‘Tu te décolonises’: Comics re-framings of the Breton Liberation Front (FLB)

Abstract

The aim of this article is to posit the productivity of examining the relationship between Brittany and comics, as a case study for developing not only the diversity of bande dessinée and comics scholarship, but also an intermedial understanding of minoritized stateless cultures. It focuses in particular on the role comics can play in political expressions in minoritized stateless cultures and nations. This is explored through the prism of two comics re-framings of the Breton Liberation Front (FLB), an underground independentist movement that was particularly active in the 1960s and 1970s. The article analyses Alain Goutal’s 1980 ‘Instantanés d’une sinistre farce’ as a piece of comics journalism that redraws the October 1980 FLB trial as a performance of Brittany–France relations, and Stéphane Heurteau’s 2013 Sant-Fieg as a postcolonial comic that explicitly addresses the status of Algeria as a key reference for the Breton militants that fought for ‘internal decolonization’. Through these two comics, the article maps out moments in ‘Breton bande dessinée’ and explores the question of how a comic can be ‘Breton’ when it is written in French, paying attention in particular to the absence/presence of the minoritized language in both ‘Instantanés’ and Sant-Fieg.