The Human Rights Graphic Novel

Drawing it Just Right

Pramod K. Nayar

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000224238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book studies human rights discourse across a variety of graphic novels, both fiction and non-fiction, originating in different parts of the world, from India to South Africa, Sarajevo to Vietnam, with texts on the Holocaust, the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, the Rwandan and Sarajevan genocides, the Vietnam War, comfort women in World War II and the Civil Rights movement in the USA, to mention a few.

The book demonstrates the emergence of the 'universal' subject of human rights, despite the variations in contexts. It shows how war, rape, genocide, abuse, social iniquity, caste and race erode personhood in multiple ways in the graphic novel, which portrays the construction of vulnerable subjects, the cultural trauma of collectives, the crisis and necessity of witnessing, and resilience-resistance through specific representational and aesthetic strategies. It covers a large number of authors and artists: Joe Sacco, Joe Kubert, Matt Johnson-Walter Pleece, Guy Delisle, Appupen, Thi Bui, Olivier Kugler and others. Through a study of these vastly different authors and styles, the book proposes that the graphic novel as a form is perfectly suited to the 'culture' and the lingua franca of human rights due to its amenability to experimentation and the sheer range within the form.

The book will appeal to scholars in comics studies, human rights studies, visual culture studies and to the general reader with an interest in these fields.

1
Introduction

Graphic humans and rights

The field of ‘Literature and Human Rights’ is a fast-growing and rapidly diversifying field. It ranges from studies of specific genres to superbly eclectic anthologies that cover a gamut of themes and forms in the broad area of Human Rights (HR) literary-cultural studies and to specific work on victimhood, gender, perpetrators and witnessing. We have seen book-length works that offer a typology of the ‘human rights novel’ or first person human rights narratives – exemplified, most recently, in James Dawes’ The Novel of Human Rights (2018), but also in earlier works like Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith’s Human Rights and Narrated Lives (2004), Joseph Slaughter’s now classic Human Rights, Inc. (2007) and Elizabeth Anker’s Fictions of Dignity (2012). Then there are works that examine the specifics of perpetrator-representations and discourses, as in James Dawes’ Evil Men (2013) and Joanne Pettitt’s Perpetrators in Holocaust Narratives (2017). Key anthologies such as Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore’s Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (2012) and Teaching Human Rights in Literary and Cultural Studies (2015), Sophia McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore’s The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights (2016) and Crystal Parikh’s The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature (2019) have brought together scholars from diverse academic domains, from narrative theory to Comics Studies, invigorating the investigations into the field that, in their earlier volume, Goldberg and Moore termed an ‘interdiscipline’ (2012).

A glance, first, at what a Human Rights perspective means. The editor of The Journal of Human Rights Practice, Ron Dudai puts it this way:

Adding a human rights lens to the way we view a specific problem or debate – poverty, criminal justice, climate change, the risks facing elderly people – means understanding the problem differently, categorizing it in a specific way, framing it in another narrative, imagining remedies and therefore also envisaging certain types of interventions (Dudai 2019). A human rights framing brings to the fore certain desired aspects of social reality: the obligations of the state, non-discrimination, accountability; it helps in articulating certain claims and deploying certain mechanisms for redress (Dudai 2019). It can entail, for example, internationalizing a form of injustice hitherto considered a local peculiarity (Bob 2007), drawing attention to remediable injustices in the context of what hitherto appeared to be unfortunate yet unavoidable suffering (Mégret 2011), or exposing abuses inherent in a certain social policy, such as in relation to drugs (Golichenko et al. 2018). Framing a grievance as a human right can strongly influence the way people understand both the problem and the solution (Clement 2018), and a human rights framework often also interacts with, contradicts or complements other frameworks guiding practice, such as medical aid, humanitarianism, and political action (Filc et al. 2015)… . [T]he idea of human rights itself becomes an independent social variable, which individuals, institutions, states, and other actors put into play for a wide range of purposes.

(2019: 275)

For Dudai, activist-scholarship that brings the HR lens to bear on topics, concerns and issues, such as poverty or climate change, is central to the practice of HR itself. In other words, the HR perspective used in examining socio-political situations and texts within academic work is integral to the larger field of HR practice. I take this to mean that the HR perspective is a form of reading texts that constitutes activist-scholarship and contributes, consequently, to HR cultures and HR practices. In this book, the focus is on an HR perspective to aid our reading of texts and discourses, a common focal point of the interdiscipline, ‘Human Rights and Literature’.

The emphasis in much HR academic work on the link between narrative (of many kinds, including the visual) and rights (including the ‘right to narrate’) has been the foundation for the interdiscipline, one could argue. A ‘human rights–oriented literary criticism’, write Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore,

attends to what is shared by narratives of suffering while at the same time recognizing the particular situations and positions of those who suffer; it explores how narratives probe the limits of language, representation, and translation to depict their subjects adequately; it reflects awareness of the arguably “west-centric” history of human rights, taking account of representations of non-western approaches to human rights, and of economic and social rights as well as third-generation solidarity rights; and it engages in both reflection upon and critique of the theories of the liberal subject and the liberal democratic state that underlie the modern international human rights system.

(2012: 3–4)

Even when granting the primacy, even necessity, of a narrative foundation to HR, commentators studying literature produced from within conditions of torture, oppression and death, caution us that, for many, ‘the relationship between life and narrative is triangulated by violence, which very often takes the form of law, or is subject to its command’ (Slaughter, “Life, Story, Violence,” 17; also see Judith Butler reading Poems from Guantanamo Bay in her Frames of War). Others have suggested that, ‘any text can be read and taught through the lens of human rights, in the sense that most texts reference the human, with attendant vulnerabilities, connections, contexts, and conflicts that make up the field of the human in human rights’ (Moore and Goldberg 2015: 3) and that ‘human rights as a mode of reception benefits from explicit links between literary representation and rights-speak’, even as, on occasion, ‘close readings of literary and narrative form can reveal the deep structures of violation with respect to rights and their representation’ (4).

Slaughter (“Vanishing Points”) and Butler (Precarious Lives) alert us to contexts in which a victim of rights violations may not be able to produce narratives, critiques or histories, while Anker, like Slaughter (Human Rights, Inc.), identifies key features of genres aligned with HR discourses. Others have traced the various genealogies of the ‘HR novel’, such as the sentimental novel (Hunt, Inventing Human Rights). Yet others scrutinize genealogies of the humanitarian movement – central to the HR campaigns and discourses in the twentieth century – within the European Enlightenment and imperialism (Barnett, The Empire of Humanity). In doing so, they drew attention to the evolution of the idea of the human. Such works, as Gareth Griffiths notes in the introduction to a collection of essays on the ‘cultural imaginary’ of HR, offer a ‘challenge … to the idea of a unilateral and uncontested concept of human rights’ (3). One must consider, James Dawes cautions, the risk involved in ‘the pernicious flattening out of context [of] human rights legal universalism’ (18). This means, he argues, paying attention to the ways and extent to which ‘narrative patterns’ in contemporary HR literature draw upon a diverse tradition of writing: Soviet dissidents, representations of transitional justice in South America, anti-apartheid activist literature, African American literary traditions and the neo-slave narratives of the contemporary era (18–19. Also see Parikh 2017).

Merging two abiding interests – HR and graphic novels and comics – this book continues themes pursued in my own earlier work: vulnerability and precarity, representations and rights, in literary and popular texts. While in my earlier directly HR-related works I have examined the question of rights in various literary-cultural texts (Writing Wrongs, 2012; Human Rights and Literature, 2016) and explored the form in another (The Indian Graphic Novel, 2016), this book focuses exclusively on the genre I term the ‘HR graphic novel’.

This choice of the graphic novel as its subject matter locates the book within visual culture studies of HR. The visual media’s links with HR discourses and campaigns have also been studied, even if these were not situated within the field of HR but opted to study adjunct fields where HR themes do find resonance, say, aboriginal lives, refugees or war. As a subfield – although Comics Studies scholars may agitate at this taxonomic violence – of visual culture studies, the graphic novel has also been extensively examined for its representations of war, violence, genocide and trauma. One shortlists here: Hillary Chute’s Disaster Drawn (2016), Andrés Romero-Jódar’s The Trauma Graphic Novel (2017), Harriet Earle’s Comics, Trauma and the New Art of War (2017), Laurike in ’t Veld’s The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels (2019) and Jane Chapman et al.’s Comics, the Holocaust and Hiroshima (2015). Besides these extended works, individual essays such as Rebecca Scherr’s (2015) on Joe Sacco, or Weber and Rall’s (“Authenticity in Comics Journalism” 2017) study of the visual strategies that communicate the sense of authenticity in comics journalism, come to mind here.

Based on the assumption that popular forms in literature and culture provide the necessary visibility to disaster, disaster victims, the violated person, as well as generate the language – representational modes – of Human Rights, this book is situated within the field of ‘Popular Culture and Human Rights’ (one could easily discern such a field emerging, and not just in terms of the books listed in the previous paragraph, but also in work such as Lieve Gies’ ‘Celebrity Big Brother, Human Rights and Popular Culture’). The graphic novel is a pre-eminent form to thematize HR concerns, with its ability to merge text and image, force a critical literacy upon the reader, enable a visibilization of the act – and politics – of witnessing, capture trauma, embody violence, generate empathetic and affective connections, to cite a few key features of the medium and the genre that find their place in the current work as well.

The HR graphic novel as a genre within the medium of graphic novels, plays a significant role in what Michael Galchinsky terms ‘the culture of Human Rights’. This ‘culture’, writes Galchinsky,

is generally not as concerned about the juncture between facts and norms (Habermas 1998) as it is about the juncture between feelings and forms. It is less about establishing an agreed code, and more about sharing individual experiences. Emotionally resonant human rights art typically doesn’t change laws or regimes; rather, it seeks to change the prevailing ethos, by depicting what human rights mean for the individuals who are deprived of them, who witness the abuse, who perpetrate it, who mourn the victims, who intervene, who provide aid, or who transmit the stories. By relating such experiences, human rights culture tries to shape a durable recollection for the wounded community.

(viii)

It seeks ‘to ground the formal rights system in an informal rights ethos’ by producing structures of feeling that appeal across national borders (2). Thus, this culture contributes to the making of a ‘global civil culture’ (5). This latter is defined as ‘an attempt to strengthen the support of publics around the world for human rights and humanitarian norms, treaties, and institutions’ (110). For such a culture to emerge, it is essential for a human rights imaginary, a language and set of modes of communicating vulnerability as well as resistance, traumatic collapse as well as resilient subjecthood to be in place as well. The human rights imaginary is driven by affect and the demand for a response. Galchinsky is keen on establishing four ‘socio-political emotions triggered by human rights violations’:

a communal sense of fear, outrage, and desire for solidarity (protest); the urge to witness, remember, and narrate (testimony); the need to satirize, express the absurdity of life under violation, and find relief (laughter); and the yearnings for mourning, renewal, and reconciliation (lament)’.

(6–7)

These are emotions found across HR texts, and the graphic novel is no exception, as we shall see. There is considerable heft and valence to Will Eisner’s claim that comics artists use ‘universally understood images’ (cited in Schmitz-Emans 386).

Galchinsky’s observations resonate with HR graphic texts’ instantiation of what Ngugi wa’Thiong O identified as the globalectic imagination. Ngugi’s definition of ‘globalectics’ is worth citing in full:

Globalectics combines the global and the dialectical to describe a mutually affecting dialogue, or multi-logue, in the phenomena of nature and nurture in a global space that’s rapidly transcending that of the artificially bounded, as nation and region. The global is that which humans in spaceships or on the international space station see: the dialectical is the internal dynamics that they do not see. Globalectics embraces wholeness, interconnectedness, equality of potentiality of parts, tension, and motion. It is a way of thinking and relating to the world, particularly in the era of globalism and globalization.

(36)

The HR graphic novel allows us, indeed forces us, to see the interconnectedness of suffering, the mutuality of vulnerability, the similar but not identical instantiations of resistance across different physiognomies, bodies and contexts. They appropriate the globalizing ‘rights discourse’ alongside a dialectic between the local specifics of, say, violations or resistance and international concerns (refugees, torture, war humanitarian interventions). The dialectic of local/global, in short, may be productively harnessed with global rights discourses in a form adequate to the task. The formation of a global civil society is rendered possible through the creation of the HR graphic novel medium and genre (although it must be said, the medium is now a huge bandwagon, and much of the work appearing is often below par). If the literary enables the making of civil society and a public sphere at local and national levels, then it stands to reason that a global civil society requires a form that may attain such a readership, generating a global critical literacy around HR. It is the assumption and claim of this book that the Human Rights comics is such a form, and the graphic novel is a constituent of ‘world literature’, as Monika Schmitz-Emans argues ...