Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader

13. Human Rights and Comics: Autobiographical Avatars, Crisis Witnessing, and Transnational Rescue Networks (Smith 2011)

On any given day, graphic narration rides currents traversing the globe. Heterogeneous in their communities of origin and unpredictable in their routes to mass publics dispersed worldwide, diverse genres of graphic narration sometimes parallel, sometimes intersect, sometimes swerve in their travels to publics, archives, and markets here and there. There is, for instance, robust transnational traffic in national genres of comics, such as the long lineage of manga from Japan and bande dessinée from France and Belgium, including the Tintin series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé (Georges Prosper Remi). (An adaptation of one Tintin comic hit movie houses in 2011 as a Steven Spielberg film.[1]) Such traffic along “the transnational circuitries of images and narratives” becomes a means through which new global identities are constituted, dispersed communities constellated, and transnational political alliances or identifications forged.[2] Young people distributed across the globe, for instance, consume styles of comics as they consume friendships on social networking sites and display celebrity attachments through fashion, thereby producing strains of global youth culture through consuming habits and the rearrangements of desire those habits release.[3] Through these habits, young people constitute an identity for themselves as savants of global mass culture, hip readers of renegade visuality, and in-members of an emergent global sociality.

Graphic narration also rides the currents of the contemporary regime of human rights: the institutions, protocols, and routes of advocacy that draw attention to what Paul Farmer describes as the unequal “distribution of misery” around the globe, give form to the management of its attempted amelioration through discourses that “offer a universal and seemingly uncontested ethics of cross-cultural relations,” and enjoin people to become activists in its service.[4] Rights advocates target genres of comics as part of the apparatuses of racist representation, state suppression, and the cultural conduits of degradation affecting marginalized groups and/or dissident voices. Equality Now, an NGO addressing the sources of structural violence against women, is currently engaged in a transnational campaign against Japanese comics called hentai that activists describe as celebrations of a normalized culture of rape exploiting women through pornographic degradation.[5] Activists have also critiqued the ways in which comics reproduce colonialist, racist, and anti-Semitic tropes of difference through crude visual stereotypes. Hergé’s Tintin series, still popular after three-quarters of a century, has been analyzed for the way it represents blacks in “Tintin in America” and black Africans in “Tintin in the Congo,” for instance.[6] Governments too are targeted for employing comic books to propagandize their version of political events, personages, or groups to a broad public, deploying the mass appeal of the comic book form to demonize those they consider “enemies of the state.” In August 1999 the Chinese government released a comic book designed to “educate” the public about Falun Gong and its founder Li Hongzhi and to reframe the movement as subversive and Li as an enemy of the people.[7] For advocates for the rights of Falun Gong practitioners, the state in this instance traffics in propagandistic life writing.

At the same time that rights activists lodge charges against certain kinds of comics, they also exploit the capacities of the genre to affect transnational rights literacy and spur activism. As Gillian Whitlock observes so acutely, in times of crisis testimony about rights violations and claims for redress and reparation is negotiated through multilayered processes of producing, circulating, and reading crisis witnessing.[8] Crisis comics are one of these modes of witness to radical injury and harm. Rights advocates exploit the apparent simplicity and easy accessibility of the comic form to make rights discourse and politics legible to large and diverse audiences.[9] They educate readers in rights discourse, naming conditions as violations of universal rights and proposing agendas for change. They contribute to the global “social work” of producing and disseminating the subject positions of “victim,” “perpetrator,” and “rescuer” managed by the rights regime. They make public an archive of marginalization and suffering. They visualize representative subjects of particular forms of victimization. They project an agenda of rescue. Arraying boxes of witnessing, they narrativize and dramatize complex information at the same time that they intensify the affect of empathetic identification.

Official United Nations (UN) bodies publish material in comic book format, as did the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in comic books entitled HIV/AIDS: Stand Up for Human Rights (2003) and HIV and AIDS: Human Rights for Everyone (2006), developed to encourage recognition on the part of marginalized youth in the global south of their “universal right to health and dignity.”[10] Government offices charged with rights literacy also use the comic book form. In celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 2008, the city of Bogota, Columbia, printed and distributed 1,200,000 comic books to educate citizens in rights discourse.[11] NGOs also use comics to reach audiences. Campaigns to combat the prison-industrial complex in the United States, for instance, reach a mass public through a widely available comic entitled “The Real Cost of Prisons,” which presents information about the economics of contemporary punishment and incarceration in an accessible format. Well over one hundred thousand copies of “The Prison Town” (one of three comics included in “The Real Cost”) have been printed; and many of those have been disseminated to inmates and their families, as well as prison reform activists.[12] The Office of the Americas for the Cause of Justice and Peace raises funds to distribute a comic book entitled “Addicted to War,” chronicling the history of warfare in the United States, to secondary schools through the “Addicted to War Books-to-Schools Project.”[13] In the Philippines, activists involved in the Coalition against Trafficking in Women produce comic books that gather, narrate, and illustrate the stories of women who have been in prostitution.[14] The various purposes of these comic books include building awareness, providing information, raising consciousness, soliciting identification, teaching an ethics of recognition, and garnering financial support.

In crisis comics the site of the autobiographical becomes the reader himself or herself. The syncopation of personal storytelling across media (language and image) and space/time (boxes and gutters) in graphic narration activates, as Jared Gardner argues of comics generally, readerly co-interpretation: “All comics are necessarily collaborative texts between the imagination of the author/artist and the imagination of the reader who must complete the narrative.”[15] Some readers in crisis comics are addressed as those with the need to know their rights. These readers are the projected audience for such comics as the two previously mentioned, produced and circulated by the WHO and the UNHCR. Such readerships are enjoined to constitute themselves, by virtue of their reading, as subjects of human rights and individual agents of rights activism. In this way, their reading becomes a form of self-rescue as they enact the agency of producing rights knowledge. Other crisis comics address a cosmopolitan readership in developed countries. These readers are addressed as privileged, safe subjects to be enlightened about conditions elsewhere; and their reading rehearses a form of rescue of the other, through the invitation to empathetic identification and outrage. In both situations, genre can be thought of as social action, contributing to the “social work” of publicizing rights discourse, distributing rights identities, and interpellating the reader as a subject of rights activism.

The personal narration of crisis comics in the context of the regime of human rights and its management of injustice is constrained by the discourses, subject positions, protocols, institutions, and venues of rights activism.[16] Take as an example the incorporation of personal stories in NGO materials noted earlier. The NGO Campaign Against Trafficking of Women uses personal stories to intensify the lived reality of rights violations against women, to figure women as the victims of the violation of women’s human rights, to put a human voice to suffering, and to appeal to empathetic readers who are solicited to join in the project of redress through identification across difference. Consider how the management of such scenes of witness involves a series of remediations that frame the story, the subject of rights, and the scenario of rescue. Representative women witness to their experiences in prostitution; their narrated lives are then remediated to become as-told-to life writing that is then visualized in a “third-person” hand of the graphic artist. There is an NGO that is functioning as a coaxer seeking the story, and a story of a particular kind. There may be an interviewer, a compiler, an editor, perhaps a translator, all of whom coproduce the form the life story will take and the experiential history that will be included and excluded. And there is a drawer who visualizes the story, distributing it in frames and gutters, figuring the avatar, attaching affect to the width of a line or the design of the page. Collectively, all these actors coproduce the personal story, reframing it as boxes of victimization. In addition, publishers and activists may attach paratexts to the life narrative that situate the stories and authenticate the narrative by providing the imprimatur of the professional activist and the bona fides of the organization attesting to the veracity of the witness. These aspects of the incorporation of personal stories in comic books for rights activism derive from the management of suffering and social justice and thus raise important questions about the relationship of boxes of witnessing to the commodification of contemporary life writing.

The example of the WHO and UNRCR comics about HIV/AIDS awareness among marginalized youth in the global south raises other issues related to activism comics. In their exploration of educational campaigns designed to circulate health information transnationally and the kinds of subjectivities those comics construct for readers, Hsuan L. Hsu and Martha Lincoln argue that the comic form employed by the WHO and the UNHCR in their series on HIV/AIDS manages the right to health and well-being in the global south as a universal right of the individual, and that, as a result of the focus on the individual as the locus of rights, the comics “neglect . . . the critical role of economic and social vulnerability in distributing health disparities unevenly around the globe.”[17] In effect, the strategy of personalizing the experience of living with HIV/AIDS in comic book form occludes the structural inequalities that impact what the discourse of human rights defines as the universal right to health and well-being. Moreover, they argue, in the visualization of differences (the figures in the comics are given stereotyped racial, gender, and ethnic identities) the pandemic is decontextualized (the same comic books are translated into several languages and circulated broadly). Imaging bodily difference, the comics at once erase differences in local conditions on the ground and “recruit . . . racial and gender stereotypes to drive the plot and command the identification of readers.”[18] Hsu and Lincoln then parse the racialized hierarchy of agency in this comic, noting that “readers are allowed to identify with the person who physically resembles them, yet simultaneously they are encouraged to identify with the person who speaks for them: the white male character, who dominates the cartoon’s dialogue.”[19] Comics such as the HIV/AIDS comics explored by Hsu and Lincoln paradoxically reproduce the universality of rights subjectivities through the transnational traffic in stereotype. The hypervisualized, seemingly unmarked white protagonist and the array of ready-made, stereotyped avatars of multicultural others surrounding him enacts the suspect pedagogical politics of the rights regime: the unmarked expert from the developed world teaching the “illiterate” subject of rights denied elsewhere around the globe how to assume the subject position of the universal individual and to take individual responsibility for making unsympathetic people better people.[20] In reaching for the identification of the reader with an avatar within the comic, the form reinforces the argument that rights activism is a matter of managing empathetic identification rather than targeting structural inequalities and formations of exploitation within and across nations.

I raise these issues about the way comics in human rights campaigns manage subjectivities not to deny the power of crisis comics to reach publics that might not otherwise be informed, come to consciousness, take action, and claim their experiences and identities as subjects of rights. I do so in order to provide a cautionary note about the impact of the regime of human rights, as the successor global regime to the cold war, on broadly accessible contemporary modes of personal narration and their commodification in global flows that do the work of rearranging histories, identities, and the politics of empathy. I do so as well to turn attention to other genres of crisis comics that, even if caught in the neoliberal politics of commodification, present alternative engagements with witnessing, memory, loss, and recovery in graphic form. For, at the same time that graphic narration in the mode of crisis comics circulates in the information economy of contemporary human rights activism, the genre of graphic memoirs, or “autographics,” circulates as a register of remembering complex histories of violence—transnational, national, communal, familial, and personal.[21]

Joseph Slaughter explores how, over the course of two hundred years, human rights discourse and the literary bildungsroman have produced “mutually enabling fictions” that share “a common conceptual vocabulary, humanist social vision, and narrative grammar of free and full human personality development.”[22] Slaughter reads the bildungsroman as the “novelistic wing of human rights,” persuasively arguing that the two share a plot “for participation in the egalitarian imaginary of the new bourgeois nation-state, a plot for incorporation of previously marginalized people as democratic citizen-subjects.”[23] We learn how to be subjects of rights through reading realist novels chronicling the education and development of an individual who achieves maturity and resolution in incorporation as a normative subject of the nation. Indeed, in this historical moment he argues, “the Bildungsroman remains the primary enabling fiction for and privileged genre of incorporation into an international ‘reading public.’”[24] And writers across the globe committed to chronicling struggles for history, knowledge, and the status of the human in decolonizing and postcolonial societies and states read novels of incorporation and sometimes write novels of education that are indebted to, haunted by, and in conversation with the bildungsroman form. Deploying the form, they test its limits, open its ambiguities, reject its terms, and intervene in the violence of the state projects it secures through its fable of incorporation. Slaughter convincingly establishes a founding relationship between human rights discourse and this literary genre of modern citizenship and nation building, and then analyses the ways in which contemporary postcolonial bildungsromane “make legible the inequities of this egalitarian imaginary.”[25]

As they witness to traumatic histories of marginalization and violence, graphic memoirs invoke, and riff on, conventions of this long-lived form of the bildungsroman. More particularly, they tell stories of the struggle to find an artistic practice sufficient for both telling and drawing complex stories of marginalization, traumatic loss, and remembering, thus working in the mode of künstlerroman, a variation of the bildungsroman that tells the story of coming-of-age as an artist. Adapting this persistent form in often-arresting ways, they unsettle readers with their combination of “high” subject and “low” or “mass” form associated with limited literacy, juvenilia, renegade outsiderness, or fantasy superheroism. Readers confronted a new kind of graphic memoir with the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1986, followed by Maus II in 1992. Maus dramatically altered the demography of the readership for “comics” and challenged reader expectations of the relationship of form and function, of the memoir as genre and the narration of stories of traumatic injury and harm. Ten years later in 2003, the publication (and subsequent translation) of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and later Persepolis II, continued to revolutionize graphic memoir, as it told the transnational narrative of coming-of-age during the Iranian Revolution. Then in 2006 Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home mined the possibilities of graphic narration in a doubled coming-out story. Genocide, suicide, and the postmemory generation; revolution, state repression, and exile; suspected suicide and closeted sexuality: these are the experiential histories witnessed, histories that activate the obligation to tell/draw the story of the autobiographical subject as always entwined in the story of others.

“Graphic memoirs,” writes Whitlock, now do the transnational and intersubjective work of “open[ing] up new and troubled spaces.”[26] The sequential art of graphic memoir presents readers with boxes of memory, filled with images and words, arrayed across the gaps that are gutters, and linked through the self-referential “voiceover” that presents in turn narration, description, emotive reaction, meditation, or metacommentary on the process of remembering. Their hybridity encodes and routes meaning in multiple directions; their oscillations between conjunctive and competing modes of representation and storytelling (visual and textual) prompt new itineraries of “framing,” “listening,” and “feeling” through the visuality of the written and the discursivity of the depicted; their complexities and densities of language and pattern across frames and gutters energizes opportunities for metacommentary and complex recursiveness. Stories that seem to move forward, visually and narratively, constantly recycle earlier frames, motifs, incidents, characterizations; repetition abounds as acts of remembering engage the returns of inadequate modes and idioms of representation.[27]

Graphic memoirs that witness to histories of injury and harm often traffic in stereotypes and their unsettlement; but that trafficking eventuates in different politics of aesthetics than in such human rights comics as the HIV/AIDS ones previously explored. The condensed stylization of the visual components of graphic memoir, the two-dimensionality of the surface of the comic form, and the repetitious features of the autobiographical avatar in crisis comics align autographics with critiques of cultures of stereotype—of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nation—that energize structures of social marginalization, its scenes of violence and its complex, inexorable afterlives. Contemporary graphic memoirs that take on the sometimes hidden, sometimes hypervisible bodies and histories of those referenced in and through stereotypes at once put the question of difference in stylized frames and unsettle the commonplaces of cultural framing: Spiegelman unhinges readers with his casting of himself, his father, his mother, and other Jews as mice in Maus (the vermin of Nazi propaganda); Satrapi unsettles the West’s stereotypes of the veil as emblematic of Muslim women’s oppression and of Islamic nations as universally “backward” in Persepolis; and Bechdel disarms readers with her burrowing inside the psychic struggles of a father who would be labeled “pervert” in Fun Home. With all three, graphic memoir occasions an education in how to represent (for the artist) and how to interpret (for the reader) the taint of otherness attached to those who become objects against which routine violence is directed—by the West, by states, by society. These graphic memoirs in the mode of Künstlerroman mix media and meanings, unpack cultural stereotypes, play to the increasing visual literacy of a global community, and, refusing to situate their projects and their readings as calls for rescue, invite readers to collaborate in remembering alternative histories.

Whitlock observes that the accessibility and adaptability of graphic memoir, through its vocabulary and grammar, enables this genre of crisis comics to travel across cultures, despite the marks of national origin.[28] So, I conclude with reference to a new mode of crisis comics incorporating personal witnessing to catastrophic loss and disaster that may well gain momentum in riding the currents around the globe. We might call this “documentary crisis comics.”

On August 24, 2009, the New York Times “Arts” section carried a review by George Gene Gustines of the publication of Josh Neufeld’s “graphic novel” entitled A.D.: New Orleans after the Deluge.[29] In the weeks after the disastrous 2004 flood that devastated New Orleans and much of the southern coast of Mississippi, Neufeld had volunteered with the American Red Cross in the recovery effort. From New Orleans he blogged about what he encountered; and then self-published his blogs as “Katrina Came Calling” (2006). Subsequently, he located and interviewed a number of survivors about their experiences during and after the disaster. Chronicling the disaster and its afterlives, Neufeld entwined versions of six “lives” into A.D. The first iteration of the “novel” was published in serial form on Smith.com in 2007 through 2008. The online version included video and audiotapes of the interviews. “Publication” in this context came as an ensemble of genres—reportage, research, primary archival document, oral history, all remediated as graphic novel, the “novel form” of witness in which, he tells us in his Times interview, he took the novelist’s license to edit witness stories and to combine features and parts of stories of his witnesses.[30] Neufeld also included on his site a message board where readers could offer their readings of A.D. Asked about the effect of this co-writing for the amazon.com site of A.D., Neufeld responded: “I don’t know if it’s the future of journalism, but in my case, feedback of any kind is really important to me. And with a large-scale project like A.D., doing it first on the web made creator–reader communication easy. Whether it was a New Orleanian reader correcting my pre-hurricane timeline (which I later amended) or one of the actual characters responding to his or her portrayal, I was grateful for the feedback. It was like having an entire community as my research and fact-checking team!”[31] For the recently printed version, published by Pantheon Graphic Novels, Neufeld expanded the story line to the afterlives of the hurricane and its displacements.

In its experimental form, A.D. joins other recent innovations in witness narrating, including Dave Eggers’s What Is the What (2007), a fictionalized memoir of Valentino Achak Deng, survivor of the Sudanese civil war, and Tracy Kidder’s Strength of What Remains (2009), a novelistic and quasi-ethnographic rendering of the story of Deogratias, Burundian survivor of civil war and the Rwandan genocide.[32] But where Eggers and Kidder narrate the story of the singular individual surviving radical injury and trauma, Neufeld innovatively disperses crisis witnessing across an ensemble of subject positions—primary witness, secondary witness, fictional composite witness, reporter, fact-checker, and reader. And in its multiple sites of witnessing—blog, online magazine, interactive blog, published text—A.D. locates crisis witnessing not in the printed book alone as the memoir commodity but in an ensemble of media through which the process of witnessing is collectively negotiated. To mediate the problematic aspects of his appropriation of other people’s stories for his graphic novel, Neufeld evolved an interactive process of composition that engaged his subjects in editing and commentary; and he continued that collaboration in the tour marketing the book—some of the informants appeared with him at book signings when possible, as they did at the New Orleans launch on August 21, 2009.[33] Shuttling across genres, Neufeld drives graphic life writing witnessing to survival of a catastrophic event and the injustice of its aftermath in yet another direction, a hybrid mode of witnessing that calls itself a novel and conjoins journalism, oral history, and blogging.

In Soft Weapons Whitlock remarks that “autobiographical narrative is an agent in complex global dialogues and encounters and a way of thinking through the interdependencies of conceptions of self and other”; and she continues that “this personal and highly engaged way of grasping relations between the self and others is intrinsic to the transits of life narrative and the narrative imagination it engenders.”[34] Human rights discourse and activist agendas pervade global dialogues and contemporary encounters across self-other circuits. In the global currents of rights politics, graphic witnessing to crises and to the crises of representing radical violence and harm contributes to the rearrangement of “opinion and emotion” related to histories of injustice, violent events, projects of remembering, and agendas for redress.[35] It is deployed instrumentally in specific campaigns to educate readers and constitute them as subjects of rights. But as previously noted, such instrumentalist uses of graphic life writing often operate through apparatuses of remediation and authentication management and thereby reproduce asymmetrical power relations across the divide of rescue politics in which there are those who know, teach, and manage and those who suffer and respond. These comics are sometimes designed to travel across global sites, as in the case of HIV/AIDS comic book campaign, carrying a message of individualist betterment, but the representative work that drawn avatars are given to do presents a universalized (stereotyped) difference unattached to the specificities of local conditions and histories.

Other modes of graphic witnessing enter such dialogues about survival, marginalization, and violent histories more obliquely, such as the graphic memoirs of Spiegelman, Satrapi, and Bechdel and the documentary graphic novel of Neufeld. These narratives exploit the possibilities the comic form provides for unsettling commonplace frames of difference, and they thematize issues of witnessing, remembering, and producing art in the time of a global commodification of suffering. Or, as in the case of Neufeld, they experiment with emergent opportunities for fracturing witnessing across multiple subjects through collective storytelling. However implicated such texts are in the “global commodification of cultural difference—the alterity industry,” they model the hard work of rescuing dense, complicated stories of family, ethnic community, and nation rather than reproducing the rights agenda of rescuing “victims,” or as Binyavanga Wainaina has satirically intoned, of “sav[ing] you from yourself.”[36]