Table Of ContentPALGRAVE STUDIES IN COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS
DOCUMENTING
TRAUMA
IN COMICS
Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories,
and Graphic Reportage
Edited by
Dominic Davies · Candida Rifkind
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels
Series Editor
Roger Sabin
University of the Arts London
London, UK
This series concerns Comics Studies—with a capital “c” and a capital “s.”
It feels good to write it that way. From emerging as a fringe interest within
Literature and Media/Cultural Studies departments, to becoming a minor
field, to maturing into the fastest growing field in the Humanities, to
becoming a nascent discipline, the journey has been a hard but spectacular
one. Those capital letters have been earned.
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels covers all aspects of the
comic strip, comic book, and graphic novel, explored through clear and
informative texts offering expansive coverage and theoretical sophistica-
tion. It is international in scope and provides a space in which scholars
from all backgrounds can present new thinking about politics, history,
aesthetics, production, distribution, and reception as well as the digital
realm. Books appear in one of two forms: traditional monographs of
60,000 to 90,000 words and shorter works (Palgrave Pivots) of 20,000 to
50,000 words. All are rigorously peer-reviewed. Palgrave Pivots include
new takes on theory, concise histories, and—not least—considered
provocations. After all, Comics Studies may have come a long way, but it
can’t progress without a little prodding.
Series Editor Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular Culture at the
University of the Arts London, UK. His books include Adult Comics:
An Introduction and Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, and he is part
of the team that put together the Marie Duval Archive. He serves on
the boards of key academic journals in the field, reviews graphic novels
for international media, and consults on comics-related projects for the
BBC, Channel 4, Tate Gallery, The British Museum and The British
Library. The ‘Sabin Award’ is given annually at the International
Graphic Novels and Comics Conference.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14643
Dominic Davies • Candida Rifkind
Editors
Documenting Trauma
in Comics
Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories,
and Graphic Reportage
Editors
Dominic Davies Candida Rifkind
Department of English Department of English
City, University of London University of Winnipeg
London, UK Winnipeg, MB, Canada
Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels
ISBN 978-3-030-37997-1 ISBN 978-3-030-37998-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37998-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020
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Cover illustration: Miriam Katin
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A
cknowledgements
The idea for this book began, as many do, with a conference, hosted at the
University of Oxford in June 2017. Entitled ‘Documenting Trauma:
Comics and the Politics of Memory’, the conference CFP asked partici-
pants to reflect on the relationship between the comics form, on the one
hand, and the remembrance of and recovery from trauma, on the other.
The response was overwhelming, reflecting the currency that such ques-
tions have long held both in comics studies and beyond. The discussions
that took place across the day’s several panels, as well as in response to
Hillary Chute’s keynote lecture, underpin the central contentions that
hold this book together, and it was wonderful to see a community sharing
and developing ideas in such a social and respectful environment. Our first
thanks must therefore go to all the participants of that conference, to
those whose papers reappear here in developed form, and also to those
others who attended both as speakers and listeners.
That conference, and thus this collection, was made possible by the
financial and administrative support of several different schemes and
organisations. Hillary Chute’s keynote lecture was generously supported
by the Oxford English Faculty’s Astor Visiting Lectureship scheme, which
provides funding for visits to Oxford by distinguished academics from the
United States. Our thanks go to the scheme, and also to the English
Faculty and its administrative team, where the visiting lectureship
was hosted.
We are especially grateful to The Oxford Research Centre in the
Humanities (TORCH), which hosted the research network, ‘Comics and
the Politics of Form’, throughout 2016 and 2017. TORCH also provided
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
a venue for, and supported administratively, the ‘Documenting Trauma’
conference in June 2017. In addition, the John Fell Fund, with its specific
mandate to foster creativity and to promote interdisciplinary fields at
Oxford, generously provided further funding for the conference. Finally, a
number of activities took place around the conference in collaboration
with other groups which deserve our thanks: the ‘Critical Visualization’
Network, also hosted at TORCH; and Oxford Writers’ House, a hub for
writers in the universities and city of Oxford, which led a day-long work-
shop entitled INKFISH where participants created their own comics in
response to the theme of ‘Documenting Trauma’.
Though we have already briefly mentioned them above, we wish to
thank once more all of our contributors, both artists and critics, who have
demonstrated admirable patience with the editors as the collection has
grown. Without them, most essentially, the collection would not have been
possible. We would like also to thank the editors at Palgrave, and specifi-
cally Roger Sabin for his faith in the project as the editor for Palgrave’s
‘Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels’ series, as well as the book’s anony-
mous peer reviewers for their valuable and supportive feedback.
The Research Office at the University of Winnipeg provided funds to
hire Sasha Bouché as our editorial assistant, and we are enormously grate-
ful for his superbly attentive work preparing the manuscript for submission.
Dom Davies would like to thank his colleagues at City, University of
London, for welcoming him so warmly into their community, and for
providing some last pieces of funding to push the book through its final
stages. He would also like to thank Candida Rifkind for joining him as a
co-editor on the project, which would not have come to completion with-
out her editorial work, both expert and collegiate. His last thanks go to
Emma Parker, for all her help in June 2017, and for her unwavering sup-
port ever since.
Candida Rifkind would like to thank Andrew Burke for his limitless
professional and personal support, and Vanja Polić and Tomislav Jurković
for their hospitality during the research leave when she worked on the
main edits. Finally, she would like to thank Dom Davies for inviting her to
join him on this project, and for being such a pleasure to work with from
start to finish.
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Documenting Trauma in Comics 1
Dominic Davies
Section I Documenting Trauma 27
2 Hierarchies of Pain: Trauma Tropes Today and
Tomorrow 29
Katalin Orbán
3 Emotional History and Legacies of War in Recent
German Comics and Graphic Novels 49
Alexandra Lloyd
4 The Past That Will Not Die: Trauma, Race, and Zombie
Empire in Horror Comics of the 1950s 69
Michael Goodrum
5 Exploring Trauma and Social Haunting Through
Community Comics Creation 85
Sarah McNicol
6 Comic: “Documenting Trauma” 103
Nicola Streeten
vii
viii CONTENTS
Section II Traumatic Pasts 109
7 Traumatic Moments: Retrospective ‘Seeing’ of Violation,
Rupture, and Injury in Three Post-millennial Indian
Graphic Narratives 111
E. Dawson Varughese
8 This Side, That Side: Restoring Memory, Restorying
Partition 131
A. P. Payal and Rituparna Sengupta
9 Visual Detention: Reclaiming Human Rights Through
Memory in Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi 153
Haya Saud Alfarhan
10 Comic: Crying in the Chapel 173
Una
Section III Embodied Histories 177
11 Folding, Cutting, Reassembling: Materializing Trauma
and Memory in Comics 179
Ian Hague
12 ‘To Create Her World Anew’: Charlotte Salomon’s
Graphic Life Narrative 199
Emma Parker
13 Una’s Becoming Unbecoming, Visuality, and Sexual
Trauma 221
Ana Baeza Ruiz
14 Discourses of Trauma and Representation: Motherhood
and Mother Tongue in Miriam Katin’s Graphic Memoirs 243
Eszter Szép
CONTENTS ix
15 Comic: First Person Third 263
Bruce Mutard
Section IV Graphic Reportage 275
16 Comics Telling Refugee Stories 277
Nina Mickwitz
17 Migrant Detention Comics and the Aesthetic
Technologies of Compassion 297
Candida Rifkind
18 Comics as Memoir and Documentary: A Case Study of
Sarah Glidden 317
Johannes C. P. Schmid
19 Afterword 335
Hillary Chute
Index 339
