ABSTRACT
Images – photographs, videos, news footage – have arguably served as a key storage house of memory in the twentieth century and, indeed, the basis for much of our contemporary access to history. Originally serving as complementary to and illustrative of the traditional oral or written narrative, images have increasingly acquired protagonism in our accounts of the past and in the ways we ‘envision’ events in our memories. As Sturken notes,
Images – photographs, videos, news footage – have arguably served as a key storage house of memory in the twentieth century and, indeed, the basis for much of our contemporary access to history. Originally serving as complementary to and illustrative of the traditional oral or written narrative, images have increasingly acquired protagonism in our accounts of the past and in the ways we ‘envision’ events in our memories. As Sturken notes,
Apart from photographs and film footage of events, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, have also witnessed the proliferation of graphic narratives, which create multilayered and multimodal forms of historical representation, often blended with autobiographical elements, privileging the embodiment of both the narrating subject and his or her memory. The artists who produce these graphic narratives use images to expand their text’s discursive possibilities, requiring readers to read beyond the verbal, beyond the narrated. Since the publication of Art Spiegelman’s two volumes of Maus in 1986 and 1991, scholars and critics have accepted the graphic form as a valid form of history and a way to create historical memory. Other texts such as Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2001), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003), and Belle Yang’s Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale (2010), among many others, have not only been useful in history classrooms, but have also required us to think critically about the ways historical genres develop and function.
