Graphic Narratives of Resistance

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.

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.

• List of FiguresForeword by Jessica Oublié, translated into English by Jeffrey Landon AllenAcknowledgements IntroductionJennifer Boum Make and Charly Verstraet Part I. Ecographic Narratives and Social Justice1. Ecographic Narratives of Resistance and for Liberation: Mines, Nuclear Sites and Factory Farms in Bande DessinéeArmelle Blin-Rolland2. The Indigenous Taiwanese Environmental Activism of Li-Chin Lin’s Sino-French Graphic Narrative Fudafudak (2017)Michelle E. BloomPart II. Moving Beyond Stereotypes: Rethinking Representations of Black Francophone Peoples and Cultures3. Resisting Archetypal Images in Alpha: Abidjan to Gare du Nord by Bessora and BarrouxAgnès Schaffauser4. Caricaturing Life from the Inside: An Exploration of the Extremes in Aya de Yopougon Patoimbasba NikiemaPart III. Drawing Against the Normativity of Knowledge and Identities5. Solidarity, Friendship and Love in the Penal ColonySophie Fuggle6. Agnès Maupré’s Le Chevalier d’Éon (2014–15): Reimagining Gender Fluidity in Eighteenth-Century FranceMaxence Leconte and Logan Crews7. Negotiating Transnational Masculinity in Riad Sattouf’s L’Arabe du futur Donald Joseph8. Resisting Closure: Auto-Representation and Interdependence in the Disability Bande DessinéeMarie Satya McDonough and Jennifer Eun-Jung Row9. Theorising Mauritian Bandes Dessinées as a Pluriversal PraxisJeanne JégoussoPart IV. Drawing Memories of War and Revolution10. Post-Revolutionary Tunisia in Comics and CartooningJennifer Howell11. War Trauma and the ‘Drive for Life’ in Mazen Kerbaj’s Lettre à la mère (2013)Myriem El Maïzi12. 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 Do13. The Independence Eleven: Football, Memory and Resistance in the Algerian RevolutionCharly VerstraetPart V. Colonial Legacies of the French Empire and Contemporary Challenges of the French Nation14. Framing France in the Indian Ocean: Of Shipwrecks and Fertile WomenMichelle Bumatay15. Remediating the Colonial Catastrophe in Lucas Vallerie’s Cyparis, le prisonnier de Saint-Pierre (2017)Robert Decker16. Producing Images of Deserted Memories: The Making of an Alternative Archive around ‘the Children of Creuse’Jennifer Boum MakeNotes on ContributorsIndex