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Abstract
Joe Sacco’s almost universally lauded comics frequently reveal issues and people that are overlooked or misrepresented in western media. Whether these are Palestinians, African immigrants in Malta, or Indian villagers, Sacco takes readers on a visual and narrative journey to locations that are disregarded. Given the similarities between Sacco’s consistent modus operandi of illustrating and voicing the global subaltern and the core principles of postcolonial studies, it is odd that a postcolonial approach to Sacco has not been developed. Whereas comic authors such as Marjane Satrapi and Art Spiegelman have received many such readings, a critical blind spot remains in this regard to Sacco as his works have not been brought into conversation with the fundamental principles of postcolonial studies at length. By examining Sacco’s comics ‘The Unwanted’, Palestine and ‘Kushinagar’, the current article redresses this oversight by contextualising Sacco’s work in relation to postcolonial literary studies. Joe Sacco’s work troubles readers by confronting them with representations of subjects against which they have constructed institutional barriers, and this article similarly troubles the way we view Sacco’s texts.
Notes
1. Although I am interested here with Palestine, ‘The Unwanted’ and ‘Kushinagar’, the characterisation of Sacco’s subject as subaltern fittingly describes nearly all of his work, outside perhaps of his comics on music.
2. Leela Ghandi (Citation1998) has fielded accusations against postcolonial studies as interested in ‘postcolonial revenge’ against the west. She argues that postcolonial studies does not seek to turn the tables on the west by now making it a marginalised and demonised entity. In fact, that would be the antithesis of postcolonial ethics as cultural equity is the goal of the field.
3. Thankfully, African comics have challenged this representation recently, most notably in the six-part Aya series by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie (Citation2008). Other works such as the non-fiction Abina and the Important Men (Getz and Clarke Citation2011), numerous versions of the Ashanti epic of Sundiata and graphic-novel versions of African literature such as Things Fall Apart (Achebe Citation1958) have also contributed to more responsible representations of Africans in comics. Nonetheless, these comics stand as exceptions to the rule for comics that circulate outside of Africa.
4. This is not to say that there have been no multicultural comics before Sacco’s, but that they are rare (especially those taking up Africa as a subject) and in nearly every case have been published recently. A 2010 collection of essays edited by Fredrick Luis Aldama, Multicultural Comics, investigates trends in multicultural comics and Sacco may be said to be participating in a similar project to Aldama’s. A few outliers, such as this collection, help to contextualise Sacco’s work but should not lessen the impression that in representing Africans responsibly he is distinctly working against the grain of comic history and even most recent trends in the field.
5. This does not immunise Sacco, though, from issues concerning the way Africa is imagined in the popular imagination in the west. Africa is most often seen in western media as war torn, diseased and impoverished. This is seen particularly in the recent literature and viral videos concerning child soldiers. African graphic novels have moved in the direction of stories and characters not on the brink of disaster, but Sacco’s modus operandi of highlighting crises means that he is not singling Africans out as crisis-prone but one of many of his subjects that experience existential threats. In other words, because Sacco only writes about people living in dire situations, he would not be writing about Africans at all if not in this manner.
6. ‘The Unwanted’ does not stick to this point-of-view formula throughout when Sacco interviews individuals. However, both of these initial chance meetings on the street demonstrate his perceived positionality to the groups when not constructed around a face-to-face interview.
7. The Subaltern Studies Group is a collection of South Asian academics and writers who have argued that the history and culture of India is not simply the story of an educated elite class that dragged the country into modernity. Instead of being interested in the ways that influence works from the top down, they are interested in ‘history from below’, or how the largely overlooked ways that movements, attitudes, culture and history have been moved by India’s subaltern groups.
8. ‘Framing Refugee Time’ by Maureen Shay (Citation2014) investigates how Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (Citation2009) uses the visual elements of comics to contrast temporalities while ‘Sounding the Occupation’ by Rose Brister (Citation2014) focuses on the spatial and sonic abilities of comics to register a national narrative for Palestine.
9. ‘Kushinagar’ and ‘The Unwanted’ portray moments of translation but not a translator, or at least not a consistent one. Sacco is more at ease linguistically in ‘The Unwanted’ as he speaks Maltese, but he also speaks to African refugees from parts of Africa with diverse linguistic compositions. In ‘Kushinagar’ we know that he cannot speak to the Dalits directly and Sacco alludes to an Indian reporter, but the reporter enters and leaves the story to create a measure of immediacy between Sacco and the Dalits, highlighted most directly on page 3 when a Dalit stares down Sacco and tells him he needs to leave.
10. I think it important to note that Sacco does not deploy the universal as a way to collapse difference completely. The landscapes, politics and general foreignness of the people and places Sacco depicts are not made into interchangeable universals but retain specificity of location while imbued with a universal humanism. In Sacco’s tales, the foreign never becomes comfortable but rather is made more legible by his proximity.
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Notes on contributors
James Hodapp
James Hodapp holds a PhD from University of Maryland, College Park. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English Literature at the American University of Beirut. His research interests include postcolonial studies, African literature, world literature, comic studies and world cinema. He has published in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, English in Africa, African Studies Review and Wasafiri, as well as in several academic anthologies.