“To Think and Imagine and See Differently”: Popular Geopolitics, Graphic Narrative, and Joe Sacco's “Chechen War, Chechen Women”

Abstract

This paper, while acknowledging the import of popular geopolitics for understanding how foreign policies are interpreted in an everyday sense, argues that this literature has glossed over a set of key oppositional cultural formats, such as documentary films, satirical newspapers, and non-fiction comic books (referred to here as graphic narratives), which also influence the geopolitical imaginations of their consumers. Using Ó Tuathail's concept of the anti-geopolitical eye, the paper considers how popular geopolitical understandings are constructed, arguing that these oppositional formats, and graphic narratives in particular, challenge hegemonic scriptings of geopolitics through a bricolage of narrative techniques. Discussing the work of comics journalist Joe Sacco and his graphic narrative “Chechen War, Chechen Women” in detail, the paper considers how three distinct narrative techniques he employs – historical interlude, the singular panel, and the depiction of the banal – make possible a counter-hegemonic reading of the individual, localised consequences of the Chechen conflicts.