Just in Time: Comics in Times of Genocide

Resha, Adrienne; Resha, Adrienne

In their introduction to the anthology Cartoonists for Palestine, published in October 2024, editors Yazan al-Saadi, Shay Mirk, Andy Warner, and Tracy Chahwan urge that, “in the face of calamity, artists still have a role to play” (4). While the editors speak specifically to the “forced displacement and killing of Palestinian people,” which has been ongoing since 1948 but has become more visible in the past two years, they also place their work within a transnational tradition of comics depicting genocide across time and place, from “those who used art to reckon with the death camps of the Holocaust in Europe to those who employed art to fight against Apartheid in South Africa, and more” (4). If genocidal violence is often normalized and invisibilized, particularly as it is happening, then how do comics “as a form of documentary, as a form of witnessing,” according to comics scholar Hillary Chute, make these calamities visible (Disaster Drawn 1)? This session considers how comics remember, represent, and respond to genocidal violence, with a particular focus on the ongoing genocide in Gaza. We consider how comics not only bear visual witness to genocide but also provoke action and/or envision pathways to repair and justice.

As images of the genocide in Gaza have flooded our screens, there is a renewed urgency around understanding how these images circulate, the ethics of their consumption, and how comics re-mediate them through drawing. The comics that we discuss have all been published within the past year to respond to the ongoing violence in Gaza: the Cartoonists for Palestine anthology (2024), the United Nations’ (UNs’) collaboration with Lebanese comics artist Omar Khouri “Palestine and the Right to Food” (2024), the Samidoon: Comics for a Free Palestine anthology (2025), and Mazen Kerbaj’s Gaza in My Phone (2025). It is the hyper-contemporary nature of these works that necessitates a just-in-time session, as some of this work was not yet published before the regular session deadline. Our session seeks to catch the scholarly discourse up with this influx of timely comic art by bringing insights from genocide studies and Palestine studies to bear on comics studies.

Adrienne Resha argues that charity anthologies like Cartoonists for Palestine and Samidoon: Comics for a Free Palestine not only say what otherwise might not be said about the ongoing genocide in Gaza but also, in their “relentless foregrounding,” show it (Said, Palestine ii). Their comics do not just document the atrocities of the present: they contextualize it in history, connecting it to the Nakba of 1948, and conceptualize futures in which not just Gaza but the whole of Palestine is free.

Alexandra Gueydan-Turek examines how Lebanese cartoonist Mazen Kerbaj’s blog-turned-comics album Gaza in My Phone recovers the moral force of art to document genocidal violence and to disrupt ways of seeing it. Against the regime of policed invisibility that frames the genocidal violence of the war, Kerbaj’s drawn reproductions of photographs and screenshots from news sources and social media elevate the voice of Gazaoui citizens, pay homage to citizen journalism’s central role in chronicling precarious Palestinian lives, and highlight the importance of cartooning as an act of solidarity and an agent of what Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski call “media witnessing” (“Media Witnessing and the Ripeness of Time”).

Katherine Kelp-Stebbins examines the possibilities and compromises attending the submission of the first UN report in comics form, “Palestine and the Right to Food,” created in collaboration with UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri and Lebanese comics artist Omar Khouri. The report, she argues, reveals a fundamental untranslatability between the methodologies of testimony and visibility offered by comics and sanctioned documentation practice.

As our panel has the recommended number of three presentations, we plan to have 17-18 minutes for each presentation followed by at least 15-minutes of discussion. Our presenters span ranks (one Postdoctoral Scholar and two Associate Professors) and come from a variety of departments and disciplines (English, Modern Languages, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures, French and Francophone Studies, and Comics Studies). Our co-organizer, presider, and presenter Adrienne Resha, in particular, is a rising scholar (a “Rising Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow,” in fact) within the field of Arab and Arab American literature and culture and is, herself, Arab American. Alexandra Gueydan-Turek also specializes in comics and graphic novels in the Arab world, and all of our panelists center work created by Arab and/or Palestinian artists or in collaboration with them.

Just in Time: Comics in Times of Genocide: Calls for Papers