Why are so many contemporary comics and graphic narratives written as memoirs or documentaries of traumatic events? Is there a specific relationship between the comics form and the documentation and reportage of trauma? How do the interpretive demands made on comics readers shape their relationships with traumatic events? And how does comics' documentation of traumatic pasts operate across national borders and in different cultural, political, and politicised contexts?
The sixteen chapters and three comics included in Documenting Trauma in Comics set out to answer exactly these questions. Drawing on a range of historically and geographically expansive examples, the contributors bring their different perspectives to bear on the tangled and often fraught intersections between trauma studies, comics studies, and theories of documentary practices and processes. The result is a collection that shows how comics is not simply related to trauma, but a generativeforce that has become central to its remembrance, documentation, and study.
1. Introduction: Documenting Trauma in Comics. Section I: Documenting Trauma- 2. Hierarchies of Pain: Trauma Tropes Today and Tomorrow.- 3. Emotional History and Legacies of War in Recent German Comics and Graphic Novels.- 4. The Past That Will Not Die: Trauma, Race and Zombie Empire in Horror Comics of the 1950s.- 5. Exploring Trauma and Social Haunting Through Community Comics Creation.- 6. Comic: "Documenting Trauma".- Section II: Traumatic Pasts.- 7. Traumatic Moments: Retrospective 'Seeing' of Violation, Rupture and Injury in Three Post-millennial Indian Graphic Narratives. - 8. This Side, That Side: Restoring Memory, Restorying Partition.- 9. Visual Detention: Reclaiming Human Rights Through Memory in Leila Abdelrazaq's Baddawi.- 10. Comic: Crying in the Chapel.- Section III: Embodies Histories.- 11. Folding, Cutting, Reassembling: Materializing Trauma and Memory in Comics.- 12. 'To Create Her World Anew': Charlotte Salomon's Graphic Life Narrative.- 13. Una's Becoming Unbecoming, Visuality, and Sexual Trauma..- 14. Discourses of Trauma and Representation: Motherhood and Mother Tongue in Miriam Katin's Graphic Memoirs.- 15. Comic: First Person Third.- Section IV: Graphic Reportage.- 16. Comics Telling Refugee Stories.- 17. Migrant Detention Comics and the Aesthetic Technologies of Compassion.- 18. Comics as Memoir and Documentary: A Case Study of Sarah Glidden.- 19. Afterword.
