The Global Graphic Protest Narrative: India and Iran

Abstract

This article situates the graphic narrative form within the current politics of protest movements. It argues that the graphic narrative captures the forms of civil disobedience that shape late-twentieth-century and twenty-first-century protest. Protest movements increasingly operate within, or in accordance with, the systems they seek to challenge. The graphic narrative, similarly, combines complicity and critique in its narrative style and structure. The argument draws on two examples from different regional and political contexts—Vishwajyoti Ghosh's graphic narrative about the years of emergency rule in India in the 1970s, Delhi Calm, and Amir Soltani and Khalil's work on Iran's Green movement, Zahra's Paradise—to show how the global graphic narrative acts as an archive of popular protests that inform present-day movements and offers a platform for those movements to perform civic action. It advocates a new formalist approach to the global graphic narrative as a popular protest form.

<i>Shaheen Bagh</i> (2021): Gender, Affects, and Ita Mehrotra’s Graphic Narrative of Protest

“…South Asian graphic narratives are being increasingly studied by notable literary scholars such as Pramod K. Nayar (2018), Harleen Singh (2015, Pia Mukherjee (2015), Kavita Daiya (2021), Amit Rahul Baishya (2019), Ritu Gairola Khanduri (2016), and others. Writing specifically about the graphic narrative of protest, Charlotta Salmi (2021) states that these narratives function as 'intermedial texts': 'It is precisely when prose fails, or there are no words to be had, that the intermedial text bears witness to its failure and presents alternative avenues for confronting state force' (Salmi, 2021: 171). By 'intermedial texts', Salmi means that the graphic medium of these narratives mediates between the written and the spoken word to express what is ineffable in these forms of expression.…”