Graphic Narratives of Resistance

Advocating for Representation and Social Justice in French-language Bandes Dessinées

Edited by Jennifer Boum Make, Charly Verstraet

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Examines the political and aesthetic gestures embedded in bandes dessinées and graphic novels in order to question the past and the contemporary realities of the French-speaking world

Looks at contexts from a large variety of countries of the French-speaking world, including (in alphabetical order) Algeria, Guadeloupe, France, French Guiana, Lebanon, Madagascar, Mauritius, Martinique, Morocco, Reunion Island, Rwanda, Taiwan, The Ivory Coast, and Vietnam
Provides geographically and historically targeted case-studies that allow the reader to delve into these contexts with critical depth of analysis
Offers an overview of the evolving role of BD as a reflective tool to question past or current cultural and socio-political realities;
Interprets historical, social, political, and cultural contexts through the means of visual literary analysis
Proposes pedagogical guidelines on each bande dessinée and the themes they tackle to maximise student engagement

This edited volume sheds light on the unique capacity of the comics medium for redrawing histories and for exploring hidden, forbidden or imagined spaces. Studying a variety of texts from the French-speaking world, it considers how bandes dessinées (BD) and graphic novels can highlight environmental, gender, racial, religious, political and social questions. It also demonstrates how BD can offer readers new perspectives through formal experiment and through reworking and subverting dominant iconographies. The contributions in this volume showcase how the comic medium, through the combination of text and image, engages with notions of voice, power, bias and perspective, and can be used as a pedagogical tool and a form of resistance to discuss diversity, decolonisation, inclusion and social justice issues.

Contents

List of Figures
Foreword by Jessica Oublié, translated into English by Jeffrey Landon Allen
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Jennifer Boum Make and Charly Verstraet

Part I. Ecographic Narratives and Social Justice
1. Ecographic Narratives of Resistance and for Liberation: Mines, Nuclear Sites and Factory Farms in Bande Dessinée
Armelle Blin-Rolland
2. The Indigenous Taiwanese Environmental Activism of Li-Chin Lin’s Sino-French Graphic Narrative Fudafudak (2017)
Michelle E. Bloom

Part II. Moving Beyond Stereotypes: Rethinking Representations of Black Francophone Peoples and Cultures
3. Resisting Archetypal Images in Alpha: Abidjan to Gare du Nord by Bessora and Barroux
Agnès Schaffauser
4. Caricaturing Life from the Inside: An Exploration of the Extremes in Aya de Yopougon
Patoimbasba Nikiema

Part III. Drawing Against the Normativity of Knowledge and Identities
5. Solidarity, Friendship and Love in the Penal Colony
Sophie Fuggle
6. Agnès Maupré’s Le Chevalier d’Éon (2014–15): Reimagining Gender Fluidity in Eighteenth-Century France
Maxence Leconte and Logan Crews
7. Negotiating Transnational Masculinity in Riad Sattouf’s L’Arabe du futur
Donald Joseph
8. Resisting Closure: Auto-Representation and Interdependence in the Disability Bande Dessinée
Marie Satya McDonough and Jennifer Eun-Jung Row
9. Theorising Mauritian Bandes Dessinées as a Pluriversal Praxis
Jeanne Jégousso

Part IV. Drawing Memories of War and Revolution
10. Post-Revolutionary Tunisia in Comics and Cartooning
Jennifer Howell
11. War Trauma and the ‘Drive for Life’ in Mazen Kerbaj’s Lettre à la mère (2013)
Myriem El Maïzi
12. Redrawing the Counter-Archive: Visual Memory, Trauma and Resistance in the Graphic Novels Quitter Saigon (2010) and Descente en enfer (2005)
Charlotte Mackay and Tess Do
13. The Independence Eleven: Football, Memory and Resistance in the Algerian Revolution
Charly Verstraet

Part V. Colonial Legacies of the French Empire and Contemporary Challenges of the French Nation
14. Framing France in the Indian Ocean: Of Shipwrecks and Fertile Women
Michelle Bumatay
15. Remediating the Colonial Catastrophe in Lucas Vallerie’s Cyparis, le prisonnier de Saint-Pierre (2017)
Robert Decker
16. Producing Images of Deserted Memories: The Making of an Alternative Archive around ‘the Children of Creuse’
Jennifer Boum Make

Notes on Contributors
Index

Reviews

This engaging collection of essays provides original perspectives on the medium-specific capabilities of graphic literature to fill historical and representational voids, reconsider past iconographies and address the legacies of marginalisation in a critical light. In their sharp analyses of graphic counternarratives that challenge normative constructs of history, nationhood, race, gender, disability and ecology, the authors offer a valuable contribution not only to comics scholarship but also to the advocacy for justice.
– Fabrice Leroy, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

About the Author

Jennifer Boum Make is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Georgetown University. Her research is focused on the French Caribbean, the legacy of colonialism and the French Atlantic slave trade and care studies. Her academic writing has appeared in multiple venues including Nouvelles Études Francophones, Contemporary French And Francophone Studies, and Francosphères, among others, and her first monograph, Decolonial Care: Reimagining Caregiving in the French Caribbean, is forthcoming. Jennifer is a founding member of the Kwazman Vwa collective.

Charly Verstraet is an Assistant Professor of French Studies in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at the American University in Washington, D.C. His research and teaching focus on Caribbean and Indian Ocean studies, Ecocriticism, Bandes dessinées, Soccer and Politics and Translation studies. His co-translation of award-winning Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau's Crusoe Footprint (2022) was a finalist for the 2023 French-American Translation Prize. Charly Verstraet is a founding member of the Kwazman Vwa collective.