Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics

This book is the first study to focus wholly on comics and graphic narratives that document refugee stories and the migrant experience. Comics have long been drawn to and about refugee narratives, as the now canonized and much-discussed work of artists such as Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, and Marjane Satrapi suggests. However, limited sustained attention has yet been paid to the more recent and emerging field of what we call in the subtitle of this book, "refugee comics" a loose arrangement of innovative, contemporary graphic works that have documented the so-called "refugee crisis", along with its many consequences and contexts, especially since 2015.

Through six in-depth chapter studies, this book covers both print and digital comics that document different aspects of the refugee experience, from initial conflicts and displacements to perilous sea journeys and border crossings to detention centres, deportation programmes, and resettlement schemes. The chapters not only interrogate the ways in which graphic narratives document the violence of racialized visualities, hardening borders, and an ever-expanding deportation regime, though this they certainly do. They also ask how comics might reorient the ethical, political, and historical relationships between Western artists, readerships, and refugees, as these take place within countries of the Global North and across North-South and South-South regions and communities.