Introduction: Trans/formation and the graphic novel

In early 2014, the Australian government’s Department for Immigration and Border Protection launched a controversial graphic novel on their website, directed against those intending to enter the country “illegally”. Titled using simple, brutal phrasing carrying ironic echoes of lazy anti-Australian stereotyping, No Way was a wordless 18-page comic discouraging potential immigrants. Although there has since been a change of Australian Premier (in September 2015, Malcolm Turnbull replaced Tony Abbott, who had been outspoken in his opposition to “the boats” a metonymical reference to those entering the country by sea [Abbott 2013]), the campaign around No Way – the ominously named “Operation Sovereign Borders” – remains active.¹ This says much about the Australian people’s capacity for consuming anti-immigration rhetoric, but it is not only Australians who think like this. As has been clear in a range of responses to the recent refugee crises in North Africa and Europe – from the output of global news networks to the content of numerous internet comment sections – attitudes towards migrant peoples have seen a steady hardening in the face of perceived increasing threats to personal and financial security in the west: from the “War on Terror” to the “credit crunch”.

As well as occurrences with a measurable, comprehensible impact on those in “western” countries, however, there are a number of 21st-century concepts with a less evident influence over global ideas, like the much-vaunted – but always poorly defined – one, so beloved of western media, of “freedom of speech”. Into this category fall several cases where the use of graphic story-telling and political comment comes into question. Considerable media attention was garnered by the controversy that surrounded the September 2005 publication of a number of comic-strip depictions of the Prophet Mohammed in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten; nearly ten years later, in January 2015, the response to the Parisian magazine Charlie Hebdo’s circulation of similar anti-Islamic cartoons was outrageously violent. The most vocal and/or violent reactions to these cartoons fall into two camps: condemning the production of the images, and thus rejecting the use of graphic forms of representation in certain contemporary arenas; or protesting against the censorious tone of these protests, and promoting artistic endeavour above particular beliefs, ideas, or emotions. Didier Fassin (2015), for example, analyses how the French attacks pitted “free speech and [ ... ] laïceté (secularism)” against Islam (3).

It would, admittedly, be disingenuous to suggest that the protests, attacks, and counter-attacks in Denmark, France, and elsewhere in Europe were concerned with the validity of graphic forms of story-telling. The initial objections were rooted in fundamental religious beliefs about the visual representation of a sacred figure, the Prophet Mohammed, and counter-protests mainly focused on this apparent censorship; in this respect they mirrored the objections to (and subsequent violent threats against, but also support for) Salman Rushdie on the publication of The Satanic Verses. In the case of Rushdie, though, form was important. As M. Keith Booker (1994) asserts, the fact that this was a novel – a work of fiction – was particularly galling for some Muslims: “viewed from [an] Islamic perspective [ ... ] the deconstruction of dualities and concomitant questioning of authority inherent in Rushdie’s fiction [were] so powerfully subversive that [the Ayatollah] Khomeini [ ... ] declared that Rushdie ha[d] to die” (253). Similarly, the fact that the Danish and French controversies concerned cartoons – examples of a powerful, provocative medium – cannot be ignored, particularly in a social-media-and-Buzzfeed-obsessed era in which images are as much a part of news reports and opinions pieces as words. Words and images, we are reminded by an important theoretical touchstone of this issue – Scott McCloud’s (1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art – are united on a spectrum of abstraction from reality.

Where do these provocative connotations of comics and graphic novels come from? The power to aggravate others, particularly those with strong religious or political beliefs, may reside partly in the perceived link with children’s picture-books. Often the earliest form of narrative we encounter, picture books – with few words, and relying almost entirely on graphic narrative – are viewed as simplistic; and this may be central to the appeal of graphic novels, which have a universality that demonstrates an important ability to by-pass the need for translation. Yet, as No Way shows, this universality can also lend itself to a viscerally “anti-migrant” expression of feeling: a narrative tactic that explicitly rejects communication within an ostensibly interdisciplinary, multiply communicative form. Here is one paradox of graphic forms of narrative, explored in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, the seemingly wordless graphic novel central to this special issue, but yet a highly effective portrayal of the injustices and sufferings of postcolonial/migrant existence.

The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing explore the precise reasons – formal, aesthetic, political – why graphic novels are so well suited both to representing postcolonial issues and to generating provocation. The articles proceed from the assumption that the formal, the aesthetic and the political are never separable categories, and thus pose the following questions. Why have their creators chosen to tell these stories as comics, rather than as novels, short stories or other literary forms? What do the interactions between words and images enable these creators to say about postcolonial experience that other forms might not? What might these particular graphic narratives be able to disclose about the politics of representational strategies more generally, in a globalized world of mass migration and displacement? As the example of No Way demonstrates, there are no simple responses to these questions. Graphic narratives may be adept at performing the “deconstructive image functions” (Brennan 2005, 109) characteristic of critiques of the dominant neoliberal culture, and at “(re)scripting missing or misrepresented identities” (Mehta and Mukherji 2015, 2), but they are equally capable of portraying (or indeed reinforcing) dominant ideologies. In fact, the tensions arising from the juxtapositions of word and image in comics tempt one to think of them, in Bakhtinian terms, as heteroglossic. That is, struggles between authoritative and marginalised voices arise within the unique language of the comics form as words and images interplay. Graphic narratives can thus find new ways to highlight the “socio-ideological” stratification inherent in all language (Bakhtin 1981, 272).

Clearly, form is key here, but before looking in more detail at the unique formal properties of comics, unpacking the terms of this special issue’s title may clarify our approach and thus suggest some preliminary answers to these questions. In choosing the title Trans/forming Literature: Graphic Novels, Migration and Postcolonial Identity, we assume, first, that graphic novels possess many of the attributes of literature, including the dialogic, heteroglossic qualities alluded to above.² And yet the obvious differences between a graphic novel and, say, a traditional literary novel, mean that the former has the potential to reshape understandings of what “literature” means: “Trans/forming” denotes a cutting across and a moving beyond received ideas about what constitutes a literary text. Seen in this way, the graphic novel is a “trans” form of literature, and the postcolonial graphic novel, explicitly concerned with movement and attendant shifts in identity perception, especially so. The forward slash is inherently deconstructive: it can be read as meaning “or”, implying alternatives, but it also implies a strong connection between these alternatives, such that any perceived binary is immediately undermined. In moving beyond traditional literatures, then, graphic narratives form literatures which continue, in turn, to cross boundaries. What our title describes is migration, in terms of form and content, as continual evolution.

To treat graphic novels as literature is important not just because there is a need to proclaim their value, but because literary value itself has for so long been bound up in questions of power, national and (post)colonial identity. Put very simply, the promulgation of “great”, canonical literature – for example, Shakespeare, or the Victorian novel – has contributed historically to the dominance of western ideas. Inversely, the marginalization of subaltern literatures has been a key strand of colonial repression. Even within comics, a form long disregarded by the gatekeepers of the literary establishment, primarily because of the predominance of superhero stories, a distinct western-dominated canon has emerged since the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus ([1980–1992] 1993) and its Pulitzer Prize success in 1992. As Mehta and Mukherji (2015) observe, there is “an established body of contemporary comics criticism and texts that reference western (post)imperial and mainstream cultures and concerns” (4). Authors such as Chris Ware, Alison Bechdel, Spiegelman and Alan Moore dominate a critical field still firmly rooted in the “US-European and manga paradigms” (Chute and Dekoven 2012, 187). Although this special issue contains analyses of work by authors who might be regarded as “canonical”, such as Joe Sacco, it shares with Mehta and Mukherji’s collection a desire to show the diversity of graphic narrative production around the world and thereby to challenge notions of canonicity and value, which are formed within discourses of imperialism, colonialism and globalization. Throughout the articles collected here, which draw to varying extents on elements of postcolonial theory, a connecting assumption is that these large questions of value, centrality and marginality, history and identity are interrogated through the formal attributes of the texts and the unique demands placed on readers by graphic novels. These texts are trans/forming politically because the process of engaging with them involves constant trans/forming.

For many artistic and literary forms the inability to plot an accurate history and development would be a negative – or at the very least might prove troublesome. For comics, it is in many ways an overwhelming positive. Image-based sequential narratives have been around for thousands of years. It cannot accurately be established when sequential art was first used for communication and decoration; some archaeologists suggest that the Blombos Cave engravings (dating from around 70,000 BCE) are the oldest example, but it is not clear whether these are narrative in form as opposed to purely decorative. Nonetheless, there are clear examples of sequential art that pre-date any other narrative form.³ The striking thing about these early comics is that they exist in almost every culture on the planet. There is no geographic distinction; comics are universal. Of course, there are key publications and figures who have assisted in the plotting of recent comics history – The Glasgow Looking-Glass, (Heath et al. 1825–26); Swiss political cartoonist Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846); Richard Outcault’s “The Yellow Kid” (published in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, and later William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal 1895–1898) – and each national tradition will undoubtedly claim that they were there first; but in truth this is not the case. The comics form grew universally, with each national tradition taking on the flavours of its home culture, simultaneously feeding off the techniques and forms of others.

One of the most important aspects of the comics form is the use of transitions the type of cognitive and visual movement the reader needs to bridge the gap, a space between images known as the “gutter”, identified by the aforementioned comics theorist McCloud. McCloud argues that what goes on between the individual panels – “closure” – is essential to effective comics writing and reading: “comics panels fracture both time and space [ ... ] but closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (1993, 45). He claims that closure is the grammar of the form, and that the entirety of the form hinges on the arrangement of elements, as Thierry Groensteen (2007) readily agrees in his concept of “arthrology”: “the true magic of comics operates between the images, the tension that binds them” (23). For comics, tension and brokenness is central. It is only by embracing these aspects of the form that readers are able to do the work of piecing together fragmented images into a narrative. The act of reading a comic requires a tremendous amount of work, but we probably do not realise this – we have been reading images all our lives – until we actively consider how the form works. Reading a comic involves crossing boundaries by the thousand. The movement from each panel to the next is a border crossing that weaves the narrative in each step. At every turn readers must consider their next moves and bridge the gap between the panels. The transitional movement used here is about reconciling violence and reconstructing brokenness; postcolonial narrative art seeks to redefine and recreate identity out of a violent and often obliterated past. Thus, in their very make up, the comics form mimics the thematic concerns of postcolonialism.

Comics is in a unique position as a narrative form for the representation of postcolonial stories. The use of image not only opens them up to a far wider reading audience than a traditional novel (itself fraught with issues of language), but the large amount of work required to actually read them gives the reader considerable control over the shape of the narrative; this is missing in a medium like film, for example, where the narrative movement is controlled by the director while the viewer remains passive. Furthermore, in film, all the action happens within one space and frame (the screen), whereas in comics each panel occupies its own space; several moments can be viewed simultaneously (although this does occasionally happen in film when a split screen is used, it is not the norm), and the reader’s control of the narrative is expanded once more. Comics forces the reader to engage with the narrative, to cross boundaries and to create links between panels and hyper-panels. We as readers participate in violence, perpetrating it with every movement of our eye across the page. For this reason alone, comics is a form that can handle the stresses and tensions of a postcolonial narrative perfectly.

The first piece anticipates some of the themes covered by the other articles: an interview with Shaun Tan, multi-award-winning comics artist and creator of The Lost Thing (2000), The Arrival (2006) and Rules of Summer (2013). The main body is adapted from a presentation given by Tan at the 33rd International Board on Books for Young People Congress, in which he discusses how issues of migration and hyphenated identity interact with and are given a voice through the comics form. This is then supplemented by further questions from Harriet Earle. The rest of the issue begins with Bidisha Banerjee’s interrogation of a work referred to at several points during the opening interview: Tan’s 2006 wordless comic The Arrival. Banerjee uses the theories of Donna Haraway – and Rosi Braidotti’s articulation of the “post-human” – to provide an innovative graphic-novel view of the immigrant experience, as envisaged through the lens of the human–animal relationship. The focus of the issue then shifts: Charlotta Salmi looks at a different aspect of humanity, with her essay on the work of “comics journalist” Joe Sacco, analysing his 2009 Footnotes in Gaza as a human rights narrative. Drawing on existing scholarship, she positions Sacco’s work as part of a wider conversation on the interplay between historiography, comics, and investigative journalism and claims that Footnotes in Gaza presents Palestinians as individual human subjects within an international media discourse.

Then the issue moves eastwards, with four pieces focused on East Asia. These begin with a US perspective, as Maureen Shay analyses a non-linear narrative, G.B. Tran’s 2010 graphic memoir Vietnamerica, echoing the themes of fragmentation and the immigrant experience opened up by Shaun Tan’s work. Shay presents a wide variety of graphic-novel tropes – in studying a “compelling brokenness” in Tran’s work – as strategies towards envisioning the migrant memory as a productive space promising constant and repeated reconnections, rather than as an arena bereft of cultural roots. The next piece takes the issue in a more sociological direction, as Philip Holden opens up a discussion on Sonny Liew’s comic The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015) and the controversy it created in Singapore. Holden argues that The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye problematizes the writing and reading of histories in a postcolonial country and suggests that Liew seeks to raise questions about the redemptive qualities of narrative and the agency of artists in the creation of postcolonial national story-telling. The following article stays with the idea of national story-telling, but of a very different kind: James Peacock’s focus on Miné Okubo’s graphic memoir of Japanese internment during World War II, Citizen 13660. Responding to previous critics, who have emphasised its depiction of spatial regimentation in American camps, Peacock explores the chronotopic potential of Okubo’s work, using critics from Thierry Groensteen to Homi Bhabha and Benedict Anderson to show how the perception of time is manipulated in order to cast Japanese Americans as a dangerous “other”. Concluding this section, Waiyee Loh examines another work with important Japanese links: Yuki Kaori’s Count Cain Series, a neo-Victorian Japanese girls’ comic (shōjo manga) that engages with an established western detective tradition in order to both support and challenge the idealisation of western rationality. Loh argues that the text articulates a contradictory desire to emulate and reject the west that has characterised Japan’s encounter with the west since the mid-19th century.

Bringing the issue to a close are two articles concerned with a burgeoning area of comics production: the Indian subcontinent. In his article, Pramod K. Nayar studies an anthology of comics on the 1947 Partition. Taking his lead from Hillary Chute’s work on politically-oriented graphic narratives, Nayar posits that in This Side, That Side the narration of history is disrupted by the use of collage, graphic montage, non-linear image, and verbal organization and uses close analysis of a variety of narrative techniques to present a rounded view of the representational strategies at play in this diverse, politically charged text. To conclude, Emma Dawson Varughese argues that the Indian graphic novel is “a new form of cultural and visual consumption” in the diversifying post-millennial Indian marketplace. Although contemporary graphic novels interface with the Amar Chitra Katha tradition of comics, they depict the nation in new, challenging, often inauspicious ways; Dawson Varughese takes Sarnath Banerjee’s The Harappa Files (2011) as her case study, showing how it engages critically with “new India” through its series of reminiscences about Indias of the past.

The diversity of approaches, theories, and texts covered in this issue presents the reader with a brief – and necessarily incomplete – but exciting survey of academic study in this area. We hope that this special issue will pave the way for greater acceptance of the graphic novel or comic as a focus for research and an increased appreciation of its value in the field of postcolonial studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Sam Knowles is a teacher, lecturer, and writer specialising in the study of the postcolonial and the transnational. First book, Travel Writing and the Transnational Author (2014), concentrates on form, genre, and canon in postcolonial writing. A forthcoming research project will focus on the political histories of transnational island spaces and he is also researching into the uses of graphic novel/comic form in representing the political and social complexities of postcolonial existences.

James Peacock is Senior Lecturer in English and American Literatures at Keele University in the UK. He is the author of Jonathan Lethem (2012) and Brooklyn Fictions: the Contemporary Urban Community in a Global Age (2015).

Harriet Earle is a lecturer and researcher in American comics and popular culture. She has a PhD in American Comics from the University of Keele. Her publications are spread across the field of comics and popular culture studies. Dr Earle sits on the editorial board of Comics Forum.

Notes

1. The following link, stating that “[t]he Operation Sovereign Borders policy has not changed or softened”, was last updated in October 2015: https://www.border.gov.au/about/operation-sovereign-borders/counter-people-smuggling-communication/english/outside-australia.

2. For a much more detailed, and contentious, discussion of comics-as-literature, see Meskin (2009).

3. Among the oldest are the Kanozero Petroglyphs in north-western Russia, which were carved approximately 6000 years ago. One series of images depicts a hunter on skis tracking a bear, while another shows moose and bears being hunted with arrows. The petroglyphs are clear narratives of daily life in northern Russia and have proved invaluable to studies in both language development and prehistoric life.