Political Imagination in Iberian and Latin American Graphic Narratives

Dapena, Xavier; Dapena, Xavier

Comic Studies, within the field of visual culture, has increasingly become a topic that has garnered growing intellectual debate in the academic field since the publication of foundational works by Eco (1964) and Dorfmann and Matterlart (1971). In a medium that occasionally has been thought of as “art without memory” (Groensteen 66), research on comics and memory has traditionally focused on the genre of autobiography (e.g. Hirsch 1992, Huyssen 2003, or Chute 2010). In Latin America and Spain, the old comic production system and its deteriorated industrial model resulted in a progressive loss of its readership that also meant “the loss of their civic-popular impulse” (Merino 270). Nowadays, an emergent graphic production configures the traces of political imagination during a period The New York Times has called the “Golden Age of Comics in Spanish” (Carrión). Challenging the limited tradition in Hispanic Comic Studies, the relevance of this panel’s proposal lies in its focus on the comic’s political imagination and how it inscribes the traumatic past of national narratives in Colombia, Spain, and Chile. In this sense, graphic narratives are emergent cultural artifacts that have served a crucial role in understanding the social contradictions and political conflicts of the past and the present.

Regarding its global composition, this panel’s topic has its conceptual roots in studies such as the transatlantic approach of Ana Merino’s El Cómic Hispánico (2004). As Merino explains, the cartoonists have “confronted the official culture from their marginal space and directly or indirectly showed their weaknesses,” from the “authoritarian and technocratic” Francoist dictatorship to modern Argentina “neutralized by the military” (262). Since this pivotal conceptual moment, there have been some fruitful proposals in the form of monographs which include Lalo Álcaraz: Political Cartooning in the Latino Community (2017) by Fernández L’Hoeste, one of our panelists, and Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics (2017) by Frederick Luis Aldama where the Latino and national identity in United States is problematized. In contrast, Comics and Memory in Latin America (2017) edited by Catalá Carrasco, Drinot and Scorer, aims to fill the critical gap on the construction of national narratives and their past from the subaltern position of the victims, by studying comics as material objects that operate as “technologies of memory” (5). This kind of anxious concern in Colombia, Spain and Chile for the inscription of the past and its political imagination reverberates in this panel’s proposal as seen in the different graphical translations analyzed, from the millennial inquiry of anthropomorphic animals within the armed conflict (Fernández L’Hoeste), to the invisibility of gendered memories in national narratives (Claudio), and to a posthumanist and steampunk reading of dictatorship (Ledesma). These different approaches reflect on the intersection of political imagination and graphic narrative and support the invigorating intellectual exchange of this panel with three formal presentations, each 18 minutes long, with at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion with the session attendees.

Since the siege of the Colombian Palace of Justice on November 6, 1985, the graphic novel Los once (2011) points to collective responsibility, questioning citizenry along general lines. This graphic novel is the result of a joint effort by the art collective Sharpball, Miguel and José Luis Jiménez and the digital artist, Andrés Cruz Barrera. In terms of style, this text may initially be viewed as derivative, given the strong influence of Maus (1991) by Spiegelman, in which Jews are represented as prey and Nazis as incarnate felines. Given its willingness to embrace ambiguity, Héctor Fernández L’Hoeste defends in his paper titled “On Memory à la Spiegelman (or Not): A Millennial Reading of the Palace of Justice Massacre,” that the graphic novel’s rejection of state iconography, omits idealizations of nationality and identity. Following Los once in its call to engage collective association, the graphic novel renders a memory exercise and points to a critique of the national narrative.

Graphic novels can “spatialize memory,” from the public space of judicial power and the armed conflict, as seen in the Colombian case, to the private space of care and gender representation (Chute 108). Within the cases of the armed conflict in Colombia, the Civil War in Spain, and the dictatorship of Chile, we might also consider the national trauma of the Spanish state as being deeply linked to national identity. As it is characteristic of traumatic events, the lack of resolution calls for healing narratives of collective and individual self-fashioning. In Esther Claudio’s presentation titled “Antonio Altarriba’s El ala rota and Ana Penyas’s Estamos Todas Bien: A gender approach to historical memory”, the scholar questions the place of the voices that build the national narrative, but also the discourses, absences, bodies, and perspectives that are being rescued to contribute to Spanish identity and its relation to gender. In a similar fashion, Claudio’s argument establishes a connection between the invisibility of women’s inscription in Spanish national trauma and the invisibility of female graphic artists in the field and the public sphere.

Within an alternative time and other spatial coordinates, graphic production permits the “representational apparatus of science fiction” to encode certain “historical impulses” (Jameson 284). In this sense, Policia del Karma (2011) by Jorge Baradit, Edmundo Paz Soldán and Rodrigo Fresán, which is a dystopian cyberpunk novel set in a nondescript place and time is profoundly influenced by Chile’s recent political history, as evidenced by its plot: a sinister police force pursues criminals across time and space, even for crimes committed in the past, crimes which in their horror bear a distinct resemblance to atrocities committed by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. In the presentation “Dystopian Steampunk: Politics and Intertmediality in the Graphic Novel Policía del Karma (2011)”, Eduardo Ledesma argues that Policia del Karma also serves as a layered palimpsest of referentiality, which is instrumentalized to effect a critique of the dictatorship and the Transition’s inability to exact justice for its victims.

Political Imagination in Iberian and Latin American Graphic Narratives: Calls for Papers