Postcolonial Comics

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 vocab-
ularies, 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 p
­ articular signifi-
cance 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 Japa­
nese 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.

Binita Mehta is Professor of French and Director of the International Stud-

ies Program at Manhattanville College, U.S. where she teaches a variety
of courses in French language, literature, and film. She is the author of
Widows, Pariahs, and ‘Bayadères’: India as Spectacle (2002) and has pub-
lished several articles and book chapters on French and Francophone litera-
ture and film, South Asian diasporic cinema, and on the Francophone bande
dessinée.

Pia Mukherji earned her doctorate in English Literature from the ­Graduate
School and University Center of the City University of New York, U.S.
Her research and publications are in the areas of British modernism, new-
media texts, and diasporic cultures. She has taught a variety of courses on
­modernism, postcolonial literatures, film studies, and writing in the New
York and Boston areas.
Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures

Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Stud-
ies, University of Kent at Canterbury, this series presents a wide range of
research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will
concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently)
colonized areas, and will include material from non-anglophone as well
as anglophone colonies and literatures. Series editors: Donna Landry and
Caroline Rooney.

  1 Land and Nationalism in   8 Postcolonial Nostalgias

Fictions from Southern Africa Writing, Representation
James Graham and  emory
Dennis Walder
  2 Paradise Discourse, Imperialism,
and Globalization   9 Publishing the Postcolonial
Exploiting Eden Anglophone West African and
Sharae Deckard Caribbean Writing in the UK
1948–1968
  3 The Idea of the Antipodes Gail Low
Place, People, and Voices
Matthew Boyd Goldie 10 Postcolonial Tourism
Literature, Culture, and
  4 Feminism, Literature and Environment
Rape Narratives Anthony Carrigan
Violence and Violation
Edited by Sorcha Gunne and 11 The Postcolonial City and
Zoë Brigley Thompson its Subjects
London, Nairobi, Bombay
  5 Locating Transnational Rashmi Varma
Ideals
Edited by Walter Goebel and 12 Terrorism, Insurgency and
Saskia Schabio Indian-English Literature,
1830–1947
  6 Transnational Negotiations Alex Tickell
in Caribbean Diasporic
Literature 13 The Postcolonial Gramsci edited
Remitting the Text Neelam Srivastava and Baidik
Kezia Page Bhattacharya

  7 Representing Mixed Race in 14 Postcolonial Audiences:

Jamaica and England from Readers, Viewers and Reception
the Abolition Era to the Edited by Bethan Benwell,
Present James Procter and Gemma
S. Salih Robinson
15 Culture, Diaspora, and 24 The Ethics of Representation in
Modernity in Muslim Writing Literature, Art, and Journalism
Edited by Rehana Ahmed, Peter Transnational Responses to the
Morey, and Amina Yaqin Siege of Beirut
Edited by Caroline Rooney and
16 Edward Said’s Translocations Rita Sakr
Essays in Secular Criticism,
Edited by Tobias Döring and 25 Fiction, Film, and Indian
Mark Stein Popular Cinema
Salman Rushdie’s Novels and
17 Postcolonial Memoir in the the Cinematic Imagination
Middle East Florian Stadtler
Rethinking the Liminal in
Mashriqi Writing 26 Language and Translation in
Norbert Bugeja Postcolonial Literatures
Multilingual Contexts,
18 Critical Perspectives on Indo- Translational Texts,
Caribbean Women’s Literature Edited by Simona Bertacco
Edited by Joy Mahabir and
Mariam Pirbhai 27 Postcolonial Custodianship
Cultural and Literary Inheritance
19 Palestinian Literature and Filippo Menozzi
Film in Postcolonial
Feminist Perspective 28 Sex Trafficking in Postcolonial
Anna Ball Literature
Transnational Narratives from
20 Locating Postcolonial Joyce to Bolaño
Narrative Genres Laura Barberán Reinares
Edited by Walter Goebel and
Saskia Schabio 29 The Future of Postcolonial
Studies
21 Resistance in Contemporary Edited by Chantal Zabus
Middle Eastern Cultures
Literature, Cinema and Music 30 Postcolonial Comics
Edited by Karima Laachir and Texts, Events, Identities
Saeed Talajooy Edited by Binita Mehta and
Pia Mukherji
22 The Postsecular Imagination
Postcolonialism, Religion,
and Literature Related Titles
Manav Ratti
Postcolonial Life-Writing
23 Popular Culture in the Middle Culture, Politics, and
East and North Africa Self-Representation
A Postcolonial Outlook, Bart Moore-Gilbert
Edited by Walid El Hamamsy
and Mounira Soliman
This page intentionally left blank
Postcolonial Comics
Texts, Events, Identities

Edited by
Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji
First published 2015
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the
authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,

and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Postcolonial comics : texts, events, identities / edited by Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji.
pages cm. — (Routledge research in postcolonial literatures ; 53)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Comic books, strips, etc.—History and criticism. 2. Graphic novels—History
and criticism. 3. Postcolonialism in literature. I. Mehta, Binita, 1962- editor.
II. Mukherji, Pia, 1966- editor.
PN6714.P676 2015
741.5'9—dc23 2014045621

ISBN: 978-0-415-73813-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-81757-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction1
B inita M ehta and P ia Mukherji

Part I
Geographies of Contact: Gibraltar / Malta / Asia-Pacific

  1 Plural Pathways, Plural Identities: Jean-Philippe Stassen’s

Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar 29
M ichelle B umatay

  2 Joe Sacco’s “Prying Outsiders”: Marginalization, Graphic

Novel Form, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Representation 44
Sam K nowles

  3 Tezuka Osamu’s Postcolonial Discourse towards

a Hybrid National Identity 59
Roman Rosenbaum

Part II
Francophone Post-Histories: Algeria / Congo / Gabon

  4 Memory and Postmemory in Morvandiau’s D’Algérie 77

A nn M iller

  5 Guilty Melancholia and Memorial Work: Representing

the Congolese Past in Comics 92
V É roniQue B ragard

  6 Visualizing Postcolonial Africa: La Vie de Pahé 111

B inita M ehta
viii Contents
Part III
Postcolonial Politics: India

  7 Postcolonial Demo-graphics: Traumatic Realism in

Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm 131
P ramod K . N ayar

  8 Graphics of Freedom: Colonial Terrorists and

Postcolonial Revolutionaries in Indian Comics 142
H arleen S ingh

  9 Graphic Ecriture: Gender and Magic Iconography in Kari 157

P ia M ukherji

Part IV
War, Nationhood, and Transnationalism: The Middle East

10 Visualizing the Emerging Nation: Jewish and Arab

Editorial Cartoons in Palestine, 1939–48 171
J effrey J ohn B arnes

11 Drawing for a New Public: Middle Eastern 9th Art and

the Emergence of a Transnational Graphic Movement  187
M assimo di Ricco

12 Men with Guns: War Narratives in New Lebanese Comics 204

L ena I rmgard Merhej

Contributors 223
Index 227
Acknowledgments

The following materials have been reprinted with kind permission from the
original copyright holders:
Bassil Zeina, La Furie des Glandeurs, Issue 4, page 12
Charles, Jean-François & Maryse Charles, Bihel Frédéric. I. Africa Dreams:
L’ombre du Roi (Casterman, 2010), p. 23. © Casterman. Reprinted with
kind permission from Casterman.
La Vie de Pahe T.1-Bitam and La Vie de Pahe T.2-Paname. Art & Colors by
Pahé; Script by Pahé. © Editions Paquet – Geneva.
Perrissin, Christian & Tirabosco, Tom. Kongo: Le ténébreux voyage de Józef
Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski. (Futuropolis 2013), p. 140. © Futuropolis.
Reprinted with kind permission from Futuropolis.
Osamu Tezuka’s  Message to Adolf  (part1) Translator: Kumar Sivasubra-
manian. New York: Vertical, 2012, Vol.1: page 115 and 399. © Tezuka
­Productions.
Stassen’s depiction of Ceuta, the Spanish enclave in Morocco. © Futuropolis /
Dist. LA COLLECTION the fdz, Samandal issue 0.
The first page of “Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar:” a map of Gibraltar and the
Mediterranean Sea. © Futuropolis / Dist. LA COLLECTION
“Two Images and Text” from the book JOURNALISM by Joe Sacco.
­Copyright ©2012 by Joe Sacco. Used by permission of Henry Holt and
Company, LLC. All rights reserved.
“Two Images and Text” from the book JOURNALISM by Joe Sacco.
­Copyright ©2012 by Joe Sacco. Used by permission of Penguin Random
House UK. All rights reserved.
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji

The edited volume Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities examines

new comic-book cultures, graphic writing, and bande dessinée texts1 as they
relate to postcolonialism in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone
settings. As we attempt to describe our work in relation to established com-
ics’ scholarship on minority, ethno-racial, postimperial, and multicultural
themes, the key terms under investigation in this introductory essay will
include two basic categories: multimodal comics narratives and their sur-
rounding postcolonial moments. The readings in this collection will be
framed, therefore, within a larger enquiry, one that considers definitive
aspects of the postcolonial condition in twenty-first-century contexts.
To introduce such graphic forms and practice as “meaningful postcolo-
nial work,”2 we first look to a field of research that has broadly employed
two distinct approaches to think about comics: first, in terms of (visual/
verbal) textualities,3 and next, in relation to (social/popular) cultures. Early
structural and semiotic studies of graphic language systems and grammars,
image-semiologies, and comics-narratologies, primarily in French scholar-
ship, designated comics as complex, encoded texts and located them within
a theoretical paradigm of “meaningful” structures.4 Comics codes were then
made problematic and characterized variously as ideological, deep, or (de)
constructive by later Marxist, psychoanalytic, or postmodern/poststructur-
alist revisions within a continuing critical tradition.5
The second paradigm of comics analysis is usefully outlined in Jean-Paul
Gabilliet’s authoritative cultural history of American comics. Gabilliet studies
the development of the “forms of modern comic art”6 as related problems of
definition and periodization. To determine if comics were indeed “born with
the mass production of the American comic strip in 1896,”7 Gabilliet proposes
that we first define the medium by examining the historical limits of comics
art and narrative. The basic picture-narrative theory of comics indicates a vast
inventory of formal pretexts that evolve from diverse iconographic traditions,
histories, and media.8 How, then, should we locate the specific category of
comics within this comprehensive register? Gabilliet suggests that a precise dif-
ferentiation requires the expansion of the term to accommodate extra-aesthetic
criteria. “Comics as a medium … is a result of a multiplicity of endogenic (aes-
thetic) and exogenic (technological, economic, social) factors.”9 While noting
2  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji
David Kunzle’s assertion that the origin of modern comics started in 1453
with a technological breakthrough, the standardization of the mobile print-
ing press, Gabilliet further examines comics history in relation to technologi-
cal, economic, and cultural shifts in the context of mass publishing since the
1830s.10 In naming comics as a cultural medium of the long twentieth century,
we find that its politics can be identified variously: as the incorporated visual
economy of a conservative mass culture or within a critical history of recuper-
ating comics from a mass to a ‘popular’ cultural product.11
Crucially, these distinct methodologies of reading comics, as textual
compositions and as cultural forms, are both organized around a common
enquiry: how can we think about comics as both meaningful and politi-
cal? Can we further elaborate these notions of comics more specifically, as
instances of postcolonial textuality or as aspects of public culture in the
postcolony, for example? It is precisely in such interrogations that we may
perhaps find a way to address the question central to our own study: how
do comics studies connect to postcolonial histories, criticism, and writing?

POstcOlOnial COmics: TeXtUalities and

PUblic CUltUres

Colonial textuality has long been identified as a persistent and strate-

gic practice of epistemic violence: self-identifying as legitimate systems of
knowledge, engaged in naming the self/other binary, and encoding names
in hierarchies of significance in (post) imperial contexts.12 Historically,
“imperial relations … were always crucially maintained in their interpella-
tive phases by textuality, both institutionally [and] informally,”13 working
as “ensembles of linguistically based practices [deployed] in the manage-
ment of colonial relationships.”14 These operations attempted to simultane-
ously legitimize colonial discourse as well as to erase and contain subversive
textualities. In postcolonial negotiations of such a “vast semantic field of
representations”15 that supported Western colonial enterprise, the most
effective interventions seem to proceed from an understanding of the notion
of unstable systems and signification; in fact, in the recognition of “colonial-
ism both as a set of political relations and as a signifying system, but one
with [the] ambivalent structural relations”16 that mark colonizing encoun-
ters. Postcolonial textualities, therefore, enter colonial discourse deconstruc-
tively, inhabiting its ambiguities and fissures, and thus initiate a “persistent
questioning of the frame, which at one level, is the space of representation,
and at another level, the frame of western modernity itself.”17 The essays
in this volume demonstrate that graphic writing, particularly enabled by
complex signifying resources, may be read as an effective category of “post-
colonial textuality,” foregrounding colonial legacies and (re)scripting miss-
ing or misrepresented identities in their precise contexts. Additionally, we
propose postcolonial comics are uniquely able to perform the characteristic
 Introduction  3
“deconstructive image functions” that remain a central paradigm of resis-
tance in Timothy Brennan’s critique of dominant “economic image-­functions”
signifying cultures of current global neo-liberalism. Brennan argues that
­established textual visualities encode rules of perception that regulate and
determine “usable” ideas of global peripheries in the present ­“information”
age. The political utility of these perceptions to new systems of imperial power
are tied to their figurations as “calculated zones of invisibility,” “service-
able abstractions,” or “repositories for counter-modernity.”18 The critique
then prescribes the important postcolonial work of decoding and contest-
ing image-objects of everyday ideology within resistant postcolonial visual
cultures and in the deconstructive textual strategies of postmodern icono-
graphics. The essays in this edition examine how comic-book production and
circulation in contemporary regional histories usefully employ and introduce
precisely such new postcolonial vocabularies. These scripts employ visual
grammars, image-texts, and graphic performances that reconstitute conven-
tional “image-functions” in established social texts and political systems and
thus, perhaps, re-envision competing narratives of resistance or rights. In this
sense, new comic cultures are of particular significance in the context of a
politically recomposed global landscape. The “creolization” of contemporary
comics forms and their reading publics arising from “the global flux of ideas
and images [within which] voices and registers overlap” necessarily creates a
“proliferation of genres and cultural exchanges within contemporary visual
cultures” and places local texts within an “expanding global public sphere
[where] the imperatives of the sign – drawing, art, photography, images or
comics – can now no longer be perceived as cultural symbols [that com-
municate] obsolete authenticities.”19 The postcolonial comic thus becomes
a particularly appropriate venue that offers radical and progressive alterna-
tives to the notion of obsolete authenticities, and, as such, “bears witness – to
testify, to accuse, to archive.”20 The readings of text, event, and identity in
the essays that follow seek to clarify precisely these moments of postcolonial
elucidation.
Apart from reading comics textualities, our studies of new comics cul-
tures from, for example, Lebanon, Algeria, Egypt, or India may be use-
fully allied with the theoretical expression of a new category, that of public
culture as a condition of modernity in the postcolony. Drawing on recent
studies on South Asian public culture as a late-modern formation distinct
from Western histories of elite, mass, and popular cultures21 or public
spheres where consumer practices depoliticize communicative action,22 we
propose that current transnational comics scenes may be contextualized
within “new public modernities”23 which particularly emphasize cultural
registers such as the circulation of images, the political roles of visuality,
“the importance of symbolic actions as opposed to rational speech, and
the links between mass media and the emancipatory dimensions of art, dis-
play and performance.”24 In contrast to familiar notions of the dominant
‘mass-manufactured’ or the marginal/subcultural ‘popularized’ in Western
4  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji
culture theory, Appadurai and Breckenridge describe public culture as a
way to enter “modernity within particular historical frames,” characterized
by a “mainstream quality” and occupying spaces created by new media,
“nomad technologies,” and the “current manipulation of signs” in a field of
global cultural flows.25 By linking “the forms of the popular to the prob-
lematics of the public sphere,” postcolonial public cultures escape “specific
Euro American master narratives”26 of civil society27 and uncover “zones of
contestation, incorporations and exclusions,” as well as “sites of resistance,
contested cultural assumptions, and subversive political possibilities.”28 The
reconstitution of new visual grammars, iconographies, and performances
appears central to the projects of postcolonial public cultures, as recorded
in several studies. For example, Deborah Poole replaces the notion of com-
mon visual cultures characterized by shared symbolic codes with the idea
of a postcolonial visual economy as “fields of vision structured systemati-
cally in terms of inequalities and disadvantages flows.”29 Sandria Freitag
studies how various visual and spectacular/bodily performative registers
and practices underwrote India’s emerging spectacles of modernity, includ-
ing, for instance, South Indian “courtly cultures [and] live performance tra-
ditions”30 Ranajit Guha’s concept of the “third idiom” in modern Indian
popular culture erases given binaries of tradition/modernity, metropolis/
periphery.31 Kajri Jain studies the history of mass-manufactured “calendar”
or “bazaar” art in the (post)colonial Indian culture industry to emphasize
differences in “the contexts of mass culture in modern Europe and modern
India,” especially in relation to the “cultic image” and other visual idioms
in the (post)colonial Indian market economy.32 Using this critical frame of
reading, the idiomatic, political, and situated aspects of postcolonial comics
texts and histories may be examined as expressions of emergent public cul-
tures that demonstrate how “modernity can become a diversely appropri-
ated experience” in different (post)national imaginaries.

COmics SchOlarship

In this section, we will mark the theoretical ground for this project by situat-
ing our enquiry within, first, the field of mainstream comics research, and
next, comics studies that relate more specifically to the legacies of imperial-
ism. The distinct agendas in Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities
may be introduced by looking to the useful notion of “canonicity” to help
place and then differentiate the present project in relation to an established
body of contemporary comics criticism and texts that reference Western
(post)imperial and mainstream cultures and concerns. In keeping with this
objective, this project seeks to introduce a timely intervention within cur-
rent comic-book area studies that remains firmly situated within the “US-
European and manga paradigms”33 and their reading publics. Recent work
in comics scholarship is characterized by a wide range of critical methods
 Introduction  5
and approaches, and may be somewhat broadly organized into social histo-
ries of comics production,34 representational and semiotic criticism,35 and
thematic studies, as, for example, in the super-hero genre or autographics.36
The readings in each category are often analytically rigorous, insightful, and
varied. But an overview of the field must bring to our notice that the “comics
exceptionalism”37 of current scholarship in such Anglo-American or Euro-
pean traditions misses how contemporary “ninth art” production in global
contexts records historical critique, political action, or emergent transna-
tional narratives of trauma, gender, protest, and global exchange. Chute and
Dekoven’s recent introduction to contemporary “Comic Books and Graphic
Novels” in The Cambridge Introduction to Popular Culture is illustrative in
that the survey is presented as a comprehensive summary of existing criti-
cism on comics format, genre, and history. The essay constructs a dominant
frame of analysis using studies of European pretexts leading to a largely
American history of modern graphic cultures. The trajectory describes pop-
ular Western print and newspaper comic texts at the turn of the nineteenth
century, the stand-alone American drawn strips and the superhero genre of
the 1930s, political comics in the Anglo-American and European 1940s tra-
dition, the mid-century underground comic movement following the federal
censorship code of 1954, and comic autobiographics from the 1970s. The
extreme significance, in the twenty-first century, of an international range
of regional graphic texts and “the global circulation of narratives mapping
both individual lives and world-historical events” is only briefly noted at the
close, as the focus remains firmly on the contemporary American scene and
the work of Ware, Bechdel et al.38
A possible second comparative frame allows our approach to posi-
tion itself as distinct from yet related to an established corpus of engaged
scholarship that questions the politics of minority/marginal representations
within mainstream comics traditions, investigates events of colonization and
decolonization in (post)imperial graphic cultures, or studies the subcultures
and spaces of resistance occupied by Western alternative comics histories.39
Some of the best-known and often cited graphic novels that focus on
themes of otherness in recent years have been Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis
(2003, 2004), Art Speigelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986, 1991), and
Joe Sacco’s graphic journalism. Apart from an interest in Satrapi’s Iranian-
French history, the Jewish experience during the Holocaust in the case of
­Speigelman, and the Arab world in the work of Sacco, most studies that
examine m ­ ulticultural and minority/marginalized themes and communities
seem to reference comics representations that are set largely within a US con-
text as narratives of national identity politics. There have been several book-
length studies that either point to the stereotypical portrayal of non-white
ethnic groups or lament their absence in comics written in the United States.
Among these are Michael A. Sheyahshe’s Native Americans in Comic Books
(2008), Fredrik Strömberg’s Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History
(2003), and William H. Foster III’s Looking for a Face like Mine (2005).
6  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji
In Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History, Strömberg suggests that
some believe that “cartoonists depict people from other ethnic and racial
groups with stereotypical traits simply because it is harder to differentiate
between persons from a national group other than one’s own” and the car-
toonist’s work merely reflects “what society has deemed acceptable at a cer-
tain point and time.”40 Dr. Charles Johnson, a black cartoonist and scholar,
does not “buy the idea that an artist is merely a creature of his time, a tabula
rasa inscribed with the bigoted beliefs of his Zeitgeist.” For him, the use of
stereotypes suggests a “lack of invention, daring, or innovation” on the part
of the cartoonist who “is content to uncritically work with received, pre-
fabricated imagery and ideas minted in the minds of others. …”41 One of the
reasons for such stereotyping, explains Johnson, was that blacks were never
part of the “artist/audience equation” since comics were written by whites
for white audiences.42 Although black presence in comic books continues
to be small, their portrayal is less stereotypical, even though they are often
included “just to be the Black character in a certain context.”43 Like ­Johnson,
Native American comic book writer and filmmaker Jon Proudstar tells
Michael Sheyahshe that cartoonists do not “want to do the homework” of
differentiating the various Native American tribes, thus portraying all Native
people alike.44 Both agree that this will change when more black, Native
American, and other non-white, ethnic minority comic-book artists start tell-
ing their own stories. William H. Foster III adds: “although slow in coming
and certain [sic] still fraught in stereotypes, the portrayal of Black characters
in comics is evolving.”45 In the Francophone context, the Belgian comic-
book artist Hergé’s (real name Georges Remi) comic book Tintin au Congo
has been criticized for its stereotypical and racist representations of the black
Congolese. We will discuss this in more detail later in this introduction.
Other books that are concerned with multicultural themes in comics
often study them within a U.S. context, although some do discuss the adap-
tation of such representations in other countries, for example, by examining
the transposition of popular U.S. superheroes into other cultural locations.
Recent multicultural studies include the 2007 special issue of the jour-
nal MELUS, entitled Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with
Graphic Narrative, Frederick Luis Aldama’s Multicultural Comics: From
‘Zap’ to ‘Blue Beetle’ (2010), and Transnational Perspectives in Graphic
Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads (2013), edited by Shane Denson,
Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein.
Derek Parker Royal, in the introduction to the special issue of MELUS,
explains that the essays in the journal study the representation of ethno-racial
characters and subject matter in U.S.-based comics, addressing “the possi-
bilities, and even the potential liabilities, of comics when representing ethno-
racial subject matter. … It is a response to what several critics of graphic
narrative have seen as a defining mark of American popular culture: its
problematic relationship to ethnic difference.”46 He adds that the contribu-
tors of his issue “map out the theoretical, literary, and historical contexts of
 Introduction  7
graphic narrative and their links to multi-ethnic subjectivity.” 47 However,
the engagement with the ethno-racial other in this essay collection remains
positioned primarily within a domestic context.
Some of the essays included in Transnational Perspectives on Graphic
Narratives, especially in the section of the book entitled “Transcultural and
Transcultural Superheroes,” venture beyond the U.S borders. In the fore-
word to the book, John A. Lent states that the book’s contributors “broaden
­literature searches beyond the United States and superheroes, draw upon
Asian, European, Middle Eastern, and North American works for analysis,
and scrutinize issues of transnationalism … as well as others such as hybrid-
ity and globalization.”48 The editors, all American Studies scholars, state that
the goal of their book is to “address two critical blind spots: the overall
neglect of graphic narratives in the increasing transnational field of American
literary and cultural studies … and the relative dearth of transnational inves-
tigations of graphic narratives in the growing field of comics studies. …”49
Their volume “concentrates on largely American genres and productions as
an exemplary field of transnational exchange”50 and their aim is “to train
a transnational focus … on American productions and genres, … to ‘do
national American studies with a transnational consciousness’.”51 For exam-
ple, the book contains chapters on Indian and Japanese manga versions or
“transcreations” of the American comic superhero Spider-man. Shilpa Davé,
in her essay entitled “Spider-Man India: Comic Books and the Translation/
Transcreating of American Cultural Narratives,” concludes that although the
“development of the Spider-Man India series as a transcreative product shows
the limitations of working with an established icon because the creators were
bound by the dictates of American narratives and conventions of storytell-
ing,” the series “also opened up the possibility of creating new venues in
the form of graphic narratives that pave the way for creative hybrid proj-
ects. …” Following Spider-Man India, publishing companies in India such
as Liquid Comics decided to develop and market comics “rooted in Indian
culture and mythology” rather than “trying to translate or transcreate other
American heroes.” 52 While Davé suggests that America remains the context
for the transplanted American comic book superhero in India, the essays in
our volume on Postcolonial Comics remove a dominant reference from the
equation altogether as they explore political and social phenomena in vari-
ous geographical regions, examining how specific colonial and postcolonial
histories shape their politics and aesthetics, and how these then translate into
graphic storytelling.
The essays in Aldama’s Multicultural Comics: From ‘Zap’ to ‘Blue Beetle’
focus mainly on comics created in a multicultural U.S. context, analyzing
racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities as characters and themes in
American comics, although one of the book’s “strengths,” as Derek Parker
Royal puts it in the foreword to the book, is its “willingness to enlarge
our understanding of ‘multicultural’ (a term usually linked to U.S.-based
culture) and expand its scope beyond the confines of comics produced in
8  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji
or related to American ethnicity.”53 One such essay in the book, Suhaan
Mehta’s “Wondrous Capers: The Graphic Novel in India,” analyzes recent
graphic novels written by Indian writers that break away from the main-
stream Indian comics industry dominated by the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK)
series that present an “airbrushed view of India’s past and present” to create
an “alternative space by accommodating voices that habitually fall outside
the realm of Indian socio-politico-cultural discourses.”54
While the books examined above are primarily concerned with study-
ing comic books that address multicultural themes and ethnic minorities
in the U.S., the Franco-Belgian bande dessinée or French-language comic
book, often tackles subjects that deal with issues of French colonialism and
postcolonialism, including those involving scenes of contemporary multi-
ethnic and multicultural France. There have been several critical and his-
torical studies of the French-language comic book: a collection of essays,
The Francophone Bande Dessinée (2005) edited by Charles Forsdick, Lau-
rence Grove, and Libby McQuillan; Ann Miller’s Reading Bande Dessinée:
Critical Approaches to the French Language Comic Strip (2007); Lawrence
Grove’s more recent Comics in French: the European Bande Dessinée in
Context (2010); and Joel Vessels’s Drawing France: French Comics and the
Republic (2010).55
More closely related to our project, the Belgian critic Philippe Delisle has
two books that analyze the Francophone Belgian bande dessinée written
during the colonial period. The first is Bande dessinée et imaginaire colonial:
Des années 1930 aux années 1980 (2008), in which, in addition to examin-
ing the well-known and much discussed Tintin au Congo where the detec-
tive hero visits the Belgian colony of the Congo, he studies other “espaces
­coloniaux mis en valeur par la bande dessinée franco-belge ‘classique’” (other
colonial spaces emphasized by the “classic” Franco-Belgian comic book).
Delisle also analyzes the representation of the “indigènes” or the native Con-
golese in these comic books. They sometimes seem like “de ‘grands enfants’
très craintifs” (very fearful “big children”), sometimes like “des êtres perfides
et violents” (perfidious and violent beings), and the enterprise of colonialism
is analyzed as a system understood as bringing progress and civilization to
these native people. Finally, Delisle also analyzes bandes dessinées published
during the 1980s to show how a new generation of Belgian BD artists, influ-
enced by their predecessors, represent colonialism in their work. 56
In his second book, De“Tintin au Congo” à “Odilon Verjus”: Le mission-
naire, héros de la BD belge (2011), Delisle examines the recurring figure of
the Christian missionary in fiction between 1920 and 1960 – although at the
end of the book, he analyzes the more recent series “Odilon Verjus” in which
an apostolic worker becomes the hero of the series. Delisle’s study focuses
on the missionary character, who often plays the hero in Belgian colonial-era
bandes dessinées and other literary forms, in order to analyze the function
of religious propaganda represented by a proselytizing Christian mission.57
Delisle concludes that the romantic figure of the adventurous and civilizing
 Introduction  9
Catholic missionary contributed to furthering the colonial agenda. As he puts
it, the Belgian comic book between the years 1920–1960 “semble d’ailleurs
avoir été plus qu’un simple miroir de la propagande missionaire. … Elle
paraît avoir contribué elle aussi à mobliser les esprits et les energies” (seems
to have been more than just a simple mirror of missionary propaganda. …
It appears to have contributed to mobilizing minds and energies).58
Apart from Delisle’s study of the Belgian comic book during the colonial
period, Mark McKinney’s research on the history and politics of the colonial
and postcolonial Francophone bande dessinée is to date the most in-depth
study on the subject. McKinney has written three books, one an edited
volume and two single author books on the Francophone bande dessinée,
studying colonial and postcolonial French-language comic books.
In his edited volume, History and Politics in French-Language Comics
and Graphic Novels (2008), McKinney states that his aim is to examine “the
importance of history and politics” for French cartoonists of the past and
how French language cartoonists have “engaged with history and politics
in recent years,” including the question “how one might view colonialism,
Nazism, and racism in past works, some of it produced by the acknowl-
edged masters of the medium?”59 The field of French-language com-
ics includes texts from both European French-speaking countries such as
­Belgium, France, and Switzerland and also the French-speaking ex-French
and Belgian colonies in North Africa, West Africa, Reunion, Quebec, and
New Caledonia, among others. However, the main production of French-
language comic books remains located in Belgium and mainland France.60
McKinney explains that although the French and Belgian governments do
support African comic book artists, it is primarily the publishing environ-
ment in Africa as well strict censorship practices that force African comic-
book artists to publish their comic books in France.
McKinney notes how world-famous Belgian and French comic-book
authors such as the Belgian Hergé and the French René Goscinny and
Albert Uderzo who wrote the Astérix series “have inevitably been read as
incarnating various aspects of French or Belgian cultural identity,” but that
“such identities were problematic constructions riddled with contradic-
tions and shaped by tensions of various sorts, including ethno-linguistic,
class, national, and racial ones.”61 As mentioned earlier, McKinney gives
the example of Hergé’s popular Tintin au Congo, published in 1930–31
and also available in English, which was recently criticized for its rac-
ist content by the British Commission for Racial Equality and was sub-
sequently moved from the children’s to the adult section of the Borders
Bookstores in the U.K. and the U.S. He describes how French comic
books today, such as Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical Persepolis which
deals with the Iranian revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, and Joann Sfar’s
comic books such as The Rabbi’s Cat (2005), which discusses the plight
of Algerian Jews in colonial Algeria (18), highlight issues of national and
cultural identity in their work and are significantly different in the way
10  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji
they portray French and Belgian cultural identity.62 They “must be situ-
ated with respect to the colonial legacy and also to a world order whose
references have shifted dramatically, to modified or new forms of influ-
ence, domination, and contestation.”63 McKinney adds that the focus of
scholarly books on French-language comics is on the formal aspects of
the medium, conducting structuralist and semiotic analyses of the comic
books; fewer deal with history and politics.64 His book therefore includes
essays that “carefully and thoughtfully analyze political and historical
dimensions of representations in bandes dessinées,” starting with earlier
comic books to more recent comics that examine how colonialism and
imperialism are represented in French-language comics.65
McKinney’s second book, The Colonial Heritage of French Comics
(2011), examines evidence of imperialist and racist assumptions in the
serialized bandes dessinées composed by the founding father of the French
comic book, Alain Saint-Ogan, in the 1930s. McKinney analyzes a volume
of Saint-Ogan’s Zig et Puce comic-book series entitled Zig et Puce aux
Indes, that presents an exoticized India of snake-charmers, sacred cows,
and elephants.66 Saint-Ogan was an important influence on Hergé who,
in Tintin au Congo, routinely exaggerates the facial features of the black
Congolese as colonial subjects, thus using reactionary aesthetic conventions
to perpetuate stereotypes of the native Congolese. McKinney’s book is now
part of a growing literature examining the representation of imperialism
and colonialism in French-language comic books. Earlier studies did not
deem comic books, considered a lower art form, as appropriate material for
serious examinations of such issues. In addition to identifying imperialist
assumptions in Saint-Ogan’s work and their influence on Hergé and a com-
pany of other comic-book writers, McKinney is also interested in how Saint-
Ogan’s work has been “republished in recent years, with little attention to
the colonialism and racism that pervade them.”67 He blames this on the
“religious and political conservatism” of many mainstream publishers, as
well as an “aggressive, reactionary nostalgia for colonialism among certain
individuals and entities. …”68 The colonialism and anti-semitism of Hergé’s
work have been identified by scholars but there has been no full-length study
of his work because writers have been unable to gain access to the Hergé
archives in Brussels that are guarded by his widow and the Hergé trust.69
McKinney also analyzes graphic representations of colonial-era exhibitions
in France and Belgium, as well as colonial-era expeditions abroad and how
they connect to contemporary ideas of such events.70 He adds that his study
aims to show “colonialism and imperialism have left their imprint on French
comics, generally in the form of unsavory images and colonialist narratives.
There are, of course, still both republished and brand new works that per-
petuate the tradition of colonialist ideology and imagery. …”71 McKinney’s
concludes by asserting that more scholarship is needed to investigate con-
nections between French-language comics ideologies and events of colonial-
ism and imperialism.72
 Introduction  11
Although he touches on these themes in the previous book, the ­chapters in
Redrawing French Empire in Comics (2013) examine contemporary French-
language comics that deal with French colonial history and its repercussions
in postcolonial France. McKinney states that he is interested in detecting
and analyzing the “French colonial affrontier” (5), “… a boundary that …
divides and connects France” to its colonies.73 Although he examines comic
books that deal with France’s ex-colonies in Indo-China, his focus is mainly
on French-Algerian relations, a shared, often violent history that has pro-
duced a “long, rich, complex and fractured French-Algerian cultural forma-
tion, including many French-language comics and graphic novels related to
Algeria, drawn and read on both sides of the Mediterranean from before
independence to the present.”74 He adds:

The affrontier is a faultline across and through which national and

trans-national identities are constantly being reconstituted. By redraw-
ing empire in comics, cartoonists reenvision identities of the French
and of the (formerly) colonized, including people from Vietnam and
Algeria, where two of the bloodiest and most protracted modern wars
of decolonization were fought.

Some of the “iconic figures of the colonial affrontier in French comics” are
“the mixed couple, the métis/se [a person of culturally and ethnically mixed
descent], the post-colonial immigrant (and family) and the war victim.” 75
According to McKinney, very few comic books dealing with the colonial
period were published after 1962, when the majority of the French colonies
achieved independence. Comics with colonial themes remerged in French
comics twenty years later in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the arrival
of “post-colonial ethnic minorities as a cultural and political movement”
and the election of François Mitterrand as President in 1981, since he and
his government encouraged “multicultural initiatives.”76 Thus ­McKinney’s
goal in this book is to “analyze comic books, especially those drawn after
1962, … as a way of ascertaining whether and how French popular culture
is post-colonial. …”77
Although McKinney includes chapters in his first book that analyze
BDs by comic-book writers from Francophone countries in Asia, Franco-
phone Canada,78 and Africa, he is more concerned with comic books that
deal with colonial and postcolonial issues in metropolitan France. There
is a long tradition of the African Francophone bande dessinée drawn by
African authors that dates back to the 1950s and then continues through
the postindependence period into the 1960s and 1970s. We see comic book
authors from the Congo, Senegal, Cameroon, and Madagascar during this
period drawing in newspapers, periodicals, and magazines. In the 1980s
and 1990s we had African publishing houses publish comic books by Fran-
cophone African writers and artists, and African comic-book artists began
receiving recognition in Europe. Three Malagasy comic-book artists were
12  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji
invited to the Angoulême festival in 1986, and Barly Baruti from the Congo
was awarded the Éditions Casterman prize.79 Since the late 1980s, Afri-
can comic-book writers have joined together in associations in African and
Europe to promote their art. Although comics published in local languages
in Francophone African continue to be popular, financial difficulties and
problems with censorship have led to the closing of many of these African
publishing houses, and Francophone African writers either self-publish or
have to depend on French, Belgian, and Swiss publishers. Many contempo-
rary ­Francophone African writers live and work in the diaspora, in France,
Belgium, and ­Switzerland, and collaborate with European artists.80 A collab-
oration between Franco-Ivorian writer Marguerite Abouet and French artist
Clément Oubrerie, for example, led to the series Aya de Yopougon, whose
first volume was awarded the 2006 Prix du Premier Album at Angoulême’s
Festival de la Bande Dessinée.81 Other writers who live in Europe include
the Gabonese writer and artist Patrick Essono Nkouma, whose pen name is
Pahé, Edimo Simon-Pierre Mbembo of C ­ ameroon, and Barly Baruti of the
Congo. One of the essays in this volume, “Visualizing Postcolonial Africa in
La Vie de Pahé,” describes how the author discusses the difficulty of having
his comic book published in his native Gabon, given his acerbic critique, in
text and image, of the dictatorial Gabonese regime.82
In summary, we have surveyed an established field of contemporary comics
histories and criticism that engages with a variety of colonial, minority, and
multicultural themes to help introduce the parameters of our own enterprise
in Postcolonial Comics. However, we also recognize that the questions which
­follow from this situated exercise, though important, seem to derive e­ xclusively
from relative associations: is the postcolonial comic, then, a minority genre?
Does it differ from works engaged with postcolonial issues in metropolitan
traditions? Does it mimic or is it original, is it subversive, influenced or sub-
missive in relation to colonial or Western histories of comics production? In
this sense, it also seems to us that the framing of the postcolonial argument
exclusively within a relative, comparative, or parallel field that includes main-
stream comics studies and postcolonial writing introduces a metropolitan/
regional binary and thus assumes a Western priority, authority, and determina-
tion in its conception of postcolonial projects of reading, writing, or political
practice. Therefore, in taking seriously the alternative to established canons of
texts and analyses, we will try to clarify, in conclusion, the specific nature of
our postcolonial project as distinct from these given frames of reference.
Primarily, we would like to designate Postcolonial Comics as an active
political project, not a reflexive exercise in that it must “reject the determin-
ing register of specific colonialities and imperial concerns that continue to
generate meanings, desires, actions.”83 It also attempts to reject the “first in
the West and then elsewhere” formula of global time as applied to postco-
lonial revisions.84 Postcolonial emergence has long been theorized alterna-
tively in a sideways relation to Western or imperial trajectories, rather than
bound to memories of alienations and absences within colonized histories.85
Amir Mufti suggests hierarchical modalities be replaced by forms of “global
 Introduction  13
comparativism” that stem from the realization that “societies on either
side of the imperial divide now lead deeply imbricated lives that cannot be
understood without reference to each other.”86 As such, Mufti extends Said’s
notion of contrapuntality, a term that emphasizes the idea of “transnational
perspectives on literary performance” and “lateral and contrapuntal readings
[of] specific contextualizations, transmissions and migrations of texts.”87

The POstcOlOnial TransnatiOnal

To elaborate this paradigm further, we would like to address once more the
relation between the postcolonial and the transnational. Various studies have
noted the coincidence of the discourses of (post)colonialism and present-day
globalization. For example, Masao Miyoshi distinguishes an old colonialism
that operated in the name of “nations, ethnicities and races” from a new
deployment of power through transnational corporations that “tend toward
nationlessness.”88 Hardt and Negri contend that the postmodern Empire is
decentered and mobile and unfolds along global networks.89 In contrast,
Neil Smith describes the “profound spatiality” of a system of global domi-
nation that remains territorialized or national, and Arjun Appadurai speaks
of the global cultural economy as a diversity of “global vernaculars.”90 As
a primary focus of our readings, we recognize that thematic variations of
events and identities in postcolonial comics reflect precisely this defining
shift in contemporary postcolonial thought – that is, a singular focus on
the ethics and politics of current transnational experience.91 A renewed dia-
logue between postcolonialism and globalization has recently directed an
effectively “rerouted” postcolonial discourse and has shaped an evolving
critical paradigm comprising a wide range of cosmopolitan themes.92 These
include, for example, the politics of postnational identity (Kwame Anthony
Appiah, Gilroy, Brennan), transnational statelessness and reinscriptions of
locality within maps of migrancies or hybridities (Gikandi), or diasporic
ethics as viable modes of postcolonial responsibility (Arjun Appadurai).
As such, our study of the postcolonial transnational comic acknowledges a
turn towards the examination of disparate practices, representational and
socio-economic, derived from transformed colonial institutions that are then
linked to “contemporary notions of the global.”93 The essays in this collec-
tion, therefore, travel very widely and also within specific histories and tex-
tual fields.94 They examine current South Asian graphic fiction that draws
on iconic and mythological traditions to picture contemporary scenes in
the global South: changing metroscapes, sexual and environmental politics,
colonial terrorism and postcolonial governance. We also study, in particu-
lar, how the new Middle Eastern and Arabic comic industries offer a wide
range of graphic interventions within specific moments of historical crises to
think about postmodern trauma, the possibility of solidarities and protest in
transnational communities, or the politics of new visual technologies. Texts
include graphic war memoirs (Lebanon, Egypt) and new media serials (Cairo,
14  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji
Beirut). Subjects include experiences and locations as diverse as Arab-Spring
graphics, post-war Jewish nationalism, and Lebanese civil-war memories.
We locate geographies of contact and exchange in the Asia-Pacific and in
the Francophone world. Readings consider personal memoirs that record
the French and ­Belgian presence in colonial Algeria and postcolonial Africa,
especially Gabon and the Congo, the creation of new manga visual styles in
postimperial Japan, and an exchange between Belgian Francophone comics
about colonial-era Congo and contemporary Congolese comics on aspects
of the DRC as a postcolonial state.
Choosing a single principle of organization, we have divided the essays in
this volume into four sections that study postcolonial graphics from differ-
ent geographical areas.
Part I, Geographies of Contact: Gibraltar/ Malta/Asia-Pacific, includes
three essays. Michelle Bumatay’s “Plural Pathways, Plural Identities: Jean
Philippe Stassen’s ‘Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar’” challenges dominant discourses
of global migration by identifying polyvalent narratives of such resettlement
patterns. Sam Knowles’s “Joe Sacco’s ‘Prying Outsiders’: Marginalization,
Graphic Novel Form, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Representation” studies
Sacco’s own status as a outsider, an Australian citizen of Maltese descent, con-
flated with that of his position as the narrator/outsider in an Indian scene of
rural caste politics in “Kushinagar.” Roman Rosenbaum, in “Tezuka Osamu’s
Postcolonial Discourse towards a Hybrid National Identity,” observes how the
transnational characters in Osamu’s manga Adolfo ni tsugu pioneer aspects of
a postcolonial graphic discourse in Japanese popular culture.
Part II is entitled Francophone Post-Histories: Algeria/Congo/Gabon.
Ann Miller in “Memory and Postmemory in Morvandiau’s D’Algérie” tells
the story of Algeria during and after the event of colonization from the
perspective of a Pied-Noir. Véronique Bragard in “Guilty Melancholia and
Memorial Work: Representing the Congolese Past in Comics” demonstrates
how the Congo has been represented during the late colonial and the post-
colonial periods by Belgian and Congolese comic-book writers and artists.
Binita Mehta’s “Visualizing Postcolonial Africa: La Vie de Pahé” examines
an autobiographical bande dessinée in which the author/subject Pahé tells
his personal story while critquing the socio-political situation in postcolo-
nial Africa and contemporary France.
Part III, Postcolonial Politics: India, consists of three essays that engage
with different facets of history and politics in postcolonial India. Pramod K.
Nayar, in “Postcolonial Demo-graphics: Traumatic Realism in Vishwajyoti
Ghosh’s Delhi Calm,” discusses links between the forms of the graphic mem-
oir and the politics of democracy using the context of the Emergency in India
during the 1970s. Harleen Singh, in “Graphics of Freedom: Colonial Terror-
ists and Postcolonial Revolutionaries in Indian Comics,” conducts a close
reading of two comic books published by the Indian Amar Chitra Katha
series to show the mutation of colonial terrorists to postcolonial revolution-
aries as part of the refashioning of national history. Pia Mukherji’s “Graphic
Écriture: Gender and Magic Iconography in Kari” studies painterly, iconic,
 Introduction  15
and magical idioms in Amruta Patil’s graphic novel to think about the notion
of postmodern intertextuality in relation to feminist identity politics.
Part IV, entitled War, Nationhood, and Transnationalism: The Middle
East, contains three essays on graphic literature representing the Middle East.
While Jeffrey John Barnes, in “Visualizing the Emerging Nation: Jewish and
Arab Editorial Cartoons in Palestine, 1939–48,” examines newspaper car-
toons in Jewish and Arab newspapers in the ten years preceding the creation
of the Jewish state, Massimo di Ricco’s “Drawing for a New Public: Middle
Eastern 9th Art and the Emergence of a Transnational Graphic Movement”
describes the history of a contemporary pan-Arab, transnational graphic
movement. Lena Irmgard Merhej’s narratalogical analysis of graphic war
stories, “Men with Guns: War Narratives in New Lebanese Comics,” sign-
posts iconic images of armed men featuring in the literature of inherited
sectarian conflicts that still disturb the peace in contemporary Lebanon.
In conclusion, we would like to acknowledge an important argument:

Postcolonialism articulates a politics of resistance to the inequalities

and exploitation of humans and the environment, and the diminution of
political and ethical choices that come in the wake of globalization. …
If globalization is the dominant or hegemonic ideology in the world
today, postcolonialism, at its best, constitutes one of its main adversar-
ies or forms of resistance.95

Civil war memories, migrations and resettlement of labor, exiles, and refu-
gees, arms-trafficking, state policing and schooling, new sexualities and cit-
ies, the Arab spring, digital-era journalism, environmentalism, and youth
movements are, broadly, current graphic events that help tell a larger story
about the changing politics of postcolonial thought and experience in this
collection, and, in so doing, critically examine the issues at stake in repre-
senting the assembly of contemporary postcolonial conditions.

NOtes

1. Although terminology is important within comics cultures for commercial

as well as creative reasons, we will not enter here into a discussion of defini-
tions that have been much debated: comics, graphic narrative, graphic writing,
graphic novel, graphic album, bande dessinée, BD. We will be using many of
these terms throughout the book to discuss various kinds of multimodal story-
telling that uses text and image in combination.
2. Krishnaswamy, Revathi and John C. Hawley, eds. The Postcolonial and the
Global. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 3.
3. See, for example, Will Eisner’s classic description of the comics medium: “The
format of comics presents a montage of both words and image, and the reader is
thus required to exercise both visual and verbal interpretive skills. The regimens
of art (perspective, symmetry, line) and the regimens of literature (grammar,
plot, syntax) become superimposed upon each other. … And it is this disciplined
16  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji
application that creates the ‘grammar’ of sequential art.” In Eisner, Will. Comics
and Sequential Art. New York: Norton, 2008, 2. Other picture-narrative models
include texts characterized by sequential images (McCloud 1993), the arthology
of symbolic/iconic images and panels (Groensteen 2007), or interactive multi-
modal text-image exchanges (Harvey 2001).
4. “Semiology and structuralism dominated, to a large extent, early comics
research [as] comics represented an almost complete catalogue of semiological
problems.” The structuralist perspective focused on the study of the comics nar-
rative, often analyzed as mythological systems (referencing Roland Barthes and
Claude Levi-Strauss), or on the study of comics as a graphic language system.
Some early semiological studies of images and the grammar of comics include
the work of Hunig (1974) on syntactemes and minimal visual units, Koch (1971)
on representemes or minimal differentiating units, Kloepfer (1977) and Oomen
(1979) on systems of phonemes and paradigms. Eisner’s Sequential Art (1986)
was a pioneering study of sequential language and comics codes. McCloud’s
Understanding Comics (1993) described the formal apparatus and grammar of
comics, including style, spacing of panels, closure time, gesture, image, text, and
color. In Magnussen, Anne and Hans-Christian Christiansen, eds. Comics and
Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Denmark: Museum
Tusculanum Press University of Copenhagen, 2000, 12–13.
5. Psychoanalytical analyses of deep comic structures is exemplified in the work
of Phillipe Marion (1993) on graphic traces and reader direct mediation. The
Marxist approach to comics structures encoded with or resisting indoctrina-
tory, conventional, and dominant social ideologies is represented in the work of
­Dorfman and Mattelart (1975) and Martin Barker (1989). “In the 1980’s, [with]
the establishment of post-modernism as a cultural category, the analysis of pop-
ular culture was disengaged from the Marxist line of criticism. … The post-
modern perspective questions the structuralist approach, according to which
an analysis should lay open the underlying structures of [conservative] mean-
ing in popular cultural texts, [and instead designate] popular culture as poly-
semic.” Examples of such methods include Barker’s reading of Deconstructing
Donald, which combines Foucault, Propp, and Volosinov; Ole Frahm’s Butler/
Deleuze-inspired deconstructive framework on the repetition and destabiliza-
tion of comics signs; and the after-structuralism work in French and Belgian
comics research by Groensteen (1986) on poetic dimension and intentionality
or Fresnault Druelle (1988) on supplementarity and third meaning. In Magnus-
sen, Anne and Hans-Christian Christiansen, eds. Comics and Culture: Analytical
and Theoretical Approaches to Comics. Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press
University of Copenhagen, 2000,16–22.
6. Gabilliet, Jean Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American
Comic Books. Translated by Bart Beatty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2005, xi.
7. Ibid., xi.
8. Tracing the evolution of the sequentially imaged narrative, Beaty and Weiner
identify precursors that include examples of Paleolithic cave art, sequences of
paintings on papyri and tomb walls in ancient Egypt, architectural friezes from
classical Greece and imperial Rome, medieval European tapestries, stained-glass
scenes and illuminated books that prefigure William Blake’s anti-industrial and
mystical painted narratives in the nineteenth century. Beaty, Bart H. and Stephen
Weiner, eds. Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: History, Theme and Technique.
 Introduction  17
Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013, 3. Petersen’s work on proto-comics histories
and traditions describes preliterate art and mythologies from South African,
Native American, and Aboriginal cultures, picture recitation and cyclic narra-
tive texts from Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain sacred literatures, ninth-century Chi-
nese popular scrolls and caricatures, eighth-century Japanese courtly and erotic
picture recitation, nineteenth-century Hokusai Manga and eighteenth-century
British caricature art. Petersen, Robert S. Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels:
A History of Graphic Narratives. Santa Barbara, Denver, Oxford: Praeger, 2011.
9. Gabillet, xi.
10. For discussions related to culturally distinct varieties of comics forms – comics,
manga, manhua, bande dessinée, historitas, cergam, fumetti – see the collection
of essays in Frederico Zanettin’s Comics in Translation. St. Jerome Publishers,
2008, and John A. Lents’s Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humor Magazines and Pic-
ture Books. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001.
11. The examination of postwar mass-culture industries in the context of late capital-
ism was famously initiated by the Frankfurt school of critical theory, notably in
the writings of Adorno, Horkhiemer, Benjamin. The critique describes the rise of
incorporated forms of popular culture within fascist and neo-fascist contexts as
the institutions of organized capital worked to promote profit motivated consum-
erist economies. In summary, “every aspect of life is scripted, style is formulaic
mediocrity, and image is propaganda” (Weaver 29). Later revisions of this para-
digm by the culture critics of the Birmingham Center including H­ oggart, Williams,
Hall, and McRobbie developed the notion of progressive popular cultures that
contest dominant identity politics and ideologies. For a review on the establish-
ment of critical theory (Frankfurt School) and cultural studies (Birmingham Cen-
ter), see John A. Weaver’s Popular Culture Primer. New York: Peter Lang, 2009.
12. Colonial textualities, supported by “the constitutive powers of state apparatus
like education and the constitutive field of knowledge within these apparatus,”
have been variously documented. For example, Stephen Slemon has listed how
Edward Said (1979) examines forms of Orientalism within colonial texts; Talal
Asad (1973) and others examine colonial anthropology; Alan Bishop (1990)
examines the deployment of Western concepts of mathematics against African
schoolchildren; Timothy Mitchell (1988) examines how the professional field
of political science came into being through a European colonialist engagement
with the cultures of Egypt; Gauri Viswanathan (1989) examines the foundations
of English literary studies within the structure of colonial management in India.
Slemon, Stephen. “The Scramble for Postcolonialism.” De-Scribing Empire:
Post-Colonialism and Textuality, eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson. London,
New York: Routledge, 1994, 15–30, 18.
13. Tiffin, Chris and Alan Lawson. “Introduction.” De-Scribing Empire: Post-­
Colonialism and Textuality. London, New York: Routledge, 1994, 1–13, 3.
14. Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–
1797. London, New York: Methuen, 1986, 2.
15. Slemon, Stephen. “The Scramble for Postcolonialism.” De-Scribing Empire:
Post-Colonialism and Textuality, eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson. London,
New York: Routledge, 1994, 15–30, 18.
16. Ibid., 22.
17. Ibid., 24. Slemon particularly references Homi Bhabha’s work on the produc-
tive effects of colonial power, describing his basic argument that “ambivalence
is everywhere [as] an effect of colonial discourse. This means that there must
18  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji
always be resistance to power within any moment of colonialist articulation
[because] colonial representations are always overdeterminations [of their] sub-
ject forming strategies.”
18. Timothy Brennan, “The Economic Image-Function of the Periphery,” Postco-
lonial Studies and Beyond, eds. Ania Loomba et al. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2005, 101–124. See pages 101–112.
19. Enwezar, Okwui. “Rapport des Force: African Comics and their Publics.” Africa
Comics. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 17–23, 18.
20. Repetti, Massimo. African Arts. Los Angeles, Summer 2007, Vol. 40, 247.
21. Twentieth-century culture theory has studied the category of popular culture
in opposition to elite, cultivated traditions of arts, discourse and life styles as
well as local folk traditions, and seen it as enabled by late capitalism and mass
communications and production technologies. See Hinds, Motz, and Nelson,
eds. Popular Culture: Theory and Methodology: A Basic Introduction. Madison
WI: The University Press, 2006, 50–51. The dominant critical paradigms of the
Frankfurt school of critical theory and the Birmingham Center for Contempo-
rary Cultural Studies include approaches that read mass-mediated culture as
reactionary, used as the instruments of fascist statism and class domination, or,
conversely, “popular culture as predicated on a sense of its own alterity [and]
marginality,” as well as its congruence with a “model of subalternity [under-
stood as] a supple culture of the colonized which manipulated eclectic signs
against the dominant colonial structure.” See Christopher Pinney’s “Introduc-
tion: Public, Popular and Other Cultures.” Pleasure and the Nation: The His-
tory, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, eds. Rachel Dwyer
and Christopher Pinney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 1–35, 3–4.
22. Appadurai and Breckenridge remind us that “while there have been several now
classic descriptions of public life that draw on European discourses surrounding
privacy, civility, citizenship and the state (Arendt 1951; Goffman 1963; Sennett
1976), the most influential recent discussion of the public sphere as a histori-
cal formation is contained in Jurgen Habermas’ study The Structural Transfor-
mation of the Public Sphere 1960.” The depoliticization of public life by the
domination and consumption of mass media – as diagnosed by Habermas – is
described as “the structural transformation of the public sphere in the course of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as one that involves a move away from
a public critically reflecting on its culture to one that consumes it.” Appadurai,
Arjun and Carol A. Breckenridge. “Public Modernities in India.” Consuming
Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, 1–19, 4.
23. Ibid., 1–19, 10.
24. Ibid., 3.
25. Ibid., 6–7.
26. By “loosening the link between the word ‘public’ and the history of civil society
in Europe” Appadurai and Breckenridge identify postcolonial public modernity:
“public in this usage ceases to have any necessary or predetermined relation-
ship to formal politics, rational communicative action, print capitalism, or the
dynamics of the emergence of a literate bourgeoisie. Thus the term becomes
emancipated from any specific Euro American master narrative and indicates
an arena of cultural contestation in which modernity can become a diversely
appropriated experience.” Appadurai, Arjun and Carol A. Breckenridge. “Public
Modernities in India.” Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian
 Introduction  19
World, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1995, 1–19, 5.
27. Ibid., 5.
28. Ibid., 3.
29. Deborah Poole. Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean
Image World. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Quoted in Plea-
sure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture
in India, eds. Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001, 9.
30. Freitag, Sandria B. “Visions of the Nation: Theorizing the Nexus between Cre-
ation, Consumption and Participation in the Public Sphere.” Pleasure and the
Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, eds.
Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001,
35–76, 39.
31. Dalmia, Vasudha and Rashmi Sadana eds. “Introduction.” The Cambridge
Companion to Modern Indian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012, 1–9.
32. Kajri Jain. “Mass Production and the Art of the Bazaar.” The Cambridge Com-
panion to Modern Indian Culture, eds. Vasudha Dalmia and Rashmi Sadana.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 184–205, 185.
33. Chute, Hilary and Marjorie Dekoven. “Comic Books and Graphic Novels.”
The Cambridge Introduction to Popular Culture, eds. David Glover and Scott
McCracken. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 187–94, 187.
34. Social histories of comic traditions include the works of, for example, David
Kunzle, Jean-Paul Gabilliet (Of Comics and Men, 2010, is an overview of the
American comic-book industry from the 1930s to the present), R. C. Harvey
(The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History, 1996), and Bradford Wright
(Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture, 2008).
35. Representational and semiotic criticism include the work of McCloud, Eisner,
Carrier’s The Aesthetics of Comics (2000), Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics
(2007), Varnum and Gibbons, eds. The Language of Comics: Word and Image
(2007). Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics is a seminal study of the for-
mal and semiotic properties of comics. Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics
remains a popular introduction to the language of comics. The Art of the Comic
Book: An Aesthetic History by Robert Harvey is based on studies of auteurs
(Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman) and genres such as the Western and
the superhero.
36. Thematic studies of, for example, the superhero genre or autographic are well
documented. The superhero theme is extensively studied in, for example, Geoff
Klock’s How to Read Superhero Comics and Why (New York: Continuum,
2002); Terrence Wandtke, ed., The Amazing Transforming Superhero! Essays
on the Revision of Characters in Comic Books, Film and Television (Jefferson,
NC: McFarland, 2007); Angela Ndalianis, ed., The Contemporary Comic Book
Superhero (New York: Routledge, 2009); Will Brooker’s Batman Unmasked:
Analyzing a Cultural Icon (New York: Continuum, 2001); and Peter Coogan’s
Superhero: The Secret Origins of a Genre (Austin, TX: Monkeybrain Books,
2006). Autographics, as described in Gillian Whitlock and Anna Poletti’s intro-
duction to a special edition of Biography (2008), studies recent visual and
textual cultures of autobiography, and begins with a survey of graphic life nar-
ratives including the work of Art Spiegelman, Harvey Pekar et al.
20  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji
37. Robert S. Petersen. Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic
Narrative. Santa Barbara CA: Praeger, 2011, xxii.
38. Chute, Hilary and Marjorie Dekoven. “Comic Books and Graphic Novels.”
The Cambridge Introduction to Popular Culture, eds. David Glover and Scott
McCracken. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 187–94, 194.
39. We are particularly mindful of the scholarship of, for example, Dorfman/
Mattelart, Aldama, McKinney, Delisle etc. who study issues and conditions of
“diversity and otherness” and point to “orientalist and paternalistic attitudes”
in existing scholarship.
40. Fredrik Strömberg. Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History. Foreword by
Charles Johnson. Korea: Fantagraphics Books, 2003, 23, 24.
41. Ibid., 12.
42. Ibid., 8.
43. Ibid., 14. Johnson explains that although black comic-book artists in the 1960s
and 1970s did write about “integration, equality, and brotherhood,” and later
black cartoonists did deal with grimmer “inner-city black life” (15–16), he is hop-
ing a for a day when they are “fully and creatively free” (16) and when American
audiences “will accept and broadly support stories about black characters that
are complex, original … risk-taking, free of stereotypes, and not about race or
victimization” (17). For more on stereotypes in comics, see W. A Coupe, “Obser-
vations on a Theory of Political Caricature,” Comparative Studies in Society and
History, 11.1 (Jan. 1969), 79–95; Derek Parker Royal, “Introduction: Coloring
America: Multi-Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative,” MELUS, Vol. 32,
No. 3 (Fall 1997), 7–22; and Jack Glascock and Catherine Preston-Schreck,
“Gender and Racial Stereotypes in Daily Newspaper Comics: A Time Honored
Tradition?” Sex Roles, Vol. 51, Nos. 7/8 (October 2004), 423–431.
44. Michael Sheyahshe, A. Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study.
North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company, 2008, 192.
45. William H. Foster III. Looking for a Face Like Mine: The History of African
Americans in Comics. Waterbury, CT: Fine Tooth Press, 2005, ix.
46. Derek Parker Royal, “Introduction: Coloring America: Multi-Ethnic Engage-
ments with Graphic Narrative.” MELUS, 32.3 (2007), 8.
47. Ibid., 9.
48. Shane Denson, Christina Meyer, and Daniel Stein, eds. Transnational Perspec-
tives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads. London and New York:
Bloomsbury, 2013, xiii-xiv.
49. Ibid., 1.
50. Ibid., 3.
51. Ibid., 7.
52. Ibid., 140.
53. Frederick Luis Aldama, Multicultural Comics: From ‘Zap’ to ‘Blue Beetle.’
­Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010, x.
54. Ibid.,173.
55. In the Introduction to Charles Forsdick, Laurence Grove, and Libby ­McQuillan’s
The Francophone Bande Dessinée (2005), McQuillan states that although it is
“the first collection of essays exclusively dedicated to the study of Francophone
BD published in an English-language academic context,” the comic book has
been studied extensively in France and Belgium (7). The French and Belgian
government both subsidize the art form. In the 1980s, both the French govern-
ment and the Belgian government opened national institutes of conservation
 Introduction  21
and research in the Centre belge de la bande dessinée (CBBD) in Brussels in
1989, and the Centre national de la bande dessinée et de l’image (CNBDI). (Joel
E. Vessels in his book Drawing France: French Comics and the Republic says the
CNBDI underwent a name change in 2009 to Cité Internationale de la bande
dessinée et de l’image (CIBDI, 14) in Angoulême, France in 1990 (Forsdick,
Grove, and McQuillan 7). The first national festival of the BD, Festival de la
bande dessinée d’Angoulême, was held in 1972 and has been held there every
year since, with prizes given annually to the best BD (Forsdick, Grove, and
McQuillan 10). The 1960s and 1970s saw the many academic studies of the
BD at the undergraduate and graduate level that applied mainly semiotic theory
to the study of the BD (Forsdick, Grove, and McQuillan 9–10). The 1980s and
1990s saw a series of theoretical works on how to read the BD. These include
Pierre Masson’s Lire la bande dessinée (1985), Benoît Peeters’s Case, planche,
récit (1991), Jan Baetens and Pascal Lefèvre’s Pour une lecture moderne de la
bande dessinée (1993), and Thierry Groensteen’s Système de la bande dessinée
(1999) (Forsdick, Grove, and McQuillan 12). The book by McQuillan et al.
includes essays that apply various approaches to the study of comics, “from
socio-historic, via theories of comedy, to narratalogically based analysis” (Fors-
dick, Grove, and McQuillan 13).
Ann Miller’s Reading bande dessinée: Critical Approaches to the French-
language comic strip (2007) examines the history of the French comic book
from the nineteenth century to the present day and applies various analyti-
cal frameworks and critical approaches to the reading of French comic books,
such narrative theory, psychoanalysis, national and postcolonial identity, and
cultural studies, among others, to study the form of French comic books. Lau-
rence Grove’s more recent Comics in French: the European Bande Dessinée in
Context (2010) provides a study of the “technical and formal qualities of the
bande dessinée” and takes a chronological approach, providing an overview of
French-language comics from the Middle Ages to the contemporary BD. In his
book, Grove does not concern himself only with the bande dessinée “but with
the notion of French-related text/image culture in general” (8). He includes
titles of publications in English on French-language comics and also studies the
BD as a cultural phenomenon, suggesting “knowledge of the bande dessinée
might be applied to further our understanding of sexism in France, the colo-
nial Other, the popularity of Disneyland Paris, as well as a plethora of other
issues” (9).
Joel E. Vessels’s Drawing France: French Comics and the Republic (2010)
examines the importance and the changing role of the bande dessinée in French
culture. As such, “it explores the shifting political and cultural place of the image
and the BD through a rough combination of social discourse, governmental
policy, and popular culture.” The book studies selections of the BD from differ-
ent historical periods of French history to analyze the “eternal construction of
Frenchness itself … investigating the nation as it transitioned from civic monar-
chy to civic republic and finally to a multiethnic, multicultural and multitongued
nation …” (14).
56. Philippe Delisle, Bande dessinée et imaginaire colonial: Des années 1930 aux
années 1980. Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2008), 11. All translations are my own.
57. Philippe Delisle, De “Tintin au Congo” à “Odilon Verjus”: Le missionnaire,
héros de la BD belge. Paris: Éditions Karthala, 2011, 7, 9.
58. Delisle, De“Tintin au Congo,” 195.
22  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji
59. Mark McKinney, ed., History and Politics in French-Language Comics and
Graphic Novels. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2008, 4.
60. Ibid., 5–6.
61. Ibid., 3.
62. Ibid., 3.
63. Ibid., 5.
64. Ibid., 20.
65. Ibid., 22.
66. McKinney, Mark, The Colonial Heritage of French Comics. Liverpool, U.K.:
Liverpool University Press, 2011, 1–3.
67. Ibid., 19.
68. Ibid., 12–13.
69. Ibid., 19.
70. Ibid., 20.
71. Ibid., 164.
72. Ibid., 164.
73. McKinney, Mark. Redrawing French Empire in Comics. Columbus, Ohio: The
Ohio State University Press, 2013, 3.
74. Ibid., 5–6.
75. Ibid., 7.
76. Ibid., 8.
77. Ibid., 33.
78. There is a rich tradition of Francophone Canadian comics (la bande dessinée
québécoise) by Quebec comic-book artists. The annual comic book festival in
Quebec, Le Festival de la BD francophone de Québec, has been held every spring
in Quebec City since 1988. Among the many Quebec comic-book writers is
Guy Delisle, who has written several graphic narratives, mainly travelogues,
in comic-book form that deal with themes of otherness and multiculturalism.
These include Shenzhen (2003) and Pyongyang (2006) about his travels in
China and North Korea respectively, as well as Chroniques birmanes (2007)
and Chroniques de Jérusalem (2011) about his visit to Burma (now Myanmar)
and Israel. The latter won the Fauve d’Or prize for best album at the Festival de
la bande dessinée d’Angoulême in 2012.
79. Massimo Repetti. “African ‘Ligne Claire’: Comics of Francophone Africa.”
IJOCA, 9.1 (Spring 2007), 520.
80. Ibid., 522–33.
81. Odile Cazenave and Patricia Célérier, Contemporary Francophone African Writ-
ers and the Burden of Commitment. Charlottesville and London: University of
Virginia Press, 2011, 139–140.
82. There are several books, articles, and blogs that discuss the African Francophone
bande dessinée. For more, see the article by Massimo Repetti, the book by Odile
Casenave and Patricia Célérier, and Christophe ­Cassiau-Haurie and Christophe
Meunier’s Cinquante années de bandes dessinées en Afrique francophone. Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2010. The Gabonese comic-book artist Pahé’s blog is one among
several blogs on the African BD. John A. Lent’s Cartooning in Africa (2009) and
Comic Art in Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America: A Comprehensive, Inter-
national Biography (1996) are other examples of books on the subject of Afri-
can comics. There are also books that deal with comic-book writing in specific
African countries, such as Christophe Cassiau-Haurie’s Histoire de la BD con-
golaise (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010). From November 15, 2006-March 18, 2007,
 Introduction  23
the Studio Museum of Harlem in New York City organized a first-ever exhibit
in the United States on comic art from Africa called Africa Comics. The works
of thirty-two African artists from all over Africa were exhibited. A two-hundred-
page catalogue accompanied the exhibition: http://www.studiomuseum.org/
exhibition/africa-comics.
83. Pratt, Marie Louise, qtd. in Mukherjee, Ankhi. “Postcolonial Responses to the
Western Canon.” The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature II, ed. Ato
Qyuason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 771–801, 781.
84. Chakraborty, Dipesh, qtd. in Mukherjee, Ankhi. “Postcolonial Responses to the
Western Canon.” The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature II, ed. Ato
Qyuason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 771–801, 781.
85. For example, Spivak’s idea of praxis as “reversing and displacing the apparatus of
value coding” or Said’s description of postcolonial emergence as an open textual-
ity, a “family of ideas permanently in discourse” as belated regroupings and redis-
positions of imperial narratives. In Mukherjee, Ankhi. “Postcolonial Responses
to the Western Canon.” The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature II, ed.
Ato Qyuason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 771–801, 795.
86. Ibid., 781.
87. Ibid., 781.
88. Coopan, Vilashini. “The Ruins of Empire: The National and Global Politics
of America’s Return to Rome.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, eds. Ania
Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty. Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 2005, 80–100, 85.
89. Ibid., 93.
90. Ibid., 95–97.
91. Revathy Krishnaswamy identifies the current “shared cultural grammar of
hybridity, cosmopolitanism, and difference” between “the postcolonial and
the global” and describes a growing body of critical analyses on our present
global situation. Critical questions posed include the following: “Has global-
ization enabled the production of postcolonialism or has it eroded its political
purchase through incorporation and domestication within a centerless space of
capital (Hardt and Negri 2000)? Is postcolonialism complicit with the forces
of neoliberal globalism (Ahmad 1992) or a space for uninformed anticapitalist,
antiglobalist sentiments (Bhagwati 2004)? Is globalization a euphemism for cor-
poratization and imperial expansion (Brennan) or does it provide postcolonial
subjects with a chance to create and inhabit alternative modernities (Appadurai
1996, Hall 2000, Gikandi 2001)? What would it mean to rethink the postcolo-
nial in terms of ‘planetary’ rather than ‘globality’? (Spivak 2003, Gilroy 2005).”
In Krishnaswamy, Revathi and John C. Hawley, eds. The Postcolonial and the
Global. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 3.
92. Wilson, Janet, Cristina Sandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh, eds. Rerouting the
Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millenium. London and New York:
Routledge, 2010, 17.
93. Loomba, Ania, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty, eds.
“Beyond What? An Introduction.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond. Durham
NC: Duke University Press, 2005, 1–40, 4.
94. Massimo Repetti, discussing contemporary African graphic writing, describes the
regional or the diasporic comic text as an interventionist, popular “cosmopolitan
cultural form, with no clearly defined territory, no cultural link to a country of
origin, and thus closely conforming to Arjun Appadurai’s model for forms of
24  Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji
globalized culture. [It exists within] a transnational fluidity of people, images and
ideas which are neither localized nor confined, made up as they are of fragments
of B-movies, fotoromanzi, Brazilian telenovelas, Japanese manga, Hollywood
films, glossy magazines, reproductions of classic art, street politics, and orality.”
Repetti, Massimo. African Arts. Los Angeles, Summer 2007. Vol 40, 247.
95. Krishna, Shankaran. Globalization and Postcolonialism: Hegemony and Resis-
tance in the Twenty-first Century. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009, 2.

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