Decentered Frames. Multidirectional Memory and Intersectional Struggle in Graphic Literature
Emily Dreyfus
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Over the last decade, the study and practice of cultural memory have shifted to acknowledge the deep, interconnected traumas caused by histories of enslavement, colonialism, racism, war, and genocide. Through what Edward Said termed their ‘relentless foregrounding,’ comics and graphic literature have long proven themselves exceptionally well equipped to mediate legacies of violence, lending narrative and pictorial expression to the experiences of victims, while alerting readers to their own subject position within matrices of power and privilege. Indeed, the unique spatio-temporality of the medium (e.g. line, panel, sequence) arguably grants access to what the cultural historian Michael Rothberg has called the ‘shared terrain’ of ‘multidirectional’ memory, with its potential for unexpected forms of intersectional solidarity.
In this seminar, we will consider comics’ historic role in decentring prevailing political narratives, negotiating multidirectional representation and processing collective memory. With reference to the work of graphic artists from the early 20th century to the present day, including Charlotte Salomon, Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, Richard McGuire, Leila Abdelrazak and Solomon Brager, we will explore questions of genre, form and poetics in comics, connecting our formal understanding of the medium with its treatment of collective traumata from the Holocaust to settler colonialism.
closeSuggested reading
Secondary Literature
Hillary L. Chute: Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (2016)
Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind (eds.): Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories and Graphic Reportage (2020)
All readings will be made available online.
close15 Class schedule
Regular appointments