Comics and Migration by Kauranen, Ralf; Löytty, Olli; Nikkilä, Aura;

Short description:

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.

Long description:

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.

Table of 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