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Abstract
This article considers Joe Sacco’s second ethnographic comic book on the Palestinian territories, Footnotes in Gaza (2009), and its preoccupation with excavating unofficial and unrecorded histories in the Gaza Strip through archival research and oral testimony. Borrowing from Johannes Fabian’s theories on anthropological time, it argues that Sacco’s particular stylistics recuperate forgotten Palestinian histories by evoking time as simultaneous and continuous, and the refugee memory as perpetually regressive. In presenting survivors’ oral accounts surrounding two events taking place in Gaza in 1956, Sacco’s graphic narrative employs what is here termed “circular visuality”: the visual and narrative device of locating images of the past alongside images of the present such that history appears circular and doomed to repetition. The past and the present are conflated, experienced simultaneously as intersubjective time, and denied a progress narrative. This device is Sacco’s material and visual response to one resident’s claim that in the Gaza Strip, “events are continuous”.