Introduction: Documenting Trauma in Comics

Abstract

elastic concept that weaves and loops along networks of institutional and social knowledges, reshaping political and cultural forms, and linking once discrete categories through enticing analogies and metaphorical shadows. Trauma is 'sticky', gathering into its shape multiple affects and forms, and assuming multiple bearings and dispositions-as Sara Ahmed has written of emotional objects more generally, trauma might be said to 'become sticky, or saturated with affect, as [a site] of personal and social tension' (2014: 11; my emphasis). As Ahmed would likely suggest, we have to 'feel our way' to trauma, a critical and affective poise that, for comics scholar Kate Polak, is built into the readerly encounter with trauma that is documented specifically in graphic narratives (2017: 30). As writers, drawers, and readers of comics, we privilege our embodied reflexes to trace the traces of trauma that imprint themselves on muscles and membranes, buildings and landscapes, monuments and narratives. In this reading, trauma is only ever a shadow of itself.Maurice E. Stevens offers one useful definition, among many: 'By trauma, I mean the sets of practices that provide explanatory narratives, organise interpersonal and material relations, and establish meaningful frameworks for understanding relatedness, temporality, and embodiment vis-avis "overwhelming events". Trauma, here, is an ingathering of practices, a cultural object ' (2016: 26).A sticky concept, an emotional object, a cultural form: trauma does not so much describe as it produces; it cannot so much be represented as it can be documented. Trauma work is, for Stevens, not about describing events, but making them (28); it involves compiling and reifying an event or process into and as a narrative of trauma. It is then a 'socially mediated attribution'; it may be made in real time as an event occurs, long after the fact, or even before it takes place (Alexander, 2012: 13).As Luckhurst insists, 'cultural narratives have been integral not just in consolidating the idea of posttraumatic subjectivity, but have actively helped form it ' (2008: 15). Highlighting both visual and popular cultures in particular, Luckhurst (2018: 296) emphasises-with the support of Latour and others-that scientific concepts, psychological terminologies, and psychiatric diagnoses are

Transgenerational Trauma in Comic Books

“…The inspiration for her work on postmemory came from Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus in which Spiegelman uses three reproduced photographs which, according to Hirsch (1997), constitute both memory (of Spiegelman's father), and postmemory (of Spiegelman). Maus was not only an immense source of theoretical development within trauma studies (an overview in Davies, 2020), but also served as the foundation for various theoretical discussions regarding the connections between trauma and comics as an art form.…”

DAVIES, Dominic; RIFKIND, Candida (Eds). (2020). Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage. Palgrave Macmillan.

“…Cada capítulo, pues, nos presenta diferentes propuestas estéticas para documentar sucesos traumáticos de tal manera que se construya un diálogo intertextual con otras obras pertenecientes al trauma genre en los cómics, lo cual, a su vez, evita que se genere una definición monolítica del trauma. Tal y como comenta Davies (2020) en su introducción, "documenting trauma becomes a genealogical undertaking, a process that seeks to feel out the contours of cultural responses and social reactions to trauma, rather than to define or delineate trauma itself " (8). Por supuesto, a pesar de que en ninguno de los capítulos se nos proporciona una definición estática del trauma, el hecho de que todos ellos trabajen bajo la hipótesis de que los textos que analicen pueden ser clasificados dentro de un mismo género implica que su carácter a menudo trabaja bajo el principio de la clasificación.…”