Terrestrial Realism and the Gravity of World Literature
Joe Sacco’s Seismic Lines
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13015341 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dominic Davies (0000-0002-3584-5789, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 301-322 |
| Publication date | 2021-09-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2052-2614 • E-ISSN: 2052-2622 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/pli.2021.18 |
| OpenAlex | W3207591552 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 17 |
Through a close reading of Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), a graphic novel about the struggle of the Dene people in Canada’s Northwestern territories, this article shows how Sacco effects a “peripheral realism” that draws the systemic continuities of different phases of colonial modernity into view. The article then describes Sacco’s “terrestrial realism,” which combines his peripheral realism with the dialectical participation of the reader as well. Finally, in a concluding theoretical discussion, I consider how the practice of drawing allows us to think through a response to modernity’s combined and uneven development that is both materialist and decolonial at the same time. Although the former typically insists on singularity and totality, and the latter promotes a contradictory plurality, the peripheral and terrestrial realisms of Paying the Land suggest a way for theorists of world literature to find a point of methodological solidarity that is both in and against capitalist modernity’s gravitational force
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Colonialism · Dialectic · Epistemology · Materialism · Modernity · Political science · Realism · Sociology · Solidarity · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
| Citations per year | 0.5 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2022 - 2026 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |