Human Rights in Graphic Life Narrative

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.