ABSTRACT

This collection examines new comic-book cultures, graphic writing, and bande dessinée texts as they relate to postcolonialism in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone settings. The individual chapters are framed within a larger enquiry that considers definitive aspects of the postcolonial condition in twenty-first-century (con)texts.

The authors demonstrate that the fields of comic-book production and circulation in various regional histories introduce new postcolonial vocabularies, reconstitute conventional "image-functions" in established social texts and political systems, and present competing narratives of resistance and rights. In this sense, postcolonial comic cultures are of particular significance in the context of a newly global and politically recomposed landscape.

This volume introduces a timely intervention within current comic-book-area studies that remain firmly situated within the "U.S.-European and Japanese manga paradigms" and their reading publics. It will be of great interest to a wide variety of disciplines including postcolonial studies, comics-area studies, cultural studies, and gender studies.

chapter |26 pages

Introduction

part I|47 pages

Geographies of Contact Gibraltar/Malta/Asia-Pacific

chapter 1|15 pages

Plural Pathways, Plural Identities

Jean-Philippe Stassen's “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” 1

chapter 2|15 pages

Joe Sacco's “Prying Outsiders”

Marginalization, Graphic Novel Form, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Representation

part II|53 pages

Francophone Post-Histories Algeria/Congo/Gabon

chapter 5|19 pages

Melancholia and Memorial Work

Representing the Congolese Past in Comics

part III|40 pages

Postcolonial Politics

chapter 7|11 pages

Postcolonial Demo-graphics

Traumatic Realism in Vishwajyoti Ghosh's Delhi Calm

chapter 8|15 pages

Graphics of Freedom

Colonial Terrorists and Postcolonial Revolutionaries in Indian Comics

chapter 9|12 pages

Graphic Écriture

Gender and Magic Iconography in Kari

part IV|54 pages

War, Nationhood, and Transnationalism

chapter 10|16 pages

Visualizing the Emerging Nation

Jewish and Arab Editorial Cartoons in Palestine, 1939–48

chapter 11|17 pages

Drawing for a New Public

Middle Eastern 9th Art and the Emergence of a Transnational Graphic Movement

chapter 12|19 pages

Men with Guns

War Narratives in New Lebanese Comics