Documenting Trauma in Comics

Reviewed by: Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage ed. by Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind Janine Utell (bio) Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, editors Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xxi + 345 pp. ISBN 9783030379971, $119.99 hardcover. ISBN 9783030380007, $84.99 paperback. Documenting Trauma in Comics emerges from a 2017 conference held at the University of Oxford, "Documenting Trauma: Comics and the Politics of Memory," and the expanded title, referencing the distinct sections of the collection, speaks to the scope of its scholarly project. In this well-edited, cohesive, and comprehensive volume, Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind have selected essays that propose to retheorize trauma through comics, and to reconceptualize graphic narrative and its medianarratology through the study of trauma. Davies's introductory chapter lays out this agenda admirably, and each of the four sections—"Documenting Trauma," "Traumatic Pasts," "Embodied Histories," and "Graphic Reportage"—unfolds with attention to the dynamics among personal and collective or social trauma, assumptions about representation that have driven trauma theory, and the generic affordances and materiality of graphic memoir and comics reportage. Life writing scholars will appreciate Documenting Trauma in Comics for its expansive theorization of multimodal narratives of trauma beyond the generic, discursive, and affective expectations of the trauma aesthetic, even as they learn of the ways comics themselves shaped that aesthetic and have come to interrogate it. Hillary Chute, who spoke as the keynote of the 2017 conference, provides an afterword that summarizes the salient features of the volume. Chute makes a case for its value, including the urgency and relevance of the theme; the proliferation of comics attending to trauma necessitating sustained study; the multiple approaches to the fields of trauma studies and memory studies evinced by the volume, as well as to comics, narrative, ethics, and human rights; the political, ethical, and affective force of images and visual storytelling as illuminated by the eighteen scholars and artists gathered; and the materiality of comics, their "process and practice," and the centrality of these to the work they are able to do through politically engaged readers, creators, and their networks (337). Chute's own Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form is essential reading in the field, and almost all of the contributors draw on its analysis. Chute also acknowledges the prioritizing of the dynamic between personal and communal or social trauma that here generates an opportunity to redefine trauma beyond the singular, the psychoanalytic, the Eurocentric. The volume is impressive in its transnational scope (considering work from Canada, England, France, Germany, India, Pakistan, Haiti, Lebanon, Hungary, Israel), and as such insists on the recognition that trauma, as Davies writes, "circulate[s]" beyond borders (18). Scholars should take note of what this transnational approach means for expanding paradigms of trauma. Davies's introduction makes clear that comics have contributed to the construction of theoretical models of trauma, even as they extend, and even dismantle, [End Page 668] those models. It is not only that trauma studies and theories of trauma have figured out ways of reading comics; comics themselves have contributed to the making of the field of trauma studies, its theories, hermeneutics, and analytical models. The essays in this collection are interested in calling into question assumptions about trauma, and the concomitant sign systems that have emerged to tell such stories in visual narrative—the visual tropes that frequently emerge in comics storytelling about trauma. Much of trauma theory, brought into widespread thought by Cathy Caruth, makes claims for the limits of language in representing trauma, for unspeakability and unrepresentability. Yet comics alter notions of what can be represented, through their medium-specific strategies—the panel, the page, the grid, the gutter—and through their interplay of word and image. As Ana Baeza Ruiz writes at the start of her essay, "Una's Becoming Unbecoming, Visuality, and Sexual Trauma," "Trauma theory has tended to characterize trauma as something unrepresentable, highlighting the impossibility of knowing the event itself and the limits of language in its articulation" (221). Yet the medium of comics has as its priority the very issue of representation, the very means of representation: what representation

Art · Comics · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Politics · Traumatic memories · Visual arts · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Digital Storytelling and Education · History · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Psychology