Working at the intersection of postcolonial literary studies and comics narratology, this paper argues that Joe Sacco’s graphic narrative Palestine contributes a spatial and sonic record of territorial occupation to the Palestinian national narrative. Sacco utilizes the comics form to represent the complex of physical borders and spatial narratives he encounters in the Occupied Palestinian Territories at the end of the first Intifada . Further, he renders graphically the epiphenomenal sonic regime resulting from spatial management. Rather than an absence or gap in the Palestinian narrative, Sacco understands spatialized sound as a presence or marker of materiality. Ultimately, Palestine suggests the rich potential of the comics form for postcolonial literary studies. Sacco’s graphic narrative reinvigorates the field’s engagement with literary representations of Israel-Palestine by demonstrating the continued utility of the (post)colonial paradigm and by challenging the fields’ scholars to forge new interdisciplinary links to comics studies.
Although the graphic narrative genre is increasingly being utilized to represent human rights atrocities in complex ways, scholarship on this topic tends to focus on the analysis of issues of historical representation. Therefore, this essay contributes to this conversation a nuanced understanding of contextual reading practices in human rights discourse by analyzing Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2001) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009) through the rhetorical concept of kairos and current theories of comics narratology. If kairos draws attention to the layered historical contexts operating within Sacco’s graphic narratives as they stake claims for human rights in Palestine and comics studies scholarship focuses on the spatio-temporal dynamics of the graphic narrative form, then together these critical approaches can disrupt the linear notions of time and bounded spaces involved in the denial of Palestinians’ rights to property, land, and return. Such an approach draws attention to the urgency of Sacco’s human rights project even while he questions its efficacy.
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