Human Rights in Graphic Life Narrative: Reading and Witnessing Violations of the 'Other' in Anglophone Works (New Directions in Life Narrative) - Hardcover

Olga Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1350329754 ISBN 13: 9781350329751

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

Synopsis

Surveying print and digital graphic life narratives about migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, 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 by western creatives may unconsciously reproduce Western neo-colonial presentations of the ‘other,’ Olga Michael focuses on gender, childhood and space within works from the United States, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Palestine, the United Kingdom, Syria, Italy, France, Niger, South Africa, Libya and Sri Lanka. Combining the familiar with the lesser-known, this book covers the work of Thi Bui's Best We Could Do, Mia Kirshner's I Live Here, Francesca Sanna's The Journey, Safda Ahmed's Villawood: Notes from an Immigration Detention Centre and the works of Joe Sacco.

Interdisciplinary in its consideration of life writing, comics and human rights studies, and comparative in approach, this book explores such topics as including 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’ in discussions surrounding refugees and migration. A vitally important work to the humanities sector, this book underscores the significance of emphatic and ethical readings as forms of secondary witnessing.

About this title

About the Author

Olga Michael is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the English Studies department at the University of Cyprus, Greece. She has written chapters for Cultures of Testimony: An International Handbook of Theory and Practice (eds. Sara Jones and Roger Woods, 2022), Representations of 21st Century Migration into Europe (eds. Nelson González-Ortega and Ana Belén Martínez García, 2022) and Autofiction in English (ed. Hywel Dix, 2018) and her articles have appeared in such journals as Journal of Perpetrator Research, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century Literature, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, ImageText and Life Writing.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350329754
• ISBN 13: 9781350329751
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256