2024/03/03 by Maaheen Ahmed · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Comics and Graphic Narratives #Japanese History and Culture #Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/fs/knae048
openalex publication_date 2024/03/03 · openalex created_date 2024/03/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
With their intimate connections to caricature and propaganda, comics have a deep history of complicity in imperialist ideologies and mechanisms of othering. One need not look further than the prevalence of the adventure genre or racialized cartooning persisting from the earliest days of print comics in the nineteenth century through most of the twentieth century. Much of this troubling history remains to be unpacked. In his monographs, The Colonial Heritage of French Comics (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011) and Redrawing French Empire in Comics (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013), Mark McKinney has done pioneering work in this direction for French-language comics. This third book in the trilogy, which covers the period from Algerian independence to the present, is no exception. McKinney adopts a dialogic approach, as theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin, combined with its graphic counterpart proposed by Thierry Smolderen, to foreground the strategies adopted by diverse comics artists to counter colonialist ideologies both in specific comics and in more widely spread techniques of visual and textual representation. The lucid Introduction makes a strong case for comics scholarship’s need ‘to reckon with the imperialist and colonial heritage of comics’ (p. 41), since racist and colonialist imagery is deeply embedded in some of the most celebrated French-language comics artists’ work, including Alain Saint-Ogan and Hergé, and going as far back as Rodolphe Töpffer. The book’s nine chapters examine works by Farid Boudjellal and the multicultural collective Anita Comix, which also included José Jover and Roland Monpierre, Baru (Hervé Baruléa), Yvan Alagbé, and Zeina Abirached. The final chapter, on undocumented migrants, begins with one of the earliest comics representations of sans papiers in France by Slimane Zeghidour, and elaborates on the different collaborative strategies used by contemporary cartoonists such as Lisa Mandel and Edmond Baudoin to tell migrants’ stories. Avoiding all reproductions of racist imagery, McKinney is careful, however, not to ignore far-right cartoonists, such as Coral (Jacques de Larocque-Latour) and his publisher Dominique Venner, to foreground the diverse, even contradictory, ways in which ‘the empire draws back’ (p. 19). McKinney displays a profound knowledge of French-language comics and colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial discourses, drawing out the strong connections between the transformations of the comics medium since the 1960s and the use of comics for postcolonial interventions through, for instance, new approaches to lieux de mémoire, or through adopting avant-garde strategies. Embedding postcolonial comics in both transnational exchanges and ‘a shared French comics culture’ (p. 21), McKinney takes an important step in highlighting the roles played by cartoonists of migrant backgrounds in affecting change in the French comics scene. Generously illustrated with colour images and complemented by a glossary, McKinney’s latest book is essential for scholars working on postcolonialism, race, and/or comics, within and beyond francophone cultures. Also suitable for classroom use through its accessible, sensitive, and rich analyses, this is an exemplary work of comics scholarship.