Comics and human mobility have a long history of connections. This volume explores these entanglements with a focus on both how comics represent migration and what applied uses comics have in relation to migration. The volume examines both individual works of comic art and examples of practical applications of comics from across the world.
Comics are well-suited to create understanding, highlight truthful information, and engender empathy in their audiences, but are also an art form that is preconditioned or even limited by its representational and practical conventions. Through analyses of various practices and representations, this book questions the uncritical belief in the capacity of comics, assesses their potential to represent stories of exile and immigration with compassion, and discusses how xenophobia and nationalism are both reinforced and questioned in comics. The book includes essays by both researchers and practitioners such as activists and journalists whose work has combined a focus on comics and migration. It predominantly scrutinises comics and activities from more peripheral areas such as the Nordic region, the German-language countries, Latin America, and southern Asia to analyse the treatment and visual representation of migration in these regions.
This topical and engaging volume in the Global Perspectives in Comics Studies series will be of interest to researchers and students of comics studies, literary studies, visual art studies, cultural studies, migration, and sociology. It will also be useful reading for a wider academic audience interested in discourses around global migration and comics traditions.
Author(s): Ralf Kauranen, Olli Löytty, Aura Nikkilä, Anna Vuorinne
Series: Global Perspectives in Comics Studies
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 296
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Series editor’s introduction
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: The entanglements of comics and migration
Part I Migration and the use of comics
2 The long road to Almanya: Comics in language education for “guest workers” in West Germany, 1970s–1980s
3 Feminist comics activism: Stories about migrant women in Sweden by Amalia Alvarez and Daria Bogdanska
4 Contracts via comics: Migrant workers and Thai fishing vessel employment contracts
5 From representations of suffering migrants to appreciation of the Mexican American legacy in the United States: The NGO-produced comics Historias migrantes
6 Collaborative work, migrant representativity, and racism
Part II Configurations of nationalism and migration
7 V for pissed-offedness: anti-immigrant subversion of dystopian superhero intertexts
8 On the “good” side: hegemonic masculinity and transnational intervention in the representation of US–Mexico border enforcement
9 The politics of inversion in Americatown: limits in public pedagogy
10 Racist and national(ist) symbols in a Finnish antiracist comics zine
Part III Conventions and revisions of migration narratives
11 Absented from his master’s service: Benjamin Franklin House, slavery, and comics
12 Tears of a refugee: melodramatic life writing and Reinhard Kleist’s Der Traum von Olympia
13 To see and to show: photography, drawing, and refugee representation in comics journalism on refugee camps
14 Humans on the move: some thoughts about approaching migration as a journalist in comics
15 Intolerable fictions: composing refugee realities in comics
Index
