Graphic “Heart of Darkness”: Two Visions of Current Affairs Comics1

Abstract

Edward Said's praise of comics journalist Joe Sacco as a kind of “Marlow” (from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness) is an analogy that reminds us of the contextualization of current affairs graphic novels in other media. While scholars and laypeople alike have praised serious comics and animated works for their capacity to get readers interested in “the horror, the horror” (iconic words of Heart of Darkness), the failure of such works to “translate” across diverse reading publics attests to the imperfections of conveying traumatic stories with drawings and words. Said's own earlier writing on Heart of Darkness helps to qualify his appraisal of Marlow‐like narrations of the forgotten peoples of the world. In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said explains that author Conrad (through Marlow) ingeniously accomplishes the tragic exposition of European imperialism in “two visions.” First, Conrad acknowledges that his readers (Marlow's “listeners”) are located “in a particular time and in a specific place,” and second, Conrad permits Marlow to use “arabesque meditations” of ideas, and alternating blunt and evasive language, to capture the unrelenting journey of European imperial mastery (Said 1993:23).

Popular culture and politics: re-narrating the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands dispute

“…Recent scholarship in the broader field of IR has discussed the significance and implications of visual art and popular culture in global politics (Weldes 2003;Campbell 2007;Dodds 2007;Bleiker 2009;Grayson et al 2009;Hansen 2017;Moore and Shepherd 2010;Buzan 2010;Shim 2017;Thorsten 2012). This approach is often called 'aesthetic' IR and has included an ongoing debate about, and development of, theoretical and analytical approaches.…”

Neoliberalism, Violence, and the Body: Dollhouse and the Critique of the Neoliberal Subject

“…Studies of popular culture, such as those of Thorsten (2012), Shepherd (2013, or Griffin (2015), show how artifacts of popular culture produce and circulate cultural meanings and practices that complicate prescriptive rationalities, like the neoliberal notion of subjectivity, because they generate occasions for counter-readings shaped by the complexities of subjective experience. Thus "popular renderings of the limits of acceptable subjectivity" (Beier and Mutimer 2014, 323) are themselves an important form of political critique.…”

Private Military Companies and Neoliberal Adventure in Roll Hard (2013) and Executive Outcomes (2015)

“…Lene Hansen argues that scholars should not overlook comics and graphic novels like these because they “may not come forth as explicit attempts to impact foreign policymaking or even as inputs to broader political debates, yet they rely upon and produce particular representations of international subjectivity and practices of significance for world politics, including, for example, diplomacy and military intervention” (582). But most scholarship on graphic novels about war focuses on texts like Maus and Palestine , which are more numerous than texts like Roll Hard and Executive Outcomes (Adams; Gilmore; Thorsten; Romero‐Jódar). Likewise, scholarly discussions of graphic novels about war often focus on the role of the genre in classroom teaching (Christensen; Decker and Castro).…”