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.
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 â metaphysical, historical, psychological, physical, and geographical â 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 â and therefore grant access to unimpeded circulation â and which are not â and therefore deny access, resulting in exploitation, discrimination, persecution, and even loss of life.
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 âLes Visiteurs de Gibraltar.â 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 ...