Postcolonial Comics

Texts, Events, Identities

Binita Mehta, Pia Mukherji, Binita Mehta, Pia Mukherji

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317814092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection examines new comic-book cultures, graphic writing, and bande dessinée texts as they relate to postcolonialism in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone settings. The individual chapters are framed within a larger enquiry that considers definitive aspects of the postcolonial condition in twenty-first-century (con)texts.

The authors demonstrate that the fields of comic-book production and circulation in various regional histories introduce new postcolonial vocabularies, reconstitute conventional "image-functions" in established social texts and political systems, and present competing narratives of resistance and rights. In this sense, postcolonial comic cultures are of particular significance in the context of a newly global and politically recomposed landscape.

This volume introduces a timely intervention within current comic-book-area studies that remain firmly situated within the "U.S.-European and Japanese manga paradigms" and their reading publics. It will be of great interest to a wide variety of disciplines including postcolonial studies, comics-area studies, cultural studies, and gender studies.

I Geographies of Contact Gibraltar/Malta/Asia-Pacific

1 Plural Pathways, Plural Identities

Jean-Philippe Stassen's “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar”¹

Michelle Bumatay

DOI: 10.4324/9781315817576-2

In the introduction to the first volume of the French periodical XXI, launched in January 2008, editors Laurent Beccaria and Patrick de Saint-Exupéry cite a return to in-depth reports and the pursuit of innovative approaches to journalism as their main goals. They go on to explain that XXI, as the subtitle “L'Information grand format” (large-format high-quality news) suggests, is committed to providing a high-quality product both at the level of format and content. Subsequently, in addition to a mix of various genres and a close attention to visual layout and design, each issue contains at least one reportage en BD², starting with “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” (The Visitors of Gibraltar) by Belgian cartoonist Jean-Philippe Stassen, a report on global migration focusing on Gibraltar and the Mediterranean Sea. The report is told through Stassen's round-trip journey from Belgium to Morocco and back to carry out interviews and to conduct research into the various policies that regulate the movement of people across borders. Like the editors of XXI, Stassen is equally committed to a high-quality product and “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” is simultaneously visually stunning and intellectually engaging. Stassen's provocative exploration of bande dessinée as a form of expression parallels his philosophical approach to the content of “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar.” That is to say, he challenges existing discourses – mainly from countries in the European Union and in North Africa – used to describe global migration, discourses that generally seek to reduce the multifaceted reality of migration to renewed binaries inherited from the colonial era. In contrast, he offers a dense narrative that thrives on the tension between visual and verbal modes of representation just as it takes advantage of the inherently plural environment of the surface of the bande dessinée page to investigate the dynamic nature of identity in today's world. Ultimately, he seeks to render the experience of migration as human by establishing a polyvalent narrative that seeks to alter readers’ perception.

As with most journalistic bandes dessinées, “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” raises awareness about a specific current event, in this case global migration. The underlying goal to humanize the migratory experience while challenging existing sociopolitical discourses at work to control, contain, and influence public opinion about migration and migrants themselves has become an important trend among artists, writers, and filmmakers the world over. In the recent book Africa and France: Postcolonial Cultures, Migration, andRacism, Dominic Thomas singles out “the practice of humanizing complex economic, political, and social issues” as “one of the greatest challenges of twenty-first-century globalization.”³ Though Thomas's book investigates the effect of contemporary global migration on specifically French and African cultures, embedded in such a task, as Thomas argues, is a larger inquiry into the far-reaching history of Europe's involvement with Africa. Consequently, while “the lure of former colonial centers cannot be underestimated” and “transcolonial connectivity remains a powerful vector in determining the migratory objectives,” contemporary relationships between Europe and Africa have changed and “the Mediterranean has emerged as a privileged site for exploring global dynamics, containing both proximity and distance, constituting a link but also an obstacle and a barrier.”⁴ Stassen takes up this dual nature of the Mediterranean in “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” and uses it to reconfigure how contemporary migration is understood in Europe.

Though “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” chronicles Stassen's journey to learn more about migratory patterns from Africa to Europe, it is not presented as a first-person narrative. Rather, it is a dense and colorful report of the places Stassen visited and the people he met. Like all of his work, it centers on individual people, geographical locations, and the interactions between the two. In focusing on various important geographical locations along south to north migratory trajectories, it explores the range of diversity including but not limited to the experiences of locals, tourists, immigrants, both legal and illegal, and those in the interstices of such overdetermined categories. Using these disparate lived experiences as exemplars, Stassen seeks to alter readers’ points of view and expose them to the possibility of plurality – plural points of view, plural histories, plural cultures, and plural identities – as an alternative to international and national policies and discourses that seek to define and control boundaries and identities. He accomplishes this through strategies that exploit the visual-verbal nature of graphic narratives and by embracing a narrative framework akin to Michael Rothberg's notion of multidirectional memory. Throughout “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” Stassen dramatizes the longue durée or long-term nature of history and focuses on the vast range of lived experience in Europe and North Africa through geography and personal accounts.

In what follows, I first look at how Stassen attempts to change the reader's perception from the beginning of the text to allow for plural points of view. Then I focus on how framing informs Stassen's spatiotemporal representation of the Mediterranean and his illustration of the relationship between barriers and identity. Wrapped up in Stassen's approach is a correlation between framing and the controlling of borders of all kinds – metaphysical, historical, psychological, physical, and geographical – the underlying driving force for the patrolling of all such borders being one and the same, namely the power to control discourse and to select which narratives and identities are valid – and therefore grant access to unimpeded circulation – and which are not – and therefore deny access, resulting in exploitation, discrimination, persecution, and even loss of life.

Figure 1.1The first page of “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar:” a map of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean Sea.⁵

© Futuropolis/Dist. LA COLLECTION

Pointing to “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” as a prime example of the current trend to address global migratory patterns, Thomas cites the first page of Stassen's reportage en BD as indicative of “the symbiotic levels of interpenetration between Africa in Europe and Europe in Africa” where “not only is history blurred and ambiguous, but so is geography, revealing complex colonial and postcolonial relations.”⁶ More than this, however, the first page also represents Stassen's logic for the entire bande dessinée by establishing an alternative visual-verbal framework for understanding global migration, a framework very much in tune with Rothberg's multidimensional memory and one that takes into account the long-term historical causes and effects of socioeconomic and political fluctuations on culture, lived experience, and identity formation. To do this, Stassen presents the reader with a splash page of an instantly recognizable yet skewed image of the Mediterranean Sea (Figure 1.1).⁷ The map of the Mediterranean appears skewed because it has been turned ninety degrees to the left of how maps are usually presented so that north, rather than being at the top, is now to the left and south to the right. This shift in representation forces readers to reorient themselves with regards to the region. Similarly, the overlaid text that accompanies this opening image purposefully foregrounds how one's point of view informs one's perception of the world: “Le détroit de Gibraltar, par lequel pénètre l'océan Atlantique dans la mer Méditerranée (ou qui ouvre la Méditerranée sur l'Atlantique), est l'endroit où l'Afrique et l'Europe sont les plus proches” (The Straits of Gibraltar, by which the Atlantic Ocean penetrates the Mediterranean (or that opens the Mediterranean to the Atlantic), is the point at which African and Europe are at their closest).⁸ The parenthetical alternative – where the Mediterranean penetrates the Atlantic – demonstrates that even geographical awareness is relative. Stassen immediately dispels the possibility and legitimacy of a singular, all-encompassing understanding of the geographic region, let alone of the contemporary political ramifications of boundaries both natural and manmade. Furthermore, that such discrepancies in understanding and representation exist where Africa and Europe are at their closest speaks to the vast gulf between competing discourses and the reality of everyday life. This first page stresses the importance of framing, the circulation of preconceived notions, and the ways in which meaning is produced and, as a kind of introduction, alerts the reader to the importance of such factors as they relate to migration. It also hints at the multifaceted relationship between space, discourse, migration, and identity.

Bringing Rothberg's notion of multidirectional memory into dialogue with “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar” sheds light on Stassen's visual and verbal approaches to such a dynamic relationship. In Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Rothberg, combining Holocaust studies and decolonization, rejects a zero-sum view of memory and offers in contrast the notion of multidirectional memory that takes into account plural and overlapping histories and identities. Central is the understanding that memory both mediates the past to serve the present and incorporates both individual and collective memories. Underlying Rothberg's main argument is his rejection “that a straight line runs from memory to identity and that the only kinds of memories and identities that are therefore possible are ones that exclude elements of alterity and forms of commonality with others.”⁹ Rather, according to Rothberg, “pursuing memory's multidirectionality encourages us to think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others; both the subjects and spaces of the public are open to continual reconstruction.”¹⁰ The surface of a bande dessinée page can be said to echo this view of the public sphere as a dynamic place and Rothberg makes this connection himself, citing as an example the tension of the multiple layers of representation at play in Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale.¹¹ This connection is especially keen in “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar,” for its preoccupation with geographical space and how it is represented reflects Rothberg's model of public space as a continually changing discursive site that informs identity.

The inventive approach to the visual layout of the page and its relationship to content demonstrated on the first page continues throughout Stassen's round-trip journey in “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar.” Each geographical location is its own discursive site where the past and present collide. The fractured surface of the page is echoed by the layering effect of various historical facts and different trajectories onto the same physical landscape. Just as the reorientation of the map of the Mediterranean on the first page demands readers consider alternative perspectives, Stassen's use of framing, visually and verbally, brings the notion of competing narratives into focus. The text itself is fittingly divided into sections that correspond to each of the locations Stassen visited. Each new section is introduced by a heading that usually takes up the horizontal top or bottom portion of the page and consists of two panels: one panel showing a small map of each location, consistently little more than solid green land masses with winding coastlines and the blue sea onto which Stassen provides the various names of each city or region, and one panel with factual information, mainly historical in nature, about the region. In these short headings Stassen draws out the polyvalence of overlapping narratives and histories to contextualize the representations of his encounters. For while each of the city maps lacks details, superimposed on the maps are numerous monikers for each city, often in different languages (French, Spanish, Arabic, and English) and sometimes consisting of alternate historical names, which foregrounds the plurality of competing linguistic and cultural value systems. The heading for Gibraltar, for example, lists the term in French, Arabic, and, in parentheses, the English term Mountain of Tarik. With just these three terms, Stassen alludes to Gibraltar's long history and the various political entities responsible for maintaining power over such a strategically advantageous geographical location.

The plurality inherent in the multiple monikers for each of the cities is further elaborated in the various facts Stassen chooses to accompany each new heading that frame key historical moments and ...