Informazioni sul corso | Nakba and Shoah: Memories of Catastrophe in Graphic Narrative

Nakba and Shoah: Memories of Catastrophe in Graphic Narrative

Nakba and Shoah: Memories of Catastrophe in Graphic Narrative
As comics scholar Hillary Chute notes in Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (2016), graphic narratives – understood as long-form narratives combining words and images, often told through a sequential series of framed panels – possess particular affordances for recording and recovering historical events as part of contemporary cultural memory. “The essential form of comics – its collection of frames – is relevant to its inclination to document,” Chute writes. Comics make the “reader access the unfolding of evidence in the movement of its basic grammar, by aggregating and accumulating frames of information” (2). In this course, we will study and test Chute’s argument about the special connection between comics (or graphic narrative, as the broader and more inclusive term) and historical documentation by analyzing a selection of works that grapple with two highly traumatic events of twentieth-century history: The mass-persecution and near-extermination of the European Jews by the Nazis (commonly referred to as the Holocaust or, especially among Jewish scholars, the Shoah) between 1933 and 1945 and the forced displacement of Palestinian Arabs as part of the Palestine War of 1948, which led to the establishment of the state of Israel and which Palestinians call Nakba. Both events – the Shoah and the Nakba – are related, and both terms translate as “catastrophe,” marking them as deeply consequential historical events but also significant subjects for cultural memory. Over the course of the semester, we will gain a basic familiarity with these events and learn how to analyze and interpret graphic narratives that deal with their difficult histories. While the course is not intended as a forum for discussion of the current violence and political turmoil in this part of the world, it does aim to provide a necessary sense of historical depth and complexity as well as the ability to critically examine graphic narratives about the two historical catastrophes that in many ways mark the beginnings of the ongoing conflict. I will provide historical and theoretical readings for several of our sessions via Moodle.

We will read and analyze the following works:
Art Spiegelman. The Complete Maus. New York: Pantheon, 1996.
Bernice Eisenstein. I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors. London: Picador, 2006.
Abdelrazaq, Leila. Baddawi. Just World Books, 2015.
Sabaaneh, Mohammad. Power Born of Dreams: My Story Is Palestine. Street Noise Books, 2021.
Sacco, Joe. Footnotes in Gaza. 2009. New York: Henry Holt, 2010.

Please purchase the books by Abdelrazaq (21,35 €), Sabaaneh (14,57 €), and Spiegelman (24,95 €). Everything else will be provided in class.

Dozent/in: Daniel Stein