issues, the colonial past, and the construction of post-independence national identities, such as in Nawal Louerrad’s Les Vêpres Algériennes. The Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Alger (FIBDA) is a main hub for publications, instruction, and classes on the comic genre, and the promotion of workshops and magazines. It also acts as a space to reconnect with an Algerian past in bande dessinée forums. Since its first edition in 2008, FIBDA has taken an all-inclusive approach to bande dessinée cultures by involving cartoonists, illustrators, graphic artists, manga authors, and publishers in its projects. FIBDA activities are not planned for just an adult public but rather approach different generations. By resuming the legacy of the 1986 festival of Bordj El Kiffan, FIBDA attempts to raise awareness about the art form the development of which in Algeria was abruptly interrupted in the 1990s. At first, the festival was mainly oriented towards Europe, Africa, and the larger international scene. Since its second edition in 2009, however, it shifted focus, establishing a shortlisted best prize for the Arabic bande dessinée, and has since awarded prizes to Samandal, Tok Tok, Brahim Rais, Lena Merhej, Omar Khouri, and Jorg Abu Mhaya, among other Arab authors and projects. The interest in Arabic comics production is related to the fact that the Ministry of Culture finances the festival. The Algerian government is very interested in the value of comics in Arabic in terms of its potential and contribution to youth culture and education.16 The expansion of the Internet in the region helped facilitate the dispersion of the medium, considering that many artists published their works on personal blogs, their Facebook pages, or on other, more art-specific social-media ­profiles.17 The web has also helped produce experimental online projects like the online illustrated story Le Misérable (2007) by Lebanese illustrators Ralph Doumit and Ghadi Ghosn, or the Algerian webzine 12tours, launched by Kamel Zakour, Rym Mokhtari, and Nawel Louerrad in 2010 with the intention of trying out a censorship-free production space. In a different way, the Internet has also helped the medium survive within difficult political contexts, as has been the case with the project Comics 4 Syria by a collective of young Syrians who aim to bring attention to the critical and dire conditions that exist in their country. Versatile Individuals: Between Graphics, Arts, and Public Interaction During the thirty-three-day war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006, ­Lebanese artist Mazen Kerbaj posted a series of illustrations about the ongoing war in Lebanon on his blog every day, while at night he would

194  Massimo di Ricco stand on his balcony playing the trumpet to “disturb” the sound of Israeli planes and bombs. During the Egyptian uprising in 2011, Magdy El Shafee distributed a graphic journal he illustrated that criticized the violent assault by the police on pacific demonstrators at the sit-in in Tahrir Square. Another Egyptian graphic artist, Ganzeer, directly intervened on the streets of Cairo with posters critical of the new military rulers by tagging stencils of the martyrs of the revolution on public walls. In 2011, the Lebanese hip-hop band Ashekman animated its musical video with illustrations by graphic artist and Samandal contributor Fouad Mezher. These are just a few examples of the multifaceted characteristics of the generation of artists who belong to the informal graphic movement in the region. These examples illustrate how these artists integrate the graphic arts and other aesthetic fields, both for art’s sake and to make a living from practicing their craft. Such instances also represent the commitment of the artists to bring the medium directly to the public sphere during significant historical moments so as to participate directly in public and political events. Most of these artists have trained in art school or graphic-design programs and, according to Samandal founder Omar Khouri, this background is helpful: “If you want to develop artistic skills, you go to this kind of program and then at least you can find work at the end in graphic design, which is quite a respectable [option].”18 The relation between this specific generation of illustrators and their involvement in art or graphic design programs sheds light on the difficulties related to working within the art scene in the region. According to Michèle Standjofski, illustrator and professor at the Academie Libanaise de Beaux Arts at the University of Balamand (ALBA): “in this part of the world, an illustrator should be polyvalent, be able to work in different fields such as publishing, animation, magazines, advertising or web design.”19 Though of different generations, Kerbaj and Abirached both graduated from ALBA, a Francophone school that published distinguished final-year projects, many belonging to people more or less currently involved in the comics scene. ALBA was probably the first school in the region to offer a Master of Arts in Illustration and Bande Dessinée as of 1997, launching a Bachelor of Arts shortly after in 2000. The Anglophone American University of Beirut’s (AUB) Graphic Design Program has been the training ground for many comic artists in Lebanon, some of whom founded Samandal. In Egypt, many comic artists graduated from the Helwan University of Arts or, as in the case of Tok Tok founder Shennawy, the College of Applied Art in Cairo. Several Algerian graphic artists of this generation have graduated from the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts d’Alger, which offers single courses in bande dessinée. In the last decade, arts schools and graphic design programs have housed most of the artists who comprise this graphic movement with the exception of a few autodidacts. As direct consequence of this disciplinary background, some of these artists are also proficient in a variety of creative fields: video animation, caricatures, branding, illustrations for children’s books, advertising, fashion

Drawing for a New Public  195 illustrations, street art, or web design. The Tok Tok founders have mainly worked in daily newspapers and magazines as cartoonists or comic illustrators. Lena Merhej has published as an illustrator of children’s books with the Lebanese publishing house Dar Onboz. Hatem Imam of Samandal works in photography, painting, video. And, along with artists like Omar Khouri, Kerbaj, and Andeel, he also plays in a band. In terms of creative influence, these regional artists model their work on foreign publications; very few acknowledge an older generation and a regional legacy of comics production.20 Whereas Lebanese artists seem more connected to new techniques of illustration, art, design, and animation, Egyptians are more in line with their legacy, with many finding a model in the national popular culture of caricatures and cartoons. Ahmad Nady is an example of a multifaceted artist who mostly works on cartoons and caricatures in Egyptian newspapers, though he also explores the medium of comics and graffiti. Along with El Shafee, Ganzeer, and some Tok Tok contributors, Nady took his illustrations to the streets of central Cairo during the initial months of the uprising in 2011 and interacted with demonstrators through hybrid workshops (Morsi 2011). If significant historical events in the region provide the impetus for increased experimentation with the art form, they also make for increased comics publication, from online forums to daily newspapers, a consequence of the global market interest on such political topics. There is a similar global interest in graphic novels of an autobiographical nature, especially those related to war, as in the works of Abirached, Louerrad, and Benyoucef. Kerbaj has expressed unease at the fact that after more than ten years of creative work, the market took notice of his graphic depictions when he began documenting the ongoing war in Lebanon.21 Abirached, who is mainly associated with a European publishing house, has expressed similar frustrations at being labeled an artist who works primarily on the subject of Lebanese war narratives and memoirs, getting little consideration for her work on a variety of themes and techniques.22 The predominant foreign interest on these specific thematics opens up more questions regarding the sustainability of local projects and the relation of these artists to the global market. Local Market, Foreign Funding, and Global Influence: On the Road to Regional Specificity The growing visibility of works of comic artists from the region in bookshops around the world should not be considered as the legitimization of the medium in the region. Their international presence is mainly related to the interest, and a certain focus, of foreign publishing houses on a particular genre: the autobiographical memoir.23 The dynamics of the global market and the sustainability of comics within the region, even if interconnected at

196  Massimo di Ricco certain levels, follow different paths. Indeed, the sustainability of the local market, the publishing process, and wider distribution options are concerns in the attempts to consolidate the comics industry within the region. Comic magazines and publishers are experimenting with different forms to achieve a certain level of sustainability. The equation is based on a hard balance between the costs of production, artists’ remuneration, and pricing policies. Samandal tries to resolve sustainability problems through sponsorships and partnerships for its trimestral publication at both local and international levels.24 In contrast, the Tok Tok magazine founders decided to avoid relying on financial support from donors and aimed at creating a sustainable product by covering all expenses with the income made from sales. Magazines and fanzines are rather widely affordable, whereas graphic novels published by local or foreign publishers are too expensive for a great majority of the local consumer.25 For this reason it is sometimes necessary to “find an audacious publisher in order to publish comic books in Arabic for the local or the regional market, one who is able to balance costs and revenues.”26 Such is the case with Dar Onboz, a publishing house known for children’s books. The editor ventured into the adult comic genre with Jorg Abu Mhaya’s graphic novel Madinah Mujawirah Lil-Ard (A City Closed to the Earth). The success of the book in the local market and in regional festivals suggests that there is a strong local market for the genre. Small publishers like Plan Bey in Beirut and The Comic Shop, which both focus on limited editions of graphic novels by regional artists, represent another possibility, though on a more restricted scale for independent ventures by the comic artists themselves. The Algerian publishing house Dalimen is invested in the growth of a comics public of all ages as prompted by the FIBDA, and this effort represents an interesting example of a publisher venturing into the production of comic-book genres not necessarily related to conventional graphic arts. Considering these instances, it appears important that in order to achieve long-term sustainability in the production field, comics industries must first focus on establishing a local public in the region, trying to understand audience interests through affordable small projects for publishing houses normally committed to other emergent genres. The interconnection between publishers on one side and festivals or magazines that aim to establish a crowd of readers on the other seems to be an important factor for successful publication efforts and medium sustainability. The increasing importance of FIBDA in Algeria has allowed for the establishment of several maisons d’éditions that have access to funding from the state.27 The case of Algeria differs from most of the other countries in the region, especially with regard to state support of cultural and artistic projects. In most other venues, inadequate state funding limits the potential for cultural production within the region. Winegar expresses this problem in her study on art production in Egypt, in which she asserts that the neoliberal economic policy of the Mubarak era left the art industry in the hands of foreign mediators who have been more oriented to export local art to global markets than to establish a local scene.28

Drawing for a New Public  197 Beside the risks related to product costs and revenues, comics publishers also face possible legal restrictions and state censorship policies, an issue that is of particular concern, given the subversive and irreverent potential of the medium. Thus in order to avoid such institutional policing, most comic magazines do not apply for official or registered status. One of the most striking examples of censorship concerns El Shafee’s graphic novel Metro. Officially charged with immorality, it was probably banned due to its political content. Artists can also face trouble with their publishers. The first issue of Zamakan, a new Lebanese comic magazine with Pan-Arab views and founded in 2013, was blocked after being sent to print following a disagreement regarding copyright issues and the subsequent unethical behavior on the part of the publishers.29 The printed copies remain in stock, the project has almost been abandoned, and the artists’ dream of making a living out of comics has quickly faded. English, French, Arabic, and Postcoloniality: Language as Politics This article has taken an all-inclusive approach to comics production in the region and has not limited its analyses to Arabic comics. It was important to include French and English-language comics, keeping in mind the varied cultural, linguistic, and private histories of the regions and artists under consideration. It thus seems necessary to add that this informal graphic movement has maintained a multi-linguistic character right from the start to include artists more comfortable with expressing themselves in English, French, or a Roman transliteration of their dialect than in classical Arabic.30 Most of the time, discussions around the politics of language in the region are constructed on a motivated postcolonial diversionary trick, not just within the comic scene but also in the fields of literature and the arts. The discussion is related to the politics of self-recognition and self-representation of an “authentic” Arab identity. The presence and influence of imported or foreign languages are common within postcolonial countries, and it seems more and more difficult to dismiss their use by local artists and authors as non-authentic. According to Mazen Kerbaj, who draws and writes in French and Arabic: “it would be an oxymoron to dismiss Khalil Gibran, the father of Lebanese literature, as inauthentic just because he wrote in French.”31 Linguistic choices in the graphic medium also involve a negotiation with the different types of Arabic spoken within the region. According to Nawel Louerrad: “In Algeria, French remains the dominant language of the production. Few authors are able to write in Algerian Arabic, and French and Algerian Arabic are constantly used together in our everyday life. Classical Arabic, instead, is too far away from our language and many people really don’t understand it.”32 Because of the inaccessibility of classical Arabic and the difficulties in cross-communication involved in encountering the variety

198  Massimo di Ricco

Figure 11.2  Bassil Zeina, La Furie des Glandeurs, Issue 4, p. 12.

of Arabic dialects used in everyday life, many of the projects analyzed here have opted for a more national stance. Samandal decided to produce a trilingual publication, reflecting the character of the country and of its contributors.33 Lab691 in Tunisia also decided to publish illustrated stories in French and Arabic, the most common languages of the country. Egyptians,

Drawing for a New Public  199 as a reflection of the predominant position of Arabic languages in their society, publish either in classical Arabic or colloquial Arabic. Zamakan may be seen as an interesting laboratory to understand the functionality of, on the one hand, a transnational publication and on the other, the viability of resolving the language issue, considering that the publication had PanArab ambitions and that the first issue was mainly comprised of works in Lebanese dialect with only few parts in modern, standard Arabic. In other words, pragmatic linguistic choices in the area are often the result of individual decisions by the artists rather than being influenced by a colonial history as such. These must be seen as tools used by certain artists who belong to a specific stratum of the population and who are addressing a certain audience.34 It is to be assumed that the use of a certain language in a specific context has more to do with the public an artist or a publication wants to reach since, even if not specifically stated as an agenda, the different types of comic genres within the region address different publics and markets. In terms of pricing or content, some publications aim to reach a more arty and intellectual public while others address a more popular one. Conclusion The global resurrection of the comic genre since the 1990s has also crucially impacted the Arab Middle East regional industry, influencing and establishing a certain dependency on funding from foreign institutions or international publishers already established in a big market. Like in other postcolonial regions,35 the regional comic scene of the last decade has still managed to develop its own specificity, employing a strong diversity of languages, genres, and forms. The best manifestation of this development is the simultaneous and transnational initiative of individuals and groups of multidisciplinary artists who, between 2007 and 2008, established an informal graphic movement, and who pushed for the establishment of the 9th art within the region. The sustainability of the local, national, and regional market is still the main issue at stake for this generation of artists. However, only a few examples in this article show how the evolution of the scene has allowed for successful experiences either in terms of establishing communities of readers or publishing communities within the medium. Despite the rather unstable labor market, as in other postcolonial regions,36 and the disadvantages faced by the Arabic language texts in the global market,37 conditions have changed since the time when local artists could only rely on foreign publishers and institutions. The internet, local magazines, and festivals organized within the region have revolutionized the reach of the medium and have decreased the importance of foreign influence, even though it still seems hard to find local publishers who venture into comicbook production.

200  Massimo di Ricco The lack of solid funding, a small and still nascent national market, and the potentially subversive character of the comics medium are probably the main obstacles for the creation of an enduring transnational movement. The development of production houses and regional markets could be one of the possible solutions for the creation of a sustainable medium. Though the linguistic diversities within the region may seem like an impediment towards the establishment of a transnational movement, artistic histories of the region hint at a different possibility. Many consumers in the region know the Lebanese dialect thanks to the songs of popular Lebanese diva Fayruz, Egyptian dialects are recognizable as the consequence of the distribution of films in the region especially during the 1950s and 1960s,38 and more recently, many have become familiar with the Syrian dialect due to the sudden growth of the musalsalat (series) dubbing industry growing the country. In the end, have comics not always been one of the best ways to learn a foreign language and connect to people?

Notes 1. The official word in Arabic for comics is chara’et moussawwara, but the artists considered in this article do not often use this expression. Some authors in the region also prefer to keep a distance from the term “comics,” mainly because of its association with the publication of strips for children. 2. Among the magazines that published comic strips for children, we might mention Sindbad (1952) and Samir (1956) in Egypt; Dunia Al Ahdath (The World of the Youngers) (1955) and Samer (1979) in Lebanon; the Algerian M’quidèch or Tunisian magazines like Irfane (1965) and Chahloui (1968). For the history of Arab comics in these decades, see: George, Khoury, “La bande dessinée d’expression arabe de 1950 à nos jours,” Takam Tikou, March 11, 2011. http:// takamtikou.bnf.fr/dossiers/dossier-2011-la-bande-dessinee/la-bande-dessineed-expression-arabe-de-1950-a-nos-jours. 3. Such a legacy has been reinforced in the last decade with the publication of local superhero narratives, of which the most representative examples are The 99 and Lebanese heroine Malaak by Joumana Medlejh. These have not been taken into consideration here because they target a younger audience. 4. Considering the feeble connection with the current graphic movement, cartoons and caricatures have not been fully taken into consideration in this article. Few individual artists within the current movement explore this genre, which has always had a significant presence in the region. 5. George Khoury. Interview by author. Beirut, August 2, 2013. 6. George Khoury started the animation division at Lebanese FutureTV channel while Lina Ghaibeh got involved as professor at the American University of Beirut (AUB) Graphic Design program. Many Algerians, targeted by conservative religious movements, migrated from their country. 7. Mazen Kerbaj. Interview by author. Beirut August 6, 2013; Abirached, Zeina. Interview by author. Beirut, August 5, 2013. 8. See: Samandal Issue 0. September 2007.

Drawing for a New Public  201 9. As was suggested in several communications with these artists, it has been more and more difficult to get commitments from non-remunerated contributors for longer stories, which involves several months of work for the author. 10. Zeina Bassil. Interview by author. Beirut, August 1, 2013. 11. Similarly, some members of Tok Tok also run the 9th Art monthly bulletin. With fifteen months of assured funding from the European Union, the bulletin aims to educate the masses about comics and to establish a network of artists in Egypt and the region. 12. Unlike Tok Tok, both these projects have had discontinuous publication ­histories. 13. The founders of Lab691 are Aymen Mbarek, Chakib Daoud, Needall Ghariani, Seif Eddine Nechi, Noha Habaïeb, Zied Mejri, and ADENOV. 14. A significant local manga scene, with magazines, publishing houses, and books, has spread in Algeria in the last few years, targeting a younger audience. For an overview of the manga scene in Algeria, see: Alexandra, Gueydan-Turek, “The rise of Dzmanga in Algeria: Glocalization and the Emergence of a New Transnational Voice,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Vol. 4, Issue 1, 2013. 15. Ganzeer. E-mail to author, September 14, 2013. 16. Samira 2013. During the months previous to the festival, FIBDA organizes events and workshops in different Algerian cities. These workshops have been important for the development of the medium. Foreign institutions often support the organization of local festivals and comic workshops, as in the case of the Let’s Comics festival in Lebanon. 17. The webpage kootoob (http://kootoob.blogspot.com/) has been, since the dawn of this movement, one of the main tools in Lebanon for illustrators and graphic artists to get to know one another’s art, to showcase talent and get commissioners of work. Mezher, Fouad. Interview by author. Beirut, July 31, 2013. 18. Omar Khouri. Interview by author. Beirut, August 2, 2013. 19. Michèle Standjofski. E-mail to author, September 3, 2013. 20. Many artists of this generation find their models or comics background in genres that range from Marvel and DC superheroes to Tin Tin, Alan Moore, L’Association graphic novels, and Japanese animated comics like Grandizer (Goldrake). 21. Mazen Kerbaj. Interview by author. Beirut, August 6, 2013. 22. Zeina Abirached. Interview by author. Beirut, August 5, 2013. 23. Miller 2007, 54. 24. This is the case with issue No. 7, in collaboration with Belgian publishing house L’Employé du Moi, and Issue No. 15, in collaboration with the Arab Image Foundation. The difficulties in making Samandal a sustainable project prompted the founders to only publish an annual anthology. 25. Samandal costs around $3.5, La Furie des Glandeurs $2, Zamakan had a cost of around $8, and Tok Tok $1.5. Mazen Kerbaj’s last comic book, Lettre à ma mère, published by a European publishing house, was sold in Beirut bookshops for almost $40. Also publications from local publishers like Jorg Abu Mhaya’s graphic novel have been sold for around $28. 26. Jorg Abu Mhaya. Interview by author. Beirut. August 7, 2013. 27. Samira 2013. 28. Winegar 2006, 302–304. 29. Zamakan magazine was a joint project by a Lebanese entrepreneur and several artists from Lebanon. The Arabic magazine wanted to reach a regional public,

202  Massimo di Ricco and it was to be distributed in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. The contributors were to be paid between $70 and $100 for a page. The remuneration was considered by the artists as sustainable in order to work on long stories. Khouri, Omar. Interview by author. Beirut, August 2, 2013. 30. The selection of languages for these texts can be related to the educational background of the artists, some of whom graduated from local Anglophone or Francophone universities and others who had the opportunity to study abroad, mainly in Europe or the United States. Considering the high cost of the fees of private institutions in the region, it is possible to assume several of these artists belong to a middle-high social strata and are thus literate in different languages, which is not representative of the great majority of the regional population. 31. Mazen Kerbaj. Interview by author. Beirut, August 6, 2013. 32. Nawel Louerrad. E-mail to author, September 30, 2013. 33. After few numbers, Samandal added to the magazine a booklet with translations in Arabic of French and English stories. The fdz interactive article is a good example in order to understand the interconnection between these languages in the Lebanese case. See: the fdz, “Thinking in opposite directions,” Arte East Quarterly, Summer 2008. http://www.arteeast.org/category/archives/ summer-2008/. 34. Barber 1995, 25. 35. Repetti 2007a. 36. Repetti 2007b, 537. 37. Armbrust 2000, 14. 38. Hammond 2007, 15.

References Armbrust, Walter. “Introduction: Anxieties of Scale.” Mass Mediations: New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond, Walter Armbrust ed., 1–31. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Barber, Karin. “African-Language Literature and Postcolonial Criticism.” Research in African Literatures 26 (4) (1995): 3–30. Cassiau-Haurie, Christophe. “La BD en Tunisie: Introduction.” Comment peut-on faire de la BD en Afrique?33 entretiens pour comprendre, Christophe CassiauHaurie ed. Paris: Africultures Association, Harmattan (L’), 2011. Groensten, Thierry. The System of Comics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Gueydan-Turek, Alexandra. “The rise of Dzmanga in Algeria: glocalization and the emergence of a new transnational voice.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics Vol. 4, Issue 1 (2013): 161–178. Khoury, George. “La bande dessinée d’expression arabe de 1950 à nos jours.” Takam Tikou, 11 Mar. 2011. Accessed 18 Oct. 2013. http://takamtikou.bnf.fr/ dossiers/dossier-2011-la-bande-dessinee/la-bande-dessinee-d-expression-arabede-1950-a-nos-jours. Hammond, Andrew. Popular Culture in the Arab World: Arts, Politics, and the Media. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2007. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Perennial, 1994 (1993).

Drawing for a New Public  203 Miller, Ann. Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-language Comic Strip. Bristol/Chicago: Intellect, 2007. Morsi, Emam. “Revolutionary Cartoons: An Interview With Ahmad Nady.” ­Jadaliyya, 4 Jul. 2001. Accessed 18 Oct. 2013. http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/ index/2048/revolutionary-cartoons_an-interview-with-ahmad-nad. Repetti, Massimo. “African Wave: Specificity and Cosmopolitanism African Comics.” African Arts Summer 2007(a): 16-35. Repetti, Massimo. “African ‘Ligne Claire’: The Comics of Francophone Africa.” International Journal of Comic Art 9.1 2007(b): 515-541. Samira, H. A. “Dalila Nadjem, éditrice et commissaire du Festival international de la bande dessinée d’Alger: ‘Le grand Kaci revient!’” Reporters.dz. Accessed 18 Oct. 2013. http://reporters.dz/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=61 52:dalila-nadjem-editrice-et-commissaire-du-festival-international-de-la-bandedessinee-dalger--l-le-grand-kaci-revient--r&catid=5:grand-angle&Itemid=6. The fdz. “Thinking in opposite directions.” Arte East Quarterly, Summer 2008. Accessed 18 Oct. 2013. http://www.arteeast.org/category/archives/summer-2008/. Winegar, Jessica. Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.

12 Men with Guns War Narratives in New Lebanese Comics Lena Irmgard Merhej

Context

The War Debate Substantial research points to a current war debate taking place in Lebanon, which has followed the amnesic period surrounding the Taif agreement1 and which moves towards establishing a living archive of narratives, histories, and memories.2 Lebanon has long been the theater of wars and unrest, and of confrontations between various populations. War-related artifacts displayed at the National Museum in Beirut include Bronze Age warriors, a pharaonic image of Ramses II slaughtering the enemies of Egypt, and a Greek sarcophagus with reliefs of horseback warriors slaughtering their enemies. Since the establishment of the Republic of Lebanon in 1943, the country continues to witness similar reoccurrences of violence. More recently, the 1975–1990 Civil War was ignited by Christian factions and the PLO3 in 1975, and subsequently included drawn-out conflicts between Palestinian organizations, Lebanese militias, American Marines, the Lebanese Armed Forces, the Israeli Defense Forces, and the Syrian Army. During and following these conflicts, war-related cultural production had diminished until the late 1990s, when public manifestations of war commemoration and documentation began to make a gradual reappearance. The Taif agreement, with its philosophy of “no victors, no vanquished” designed to create post-war peace, also generated what Samir Khalaf coins a “collective amnesia.”4 Less pronounced since 2007, this condition, according to Carol N. Fadda-Conrey, has now transformed into a “living archive,” a form of war debate voiced by civil society in recent years.5 The war of 2006, ignited this time by Hezbollah and Israel, brought back old memories of post-civil war conditions to the public surface and initiated “renewed efforts towards cultural resistance and social mobilization.”6 The debate, however, inherited schisms created by the Civil War that had not been healed or addressed in the Taif agreement. In Whahm Al-SilmalAhli (The Illusion of the Civil Peace), Husayn Ya‘qub describes how the “democracy” established by sectarian groups that maintained control over the media in fact consolidated the sectarian schisms of the Civil War.7 Thus,

Men with Guns  205 cultural productions that accompany this new post-war debate still maintain and perpetuate inherited historical divisions and are often subjected to state obstructions even as a new civil order is taking shape.8

The Debated Narratives Documentation on the Civil War started as early as its onset. Etel Adnan wrote Sitt Marie Rose in 1977 about the events that led to the murder of Marie-Rose Boulos at the hands of Christian factions for her support of the PLO. Adnan’s work exemplifies Miriam Cooke’s 1987 study of Lebanese women’s literature, which emphasizes narratives of empowerment and responsibility. Following the Civil War and up until the mid-1990s, the debate focused on issues of public amnesia, reconstruction, and memorial work.9 Lebanese literature of war covers themes related to trauma,10 fragmentation, and liminality,11 as well as diaspora, exile, and repatriation.12 War narratives in Lebanese films tend to center on the loss of hope and of utopian ideals and the emergence of minority voices and recovered memories.13 Yet narrative accounts of the 1975–1990 Civil War in Lebanon in many instances point to “the continuation of violence” and the replacement of sectarian conflict by a war enabled by “bulldozers, connections and money” in civil society.14 A variety of voices reported on the 2006 war, imagining “life through war and the postwar” periods and describing efforts to bring about reconstruction by civil society.15 Civil measures were initiated to undertake the work of lobbying for draft laws on missing and forcibly abducted persons16 or requesting war commemorations and justice for instances of war crimes and transgressions.17 In parallel, a mobilization towards archiving and research has gained momentum. For example, political-map researcher Zeina Maasri includes posters of Civil War parties in her research and mappings.18 She redraws her 1975–1992 chronological and thematic poster maps in named categories: “belonging,” “commemoration,” “the cult of the zaim,”19 and martyrdom. “Acknowledging Lebanon’s relatively recent past requires that important evidence and artifacts of its history be carefully collected, protected, and promoted to the public.”20

The Actors of the Debate Gradually, the political activities of civil society have spread to the street,21 indicating an ongoing cold war in Lebanon between sectarian parties and their corporate allies and a civil society that, despite a hard struggle, is finding ways to voice its political views and demands.22 These civil practices are chiefly a counter to the post-war amnesia created by a state agenda and a collective psychological condition. This collective amnesia seemed pervasive. Those who lived through the war want to forget and move on while those who were abroad or had not been born then have little or no recollection

206  Lena Irmgard Merhej of events just past.23 Indeed, the state conspired to silence narrative and commemorations of the Civil War by presenting it as the “war of others.”24 This amnesia transformed civil society when it organized itself to deal with the legacy of war. A counter-forum provided by art, personal narrative, and visual evidence took shape. Initially, civil society slowly replaced the prevailing amnesia with a national debate that employed personal stories.25 Cultural institutions26 flourished in the late 1990s and have since provided a platform for debates and public discussions. Also, in 2005, after the political engagement of the Lebanese in protests following the assassination of the former prime minister Rafic Hariri and the so-called Cedar Revolution against Syrian domination, the middle classes relived the past and became central agents for the production of historical memory.27 Following 2006 and the “the first really ‘live’ war in history,”28 there emerged a multitude of artists and researchers working on that war.29 “The open discussion of political issues through social media and the fact that [participants] can be incognito” provided a forum for voices critical of political regimes and made it possible “to suggest alternatives through continuous debates among different layers of the society from different countries.”30 Despite this movement, Husayn Ya‘qub identifies a persistence of “the forces of the war [… in] the construction of the civil peace” and in the ­restrictions affecting the transmission and transparency of the debate.31 A  conservative faction has emerged that supports state-sponsored policies and is regulated by religious interest groups and reinforced by the Taif agreement. The religious parties today maintain the censoring power to ­suppress artists from working with religious concepts and to “reinforce sectarian and racial boundaries.”32 The various post-war governments have failed to answer the demands of civil society, yet a civic movement is ­becoming engaged in the debate in the form of archival and documentation activities, and in legal and social action. Indeed, Najib Hourani believes there is a “global neo-liberalist war” on who gets to narrate the Civil War, and this war of narratives is between the state alliance of the militia and the corporations on the one hand and “the excluded poor and refugees” on the other.33 By 2011, civil society had acknowledged the trauma, differentiated itself from the state’s approach towards the Civil War, and empowered itself to voice its own narratives towards a negotiated conflict that aims to move beyond violence. However, this progress is restricted to a closed debate that has little or no influence on legislative or any other kind of state reform. The Material As part of the emergent and disparate voices that co-exist and participate in the war debate, Lebanese adult comics, created by a small company of artists and designers, are on the margins of cultural production. Although ­ ebanon the market is nascent, since 2000 the production of adult comics in L has been the highest and the most translated among countries in the Arab

Men with Guns  207 world. The war narrative, influenced especially by the 2006 war, is a dominant genre in Lebanese comics produced between 2003 and 2009, and such narratives present a range of iconic representations of armed men. My study focuses on the representation of such figures in extreme war situations. Twelve Lebanese adult comics, totaling one hundred and seventy-two pages published between 2003 and 2009, have been used to present a comprehensive war record that documents these armed characters. Starting alphabetically, Zeina Abirached’s Le Jeu des Hirondelles: Mourir Partir Revenir (A Game for Swallows: Die, Leave, Return) is a black-andwhite graphic novel published in 2007 in Paris by Cambourakis. The story is of the author and her brother waiting for their parents to return home one afternoon. Je Me Souviens (I Remember), also published by Cambourakis, is a black-and-white, one-image-per-page book. It is a collection of many memories of childhood and, particularly, of the war that still lingers. The FDZ and Omar Khouri created Schroedinger’s Riddle in 2010 and published it in Samandal, Vol. 10. During a flight from Beirut to Sofia, a male passenger is suspected of hiding a bomb that causes the plane to crash. In parallel, a Bulgarian hadjuk34 ambushes Ottoman soldiers on a train. The plane and train collide. The story has an open-ended conclusion, seemingly left to be continued. Also published in Samandal, Vol. 10, The Adventures of Fakhr El-Din by Ghadi Ghosn is set in a modern city street scene where Fakhr El-Din35 and his troops clash with a car driver. Fakhr El-Din is killed and the troops disassemble. Ghosn appears and starts discussing politics in Lebanon with a woman whom he ends up killing. Mazen Kerbaj published Une Enfance Heureuse (A Happy Childhood) in in 2003 in Ego Comme X, No. 9, Paris. Drawn in black and white, the eight-page strip comprises a collection of Kerbaj’s memories as a war child and his observations as participant, observer, negotiator, and skeptic in the games of war. Omar Khouri’s Salon Tarek El-Khurafi was serialized and published in four volumes of Samandal between 2007 to 2010. The corpus for my study includes the parts published in 2008 and 2010 only. A total of sixty-seven pages, to be continued, tell the story of how the characters of the “Mental Security Forces” prohibit and cease any production and distribution of images and hunt members of the “Freedom Party.” A few friends gather in secret and work out a plot. In Joumana Medlej’s Angel of Peace, the main character, Malaak, was born out of a cedar tree. She discovers her superpowers and her two mythical guardians, the Sea and the Mountain, who watch over her as she engages in the war and fights the djinns36 and their militias in the streets of Beirut. As a comics artist, I published Mrabba w labban, aw Kaifa asbahato ummi loubnaniya (Yogurt and Jam, or How My Mother Became Lebanese), a biography of a German woman living through the Civil War as a lover, a worker, a wife, a mother, and a friend. The Crusades through Four Arab Eyes was published in Samandal, Vol. 10, and is a single-page story of two

208  Lena Irmgard Merhej Arabs who get devoured by a crusader lion. Together they make a bomb and manage to escape. However, they then start quarreling over the trophies and proceed to make bombs to target one another. Fuad Mezher’s popular comic The Educator, also published as a series in 2008–2009 in Samandal, Vols. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 8, totals seventy-seven pages. John, a student at “the Institute,” is attacked by nihilists and then saved by “the Educator.” This means John owes the Educator a favor, which turns out to be a contract killing. John refuses; however, his girlfriend and the Educator convince him to steal the antidote for the poisonous gas used by the nihilists. They succeed, only to discover both the gas and the cure are government strategies to control the population. Barrack Rima’s Beyrouth is a twenty-two-page volume of intertwining stories of post-war Beirut. Flâneurs wander through the modern city of Beirut trying to recollect memories and the heritage of the era before the Civil War and the subsequent reconstruction, and to find peace despite the absurd real-estate violations and territorial appropriation. In Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Mieke Bal suggests that deployment of narratives when “each party [gives] its own version” of a single event can contribute towards a more complete understanding of a conflict.37 In analyzing late twentieth-century American war fiction, Lidia Yuknavitch describes how “new voices are being amplified, those of enemies, victims, women, children, reluctant soldiers, those who refuse to fight, the poor, the marginalized.”38 Yuknavitch adds: “Let those disparate voices coexist, interrupt each other, torture one another, and yet survive.”39 In this context, my study examines the textual presence of armed combatants in the war comics included in the corpus. Who are the armed characters found in Lebanese war comics and what roles do they play in the narratives? Is there a diverse range of such representations and do they comment on aspects of the war debate? According to Aaron Denham, historical trauma is often contextualized and then transformed into an “ethical framework”40 by societies, which then serves as a template for narrative strategies and “narrative employment.”41 The historical trauma is then expressed as stories of “suffering, resilience, and resistance.”42 Hence the question: in Lebanese war comics, how are armed characters implicated within these narratives of suffering, resilience, and resistance? Method This study draws on the methods of visual theory, comics narratology, and social semiotics, as well as on a specific visualization technique in which digital manipulation of the image is central to the analysis. It presents a mixedmethod approach towards comics narrative analysis, particularly building on fragmentation and re-editing techniques as additional contributions to the academic debate.

Men with Guns  209 Most contemporary comics researchers term comics as “narrative species of visual dominance.”43 Ann Miller (2007) defines comics as “images which are in a sequential relationship, and which co-exist with each other spatially, with or without text.”44 Text, however, always accompanies the images of comics, at the very least by their title. Comics articulate spatially and sequentially composed “ribbon[s] of images” and ribbons of words that intersect, combine, or accompany the other.45 Narrative elements in comics, including narrator and character icons, are embedded visually in linear and tabular fashion.46 Such diagrams often emphasize the distinctions between narrative and story. Similar to the way narratology provides a theoretical frame in interdisciplinary and trans-medial research,47 published studies of narratives in comics also draw from narratology and often adopt Gérard Genette’s48 and Mieke Bal’s49 distinction between story and narration: what is being told and how it is being told in a literary text – in other words, the narrative levels within the text. Also, the analysis of focalization as a developed narratological concept reveals the inflection or the coloring of the narration. Focalization charges the narrative with the perspective of the focalizer and thus the distances or positions from which it reflects its information to tell or show a graphic story. The narrative focus can be internal via the coloring of the characters themselves, external via the coloring of the narrator, or non-existent at zero degree.50 The mapping in my analysis thus considers the “multimodal braiding of comics narrative”51 and maps the characters on the different levels of narration by distinguishing narrators from actors, their types as verbal or visual or as abstract, figurative, or symbolic, their social status, and their narrative function. In social semiotics, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen propose pointers to a character’s social status, both in language and in image.52 The relevant pointers in my study are categorizations of armed men that investigate typification of groups vs. individuals, their distancing within the surrounding text from their ‘reality,’ and the relation to whether they are active or not.53 My analysis will look not only at the narration but also at instances of “focalized narration”54 to understand the involvement of the character in the story and in the narrative. Using digital functions in the visualization, the material was archived and edited to retain the relevant pages, which then were copied and flattened into a ribbon of images. The visual narration, verbal narration, and focalized narration were annotated on visualized tracks, and the mapping was done by highlighting and coloring the material and its tracks on a transparent layer (Fig. 12.1). Visualization facilitated the manipulation of the material and determined digital editing and reshuffling functions. After exploring the existing theoretical frameworks of the comics systems analysis – including multimodal and narrative comics analysis – I used an applied approach to be tested on Lebanese comics, capturing their various multimodal levels. Through this method, I attempted to answer my central research question with regard to the identity and the involvement of

210  Lena Irmgard Merhej

Figure 12.1

represented armed characters during wars. First, the identification of the characters was made on the linear and tabular articulations of the images, followed by the identification of the modes used, whether image, text, or icono-text. Second, the mapped characters were edited from the material either as: —a sequence of images that refers to the armed character conceptually by means of abstraction; —an image or a sequence that refers to the armed character ­symbolically; —an image or a sequence that presents the armed character figuratively; —a combination of text and image that makes an armed character; or —words that refer to an armed character. Third, the mapping was analyzed according to the social semiotics methods of van Leeuwen by identifying the armed men’s affiliation to a group or not and to the state or not. State groups and non-state groups were retained to focus on the armed men rather than on the man, as that would have been beyond the scope of my study. Finally, the narrative analysis distinguished the fundamental narrator, the monstrator, the reticent or actorialized narrator,55 and the actors or characters from the narration and its focalization of armed men. I designed this methodology to answer the following questions: who are the armed men in Lebanese comics’ narratives of war? What is their engagement in the war debate? After I edited and reshuffled the corpus, the new material became an icono-textual ribbon of armed men that, though varied, still derived from the original comics. This sort of comics re-narration also set the skeletal frame for the development of the analytical text in Section 4: Analysis. Its spatial quality was arbitrarily created according to the chronology of the ribbons but also was restricted by its width and height for its legibility (Fig. 12.2).

Men with Guns  211

Figure 12.2

As mentioned above, the objectives of my study are to locate, describe, and define the identity and the engagement of armed men in Lebanese comics as direct parties in conflict in order to understand what these comics are contributing to the Lebanese war debate and from which particular focalizations of that common traumatic experience they originate. Analysis Armed men in Lebanese comics are direct actors in violent conflicts and their cultural representations may be read as aspects of the larger Lebanese war debate. This section examines the identity, role, and narrative function of such figures in the comics texts under analysis. Armed characters in

212  Lena Irmgard Merhej this graphic corpus belong to either state or non-state groups. State groups include the national army, internal security, police, or other directly statesponsored factions. Non-state groups may be state-supported, for example hired security guards, or they may be members of mafias, militias, or guerilla factions opposed to the state.

Armed State Groups From a survey of the totality of the corpus, we may conclude that state actors are uniformly represented as weak, ineffectual, vulnerable, uncertain, and confused regarding their role and their mission in the landscape of war. The text between quotation marks is the transcribed text from the comics in the corpus. The Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) appear only in Battles and Scars by Joumana Medlej. An episode that dramatizes an encounter between Malaak, the heroine, and two soldiers, for example, obliquely characterizes the LAF as weak and without agency. Two armed soldiers sit behind a truck looking relaxed but puzzled. One of them asks: “What do we do?” The question symbolizes the pervasive mood of the army, marked by a lack of purpose and confusion regarding their role. When Malaak asks if things are quiet, the soldier replies: “Not really, but we have to keep watch here.” Being loyal and sincere, the soldiers do not engage actively in Malaak’s anti-establishment fight. When she waves goodbye to the two soldiers, one of them is depicted surrounded by hearts. The other says: “I told you to lose the beard, Raffi!” Physical height distances Malaak from the army; they look up to and flirt with her, though she remains unattainable. These uncertain and insecure soldiers represent the LAF, expected to be an assured part of a solid entity. This instance of a noticeable focalization characterizes the weakness, dependency, and reliance on external support required by the LAF. Indeed, between 1975 and 1993, many LAF soldiers defected to sectarian militias. Moreover, in 2006, the LAF refused to disarm Hezbollah and directly fight the Israelis. As for armies from other countries, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also have rather a shy presence in Lebanese comics. In Beyrouth by Barrack Rima, a Lebanese living abroad claims his right to repossess his former home from those occupying it. A voice says: “I saw Israeli soldiers pass” and then argues: “But it’s mine [even it was occupied] during the whole war!” Even though these assertions are verbal, they are accompanied by an image of an occupied house, probably by refugees from the occupied south territories. Rima superimposes two occupations in a multi-stable way: first, that of the house by refugees or displaced persons and second, the IDF occupation. The narrator focalizes the argument by adding another multi-stable visual disruption, namely, an evil hand, conceptualized from fragments of ink blots, which stands for an organic tree. The narrative deployment shows unclear boundaries between who occupies and who speaks, bringing closer a comparison between the occupation by the IDF and that of the real-estate moguls in post-war Beirut.

Men with Guns  213 In my comic book Yogurt and Jam, or How My Mother Became Lebanese, a sequence presents how, in 1983, the U.S. Marines are welcomed at the German hospital in Beirut where the main character, the mother, works. The focalization in this case is on the verbal instance of “welcomed” rather than “hospitalized,” to buffer the event of a suicide bomber killing two hundred and forty-one Marines in Beirut that year. In the same book, an image of four gunmen is captioned with the verbal statement: “She says that every time a person close to her dies, she reads a book on history.” A visual pattern of an infantry unit, illustrated by the arrangement of the soldiers and their vertical weapons, may be read as creating a resilience narrative, though in a multi-stable way. In other words, the act of reading heals despite, or because, someone, maybe a soldier, passes away. Another welcoming strategy is represented in a segment involving the Ottoman soldiers of Schroedinger’s Riddle by the FDZ and Omar Khouri. The main character, Voyvoda, says “Welcome, Turkish!” as the Ottoman soldiers are introduced. Two sequences are then emphasized: a three-panel ballet of shot men, their weapons falling and a two-panel dance of soldiers performing an execution, moving synchronically in a semi-circle, all pointing their arms and turning together towards one target. Another Ottoman soldier is shot, adding to the previous rhythmic beat of the three panels. Also choreographed, the soldiers shout in a unified voice: “Captain!” The narrative focalization is on the rhythm, building towards the defeat of the army, visualized by the shootings and by bodies flying and culminating in the desperate scream of the soldiers for their fallen leader. This rhetorical visual deployment is a so-called jahili strategy that focalizes the strength, heroism, and triumph of the enemy. The Adventures of Fakhr El-Din56 by Ghadi Ghosn represents the army as a group, all on foot carrying spears. A car obstructs the road and two soldiers are in disbelief: “What? I can’t believe this!” A third calls the driver “the Mogul.”57 A bearded soldier steps up: “Stand aside, knave. The sign clearly indicates our right of passage.” Again in disbelief, the bearded soldier unleashes his anger: “A pistol?” He leans forward, saying: “The bastard [son of a whore]! Is he trying to intimidate us?” The soldiers behind him confirm: “He has a pistol.” All in profile, angry and gritting their teeth, they move forward from the bottom left to the center. The bearded soldier shouts again: “Damn you! You get back! The Law is on our side!” The diagonal angle of his spear opposes the other spears, differentiating him from the others. The soldiers gather around the killed Fakhr El-Din, their heads low. The bearded soldier is crying as the others leave the scene, one by one. The narrative focalization of the army of Fakhr El-Din is presented first as a unified horde, divided by the bearded man, and then by even greater division following the death of Fakhr El-Din, who himself had remained inactive all along. The two historical references, created by the army and the contemporary figure of the car driver, overlap the narrative of threatened Lebanese unity. Indeed, Fakhr El-Din is killed by the intolerance of the driver. His

214  Lena Irmgard Merhej death is symbolic, pointing to the death of values, the qualities of unity and tolerance, and the legacies of fellowship inherited from the times of Emir Fakhr El-Din. These stand in contrast to the violence and the aggression found on city streets in Lebanon today. A lion represents the crusaders in my comic strip The Crusaders through Four Arab Eyes. With crosses on his shield and flag, Richard the Lionheart, standing at the helm between two turbaned men, steers his ship towards the reader. The invasion of the Crusades is transported here to the Arab coast. The title refers directly to Amin Maalouf’s work The Crusades through Arab Eyes, focusing attention on a post-colonial reading of history. The lion is small and alone, but has a big mouth as he grimaces and roars. Asymmetrical transformations of the panel emphasize the disruption of the scene; the turbaned men fly, their coffee cups fly, both in a synchronized fashion. The absurdity of the imperial logo and the ironic impact of the lion’s aggression strategically focalize and ridicule the armed invasion, serving to demystify its aura.

Fictional State Groups Fictional state groups are the second category of armed state groups. Images of the “Internal and Mental Security Forces” and the “Religious Police” are broadcast on the news in Salon Tarek El-Khurafi by Omar Khouri. A blank, featureless face, flanked by a play-button symbol, is presented as the spokesman of the “Mental Security Forces,” who announces that “the possession and the distribution [of] all images and films taken of the building after the explosion [is] illegal.” The play-button symbol focalizes such officers as agents of coercion by relying on a sectarian media to deploy their agendas.58 In The Educator by Fuad Mezher, the armed forces carry sophisticated army gear and heavy rifles, often poised ready for use so “the Institute is kept secure at all times.” A security guard, whose image is reflected in the glasses of one of the Educator’s followers, does not see those who see him. These men remain silent and only oversee the events of the story without participating. The general articulation of these figures reveals a focalization of the security status, from seemingly strong to clearly weak and ineffectual. The inactive, weakened group that contrasts with the heavy artillery is focalized by the narrator to embody a collaboration between the narrative of national security and the politics of fear, a relevant theme in existing debates on the issue of civil peace.59 Another instance of an armed military is composed of fantastical djinns60 in Angel of Peace by Joumana Medlej, demon-headed and wearing army costumes. While attacking Malaak, the djinns shoot at buildings, harass and bully civilians, and engage in looting. Focalized by their anthropomorphic depiction, the djinns’ behavior bring them closer to identification with humans. In fact, their violent actions are not only disruptive but most often performed in collaboration with or by the manipulation of humans or civilian characters. As such, the djinn army presents a parable suggesting that those

Men with Guns  215 responsible for the war are foreign, evil, and inhuman and that such groups often are allied to civilian collaborators.

Non-state Armed Groups Graphic descriptions of non-state armed groups include mafias, militias, gangs, poachers, and any other armed groups that do not adhere to or operate under state authority. Like state groups, they often wear uniforms and may be both fictional and non-fictional characters. The identity of militia men in Une Enfance Heureuse by Mazen ­Kerbaj are traced61 from photographs that seem to date from the Civil War. The men, wearing mustaches and in 1970s dress, are at ease holding rifles in their hands. The focalization is made by the contrast between the traced photograph and the graphiation62 of the rest of the comic, which adheres more closely to Kerbaj’s style. This difference acts as a reminder that present reality, in this case that of war, does not match the narrator’s version. This suggestion also contrasts with the narrator’s misconception that the armed men are “super sympas”63 and “friends.” The narrative exposes the confusion that exists between the real conditions of war and how children are taught to see them otherwise. It chooses a critical distance from the prevailing fascination with armed factions, particularly militias, and presents the first instance of resistance, this time against one’s own ideological training. The snipers in Le Jeu des Hirondelles: Mourir Partir Revenir by Zeina Abirached are iconic, only marked linguistically, and create thematic and textual divisions within the narrative. A play of typography positions the word “sniper” on a map separating the children, “my brother and I,” from their “parents.” Later in the story, “they” “kill Victor.” The visual absence focalizes the snipers, hidden from their targets, these killers and dividers of families. In Abirached’s Je Me Souviens, a sniper divides a crowd of pedestrians, thus creating a schism in the spaces between these civilians who remain the target of this hidden threat. In both cases, the absence of a visual sniper is pertinent and focalizes the presence of the targets, randomly caught between life and death. Abirached shows us what the sniper sees, namely civilians who have renegotiated their public spaces by creating strategies to avoid snipers in order to get on with their daily life. In my comic book Yogurt and Jam, or How My Mother Became Lebanese, in a sequence of nine panels, a sniper captioned “1981” shoots another sniper captioned “1979,” while firing shots from the airport, “1977,” from a building, “1978,” and from a tank, “1983.” The figures of the historically separated and marked snipers engaging with each other is permitted by the spatiality of the page, focalizing a disjunction between the verbal and the textual track and the absurdity inherent in all such episodes. On another page, a row of seven portraits captioned “Political Leaders” depict armed men: a rugged butcher with a knife, a hunter and a soldier with rifles, and a straighthaired civilian with a gun. This is followed by the image of another row of

216  Lena Irmgard Merhej the same men, this time all wearing suits. One of them is celebrating, raising a champagne glass, while another is wearing a sinister eye mask. These focalizations act on the sequence and contribute to the irony of a chronological shift: “Suddenly, war was over and peace began.” In the penultimate panel, an armed man stands at a checkpoint examining the protagonist’s documents; he orders her to get out of the car, then kidnaps and questions her. The last panel shows three armed men in the interrogation room, bent down in suffering from the effects of the protagonist’s questions. In a strange reversal, the prisoner interrogates the jailors about their lost female family members, a reference to the seventeen thousand missing women, many kidnapped during the Civil War, who have never returned or been found. A group of snipers form a madness spiral64 on the first page of Medlej’s Angel of Peace. Two women, cut out from photographs, kneel behind sandbags, introducing the scene of the so-called war of militias at the onset of the Lebanese Civil War. Used in cartoons as a symbol for dizziness, the iconic spiral formed by real photographs into a vortex at the center of the panel expands the dizziness, further emphasizing the madness of sniper wars. The militiamen are represented as fictional djinns and have civilian allies who collect the spoils of looting and act as executioners. A hooded civilian points his gun at the forehead of Malaak. The visual focalization of such horror provides a narrative context for Malaaks’s heroism and resistance. The Educator by Fuad Mezher presents another instance of fictional m ­ ilitia: nihilists who are civilians armed with knives and rifles. For John, the actorialized narrator,65 they are “a plague,” dressed in black, spiked leather with blackened eyes and zipped mouths. As an enraged militiaman beats a stick, a madness-inducing gas is released as a weapon. As the story develops, the nihilists’ alliance with “the System” is revealed as they are seen communicating with a security guard at “the Institute.” The armed nihilists are focalized by repetitive martial-art movements in sequences that emphasize their defeat. The vivid narrative of resistance concludes as the gas finally kills the security guards. Conclusion If the Lebanese hold a deep desire to forget the traumas of war, they also hold a deep desire to grieve, to find resilience, and to resist the civic stagnation and sectarian inequities that are the legacies of the Civil War. My study has investigated the contribution of comics to the war debate by using a multimodal and narrative analysis of armed men in Lebanese comics to determine aspects of their identity and their engagement in war stories and, by implication, in the larger context of contemporary Lebanese history. The result shows that the narratives of armed men that are allied to the state focus on resilience, while narratives of non-state armed men focus on suffering. Nevertheless, both express statements of resistance by making visible the oppressions of historically inherited conflicts. Though armed state groups such as the Lebanese Armed Forces are shown as ineffectual

Men with Guns  217 and weak against repeated aggressions, a measure of resilience and healing is achieved by the display of certain repetitive aspects of the invasions of foreign armies that are, by turn, complimented,66 vilified, and, most importantly, vulgarized in their representations. The narrative of national resistance that emerges from these comics also argues, however, that the real character of an achieved Lebanese unity is absurd and violent, rather than one of an authentic civic peace. Post-war Beirut is still invaded by sectarian interests and real-estate mafia who control the media, the security apparatus, and the political establishment. Then again, such non-state armed groups as the militias have exercised random violence and caused much suffering and horror, particularly through their tactics of sniper attacks and kidnappings of civilians. A critical perspective on the Lebanese wars is maintained by interrogating the behavior of civilians, by implicating the civilians and the militia as one entity, and by revealing the inheritance of the sectarian conflicts from the past epoch of the militia to the present era of the mafia, where neither state nor non-state armed factions can be trusted. These conclusions help position these graphic stories within larger cultural narratives, particularly those of resistance that, after cycles of narratives of suffering, the Lebanese still are learning to master. They also add to the awareness of a progressive civil movement striving towards post-war reconstruction despite obstructions by the state and its sectarian heritage. Although my study is based on narratives of war in Lebanese comics with a specific focus on armed men, the findings enhance our understanding of the specific narratives that involve state armies, foreign armies, national security, and the militia, which, during the war, were directly caught in the line of fire. The systematic methodological process of extracting multimodal narratives in graphic texts used in this current investigation may be further developed on a larger corpus to map the expansion of the study of war narratives in Lebanese comics. Notes 1. Known also as the National Reconciliation Accord, agreed and signed in Taif, Saudi Arabia, in 1989 and based on the principle of a balanced “mutual coexistence” between Lebanon’s different religious parties with regard to their political representation, an issue still debated today. 2. See Fadda-Conrey, 2010; Georgis, 2013; and Haugbolle, 2010. 3. Palestine Liberation Organization. 4. Samir Khalaf. Beirut Reclaimed: Reflections on Urban Design and the Reconstruction of Civility, 1993 (19). 5. “Writing Memories of the Present: Alternative Narratives about the 2006 Israeli War on Lebanon” (170). 6. Sune Haugbolle (2010). “Looking the Beast in the Eye: Collective Memory of the Civil War in Lebanon” (234–235). 7. Page 23. 8. See Ya‘qub, 2011.

218  Lena Irmgard Merhej 9. See Haugbolle, 2010. 10. See Seigneurie, 2008. 11. See Khalaf, 2009. 12. See Hout, 2012. 13. See Hourani, 2008; and Khatib, 2007. 14. Sune Haugbolle (2010). “Looking the Beast in the Eye: Collective Memory of the Civil War in Lebanon” (66). 15. Ibid., 64. 16. Available at http://www.actforthedisappeared.com/assets/documents/DraftLaw-Eng.pdf. Accessed 30 May 2014. 17. See Barak, 2007; Fadda-Conrey, 2010; and Haugbolle, 2010. 18. Zeina Maasri (2009). Off the Wall. 19. Overlord in feudal times; today a political leader with whom favors are exchanged for electoral loyalty. 20. UMAM Documentation and Research Organization, founded in 2004. Available at http://www.umam-dr.org/. Accessed 2 Mar. 2014. 21. An example of such activities is the political theater of Zoukak and the street performance Nesbsamneh W Nesbzeit. Moreover, like numerous other draft laws on social justice issues, the law criminalizing violence against women, including rape, is yet to be ratified. 22. See Ya‘ub, 2011. 23. See Haugbolle, 2002. 24. Oren Barak (2007). “‘Don’t Mention the War?’ The Politics of Remembrance and Forgetfulness in Postwar Lebanon” (70). 25. See Barak, 2007; Gabai, 2010; and Haugbolle, 2002. 26. Among others, the Beirut Theater, Ashkal Alwan, and the Arab Image ­Foundation. 27. See Haugbolle, 2010. 28. M. Kalb and C. Saivetz (2007). “The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict” (44). 29. See Choubassi, 2012; and Al Nakib, 2013. 30. Hassan Choubassi. “The Arab Masses: From the Implosion of the Fantasies to the Explosion of the Political,” 2012 (n.p.). One such platform is the independent e-zine produced by the Arab Studies Institute (ASI) titled Jadaliyya, which in Arabic means “dialectic.” 31. Husayn Yaq'ub. The Illusion of the Civil Peace, 2011 (21, 15). 32. Nasser Al Taee. “Marcel Khalife’s ‘Oh My Father, I Am Yusif’ and the Struggle for Political Freedom and Religious Sensitivity,” 2009 (29). 33. “The Militiaman Icon” (305). 34. Fighter during the Bulgarian uprising against the Ottomans at the turn of the 19th century. 35. Emir Fakhr El-Din (1572–1635) headed the administrative Ottoman governorate (mohafazah) of Mount Lebanon and challenged the Ottoman occupation. 36. Demons. 37. Page 77. 38. Allegories of Violence: Tracing the Writing of War in Twentieth-century Fiction (iv). 39. Ibid., 125. 40. “Rethinking Historical Trauma: Narratives of Resilience” (391).

Men with Guns  219 41. Refers to “the transformation of a set of historical events (a chronicle) into a sequence endowed with the structure of the plot types of myths or literary genres” (Herman, Jahn, and Ryan, 2005, 137). 42. Ibid., 411. 43. See Miller, 2007; and Pratt, 2009. Quote from Thierry Groensteen. Bande Dessinée et Narration Système de la Bande Dessinée 2, 2011 (89). 44. Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip (75). 45. Thierry Groensteen. Bande Dessinée et Narration Système de la Bande Dessinée 2, 2011 (106). 46. See Fresnault-Deruelle, 1976; and Peeters, 2007. 47. See Meister, 2003. 48. Narrative Discourse. 49. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 50. See Genette, 1980; and Miller, 2007. 51. Thierry Groensteen. Bande Dessinée et Narration Système de la Bande Dessinée 2, 2011 (118). 52. See Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, 2nd Edition, 2006. See also Theo van Leeuwen (2008). Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Analysis. 53. See Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (2006). “Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design,” 2006. 54. Silke Horstkotte and Nancy Pedri. “Focalization in Graphic Narrative,” 2011 (341). 55. See Groensteen, 2010. 56. See endnote 35. 57. Reference to another foreign army. 58. See Ya‘qub, 2011. 59. Ibid. 60. See endnote 36. 61. Process of drawing over a photograph, often using another layer, for example, tracing paper (calque) or digital layer (imaging software). 62. Graphic quality of the work supplemented with monstration, the showing of the visual content (Baetens, 1996). 63. Most sympathetic. 64. Zeina Abirached also presents a displacement spiral in Je Me Souviens (39–40). 65. Visualized actor or character in a visual narrative (Groensteen 2011, 103). 66. Referring to the strategy of praise in Arabic poetry that compliments defeated heroes in order to magnify the strength of those being praised.

References

Primary Sources Abirached, Zeina (w, p, i). Le Jeu Des Hirondelles: Mourir Partir Revenir, 2007. Paris: Cambourakis. ——— Je Me Souviens, 2008. Paris: Cambourakis.

220  Lena Irmgard Merhej Ghosn, Ghadi (w, p, i). “The Adventures of Fakhr El- Din.” Samandal 10, 2010. Kerbaj, Mazen (w, p, i). “Une Enfance Heureuse.” Ego Comme X N 9, 2003: x–x. Paris: Ego Comme X. Khouri, Omar (w, p, i). “‫ يفارخلا قراط نولاص‬Salon Tarek El- Khurafi Part 3.” Samandal 4, 2008a. ———“‫ يفارخلا قراط نولاص‬Salon Tarek El- Khurafi Part 2.” Samandal 2, 2008b. ———“‫ يفارخلا قراط نولاص‬Salon Tarek El- Khurafi Special Part 1.” Samandal 9, 2010. Medlej, Joumana (w, p, i). “Angel of Peace.” Malaak, Vol. 1, 2007. Beirut: Self-­ published. Merhej, Lena (w, p, i). “The Crusades Through Four Arab Eyes.” Samandal 10, 2010. ———Yogurt and Jam, or How My Mother Became - ‫يمأ تحبصأ فيك وأ نبلو ىبرم‬ ‫ةينانبل‬. Beirut: Samandal, 2011. Mezher, Fuad (w, p, i). “The Educator: Student Organizations.” Samandal 3, 2008a. ———“The Educator: A Healthy Learning Environment.” Samandal 1, 2008b. ———“The Educator: Extra Curricular Activities.” Samandal 4, 2009. ———“The Educator: Learning Outcomes.” Samandal 8, 2010. Rima, Barrack (w, p, i). Beyrouth, 2011. Brussels: self-published. The FDZ (w, p, i) and Omar Khouri (w, p, i). “Schroedinger´s Riddle.” Samandal 10, 2010.

Secondary Sources Al Taee, Nasser. “Marcel Khalife’s ‘Oh My Father, I Am Yusif’ and the Struggle for Political Freedom and Religious Sensitivity.” Kaleidoscope of Cultures: A Celebration of Multicultural Research and Practice, Marvelene C. Moore and Philip Ewell eds. 23–31. R&L Education, 2009. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 3rd edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Barak, Oren. “‘Don’t Mention the War?’ The Politics of Remembrance and Forgetfulness in Postwar Lebanon.” Middle East Journal 61.1 (2007): 49–70. Baetens, Jan. “Sur La Graphiation: Une Lecture de Traces En Cases.” Recherches En Communication 5 (1996). Accessed 21 Apr. 2013. http://sites.uclouvain.be/rec/ index.php/rec/article/viewArticle/1251. Choubassi, Hassan. “The Arab Masses: From the Implosion of the Fantasies to the Explosion of the Political.” The Congress on Cultural Motion in the Arab Region “Inverted Worlds.” Beirut, 2012. Cooke, Miriam. War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ———War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University, 1996. Denham, Aaron R. “Rethinking Historical Trauma: Narratives of Resilience.” Transcultural Psychiatry 45.3 (2008): 391–414. Fadda-Conrey, Carol N. “Writing Memories of the Present: Alternative Narratives about the 2006 Israeli War on Lebanon.” College Literature 37.1 (2010): 174–190. Fresnault-Deruelle, Pierre. “Du Linéaire Au Tabulaire.” Communications 24.1 (1976): 7–23.

Men with Guns  221 Gabai, Anna. “Samandal: Comics from Lebanon.” Desire, Pleasure and the Taboo: New Voices and Freedom of Expression in Contemporary Arabic Literature, eds. Sobhi Boustani, Isabella Camera D’Afflitto, Rasheed El-Enany, William Granara, Pisa; Roma: Fabirizio Della Editore, 2014. Genette, Gérard, and Ann Levonas. “Boundaries of Narrative.” New Literary History 8.1 (1976): 1–13. ———Narrative Discourse. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Georgis, Dina. “The Living Archive of War in Rabih Mroué’s Make Me Stop Smoking.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 18.3 (2013): 242–58. Groensteen, Thierry. “The Monstrator, the Recitant and the Shadow of the Narrator.” European Comic Art 3 (1) (2010): 1–22. ———Bande Dessinée et Narration Système de la Bande Dessinée, 2. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2011. Haugbolle, Sune. “Looking the Beast in the Eye: Collective Memory of the Civil War in Lebanon.” Oxford: University of Oxford. 2002. http://www.111101.net/­ Writings/Articles/PDF/Sune_Haugbolle.pdf. Accessed 6 Jul. 2014. ———War and Memory in Lebanon. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Herman, David, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. London; New York: Routledge, 2005. Horstkotte, Silke and Nancy Pedri. “Focalization in Graphic Narrative.” Narrative 19.3 (2011): 330–57. Hourani, Najib. “The Militiaman Icon.” Cr: The New Centennial Review 8.2 (2008): 287–307. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ncr/summary/v008/8.2.hourani. html. Accessed 24 Aug. 2013. Hout, Syrine. Post-War Anglophone Lebanese Fiction: Home Matters in the Diaspora. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Kalb, M. and C. Saivetz. “The Israeli–Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict.” The Harvard International Journal of Press/ Politics 12.3 (2007): 43–66. Khalaf, Roseanne Saad. “Youthful Voices in Post-War Lebanon.” The Middle East Journal 63.1 (2009): 49–68. Khalaf, Samir. Beirut Reclaimed : Reflections on Urban Design and the Restoration of Civility. Beirut: Dā r an-Nahā r, 1993. Khatib, Lina. “Violence and Masculinity in Maroun Baghdadi’s Lebanese War Films.” Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies. 21 (1). 2007: 68–85. Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. “Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design,” 2nd edition, London; New York: Routledge, 2006. Maasri, Zeina. Off the Wall. London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009. Maalouf, Amin. The Crusades through Arab Eyes. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. Meister, Jan Christoph. “Narratology as Discipline: A Case for Conceptual Fundamentalism.” What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory, Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller eds. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003. Miller, Ann. Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip. Edited by Intellect Books: Bristol, UK, 2007. Peeters, Benoit. “Four Conceptions of the Page.” ImageTexT 3.3 (2007): 41–60. http:// www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/peeters/. Accessed 5 May 2014.

222  Lena Irmgard Merhej Pratt, H.J. “Narrative in Comics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67.1 (2009): 107–117. Seigneurie, K. “Anointing with Rubble: Ruins in the Lebanese War Novel.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28.1 (2008): 50–60. Van Leeuwen, Theo. “Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Analysis.” Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Ya‘qū b, Ḥusayn. The Illusion of the Civil Peace ‫يلهألا ملسلا مهو‬. Beirut: Sharikat al-Maṭbū ʻa ̄t lil-Tawzīʻ wa-al-Nashr, 2011. Yuknavitch, Lidia. Allegories of Violence: Tracing the Writing of War in TwentiethCentury Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Contributors

Jeffrey John Barnes is a doctoral candidate in the Department of ­History at the University of Akron, U.S. His work focuses on the Modern ­Middle Palestinian East and the Israel/Palestine conflict, specifically the role ­ Christians play in the discord. He teaches part time at Malone ­University. Véronique Bragard is an Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. She is the editor with Srilata Ravi of Ecriture mauriciennes au féminin: penser l’altérité (L’Harmattan, 2011) and with Christophe Dony & Warren Rosenberg of Portraying 9/11: Essays on Representations in Comics, Literature, Film and Theatre (McFarland 2011). Her current projects examine the Belgian colonial past and Belgo-Congolese Literatures, and the representation of waste in world literatures and graphic novels. Michelle Bumatay is a Visiting Assistant Professor of French at ­Willamette University, U.S., and received her doctoral degree in French and ­Francophone Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, U.S. She is currently working on her first manuscript, Black Bandes Dessinées: Reconfiguring Colonial Iconography and Verbal-Visual Discourses, in which she examines both the form and content of French-language graphic narratives by cartoonists from sub-Saharan Africa and the diaspora. She has published an article on Gabonese cartoonist Pahé in the journal European Comic Art and has published multiple articles on the work of cartoonist Jean-Philippe Stassen, the latest being a chapter in the anthology Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities. Massimo Di Ricco is lecturer at the Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla (Colombia) and he holds a PhD in Mediterranean Cultural Studies from the University of Tarragona (Spain). He has been working in Lebanon, Egypt and Tunisia, as well as in Latin America since 2005, especially focusing on the region’s wide relationship with the Middle East. He has published articles in several journals on the relation between individuals and communities in the Middle East, history and cultural production, soft power and global transnational history. ­ ransnational Dr Sam Knowles’s first monograph, Travel Writing and the T Author, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. He has c­ ontributed

224 Contributors to the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Postcolonial Text, and ­Studies in Travel Writing, and is currently editing a special issue of the ­Journal of Postcolonial Writing: ‘Trans/forming Literature: Graphic N ­ ovels, ­Migration, and Postcolonial Identity’. He has also recently had an article series on graphic novels and postcolonial trauma commissioned by Lacuna magazine. Binita Mehta is Professor of French and Director of the International S­ tudies Program at Manhattanville College, U.S. where she teaches a variety of courses in French language, literature, and film. She is the author of ­Widows, Pariahs, and ‘Bayadères’: India as Spectacle (2002) and has published several articles and book chapters on French and Francophone literature and film, South Asian diasporic cinema, and on the Francophone bande dessinée. Lena Irmgard Merhej (PhD) studied Graphic Design at the American ­University of Beirut and majored in Design and Technology at the P ­ arsons School of Design before completing her thesis, “Analysis of Graphic ­Narratives: War in Lebanese Comics” at Jacobs University in Bremen. She has taught at the American University of Beirut and the Lebanese American University, where she gave various workshops. She is a cofounder of Samandal, a Lebanese comics organisation. She is a visual storyteller and has exhibited her work both locally and internationally. Another Year and Yogurt and Jam, or How My Mom Became Lebanese, which took the FIBDA awards for Best Arabic Comics in 2009 and 2013, deal with events of occupation, civil war and regional conflicts. Ann Miller was formerly Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Leicester, UK, where she is now a University Fellow. She is the author of Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip (2007), and the co-editor (with Natalie Edwards and Amy L. Hubbell) of Textual and Visual Selves (2011). She has published numerous articles and chapters on French-language comics, and has translated some key theoretical texts from French, including Thierry Groensteen’s Comics and Narration (2013). She is joint editor (with Laurence Grove and Mark McKinney) of European Comic Art. Pia Mukherji earned her doctorate in English Literature from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, U.S. Her research and publications are in the areas of British modernism, newmedia texts, and diasporic cultures. She has taught a variety of courses on modernism, postcolonial literatures, film studies, and writing in the New York and Boston areas. Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Department of English, the University of ­Hyderabad, India. He is the author of, most recently, ­Citizenship and ­Identity in the Age of Surveillance (Cambridge 2015), P ­ osthumanism ­(Polity,  2014), Frantz Fanon (Routledge 2013), Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire

Contributors  225 of Human Rights in India (Routledge 2012). ­Forthcoming work includes The Transnational in English L ­ iterature: S­hakespeare to the Modern (Routledge), The Postcolonial Studies ­Dictionary and the edited Postcolonial Studies Anthology (both from Blackwell). He is currently working on a book on the Indian graphic novel. Roman Rosenbaum specializes in Postwar Japanese Literature and ­Popular Cultural Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Japanese Literature at the ­University of Sydney. In 2008, he received the Inoue Yasushi Award for best refereed journal article on Japanese literature in Australia. In 2010/11, he spent a year as a Visiting Research Professor at the I­ nternational Research Centre for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) to complete a monograph on the social activist Oda Makoto. He is the editor of Representations of Japanese History in Manga (Routledge 2013). His latest edited book is entitled Visions of Precarity in Japanese Popular Culture and Literature (Routledge 2015). Harleen Singh teaches South Asian literature and film, colonial studies, and women’s studies at Brandeis University, U.S. Her book, The Rani of Jhansi: Gender, History, and Fable in India (2014), was published by Cambridge University Press. She has also published numerous articles on South Asian literature and film. Her next book Half an Independence: Women, Violence, and Modern Lives in India examines the contemporary intersections of modernity and sexual violence.

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Index

9th art in the Middle East 190–200 12tours 193 17 Bulles (Benyoucef) 193 Abirached, Zeina 187, 189, 195, 207, 215 Abouet, Marguerite 12, 113 Academie Libanaise de Beaux Arts (ALBA) 194 Adnan, Etel 205 Adolf ni tsugu (Osamu) 60–70; graphic critique of 65–66; identity hybridity in 62–65; rebranding and repackaging of postcolonial accessibility 66–68 Adventures of Fakhr El-Din, The (Ghosn) 207, 213 affrontier, French colonial 11 Africa: corruption among government officials 120; history of comics in 112–14; inter-African rivalries 120–1; relationship with Europe 30; socio-political critique by Pahé 114–26; visualizing postcolonialism 111–26 Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, and Racism (Thomas) 29–30 Africa Dreams 97, 106 African Francophone writers 22n–23n African refugees migrating 45 African writers 12 Afro-Americans. See Blacks Afro-Bulles 113 After Empire: Melancholia or Convival Culture (Gilroy) 94 Ahimsa 142 Albert 1, king of Belgium 104 Aldama, Frederick Luis 6, 7 Al-Doshma 191 Alexander, Jeffrey 135

Algeria: growth of comics for adults 188–9, 193; portrayed in comics 11; publishing comics 196 Algerian War 86 al-Ghouri, Emil 173 al-Husayni, Haj Amin 177 al-Wahda 173, 180–1 Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) comic series 142–53 Ambedkar, B. R. 131 American ethnicity 7–8 American University of Beirut (AUB) 194 anachronism 33–34 Anand, S. 131 Angeles y Fuensanta (painting) 158 Angel of Peace (Medlej) 207, 214, 216 anti-Semitism 10 Appadurai, Arjun 13 Arab editorial cartoons 171–82 Arabic language 197–8 Arab press in Palestine 173, 175–7, 180–2 Arab Revolt of 1936–39, 171, 172 armed men depicted in Lebanese comics 210–6 armed state groups depicted in Lebanese comics 212–4 Armitt, Lucie 160 artwork having therapeutic function 80–81 Ashekman band 194 Asia-Pacific War 60, 61, 67 Astérix 9, 116, 117, 118 Atlal Al Mustaqbal (Azmy) 192 Au Coeur des ténèbres (Miquel and Godart) 97 autobiographical comic books 111–12, 114–26 Autostrade 191 Aya de Yopougon (Abouet) 12, 113 Azad, Chandra Shekhar 142, 148–53 Azmy, George 192

228 Index Bagha Jatin, The Tiger Revolutionary 143, 145–8 Bal, Mieke 208, 209 bande dessinée 8–12, 21n, 31–32, 82, 111, 193; definition 41n; framing in 33; plurality of 29 Bande dessinée et imaginaire colonial: Des années 1930 aux années 1980 (Delisle) 8 Baqi, Fadi 190 barbaric spaces in graphic novels 132–4 barbarism and tension with civilization 40 Barthes, Roland 88 Baruti, Barly 11, 12, 104 Bassil, Zeina 190 Baudrillard, Jean 46 Bauman, Zygmunt 106 bazaar art 4 Beaty, Bart 44 Beirut’s growth of comics for adults 189–91 Belafonte, Harry 106 Belgian cultural identity 8–10 Belgium: colonial exploitation of the Congolese Democratic Republic 92–107; immigration in 34 Benjamin, Walter 39–40 Ben M’Hidi, Labri 86 Bennett, Jill 80 Benyoucef, Abbas Kebir 193 Beyrouth (Rima) 208, 212 Beyrouth, juillet-août 2006 (Kerbaj) 189 Beyrouth-Catharsis (Abirached) 189 Bhabha, Homi 69 Bhimayana (Natarajan and Anand) 131 Bihel, Frédéric 97 Bingo 93 Bingo en Belgique (Sisé) 93 Bitam 115 Bitam (Pahé) 111 Black comic book writers 20n Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History (Strömberg) 5–6, 123 Blacks: discriminated against migrating across borders 35–36; represented in comics 6; stereotypical representation 121–4 blind panel in comics 77–78, 81 Bongo, Omar 119 borders and discrimination of those crossing 35–38

borderzone 47, 53 Bose, Subhash Chandra 142 Boulos, Marie-Rose 205 Brahamchari aspect of life 147–8, 150, 152 Brennan, Timothy 3 Breton, André 86 Britain: dispossessing Arabs in Palestine 180–1; and postcolonial melancholia 94; support of Arabs 179–80 British Mandate 173 Brummett, Palmira 172 Bruner, Edward 47, 53 Butler, Judith 163–4 Bye Bye Babylon (Ziadé) 187 calculated zones of invisibility 3 calendar art 4 call-ins as a writing device 133–4, 136–7 Cambridge Introduction to Popular Culture 5 canonicity 4 caricature 134–7; of a physiognomic feature 135–6; purpose of 122–3 Caruth, Cathy 80 Casenave, Odile 113 Cassiau-Haurie, Christophe 93, 104 caste system in India 48–53 Catholic missionary, portrayal of 8–9 Cavarero, Adriane 163 Célérier, Patricia 113 censorship 135–6, 197 Ceuta: border control against migrants 35–38; as Spain’s enclave in Morocco 34–35 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 107 Chamberlain, Neville 175 Chandra, Nandini 144 Chandra Shekhar Azad, Freedom was his Mission 143, 148–51 Chaney, Michael 111 Charan, Sib 50–51 Charles, Jean-Francois 97 Charles, Maryse 97 Ching, Leo 60, 65 Chirac, Jacques 88 Choi, Chungmoo 59 Choudhary, Ashok 52 Christensen, Lila 131 Chute, Hilary 5, 81 civilization and tension with barbarism 40 civilizing mission 115 “colonial aggressor” 65

Index  229 Colonial Heritage of French Comics (McKinney) 10 colonial terrorists in Indian comics 142–53 colonial textualities 17n Colorizing America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative 6 “Comic Books and Graphic Novels” (Chute & Dekoven) 5 comics: as cultural forms 1–2; definition 209; evolution of 16n–17n; history of in Africa 112–14; psychoanalytical analysis of 16n; reimagining trauma 81; scholarship 4–13; structuralist approach to 16n; as textual compositions 1–2; transnationalism 7 Comics 4 Syria 193 comics codes 1 comics exceptionalism 5 Comic Shop, The 196 Comics in French: the European Bande Dessinée in Context (Grove) 8 Comics versus Art (Beaty) 44 Congo: colonial exploitation by Belgium 92–107; denouncing of imperialism in 94–101; and guilty nostalgia 101–3; post-independence of 101–3 Congo Diary (Conrad) 95 Congolese: inversions and memorial work 103–5; stereotypic portrayal of 8, 10 Congolese Mandela 103 Conrad, Joseph 40, 94, 95 contact zones 47, 55 Contemporary Francophone Writers and the Burden of Commitment (Casenave and Célérier) 113 contrapuntality 13 Cooke, Rachel 45 corruption among government officials 120 Coupe, W. A. 122, 135 Crusaders through Four Arab Eyes (Merhej) 214 Crusades through Arab Eyes, The (Maalouf) 214 cultic image 4 D’Algérie (Morvandiau) 77–89; memory 77–89 Dalimen 196 Dalit Pride 52 Dalits 48–52

Dar Onboz 196 datsu-a nyù-ð 60 datsushokuminchi-ka 60 datsuyo-roppa-ka 60 Davar 173–5, 177, 180 Davé, Shilpa 7 decolonization 60 deconstructive image functions 3 “de-Europeanization” 60 Deewar (film) 153 de Gaulle, Charles 86, 177 Dekoven, Marjorie 5 Delhi Calm (Ghosh) 131–9; barbaric spaces of 132–4 Delisle, Philippe 8–9 democracy represented in graphic novels 131–2, 139 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 120 demo-graphics 131–2, 139 De Mul, Sarah 92, 94, 99, 106 Denham, Aaron 208 Denson, Shane 6 De “Tintin au Congo” à “Odilon Verjus”: Le missionnaire, héros de la BD belge (Delisle) 8 dialectical linkage in comics 83–84 Diantantu, Serge 94, 103–4 diaspora 62, 70; ethics 13 Die Entdeckung (Heuvel) 61 Discovery of India (Nehru) 143 discrimination: and identity 35–40; against migrants 35–36 Doherty, Thomas 135 Doordarshan generation 143 doubled identity theme 162–3 Doumit, Ralph 193 Drawing France: French Comics and the Republic (Vessels) 8 drawing in the Middle East 187–200 Edimo N’Galle, Christophe 113, 114 editorial cartoons 171–82; in the Arab Press 175–7; in the Jewish press 173–5 educational manga 61 Educator, The (Mezher) 208, 214, 216 Egypt: publishing comics 196; rise of comics for adults 191 Eid, Wissam 190 Eisner, Will 123 El Shafee, Magdy 189, 190, 191, 194, 197 “escaping Asia and entering Europe” 60

230 Index ethics of postcolonial representation in comics 54 ethnic identity in comics 44–55 ethno-racial characters 6–13 Europe: backlash against migrants 35–36; involvement with Africa 30 European Jews’ plight in the Third Reich 172, 174–5, 182 Exils (film) 79 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven 132 Fadda-Conrey, Carol N. 204 fairy tale intertexts 159–62 family history 77–79 Famy, Mohamad 192 fanzines in the Middle East 190–1 feminist identity 158–64 Festival International de la Bande Dessinée d’Alger (FIBDA) 193 festivals in the Middle East 193 fictional state groups depicted in Lebanese comics 214–15 Filastin 173, 175–7 Fischman, Lisa 44, 46 focalization 209 focalized narration 209 Fons, T. T. 113 Forsdick, Charles 8 Foster, Hal 160 Foster, William H. III 5, 6 framing in relation to migration 32–33 France: colonizing Africa by imposing educational system 115–17; critique by Pahé 124–5; immigration to 34; presence in North Africa 79; relations with Algeria 11; travel between Algeria and 78; treatment of black African immigrants 123–4 Franco-Belgian comic book 8–12 Francophone African writers’ ability to publish 11–12 Francophone Bande Dessinée, The (Forsdick, Grove, and McQuillan) 8 Francophone Canadian comics 22n Freitag, Sandria 4 French colonial affrontier 11 French cultural identity 8–10 French language comics 8–13; reflecting imperialism and colonialism 10 Gabilliet, Jean-Paul 1–2 Gabon 112, 115; income disparity 119; politics of 119 Gabonese’s rivalry with Malians 120–1

gag trope 135–7 gakushû 61, 68 Gandhi, Indira 131 Gandhi, Sanjay 139 Ganzeer 191, 194 Gatliff, Tony 79 gekiga 62, 68 gender and magic iconography 157–64 Genette, Gérard 133, 209 genocide 96–97 geopolitics 33–34 German fascism 65 German-Japan and Jewish history 69 Germany’s clash of modernities with Japan 61 Ghosh, Vishwajyoti 131–9; mimetic approximation 137–9; mixing everyday/nation with the extreme/ state 133–4; traumatic realism 131–9; use of caricature and grotesquerie 134–7 Ghosn, Ghadi 193, 207, 213 Gibraltar: as a British enclave in Spain 34; and global migration 33–34; global migration to Europe 29–41 Gilman, Sander 65 Gilroy, Paul 62, 94 Glascock, Jack 123 global comparativism 12 globalization 13–15, 23n global migration 29–41 global vernaculars 13 Göcek, Fatma Müge 172 “god of comics” 68 Goorgoorlou 113 Göring, Hermann 177 Goscinny, René 9, 116, 117 Gott, Michael 78 graphic écritures 157–64 graphic novel 53–54; autobiographical 111–12 114–26; intertextuality of 60–62; linked with democracy/ politics 131–2; in the Middle East 191–3 Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels (Chaney) 111 Groensteen, Thierry 77 grotesquerie 134–7 Grove, Laurence 8 Guérin, Frances 83 Guha, Ranajit 4 guilt and humanitarian ideal 94–101

Index  231 guilty nostalgia: postcolonial 95–97; and post-independence Congo 101–3 Gurion, David Ben 180 Hall, Stuart 59, 62 Hallas, Roger 83 Heart of Darkness (Anyango and Mairowiotz) 95 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 40, 94–101 Heart of Darkness paradigm 94–101 Hergé 6, 9, 10, 92, 106, 121, 123 Hermann, Yves 101 Heuvel, Eric 61 higaisha 65 Higbee, Will 79 Hindustan Socialist Republican Association 150 Hirsch, Marianne 82, 88 historical insurrections represented visually 151–3 historical trauma 208 Historie de la BD Congolaise (CassiauHaurie) 93 historiographic metafiction 160 History and Politics in FrenchLanguage Comics and Graphic Novels (McKinney) 9 Hitler (Shigeru) 61 Hitler, Adolf 62–64, 174–7, 182 Hochschild, Adam 92, 93, 96, 97 Holocaust 135; how to represent 137; postcolonial rendition of 65–66 Hourani, Najib 206 Hubbell, Amy L. 79 humanitarian ideal and guilt 94–101, 106 Hutcheon, Linda 160–1 Hutchinson, Rachel 60 Huyssen, Andreas 137 hybrid national identity 61–70 Hymer, Eliza Gerd 63 identity: cultural 8–10; and discrimination 35–40; hybrid national 61–70; and migration 35–36 identity crisis of Japan due to AsiaPacific War 61 “ideological conversion” 64 image-functions 3 Imam, Hatem 190, 195 immigration: to Belgium 34; to France 34

imperialism 4; reflected in Frenchlanguage comics 10 income disparity in postcolonial Africa 119 India: caste system and poverty depicted in comics 48–55; colonial terrorists and colonial revolutionaries 142–51; comics originating in Indian culture rather than transcreating American heroes 7; depicted in comics 131–9; emerging modernity of 4; graphics of freedom 142–53; marginalization of people depicted in comics 48; postcolonial politics 14; traumatic realism depicted 131–9 Indian Emergency of 1975–77 131–9, 153 Inouye, Rei Okamoto 67 intergenerational stories 82–83 international travel and cultural discrimination 35–38 Internet facilitating growth of comics 193 intertextuality of graphic novels 60–62 Israel, creating state of 171, 178–80 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) 212 Israeli occupation 46 Israeli-Palestinian conflict 63–64 itihasa 144 Jackson, Rosemary 162 Japan: clash of modernities with Germany 61; identity crisis due to Asia-Pacific War 61; lack of currency with postcolonialism 59–60; rise of nationalism 67 Japanese ultranationalism 65 Jardins du Congo (Ritz) 94 Jatin, Bagha 142, 145–8, 151–3 Je Me Souviens (Abirached) 207, 215 Jewish diaspora 65 Jewish editorial cartoons 171–82 Jewish press in Palestine 173–5, 177–80 Jews as victims of Third Reich 172, 174–5 John Bull 180, 181 Johnson, Charles 6, 123 kagaisha 65 Kagan, Élie 87 Kahlo, Frida 157, 162 Kamil, Adolf 61, 62–64 Kari (Patil) 158–64 Kaufmann, Adolf 61–64

232 Index Kerbaj, Mazen 189, 193–4, 197, 207, 215 Khalaf, Samir 204 Khouri, Omar 190, 194, 207, 213, 214 Khoury, George 188 Kimbangu, Simon 103–4 kindai no chðkoku 60 King Leopold’s Ghost (Hochschild) 92, 93, 98 King’s Shadow, The 98 Kinshasa 120 Kongo: Le ténébreux voyage de Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (Tirabosco) 95 Kress, Gunther 209 Kunzle, David 2 “Kushinagar” comic 45–55 Lab619 191 Lab691 198 L’Afrique dessinée 113 La Furie des Glandeurs 190–1 language as politics 197–9 La Revanche du Phéniz (Mahmoud) 193 Laub, Dori 80 La vie de Pahé (Pahé) 111–26 Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) 212 Lebanon: civil war in 204–6; growth of comics for adults 188–9; post-war amnesia 204–6; producing adult war comics 206–17; war narratives in 204–17 Le Jeu des Hirondelles: Mourir Partir Revenir (Abirached) 207, 215 Le Misérable (Doumit and Ghosn) 193 Le Monde de Pahé (television) 112 Lent, John A. 7 143 Léonard, Mick 101 Leopold II, king of Belgium 98–100, 103 Leopold’s Soliloquy (Twain) 100 Les Jardins due Congo (Pitz) 101–3 Les Passants (Rais) 193 Les Vêprs Algériennes (Louerrad) 192–3 “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” (Stassen) 29–41 linguistic choices in the graphic medium 197–9 long-term nature of history 30 longue durée 30 Looking for a Face Like Mine (Foster) 5 Louerrad, Nawel 192–3, 197

Lunsford, Andrea 136 Lyons, James 131 Ma, Sheng-Mei 65 Maalouf, Amin 214 Madame Livingstone (Baruit and Cassiau-Haurie) 104–5 Madinah Mujawirah Lil-Ard (Mhaya) 192, 196 magazines in the Middle East 190–1 magical-realistic narrative 158–64 magic iconography and gender 157–64 Mahmoud, Gihen Ben 193 Malamine, un Africain à Paris (Edimo and Mbembo) 114 Malians’ rivalry with Gabonese 120–1 Mamadou 120–1 manga 61, 67, 68 manga no kamisama 68 marginalization portrayed by Joe Sacco 44–54 Mason, Michele M. 60 mass publishing 2 Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Spiegelman) 5, 61, 81, 82, 135, 137 Mayawati 52 Mbembo, Edimo Simon-Pierre 12, 114 McKinney, Mark 9–11, 77, 86 McQuillan, Libby 8 Mediterranean 31–32 Medlej, Joumana 207, 212, 214, 216 Mehta, Suhaan 8 melancholia, postcolonial 94 MELUS 6 memory in D’Algérie (Morvandiau) 77–89 memory of reading 145 Mercier, Gaston 104–5 Merhej, Lena 190, 192, 195, 207, 212, 215 Message to Adolf 67 meta-image 82 métiss/se 11 Metro (El Shafee) 190, 191, 197 Meyer, Christina 6 Mezher, Fouad 190, 194, 208, 214, 216 Mhaya, Jorg Abu 192, 196 Middle East: linguistic choices in the graphic medium 197–9; and political cartoons 172; and transnational graphic movement 187–200 migration: from Africa to Europe 30–41; and identity 35–36; of North African refugees 45 militia in comics 215–16

Index  233 Miller, Ann 8, 14, 209 Miller, Frank 134–5 mimetic approximation 137–9 minority themes, lack of 5–6 mission civilisatrice 115 mixed couple 11 Miyoshi, Masao 13 mobile printing press 2 Mobutu Sese Seko 120 modernity characterized by nations 4 Mokhtari Rym 193 monstrator 77–78 montage 67 Morel, Edmund 100 Morvandiau 77–89; intergenerational story 81–83; treatment of trauma 81–83 Mouhtaraf JAD 188 Mountain of Tarik 33–34 Mrabba Wa Laban (Merhej) 192, 207, 212, 215 Mufti, Amir 12–13 Mukherjee, Jatindranath. See Jatin, Bagha Mukherjee, Meenaskshi 144 Multicultural Comics: From ‘Zap’ to ‘Blue Beetle’ (Aldama) 6–8 multicultural themes 5–13 multidirectional memory 30–33, 40 Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Rothberg) 32, 40 Mumbai depicted in comics 158–9 Nabaa, Tarek 190 Nadjem, Delila 190 Nady, Ahmad 195 Nakba 173, 182 narratable self 163–4 narrated I and the narrating I 114 narratology 209 Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of narrative (Bal) 208 Natarajan, Srividya 131 national identity, hybrid 61–70 nationalists converting to democracy supporters 64 Native Americans in Comic Books (Sheyahshe) 5 Native Americans represented in comics 6 Nehru, Jawaharlal 142, 151 Nkouma, Patrick Essono 12, 111 Noiriel, Gérard 34

non-Europeans discriminated against migrating 35–36 non-state armed groups in Lebanese comics 215–16 non-white ethnic groups, stereotypic portrayal of 5–6 North Africa: backlash against migrants 35–36; presence of France in 79 Obélix 116, 117 “Odilon Verjus” series 8 Onbonz, Dar 192 Oniki, Yuji 65 Orientalism (Said) 69 Ortiz, Jo 86 Osamu, Tezuka 60–70; and postcoloniality 68–70; sense of postcoloniality 60 otherness theme 5 Ottoman Empire and political cartoons 172 Oubrerie, Clément 12, 113 “overcoming modernity” 60 Pahé 12, 111–26; bi-cultural identity 115–18; critique of Africans 120–1; ethnic stereotyping 121–4; schooling in Gabon and France 115–18; views on Africa and Africans 118–24; views on France 124–5 Pai, Anant 143–4, 152 Palestine: editorial cartoons in 171–82; nationalism 171, 173; partitioning of 178 Palestine comic series 46 Palestine Post, The 173–5, 178 Paname (Pahé) 111 Papon, Maurice 87 Paquet, Pierre 112, 114, 119 paratextual writing elements 134, 138 Patil, Amruta 158–64 PDG (Parti Démocratique Gabonais) 119 Persepolis (Satrapi) 5, 9, 61, 78, 81, 82, 113, 134 Phoeniz (Osamu) 60 phrase-image in comics 83–84 picture-narrative theory of comics 1 Pied-Noir community 77, 79, 83 Pitz 101–3 Plan Bey 196 pluralilty as part of global migration 30

234 Index politics: of language 197–9; of testimony in artwork 81 polygamy in postcolonial Africa 119 Poole, Deborah 4 popular culture 18n postcolonial demo-graphics 131–2, 139 postcolonial discourse in graphic narratives 59–60 postcolonialism: as an Anglo-American phenomenon 59; lack of in Japan 59–60; and Tezuka Osamu 68–70 postcolonial revolutionaries in Indian comics 142–53 postcolonial textualities 2–4 postcolonial transnational 13–15 postcolonial visual economy 4 postmemory 82–83 postmodern intertextuality 159–61 postnational identity 13 poverty in India 48–53 Pratt, Mary Louise 47, 55 Press, Charles 172 Preston-Schreck, Catherine 123 proto-comics 16n–17n Proudstar, Jon 6 public cultures and postcolonial comics 2–4 public space being dynamic 32–33 publishers funding local markets 195–7 punctum 88 Quayson, Ato 67 Rabbi’s Cat, The (Sfar) 9 racial inequality 47–55 racial stereotypes in Adolf ni tsugu 65 racism by French immigration officials 124–5 Rai, Lala Lajpat 149 Rais, Brahim 193 Rancière, Jacques 83, 85, 88 Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to the French Language Comic Strip (Miller) 8 reciter 77 Redrawing French Empire in Comics (McKinney) 11 reframing 83 regional specificity in comics 195–7 reinscriptions of locality 13 Remi, Georges. See Hergé repositories for counter-modernity 3 Repetti, Massimo 18, 22–24, 126, 202 Retour au Congo (Hermann) 101 return home movie 78

reverse acculturation 67 Rima, Barrack 208, 212 Ritz 94 Romero de Torres, Julio 158 Rosenblatt, Adam 146 Rothberg, Michael 30–33, 40, 132, 133 Royal, Derek Parker 6, 7, 123 Sacco, Joe 5, 14, 134, 136; depicting unfair treatment of others 44–55; exhibition of his work 44; as a prying outsider 45, 54 Sage, Lorna 160 Said, Edward 69 Saint-Ogan, Alain 10 Salon Tarek El-Khurafi (Khouri) 207, 214 Samandal 190, 196, 198 satire 122–3, 135 Satrapi, Marjane 5, 9, 61, 78, 81, 113, 134 Satyagraha 142 Schengen Area 35, 39 Schiller, Friedrich 123 Schroedinger’s Riddle (Khouri) 207, 213 Scorsese, Martin 106 Sðhei, Tðge 62 Segall, Kimberley Wedeven 82 service-able abstractions 3 severed hands metaphor 92, 97, 99 Sfar, Joann 9 Shaka Zulu 117, 118 Shakti 146, 150 Shennawy, Mohammed 191 Sheppard, Reverend 100 Sheyahshe, Michael A. 5, 6 Shigeru, Mizuki 61 Sholay (film) 153 Shumari (Osamu) 60 signage of urban space 133 Simon Commission 149 Simon Kimbangu (Diantantu) 94, 103–4 Singh, Bhagat 142, 149, 151 Sisé, Mongo 93 Sitt Marie Rose (Adnan) 205 Sivasubramanian, Kumar 66 smiling masks 135, 137–8 Smith, Neil 13 snipers in comics 215–16 social semiotics 210 Sorge, Richard 68–69 South Korea’s lack of currency with postcolonialism 59 Spee, Bernard 92

Index  235 “Spider-Man India: Comic Books and the Translation/Transcreating of American Cultural Narratives” (Davé) 7 Spider-Man India series 7 Spiegelman, Art 5, 61, 81, 135 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 62, 70 Sreenivas, Deepa 152 Srivastava, Piyush 48 Stalin, Joseph 181 Standjofski, Michèle 188, 194 Stanley, Henry Morton 100 Stassen, Jean-Philippe 29–41 Stein, Daniel 6 stereotypes: of Blacks 121–4; breaking away from 114–15, 122–4; portrayal of non-white ethnic groups 5–6 Strömberg, Fredrik 5–6, 123 structuralism 16n studium 88 Sufian, S. 172 Suicide of Dorothy Hale, The (painting) 162 symbolic linkage in comics 83–84 Taif agreement 204 Tarifa 34 tenkð 64 textualities and postcolonial comics 2–4 Third Reich 172, 174–7, 182 Thomas, Dominic 30, 31, 37 Tintin au Congo (Hergé) 6, 8, 9, 10, 92, 93, 106; ethnic stereotyping 121, 123–4 Tirabosco, Tom 95 Todorov, Tzvetan 106 Tok Tok 191, 196 touristic borderzone 47 transcreations of American comic heroes 7 transnational comics culture 187–200 transnationalism 7, 13–15 Transnational Perspectives in Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads (Denson, Meyer, and Stein ) 6–7 transnational statelessness 13 trauma: defined 80; reimaginined in comics 81 trauma fiction 80 traumatic realism 131–9

travel back to ancestral homeland 78–79 Twain, Mark 100 Two Fridas, The (painting) 157, 161 Uderzo, Albert 9, 116, 117 Uncle Sam 181 Une Enfance Heureuse (Kerbaj) 207, 215 United Nations 177 “Unwanted, The” comic 45–46 van Leeuwen, Theo 209 Vessels, Joel 8 V for Vendetta (Miller) 134–5 Vibhuti Prasad (VP) 131 “victimised” 65 visual idioms 4 “War Junkie” (exhibition) 44 War Junkie (Sacco) 46 war narratives in Lebanon 204–17 Waugh, Patricia 159–60 welcoming strategy 213 Western powers intervening in Jewish affairs 177–8 Whitehead, Anne 80 Williams, Paul 131 women’s role of in India’s independence 146, 148–9, 152 “Wondrous Capers: The Graphic Novel in India” (Mehta) 8 work of retracing 83 XXI (periodical) 29 Yacouba being discriminated against from migrating 35, 38–40 Yishuv 172–82 Yogurt and Jam, or How My Mother Became Lebanese (Merhej) 192, 207, 212, 215 Yuknavitch, Lidia 208 Zakour, Kamel 193 Zamakan 199 Zerooo (magazine) 189 Ziadé, Lamia 187 Zig et Puce series 10 Zine el Arab 191 Zionism 171, 173–80