This panel brings together three established field experts to address the ways graphic texts navigate postcolonial contexts from Lebanon to Iran that evoke the tensions between Freud’s concepts of mourning and melancholia, between coming to terms with the past and the imperative never to forget, while at the same time “reimagin[ing] mourning,” as Brown and Puri argue, “away from a process of individualized grief-work” and towards “a collective condition” in the aim of fashioning subaltern archives.
Presenters will speak for fifteen minutes each, leaving a half-hour for questions. Leila Pazargadi starts the panel with “Autographics and the Archive,” investigating the graphic memoirs of Marjane Satrapi and Zeina Abirached by tracing the contrast between the motifs of home and the street in Persepolis, A Game for Swallows, and I Remember Beirut. Pazargadi argues that the comics medium allows these authors visually to confront historical conflict and personal trauma through innovative modes of witnessing. By locating their stories within domestic spaces, she contends, Satrapi and Abirached highlight the tension between national politics and everyday life while foregrounding the intergenerational memories produced and preserved within the home, suggesting the texts ultimately function as archives, preserving personal and familial histories while challenging dominant political narratives.
In “You Can’t Mourn What You Won’t Remember,” Kate Polak observes that although the Prophet Muhammed requested that his grave be without markings, Muslims developed a range of commemorative art utilizing stunning geometric designs and tessellations, integrating calligraphy to invoke the past in ways both narratorial and abstract. Starting from this visual environment, Polak explores how the history of Islamic art can be used to critique recent Orientalist representations of the Arab world in graphic narratives, focusing on comics by non-Muslims such as Craig Thompson’s Habibi, and how they employ colonialist and anti-colonialist strategies in their afflatus of Islamic art in a problematic aestheticization of postcolonial sites of mourning.
Anchoring the panel, James Hodapp, in “Postmemory and Trauma in the Graphic Memoirs of Zeina Abirached,” identifies the author as part of a growing number of Lebanese artists who were either too young during the Lebanese Civil War to remember it or were born afterwards, but who still center trauma, witnessing, and memory of the war in their work, interrogating how a generation without memory of an event can memorialize it. Using Hirsch’s concept of postmemory—how even those who did not experience a foundational trauma often organize their identities around it—he argues that in A Game for Swallows and I Remember Beirut, Abirached exemplifies postmemorial work through time dilation (the stretching of narrative time) and an anamorphic gaze (gaining clarity by looking at one’s subject indirectly) to express the immediacy of previous trauma for subsequent generations.
This panel engages the convention’s theme of “Emancipatory Narratives” through these works’ commitment to, to paraphrase James Baldwin, “keeping brutal experience alive” in the form of the autobiographical memorial, forging the mourning process into an agential renegotiation of history and identity in a geopolitical region in which the echoes of colonial violence seem always to remain.