Abstract
Comics are an increasingly popular medium in the twenty-first century. Combining words and images, comics enable the expression of individual and collective histories that straddle languages and cultures, reflecting the multimodality of the cognitive and narrative processes in a multilingual, globalising world. This article proposes an original framework to understand the power of comics as a transcultural medium by exploring the production of Takoua Ben Mohamed, a graphic journalist and comics author born in Tunisia and raised in Rome. These comics visualise histories of migration and translation in Italy and the Mediterranean, questioning notions of homogeneity, authenticity and canonicity of Italian memory and culture. The article engages with the theoretical and methodological framework of the Transnationalizing Modern Languages (TML) research project, exploring the interconnected linguistic and cultural dimensions of memory and translation. The analysis identifies a series of processes termed mediation-translation in Ben Mohamed's comics, which illuminate the constitutive nature of memory and translation in contemporary processes of identification.
Highlights
Takoua Ben Mohamed started making comics to communicate with children and teachers at school
The analysis focuses on the graphic journalism of Takoua Ben Mohamed in order to explore the social and cultural dimensions of her work and how they are expressed through the different formats and the multiple translational strategies of her multilingual comics
‘Sunglasses – occhiali da sole per la vittoria’ (‘Sunglasses – Sunglasses for Victory’) is a story that illustrates this point at multiple levels, since it was drawn for the blog of the hair salon Ricciocapriccio and set in Rome’s underground rail network
Summary
Takoua Ben Mohamed started making comics to communicate with children and teachers at school. Takoua turned shy and taciturn in a classroom of multilingual pupils schooled in Italian. Comics enabled her to make contact with people, establish empathy, raise questions, and exchange Arabic and Italian words with classmates, neighbours, readers and audiences across the world (Ben Mohamed 2018, 189). Stemming from an urgent need to reply to pressing questions on the hijab, contest islamophobia, and visualise trajectories marginalised by nationalist regimes of citizenship and migration in the Mediterranean, her stories have experimented with different genres and formats of comics, from graphic journalism to graphic memoir, and across digital and printed media. This article considers Ben Mohamed as a cultural translator and producer of Italian culture within the globalising flows that make comics an increasingly significant transcultural medium
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