Graphic Disruptions

Room Number: TRS 1-077

Join the Meeting: https://ryerson.zoom.us/j/94721206965?pwd=NjFpemJCd2syWXZrZHR2OEdEeDhwUT09

Chair: Jennifer Henderson (Carleton U)

Speakers:

Sayan Mukherjee (Dhirubhai Ambani IICT), “The Cost of Progress: Displacement and Destruction of Communities in Indian Graphic Novels”

Gillian Roberts (Nottingham U), “Visualizing the Canada-US Border: Graphic Novel Adaptations of Wayde Compton’s ‘The Blue Road’ and Thomas King’s ‘Borders’”

Terri Tomsky (U Alberta), “Guantánamo comics: representing and resisting regimes of (in)visibility”

Paper Summaries:

Sayan Mukherjee (Dhirubhai Ambani IICT), “The Cost of Progress: Displacement and Destruction of Communities in Indian Graphic Novels”

This paper takes a closer look at Indian graphic novels, such as Orijit Sen’s River of Stories, in order to scrutinize the manner in which displacement of communities is depicted within them. The paper will also attempt to identify the ramifications that such acts have upon individuals within a community.

Gillian Roberts (Nottingham U), “Visualizing the Canada-US Border: Graphic Novel Adaptations of Wayde Compton’s ‘The Blue Road’ and Thomas King’s ‘Borders’”

This paper examines the recent graphic novel adaptations of Wayde Compton’s The Blue Road and Thomas King’s Borders short prose texts concerned with the settler-colonial border between Canada and the United States that have been visually enhanced in their new incarnations, enabling further scrutiny of the border’s colonial violence.

Terri Tomsky (U Alberta), “Guantánamo comics: representing and resisting regimes of (in)visibility”

Focusing on Sarah Mirk’s comic, Guantánamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison (2020), this paper analyzes the comic form as critical to revealing the state’s regime of (in)visibility, which hides its violence. The paper explores how this (in)visibility facilitates the racist, neoimperial norms that enable Guantánamo to persist.