Human Rights in Graphic Life Narrative: Reading and Witnessing Violations of the Other in Anglophone Works

Surveying print and digital graphic life narratives about people who become ‘othered’ within Western contexts, this book investigates how comics and graphic novels witness human rights transgressions in contemporary Anglophone culture and how they can promote social justice. With thought given to how the graphic form can offer a powerful counterpoint to the legal, humanitarian and media discourses that dehumanise the most violated and dispossessed, but also how these works may unconsciously reproduce Western neo-colonial presentations of the ‘other,’ Olga Michael focuses on gender, death, space, and border violence within graphic life narratives depicting suffering across different geo- and biopolitical locations. Combining the familiar with the lesser-known, this book covers works by artists such as Joe Sacco, Thi Bui, Mia Kirshner, Phoebe Gloeckner, Kamel Khélif, Francesca Sanna, Gabi Froden, Benjamin Dix and Lindsay Pollock, as well as Safdar Ahmed and Ali Dorani/Eaten Fish. Interdisciplinary in its consideration of life writing, comics and human rights studies, and comparative in approach, this book explores such topics as the aesthetics of visualised suffering; spatial articulations of human rights violations; the occurrence of violations whilst crossing borders; the gendered dimensions of visually captured violence; and how human rights discourses intersect with graphic depictions of the dead. In so doing, Michael establishes how to read human rights and social justice comics in relation to an escalating global crisis and deftly complicates negotiations of ‘otherness.’ A vitally important work to the humanities sector, this book underscores the significance of postcolonial decolonized reading acts as forms of secondary witness.

Olga Michael is Adjunct Lecturer in Anglophone Literature at the University of Cyprus.

Kate Douglas is a Professor in English at Flinders University, Australia. She is the author of Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma and Memory (2010) and the co-author of Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation (2016; with Anna Poletti). Her edited collections include (with Ashley Barnwell) Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies (2019). Kate is the Head of the Steering committee for the International Auto/Biography Association's Asia-Pacific chapter.

John David Zuern is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawai?i at Manoa and a co-editor the journal Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. His recent work on life writing and digital literature has appeared in Comparative Literature and (with Laurie McNeill) in the volume Research Methodologies for Auto/Biography Studies (Routledge 2019).

Anna Poletti is Associate Professor at Utrecht University and co-editor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly. Their recent work on life writing includes Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book (2020), and the entry “Identity Technologies” for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature.