Immigrants and Comics: Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis

Immigrants and Comics is an interdisciplinary, themed anthology that focuses on how comics have played a crucial role in representing, constructing, and reifying the immigrant subject and the immigrant experience in popular global culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Nhora Lucía Serrano and a diverse group of contributors examine immigrant experience as they navigate new socio-political milieux in cartoons, comics, and graphic novels across cultures and time periods. They interrogate how immigration is portrayed in comics and how the ‘immigrant’ was an indispensable and vital trope to the development of the comics medium in the twentieth century. At the heart of the book‘s interdisciplinary nexus is a critical framework steeped in the ideas of remembrance and commemoration, what Pierre Nora calls lieux de mémoire.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in Visual Studies, Comparative Literature, English, Ethnic Studies, Francophone Studies, American Studies, Hispanic Studies, art history, and museum studies.

Nhora Lucía Serrano is the Associate Director for Digital Learning & Research at Hamilton College, New York. Originally from Colombia, and previously a Visiting Scholar of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, Dr. Serrano is a trained Medieval and Early Modern Visual Studies scholar, who was the recipient of a 2018 Mellon Press Diversity Fellowship at the MIT Press, a 2017 NEH Summer Institute fellowship at the Newberry Library, and a 2014 Smithsonian National Postal Museum fellowship. Dr. Serrano is a founding member and currently the Treasurer of the Comics Studies Society, and from 2014–2018, she served on the MLA Executive Forum on Comics and Graphic Narratives. Presently, Dr. Serrano is an MLA Delegate Assembly Member and she serves on the MLA Executive Discussion Group on Book History, Print Cultures, Lexicography.