Countering the ‘culture of oblivion’: reclaiming marginalised memories in post-dictatorship Chilean graphic novels and comics journalism

Reviewed by: The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels: Considering the Role of Kitschby Laurike in 't Veld Candida Rifkind Laurike in 't Veld, The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels: Considering the Role of Kitsch. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 230 pp, $84.99, $64.99 (eBook). Any book whose title juxtaposes the weight of genocide with the insubstantiality of kitsch signals a provocative intervention into the well-established nexus of comics studies and trauma theory. Laurike in 't Veld's book is indeed a fresh take on these topics, and her readings of both canonical and lesser known graphic novels about genocide is a welcome and accessible contribution to the field. Reading a group of graphic novels (although some are more properly graphic auto/biographies, documentary comics, and comics journalism) about the Holocaust and the genocides in Armenia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, in 't Veld shows how a concept such as kitsch can provide a productive framework for understanding how these texts produce affective responses to the atrocities they depict. But this is not a purely celebratory discussion of the power of comics to overcome compassion fatigue or solicit new empathy for the victims of suffering. Particularly helpful is the author's considerations of the limits of kitsch and anti-kitsch strategies in a perceptive analysis of the aesthetics and politics of graphic representations of genocide. Chapter one is an introduction that delineates the scope of the study, provides an overview of early representations of genocide in comics, introduces the theoretical framework, and summarizes the chapters. Readers skeptical of in 't Veld's yoking of kitsch aesthetics to genocide narratives will find an in-depth discussion of her methodology here, as the author traces the history of kitsch from the early twentieth century to now in order [End Page 348]to unpack its potential for comics studies. While a richer answer to the question "What is kitsch?" unfolds over the course of the book, its aesthetic qualities of visual excess, narrative tendencies to hyperbole, and historical universalisms are clear from the beginning. Yet, like its close relatives camp and melodrama, the denigration of kitsch often attributed to the Frankfurt School and Clement Greenburg has more recently been overturned by cultural critics recuperating kitsch as a category of potential plurality and cultural resistance. This is where the study's core argument emerges: kitsch is an aesthetic and political category of tensions between excess/restraint, attraction/repulsion, distance/affect, and presence/absence. As such, some kitsch reaches its limits in the representation of atrocity; other versions of it unravel themselves to comment self-reflexively on these limits. Organized thematically rather than chronologically or by individual works, this book returns to its corpus of texts in each chapter from a slightly different angle. The primary Holocaust graphic narratives are Art Spiegelman's Maus;Eric Heuvel's The Search;Joe Kubert's Yossel, April 19, 1943;Dave Sim's Judenhass;and Pascal Croci's Auschwitz;the Rwandan genocide is represented in Jean-Philippe Stassen's Deogratias, Matteo Casali and Kristian Donaldson's 99 Days, and Rupert Bazambanza's Smile through the Tears;the Bosnian genocide is the focus of Joe Kubert's Fax from Sarajevoand Joe Sacco's Safe Area Goražde;and, the Armenian genocide is represented in Paolo Cossi's Medz Yeghern: il grande male(unavailable in English). Some readers may find it difficult to follow the thread of a single graphic novel's analysis through the whole book, but this organizational approach allows the author deeper comparative analysis and an enlightening set of twists and turns around a set of figures, tropes, and topics. Chapter two, "(In)human Visual Metaphors: The Animal and the Doll," introduces two common visual tropes in genocide graphic narratives that soften representations of violence, atrocity, and death. The chapter shows how animals and dolls work as signs of innocence and sentimentality in order to heighten affective responses and readerly interaction. The first section on animal representations draws on existing scholarship, particularly on the mouse/cat/pig figures in Mausand the real and surreal dogs in Deogratias, to show how these animal metaphors are not just substitutive, but also allow for self-reflexive commentary on...

This chapter discusses the effects the inaccurate term ‘illegal’ or ‘clandestine’ immigration has on the public response to migration at large. Taking as example two French graphic novels typical of the ‘comics journalism’ (Dabitch et al., Immigrants. Paris: Futuropolis, 2010) genre, Droit du sol by Charles Masson and Clandestino by Aurel, the chapter focuses on the ways in which these works’ intermediality quality allows them to contest assumptions and common discourses around illegality. Moreover, Pruteanu analyses the importance of the image of the author as both reporter and witness of the facts, linking Masson and Aurel’s works to the biofictional genre which Rosalia Baena calls ‘life writings’ (Transculturing Auto/Biography: Forms of Life Writing. London: Routledge, 2014).

ABSTRACTRecent years have seen the rise of a new genre in news coverage: comics journalism. It combines journalistic techniques with the use of comics as a medium. Instead of reporting verbally, journalists draw the news. However, if journalists use a medium for news coverage that is associated with fiction, how will readers know whether the comics journalists are telling the truth, whether their reports are not fictional? Results of our qualitative content analysis show: journalists employ several visual strategies in their comics to appear authentic and reliable. Authentication strategies are: the author’s presence, physical resemblance, stylistic devices, documentary evidence, and the meta-story of the comic. To better understand the tricky relationship between comics and journalism, we contextualise the emergence of comics journalism by looking back into the history of comics and graphic novels and discussing the journalistic principles of truthfulness and objectivity as well as the inherent subjectivity of comics journalism. The paper concludes with an outlook on future developments.

ABSTRACTJoe Sacco’s graphic novels are often described as comics journalism, even though many of them evidence a distinctly historical method. This essay discusses the development of an engagement with the past in Sacco’s oeuvre and asserts that Safe Area Gorazde is the first long-form work where he fully deploys journalism and history together. A close reading of that work demonstrates that these two approaches are not combined into a synthesis as many scholars often assume. Instead, journalism and history largely unfold as separate modes of discourse alongside one another and as such are doubly performative: they transform our awareness of the present as well as our understanding of the past. Sacco was born on Malta but his family soon moved to Australia and then to the United States, where he studied journalism in college. He became involved with alternative comics in the 1980s. While travelling during the early 1990s, he visited the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and his experience there led to the work Palestine, which gained him critical attention. That work and the others that followed established him as a "comics journalist."

The Comics of Rutu Modan: War, Love, and Secrets is a biography and analysis of the work of Rutu Modan, a groundbreaking female graphic novelist from Israel. Modan is best known for her two graphic novels, Exit Wounds and The Property. Modan’s work depicts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Holocaust, and most significantly, the effects of war and trauma on individuals. This book begins with a history of Israeli cartooning from its roots in early Zionism. It provides an in-depth look at the female Israeli cartoonists who preceded Modan, as well as the counter-culture Israeli comics of the 1970s and the art comics boom of the 1990s. The book explores Modan's comics within the Israeli historical, political, sociological and literary background. It offers a history of the comics collective Actus Tragicus, of which Modan was a founder, and shows how the collective paved the way for modern comics to take root in Israel. Using the recurring themes of absence and presence, the book analyzes Modan's strong female characters, the role of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in her work, and the lingering effects of the Holocaust on Israeli society. The book also explores Modan's lesser-known but still important projects, including her comics journalism, her family narratives, and her line of children's comics that revitalizes Israeli classics.

There is a fairly long history of cartooning employed in support of journalism, but reporting done entirely in the form of comic strips, comic books, or graphic novels is a relatively new phenomenon. Some of the leading practitioners of drawn journalism have had work published in traditional print media, but journalism comics have particularly thrived in online venues. While most scholarship on comics journalism has come not from journalism studies but from comics studies, the focus of the scholarship is often on issues central to journalism—objectivity and authenticity. Because drawings are inherently subjective and interpretive and some comics journalists have an avowed aversion to the traditional journalistic standards of objectivity, journalistic comics have been compared to narrative journalism.

The field of human rights (HR) and literature has expanded in the last two decades. Fiction, poetry, memoirs, and graphic novels with HR themes have been examined, and also cognate fields like popular culture and HR, humanitarianism, and the history of HR itself. The literary, with its emphasis on the human ‘subject,’ the formation of this subject, and the hurdles that confront its formation, is appropriate for the study of how humans are conceptualized as deserving (or not) of rights, and the conditions in which the human loses her humanness. Victims, perpetrators, and bystanders are characters in literary texts that critics study as models of subjectivity. The literary text asks us to imagine the nature of the human person, the universal state of human vulnerability, and the situations in which this vulnerability is prised open for exploitation. The entries here consist of those that engage directly with literary texts but also with frames, contested and debated, that define the human, and without which a rights regime cannot be put in place or modified. Forms and aesthetics that are central to the documentation, witnessing, and communicating the urgency of HR themes in various genres are also necessarily a part of this bibliography. Various forms and genres in literature—across ages, geocultural formations, and nations—have addressed the theme of HR, explicitly or implicitly. The war novel, for instance, is more concerned with mass HR violations such as genocide, rape, and continuing trauma. The child-abuse novel is focused on individual HR. Plays by authors like Ariel Dorfman, (e.g., his Resistance trilogy) use theatre to speak of unspeakable horrors like torture. In the late 20th century, especially in the wake of Art Spiegelman’s pioneering Maus, numerous graphic novels, comics, and pieces of comics journalism have sought to document atrocity and HR. Testimonial texts and fiction by victims have constituted a globally visible genre, again since the last half of the 20th century.

This book analyses the relationship between comics and cultural memory. By focussing on a range of landmark comics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the discussion draws attention to the ongoing role of visual culture in framing testimony, particularly in relation to underprivileged subjects such as migrants and refugees, individuals dealing with war and oppressive regimes and individuals living with particular health conditions. The discussion is influenced by literary and cultural debates on the intersections between ethics, testimony, trauma, and human rights, reflected in its three overarching questions: ‘How do comics usually complicate the production of cultural memory in local contents and global mediascapes?’, ‘How do comics engage with, and generate, new forms of testimonial address?’, and ‘How do the comics function as mnemonic structures?’ The author highlights that the power of comics is that they allow both creators and readers to visualise the fracturing power of violence and oppression – at the level of the individual, domestic, communal, national and international – in powerful and creative ways. Comics do not stand outside of literature, cinema, or any of the other arts, but rather enliven the reciprocal relationship between the verbal and the visual language that informs all of these media. As such, the discussion demonstrates how fields such as graphic medicine, graphic justice, and comics journalism contribute to existing theoretical and analytics debates, including critical visual theory, trauma and memory studies, by offering a broad ranging, yet cohesive, analysis of cultural memory and its representation in print and digital comics.