Abstract
This chapter begins with an indicative survey of comics responding to the current ‘refugee crisis’. The comics in question adopt one of two distinct and established approaches. The first is reportage, usually featuring the author/creator as a central device, while the second re-works and renders testimony in visual form. In their different ways, both contribute to a wider repertoire of positive and sympathetic representations of refugees, offering a counter-point to hostile media and political discourse, often by a focus on the stories of individuals. Mobilizing compassion and moral responses through personal stories of hardship, trauma, tenacity, and survival has long been a tactic of reformist agendas and humanitarian advocacy. By their qualitative difference from dominant forms of factual discourse, comics offer certain advantages. They may also circumvent certain problems associated with photographic representations of suffering. Such comics can nevertheless run the risk of re-producing established victim tropes, and just as with other forms of representation, human-interest angles carry the potential to obscure political dimensions. In an attempt to consider and situate these concerns, the analysis considers the various positions and relations that constitute ‘refugee comics’: subjects, readers, creators, (im)materiality, and circulation.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
This use of individual narratives to draw attention to wider social issues is similarly evidenced in the recent proliferation of illness narratives.
- 2.
The Meantime project was funded by the French NGO Solidarités International publicizing the everyday realities and experiences of Syrian refugees through online comics (http://comics.solidarites.org/en/home), and exhibited in Beirut in February 2017.
- 3.
Originally published as a series of zines, this project has since been taken up by Ad Astra Comix, a Canadian publishing collective dedicated to producing social justice comics, and re-printed through crowd-funding.
- 4.
While boasting that they release a hundred titles a year, Verso’s graphic overall novel output currently stands at nine titles, including Red Rosa (2015), Evans’ biography of Rosa Luxemburg.
Works Cited
Abdelrazaq, Leila. 2015. Baddawi. Charlottesville: Just World Books.
Bartoloni, Alex. 2015. Home Is Where One Starts From: A Comic Book for Refugee Children. Online source: https://internationalmedicalcorps.org/story/home-iswhere-one-starts-from/. Accessed 10 Feb 2020.
Bulling, Paula. 2012. Im Land Der Frühaufsteiger. Berlin: Avant Verlag.
Cabot, Heath. 2013. The Social Aesthetics of Eligibility: NGO Aid and Indeterminacy in the Greek Asylum Process. American Ethnologist 40 (3): 452–466.
———. 2016. “Refugee Voices” Tragedy, Ghosts, and the Anthropology of Not Knowing. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 45 (6): 645–672.
Chak, Tings. 2017. Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention. Ontario: Ad Astra comics.
Chaney, Michael A., ed. 2011. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Chute, Hillary. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York/Chichester: Columbia University Press.
———. 2016. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Colvin, Christopher. 2004. Ambivalent Narrations: Pursuing the Political Through Traumatic Storytelling. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 27 (1): 72–89.
———. 2006. Trafficking Trauma: Intellectual Property Rights and the Political Economy of Traumatic Storytelling. Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural Studies 20 (1): 171–182.
Dysart, Joshua. 2016. Living Level 3: Iraq. Huffington Post. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/joshua-dysart/living-level-3-graphic-novel_b_9012914.html. Accessed 18 Aug 2017.
Eastmond, Marita. 2007. Stories as Lived Experience: Narratives in Forced Migration Research. Journal of Refugee Studies 20 (2): 248–264.
El Refaie, Elisabeth. 2012. Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Ellsworth, E. 1989. “Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering?” Working Through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review 59 (3): 297–324.
Evans, Kate. 2015. Red Rosa. London: Verso.
———. 2017. Threads: Tales from the Refugee Crisis. London: Verso.
Fransman, Karrie. n.d. Over Under Sideways Down. http://webapps.redcross.org.uk/RefugeeWeekComic/. Accessed 27 Aug 2019.
Gardner, Jared. (2007) 2008. Autography’s Biography, 1972–2007. Biography 31 (1): 1–26.
Georgiou, Myria, and Rafal Zaborowski. 2017. Media Coverage of the “Refugee Crisis”: A Cross-European Perspective. Strasbourg: Council of Europe.
Gibson, Mel. 2008. What You Read and Where You Read It, How You Get It, How You Keep It: Children, Comics and Historical Cultural Practice. Popular Narrative Media 1 (2): 151–168.
Gilmore, Leigh. 2001. Limit-Cases: Trauma, Self-Representation, and the Jurisdictions of Identity. Biography 24(1): 128–139. Online source: https://doi.org/10.1353/bio.2001.0011. Accessed 10 Feb 2020.
Glidden, Sarah. 2016. Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria and Iraq. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly.
Gross, Bernhard, Kerry Moore, and Terry Roslyn Threadgold. 2007. Broadcast News Coverage of Asylum April to October 2006: Caught Between Human Rights and Public Safety. Cardiff: Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies.
Hirsch, Marianne. 1997. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Humphrey, Aaron. 2017. Emotion and Secrecy in Australian Asylum-Seeker Comics: The Politics of Visual Style. International Journal of Cultural Studies: 1–29. https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/handle/2440/105304. Accessed 13 Oct 2017.
‘International Medical Corps UK’. https://www.internationalmedicalcorps.org.uk/home-where-one-starts-comic-book-refugee-children. Accessed 18 Aug 2017.
Käpylä, Juha, and Denis Kennedy. 2014. Cruel to Care? Investigating the Governance of Compassion in the Humanitarian Imaginary. International Theory 6 (2): 255–292.
Khosravinik, Majid. 2010. The Representation of Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Immigrants in British Newspapers: A Critical Discourse Analysis. Journal of Language and Politics 9 (1): 1–28.
‘Know-Your-Rights Comic Strip Project for Syrian Refugees’. 2016. Madre: Demanding Rights, Resources, and Results for Women Worldwide, February 2. https://www.madre.org/press-publications/your-support-action/know-your-rights-comic-strip-project-syrian-refugees. Accessed 18 Aug 2017.
Londja, Tresor. 2013. Así es la Vida. Online source: https://www.accem.es/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Asi_es_la_vida-br.pdf. Accessed 10 Feb 2020.
Malkki, Liisa. 1996. Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism and Dehistoricization. Cultural Anthropology 11 (3): 377–404.
Mandel, Lisa, and Yasmine Bouagga. 2017. Les Nouvelles de la Jungle de Calais. Paris/Brussels: Casterman.
McLagan, Meg. 2003. Principles, Publicity, and Politics: Notes on Human Rights Media. American Anthropologist 105 (3): 605–612.
‘Meantime…, a collective Graphic Novel by Solidarités International’. 2017. Soldarités International. http://comics.solidarites.org/en/home. Accessed 18 Aug 2017.
Mickwitz, Nina. 2016. Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. New York/London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nayar, Pramod. (2010) 2011. Subalternity and Translation: The Cultural Apparatus of Human Rights. Economic and Political Weekly XLVI (9): 23–26.
Peters, John Durham. 2009. Witnessing. In Media Witnessing in the Age of Mass Communication, ed. Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski, 23–41. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pupavac, Vanessa. 2008. Refugee Advocacy, Traumatic Representations and Political Disenchantment. Government and Opposition 43 (2): 270–292.
Pustz, Matthew. 2007. I Gave It All Up to Draw Comics. In Inside the World of Comic Book, ed. Jeffery Klaehn, 61–81. Montreal/London: Black Rose Books.
Razack, Sherene. 1993. Story-Telling for Social Change. Gender and Education 5 (1): 55–70.
Rebmann, Ralf. 2016. Die Künstlerin Ali Fitzgerald bietet in einer Berliner Notunterkunft Comic-Workshops für Geflüchtete an. https://www.amnesty.de/journal/2016/februar/gezeichnet. Accessed 19 Aug 2017.
Richert, Hannele, ed. 2016. Mitä Sä Täällä teet? (What Are You Doing Here?). Helsinki: The Finnish Comics Society.
Rosler, Martha. 2004. In, Around and Afterthoughts: On Documentary Photography. In Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings 1975–2001, 151–206. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.
Sacco, Joe. 2003. Palestine. London: Jonathan Cape.
———. (2009) 2010. Footnotes in Gaza. London: Jonathan Cape.
———. 2012. The Unwanted. In Journalism, 109–158. London: Jonathan Cape.
Sadar, Claire. 2017. The Comic, “Haawiyat,” Brings the Stories of Syria to Refugee Children. https://muftah.org/comic-haawiyat-brings-stories-syria-refugee-children/#.WXr0eBPyvVp. Accessed 18 Aug 2017.
Salkowitz, Rob. 2017. Comics Project Aims to Offer Hope to Syrian Refugee Kids. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robsalkowitz/2017/05/16/comics-project-aims-to-offer-hope-to-syrian-refugee-kids/#7314fd5e6c53. Accessed 18 Aug 2017.
Schabert, Ina. 1982. Fictional Biography, Factual Biography, and Their Contaminations. Biography 5 (1): 1–16.
Sigona, Nando. 2014. The Politics of Refugee Voices: Representations, Narratives, and Memories. In The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, ed. Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al., 369–382. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stein, Daniel. 2013. Superhero Comics and the Authorizing Functions of the Comic Book Paratext. In From Graphic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, ed. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, 155–189. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Tomsky, Terri. 2011. From Sarajevo to 9/11: Travelling Memory and the Trauma Economy. Parallax 17 (4): 49–60.
Zetter, Roger. 2007. More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of Globalization. Journal of Refugee Studies 20 (2): 172–192.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mickwitz, N. (2020). Comics Telling Refugee Stories. In: Davies, D., Rifkind, C. (eds) Documenting Trauma in Comics. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37998-8_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37998-8_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-37997-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-37998-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)