Memory offers an alternative to institutionalized historiography and serves as a site of contestation for official narrative. Storing personal – often traumatic – experiences might challenge, contest, add or question a whole apparatus that actively hides the perpetrators' accountability. This session will discuss how graphic novels in Spanish speaking countries have used the powerful combination of drawing and text to explore the act of remembering as a way to find truth, justice and reconciliation. How do contemporary comics approach devastating public histories? How do identity politics speak of political violence and its artistic rendering? What mechanisms are used to aesthetically and politically visualize testimony? What traumas are culturally articulated and which ones are still unspeakable and hard or impossible to articulate? These are some of the questions to debate in this panel.

The specificities of graphic narrative demand particular forms of study. As a type of literature, comics reveal a proximity to the textual tradition but the use of drawings, the dialogue between panels and text, and the specific elements of this language demand a theoretical approach on its own. For this reason, creating a space for dialogue at the MLA convention among academics devoted to the study of this particular artistic expression is crucial. Memory is arguably the most recurrent and important topic of contemporary graphic novels, both in stories of individual memory and in the mnemonics related to political violence. In Spanish speaking countries, graphic narrative has come to the forefront of international debates because it has provided some of the most sophisticated reflections on the matter. Transitional justice from dictatorial regimes in Peru, Uruguay or Spain together with testimonial representations, memorialization from or against the State, genocides and ecocides throughout the entire continent, and massive migratory movements have been portrayed in comics in all their magnitude. A panel on memory and political violence in Spanish speaking comic production is crucial to further advance the study on the matter.

Within the increasing attention towards comics in general, international criticism reveals a profound interest in comics from Spain and Latin America. The New York Times and El País have called the current period the “golden age of the comic in Spanish.” The two special issues of European Comic Art on Spanish comics are the only ones so far to have been published as a book - Spanish Comics- Historical and Cultural Perspectives (Berghahn, 2021). The scholarly journal ARBOR devoted a special issue to Spanish comics, while international research groups at the Université Blaise Pascal in France and at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom are funded by the European Union to further their research on comics from Spain and from Latin America.

This session provides an intersectional approach to memory that will also reflect the geopolitical complexity of the Spanish-speaking countries. Carla Sagástegui will present on the documentation and research that she carried out for one of the most well-known graphic novels on Human Rigths, No one will take you out of your land (2019) and the general oeuvre of Peruvian journalist Jesús Cossio. Her paper focuses on transitional justice just as Elizabeth Warren does for the Spanish case. In her presentation, she interrogates the “successful” Spanish Transition through the grotesque aesthetics of Carlos Giménez’s underground comics in España Una, Grande y Libre. Finally, Denisse Torena will explain her artistic work-in-progress that rescues the memories of an 88-year old Uruguayan about the dictatorship years. Her graphic novel aims not only at portraying a traumatic period for the country but also at problematizing gender and ageism In order to allow for at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion, the presentations will be limited to 20 minutes with a Q&A part at the end.