HUMAN RIGHTS IN GRAPHIC LIFE NARRATIVE : reading and witnessing violations of the other in... anglophone works

Surveying print and digital graphic life narratives about migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, this book investigates how comics and graphic novels witness human rights transgressions in contemporary Anglophone culture and how they can promote social justice. With thought given to how the graphic form can offer a powerful counterpoint to the legal, humanitarian and media discourses that dehumanise the most violated and dispossessed, but also how these works by western creatives may unconsciously reproduce Western neo-colonial presentations of the ‘other,’ Olga Michael focuses on gender, childhood and space within works from the United States, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Palestine, the United Kingdom, Syria, Italy, France, Niger, South Africa, Libya and Sri Lanka. Combining the familiar with the lesser-known, this book covers the work of Thi Bui’s Best We Could Do, Mia Kirshner’s I Live Here, Francesca Sanna’s The Journey, Safda Ahmed’s Villawood: Notes from an Immigration Detention Centre and the works of Joe Sacco. Interdisciplinary in its consideration of life writing, comics and human rights studies, and comparative in approach, this book explores such topics as including the aesthetics of visualised suffering; spatial articulations of human rights violations; the occurrence of violations whilst crossing borders; the gendered dimensions of visually-captured violence; and how human rights discourses intersect with graphic depictions of the dead. In so doing, Michael establishes how to read human rights and social justice comics in relation to an escalating global crisis and deftly complicates negotiations of ‘otherness’ in discussions surrounding refugees and migration. A vitally important work to the humanities sector, this book underscores the significance of emphatic and ethical readings as forms of secondary witnessing. Cover Halftitle page New Directions in Life Narrative Title page Copyright page Contents Figures Acknowledgements Introduction Life narrative, testimony and witness Looking elsewhere: graphic testimony and visual witness Primary texts and graphic life narrative sub-genres Aspects of injustice and suffering In/visibilities Decolonial theory, social justice and the decolonization of human rights Chapter overview and a note on myth 1 Precarious femininities and gendered inequalities Remediating the graphic tale of Philomela, (de)colonizing human rights The game of neoliberal economy and coloniality in Juarez (Post-)colonial encounters and sex work in the journal entries of Burma (Post-)colonial encounters and sex work in ‘The Story of Mi-Su’ Spectacles of gendered violence in Palestine Coda 2 Graphic martyria and male suffering Hierarchies of masculinity, male suffering and graphic martyria Tortured male bodies, (graphic) art and literature Male suffering off-scene in Palestine Spectacles of male suffering in Vanni The child soldiers of Sri Lanka and Burma The Palestinian Shebab Resistance Coda 3 Graphic thanatopoetics and the in/visible spectacle of death Thanatopolitics, graphic life narrative and the meditation on death The Saigon Execution photograph in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do Femicide, social justice activism and photographs of the dead in La Lucha Picturing death in the journal entries of Juarez Reconceptualizing death in ‘La Tristeza’ Western reporting, thanatic temporalities and deadanimals in Footnotes in Gaza The tempo of dying in Palestine Coda 4 Graphic topopoetics and spatial (in)justice The spatial turn and spatial injustice in graphic life narrative Mapping femicide: zooming out of, and in on, the gendered crimes of Juarez Island landscapes of suffering and leisure: the heterotopias of Manus Island and Sri Lanka The olive trees of Palestine Spatial violence and irregular migration Coda 5 Western borders, violence and ponos Border ponos Border monstrosities Icons of (in)justice The animal as witness at Western borders Refugee resistance in Villawood and beyond Coda 6 Final remarks on the implications of reading graphic life narratives and bearing witness to other people’s distant suffering References Index Surveying print and digital graphic life narratives about people who become 'othered' within Western contexts, this book investigates how comics and graphic novels witness human rights transgressions in contemporary Anglophone culture and how they can promote social justice. With thought given to how the graphic form can offer a powerful counterpoint to the legal, humanitarian and media discourses that dehumanise the most violated and dispossessed, but also how these works may unconsciously reproduce Western neo-colonial presentations of the 'other,' Olga Michael focuses on gender, death, space, and border violence within graphic life narratives depicting suffering across different geo- and biopolitical locations. Combining the familiar with the lesser-known, this book covers works by artists such as Joe Sacco, Thi Bui, Mia Kirshner, Phoebe Gloeckner, Kamel Khélif , Francesca Sanna , Gabi Froden, Benjamin Dix and Lindsay Pollock, as well as Safdar Ahmed and Ali Dorani/Eaten Fish. Interdisciplinary in its consideration of life writing, comics and human rights studies, and comparative in approach, this book explores such topics as the aesthetics of visualised suffering; spatial articulations of human rights violations; the occurrence of violations whilst crossing borders; the gendered dimensions of visually captured violence; and how human rights discourses intersect with graphic depictions of the dead. In so doing, Michael establishes how to read human rights and social justice comics in relation to an escalating global crisis and deftly complicates negotiations of 'otherness.' A vitally important work to the humanities sector, this book underscores the significance of postcolonial decolonized reading acts as forms of secondary witness.