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Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, "Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics" (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to have with me both of the authors of a book titled Graphic Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics, published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2025. This book, as the title suggests, is a in depth, intricate study of comics that are about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, detainees. We're going to talk about what some of those labels mean in this context, examining what's actually happening in these narratives within them, the way that they're crafted visually, politically, and what this means for our understanding of obviously politics around refugees as well as comics and of course, their interactions. So I'm very pleased to welcome both of the authors of the book, Dr. Dom Davies and Dr. Candida Rivkind, to the podcast to tell us all about their work. Dom Candida, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having us. Could you please start us off by introducing yourselves each a little bit and then tell us why you decided to write the book together. Dom, perhaps you can start.
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Dr. Dom Davies
Yeah, so I'm Dom Davies. I'm a reader in English@ City St. George's@ University of London.
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Dr. Candida Rivkind
Candida. I'm Candida Rifkin. I'm a professor of English at the University of Winnipeg in the centre of Canada.
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Dr. Dom Davies
And we decided to write this book together. Well, we had worked on a previous project, an edited collection called Documenting Trauma in Comics. And we had kind of, as Candida often says in these conversations, we'd been turning up at the same conferences and being put on the same panels because we were always talking about the depiction of refugees in comics and graphic narratives. And we did this collection about trauma in comics and the way comics reproduce but also challenge sort of tropes of trauma, kind of like conventional sort of stories around empathy and thinking about sort of traumatic histories and how comics grapple with these kind of tensions. And we worked really well together on the edited collection and we enjoyed working together. And we decided that we wanted, because we were both interested in this more particular area of comic studies, refugee comics, that we would bring our shared interests together. Rather than writing sitting alone in our rooms writing a solo authored monographs, we would team up and create more of a dialogic form that seemed to sort of meet the subject and the demands of the subject.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's definitely a reasonable thing to come to given that you had this prior experience working together and as you said, kept turning up at all the same conferences. So speaking then of that writing together, Candida, can you maybe tell us a bit more about how that worked from a process point of view?
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Dr. Candida Rivkind
Yeah, for sure. So I think when a lot of people collaborate on books, they tend to actually co write. You know, they'll arrange a teams meeting or send drafts back and forth of the same work. But we decided to do something a little bit different because we do have different backgrounds and training. My background is in literary studies with an interest in life writing, autobiography and affect theory and so on. DOM comes from post colonial studies and has an interest in infrastructure studies. So we thought that rather than going through that really belabored process of trying to co write and combine our voices, we would actually delegate the different areas of interest and topics. So there are six main chapters to the book, and we each wrote three going back and forth. And then it just sort of organically worked that there were three subsections that we each could have a chapter in. So we would write our drafts and then send the complete draft of our own chapter to the other person and they would be our first reader and editor. And that was frankly the best part of the process for me, because I had an interlocutor who was also Deeply immersed in the field. That could bring some fresh eyes and perhaps new references, new thoughts, and also look at my close readings and, you know, point out things that I might have missed. So it was. It's a combined manuscript, but we have distinct voices, I think, and distinct areas of interest. Each chapter is signed by Maine to us. And so it is, I think, a new kind of methodology that we haven't seen a lot, but I would really recommend because it allowed us to combine our interests in a way that didn't require us to submerge any of them.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's exactly why I asked you to tell us a bit about it, because I thought it was really interesting. And even just from reading the book, definitely got a lot of ideas of, like, ooh, I could see this working in a bunch of other fields too. So thank you for taking us a bit behind the scenes there, Dom. Was there anything you wanted to add?
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Dr. Dom Davies
Yeah, just how rewarding it was really, to see someone coming from a different set of kind of sort of, you know, we both working in comic studies, but this is a very, very interdisciplinary book, as Candida says. My background are kind of like infrastructure humanities, environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, Canada's in. In life writing and Canadian writing and women's writing, and bringing those sort of different skill sets together. I learned so much from. From Canada. But then also, it's worth saying that we. We did co author an introduction and conclusion, you know, after we'd kind of written our chapters. And that was also a really kind of rewarding intellectual experience because I think some of the kind of major concepts actually came after we'd done our individual close readings. We kind of realized the theoretical gaps that we needed to fill, and I'm sure we'll talk about some of those, and we're able to sort of hash those out together. And to get that, obviously, we had peer reviews on the book, but to already have the opinion of someone, a scholar that you really trust, before you even get to that stage was really helpful. And I definitely recommend the experience.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really great to hear. And it is, in fact, on those theoretical questions that I'd like to turn to next, because, of course, any sort of book that involves close readings, one cannot close read every text that could fit into the categories. So can you tell us a bit more about how you define what makes a refugee comic? How you chose which ones to go in the book? What are we doing in terms of audience conceptualization here? Maybe, Dom, you can tell us a bit more about that theoretical aspect of the text.
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Dr. Dom Davies
Yeah, I think it's worth sort of starting out by just sketching out what we mean by refugee comics, as you say. And I mean, you know, broadly, it's not super complicated comics by and or about refugees. Basically, although we use refugee in a very expansive sense, we don't mean in the terms of like refugee, someone who has attained legal status as a refugee. And in fact one of the arguments of the book, and we draw on the refugee. Critical refugee studies scholar Vin Nguyen, whose work on refugee tude, says, you know, we need to think of refuge as a more expansive set of lived relations and conditions and things that we move in and out of. It's not this kind of, it's not only this legal category. So it's worth saying that we're thinking about refuge in this broader, more expansive sense. And Vin kindly wrote a forward for the book which was really, really helped to set that up. And then when you, when you, once you start thinking about refugee tude or refugee hood or refugee in that way, you begin to see that actually comics have this really close relationship with, with the refugee experience or the migrant experience historically. I mean, you know, the sort of, sort of stereotypical one is the fact that, you know, even, even Superman is, is a refugee from, from Krypton. Right. He's kind of, he's survived, his whole family have been destroyed, he's fled his home planet and he's turned up on Earth looking for somewhere safe to kind of rest. But I think we don't actually look at superhero comics. We're much more interested in the tradition of kind of documentary or non fiction comics. Although we do look at some fictional and speculative comics as well. And there again we find, if you think about the canon of people who are familiar with, in literary studies or comic studies will know, the sort of widely recognized canon of documentary comics includes books like Art Spiegelman's Maus, which is of course about the displacement of World War II. And you know, it's the story of Vladec who is a refugee in the US from Europe after his time in Auschwitz. Same with Mayan Satrapi. Her Persepolis, another very well known comic is about. She flees the war in Iran and studies in Europe for that time so she can be safe during that conflict. And then again, something like Joe Sacco's work is very much interested in these figures who. In figures in Palestine, for instance, in his sort of landmark set of comics where again, it's all about his talking with people in refugee camps. So that's really close, tight connection. And there's lots of reasons for that that we can perhaps, we'll perhaps unpick as we as we go today why there's this close relationship between the comics form and refugee stories. But it's worth saying that actually we're trying to, you know, there's a lot of stuff that's been written about those kind of very well known documentary comics. And so the kind of refuge g comics that we're interested in our book are really Almost all, with one or two small exceptions, written or drawn or made created after 2015 and 2015 was the so called migrant crisis in Europe. And I use crisis in. I'm making inverted comments there because obviously it was a crisis for Europe, but it had been a crisis for people in Syria and Libya and other parts of sub Saharan Africa for much longer. But the crisis emerged into European media and visual culture in 2015 and has now become one of the most controversial and hotly debated political topics in sort of Anglo, European and American media is the question of the migrant. So we wanted to look specifically at comics that came in the wake of that explosion of kind of anti migrant sentiments and to think about specifically how comics were navigating those tensions, responding to them, sometimes being complicit with them, sometimes perpetuating a humanitarian gaze, but occasionally, sometimes introducing quite a radical notion of refugee agency into a visual culture that's otherwise, you know, overwhelmingly anti migrant.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a very comprehensive foundation. Thank you. Candida, anything you want to add?
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Dr. Candida Rivkind
Well, you asked about conceptualizing the reader of these comics, and that is a question we ourselves had to ask because one of the questions we're asking throughout the book is how do these comics themselves position their readers? And, you know, I'm always wary, I tell my students, try not to use the phrase the reader because we don't know who is this reader. It's a kind of fictive invention. So about halfway through working on the book, Dom and I sort of at the same time said to each other, who are we talking about when we're talking about the readers of these comics? And like many scholars, we had defaulted to a kind of vague idea of the Western reader as the reader of these comics. And that's certainly been the default for people looking at how these comics can engender empathy and perhaps you know, even lead to social change or charitable donations in support of refugees. There's no doubt that some nonprofits and others have used comics in that very specific way. But the idea of a Western reader just doesn't work for us. It felt too sweeping because what does that even mean? So we developed the term citizen reader and citizen viewer. We use them sort of interchangeably because for us, the real dynamic here isn't between the west and the non west, it's between citizens and refugees. So there may well be people living in the west who are displaced, people without papers. There may be refugees living in the west reading these comics. And there are certainly citizens who travel globally into zones that might be thought of as the spaces where refugees live and occupy. So we really wanted to think about that dynamic and understand that a lot of these comics are targeted in the first instance to citizen readers to try and create alternate narratives or images of refugees. John just mentioned that idea. The migrant is a threat or as helpless. We see a lot of images of refugees as agents. But we wanted to think about how even those who have citizenship in the west may themselves not have the full rights to that we think of as citizenship because of their race or religion or gender or sexuality and so on. So that became a really important theoretical question for us to position ourselves in relationship to the comics and how we imagine the reader. So that's why we use the term the citizen reader, citizen viewer. And we do expand on that in our introduction.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely helpful to understand as well. So thank you for adding that on. The next thing I would like to talk about is getting into some of these close readings. Obviously, obviously with less detail than in the book. I'm not going to ask you to read out a chapter to us live, but if you could give us some sense of some of these key chapters that you have mentioned exist. So starting with representations of the sea in refugee comics, given especially Dom, what you just told us about the focus of the crisis with Europe crossing the Mediterranean, the sea is a really important part of what has been in all these news stories for years. So how can representations of the sea in these refugee comics be making a bigger point, being anti colonial or even abolitionist?
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Dr. Dom Davies
Yeah, these are the claims that I make in that chapter. And you're absolutely right, obviously one of the most spectacular, in a sort of negative sense, places where migrants are seen as out at sea. If you Google migrant crisis, the images that come up are migrants aboard dinghies. And there's kind of reports of people drowning in the Mediterranean in the Channel all the time. And tens of thousands of migrants have died in the Channel in the last 20 years or a quarter century. So I was very interested because it's such a hyper visual and it's something that's so dominant in our visual culture. It's something that I wanted to explore in refugee comics to see how they reframed the sea. And it's worth also just picking up on something Candida said then about how migrants tend to be either presented as victims or as a threat. And I was interested in. And one of the things we're both interested in in this book is how could we. How can refugees be represented as actually just agents, People with desires, with meats, with. With homes, people who've lost their homes, people with families, you know, rather than these kind of. These very sort of extreme polarized depictions as kind of victims or threats. And one of the ways that critical refugee scholars have done this is to call for a spaces and places, not faces approach. So rather than obsessing over the image of the refugee, instead turn our attention to the landscapes or indeed the oceanscapes through which refugees are moving. So it's really interesting that this was being called for in critical refugee studies. And then I was reading these comics, and lo and behold, a lot of them, they do focus on refugee faces, but they also spend a lot of time depicting the sea. And so I wanted to really draw out what that might be telling us and what that might be meaning. And what I kind of felt was that the more we focused on the sea and the more refugee comics helped us to think about the sea, the more the kind of contemporary Mediterranean crossing was situated within a much longer history of sea crossings through kind of certain aesthetics, certain kind of references. So I'm thinking of a book by Tom Feelings, who's an African American illustrator and artist. It's a kind of silent graphic novel, which means it doesn't have any text. And he does this incredible sort of. Yeah, this silent depiction of the Middle passage. And it's got the sea and it's got these people, you know, bound in boats and making this perilous crossing, this perilous journey across the Atlantic as enslaved people. And there were real echoes of that comic in the kind of comics about the refugees in the Mediterranean. So I was really interested in the way, by getting us to think about the sea as having a kind of, you know, the sea isn't just the sea. It signifies a whole set of stories. It's a kind of, you know, the sea is media, it's matter in some ways, and it projects narratives. And actually, the refugee comics were helping us to see that the current refugee crisis is, in fact, the latest symptom in a much longer history of racial capitalism. This is helping Us to think, to see how this is. In fact, the current migrant crisis is not like a recent crisis that just needs to be resolved through some bureaucracy or some humanitarian aid. It's actually sort of structural, embedded in the kind of the operations of the much longer world system that we think of as capitalist modernity, I suppose.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And so this makes the sea potentially anti colonial and abolitionist.
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Dr. Dom Davies
Well, I think the first, you know, to begin thinking about thinking differently about how we might look at or how we might see refugees differently, we might first think about them in these much longer. These much longer histories. And so it causes us to think, okay, well, rather than that kind of what we might think of as the. The terracentrism of contemporary national identities, actually we have this kind of oceanic identity where identity becomes much more fluid. We think about something that's constructed over time and through different connections to different parts of the world. And that transcend the fiction, I suppose that nations are somehow self contained and have immune from migrants and that migrants are a threat to the integrity of the nation. Were actually, you know, that's a complete fiction. It gets us to start seeing how national cultures are built differently, if that makes sense.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's definitely a useful, you know, by increasing the historical lens, kind of different things therefore come up more. Which is definitely interesting to think about in terms of the kind of concept and theory of what we use to the lenses we use to look at these comics.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
There's of course also the like literal looking at the techniques that are being used in the comics too. So I wonder maybe Canada, you can tell us a bit about how we might understand specific techniques that are being used in a particular comic and what that's doing to make these arguments for humanizing refugee camp depictions, for example.
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Dr. Candida Rivkind
Yeah, for sure. So I wrote the chapter on refugee camp comics and there are a variety of comics that are about camp, some by westerners who went to volunteer, like Kate Evans, who started a blog and then turned into documentary comic threads about her time in the Calais and Dunkirk camps. And there are, you know, all kinds of approaches to the refugee camp. But when it comes to drawing and what comics can do, I think Dom and I are both influenced by Hilary Cheats observations and Cheat is an important comic scholar and she's written in several places about how the hand drawn comic embodies the artist on the page and it's their physical presence on the page which creates a kind of intimacy between the artist and the page and the reader and the page. And we're all drawn reader, subject, artist into this kind of intersubjective relationship. So that's a sort of theoretical idea about line drawing. On a very practical level, comics artists can draw people who need to hide their identity. People who are displaced on the move, who are, you know, evading legal borders and so on. Olivia does this in his extraordinary collection of comic sequences, Escaping wars and Waves, which is about his time with Doctors Without Borders in refugee camps, and Syrians are being detained in Iraq and elsewhere. And he focuses on spaces and places, not faces. But he also provides very detailed drawings. However, sometimes he masks the identity of the people whose drawings he's giving us. So he has one section just called the Afghan, and it's about a young Afghani man who's detained in Calais and trying to get across the Channel to the uk. So we can learn his story, we can understand his situation, but unlike photography or film, we don't actually see his face. So he protects his identity and helps him with his security. The other thing about mind drawing is that it can be as detailed or as minimal as the artist wants. So they could do a very quick sketch on the fly and just gesture towards the scene, which then requires the reader to project their own meaning into it and to fill in those gaps. Or they can provide very detailed drawings like Kubler does. One of the things I love about his depiction of camp life is the way that detained migrants make home in these tents. UNHCR provided tents with very little. They eat candy, they have a heater, they trade objects. And Kugoo depicts all of this in the background so we can get a deeper and thicker sense of these people's lives, not just their faces that might appear tragic or sad. And the other thing I wanted to say is that comics often have frames, right? So the very form of comics is panels with borders on a page or a screen. And some artists can do interesting things with those framing devices themselves. So one of the comics I look at is Badawi Melila Adorizak, and it's a. A comic set in the past because it's based on her Palestinian father's time in the 50s and 60s in a Lebanese camp called Badawi, which still exists today. But what she does in her drawings of her father and her grandmother's lives in the past is she frames each panel with drawings of Palestinian embroidery, the tech trees embroidery that many people might know from women's clothing and from, you know, objects that are sold, textiles. So she's framing the story of her father's time with a cultural object that has deep political and cultural meaning. And that's something unique to comics.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely a key part of what's happening visually here, and especially those details about kind of how much detail is or is not shown. Definitely makes an impact, which is hard to do if it was a photograph. Right. Kind of everything is equally represented in a photograph. But this definitely adds a whole bunch of nuance. And let's, as you said, with the border changes, kind of make, bring. Bring in additional visuals to make additional points. So I wonder then if we can continue talking about the ways in which kind of additional messages are brought into what otherwise might seem like sort of straightforward depictions of kind of here's what happened to a particular person. Moving to a slightly different, though definitely related political topic of the global war on terror. The kind of official name for a whole bunch of different campaigns that resulted, obviously, and a huge amount of people being forcibly moved from where they otherwise were. What can comics do in terms of using these visual elements, some of which we've discussed already, to challenge some of the assumptions and paradoxes built into the particularly American government conception of the global war on terror?
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Dr. Dom Davies
Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, it's worth saying. So I. There's a kind of whole chapter on comics and the war on terror and it focuses specifically on Sarah Glidden's the cartoonist and journalist, really. Sarah Glidden. Her graphic novel was a long form documentary graphic book, I suppose, of about 400 pages, 300 pages, you know, thousands of panels that are all delicately hand painted, beautiful. To read about her, it's called Rolling Blackouts and it's about her journey. She goes on a. On a sort of tour really with some journalists through Iraq and Syria. And what I wanted to do was to use this and it was made in. She made it in. The tour that they went on was in 2010, but she published it in 2016. So there's a kind of big lag, if you like, in the sense that she was interviewing refugees who've been internally displaced or you know, been displaced over the border from Iraq to Syria in the wake of the Iraq war or to Turkey. But then obviously by the time the book actually came out, that was in 2016. And then Syria had had its own civil war in that intervening period and many, many Syrian refugees had obviously fled to Turkey and further to Europe. So it's a very interesting time lag in the sense that it's this comic about a situation that's changed. And so it's not at all news media. It's not trying to show us anything new. On the contrary, it's what Joe Sacco, who I mentioned earlier, would call slow journalism. It's a kind of really Delayed, drawn out. And I mean that kind of, you know, figuratively, but also literally, because it takes her such a long time, it takes Glidden such a long time to paint these panels. It takes sort of five years to put together a comic of this lens that it's more of a meditation, if you like, a kind of visual meditation on the way in which we receive news media, the way in which we see our visual culture operates. And I think this is kind of. I try and connect this basically to the War on terror, because one of the things that the War on Terror did was that before the War on Terror, there was this kind of general belief. And Susan Sontag, the great visual theorist Susan Sontag, talks about this, this belief that if you could just document atrocity, then people would mobilize to stop it, then leaders would be held to account. Leaders only get away with things that we can't see. I mean, obviously, now that we're talking in the aftermath of the genocide in Gaza, that seems like a ludicrous thing to say. But in 2010, this was kind of still very much a sort of normal conviction when Sarah Gludon was putting her comment together. And so what's really interesting is that the War on Terror begins. The kind of process that has come to a head in Gaza, which is that, you know, the War on terror was all about embedding journalists with US Marines in Iraq and Syria, about kind of live streaming the war in Iraq and live streaming, kind of the kind of bombing of Baghdad and so on and so forth. So it kind of upset this idea that if you could see more, you'd somehow understand and understand more, or somehow there would be more kind of political accountability that actually what the War on Terror disproved is what Gaza's now really disproved, which is being able to see, see atrocity doesn't actually empower us to do anything about it. And so actually, what comics can do is not simply show us, tell us about things that we don't see, although they can do that documentary tradition, but they can actually show how power works visually in the visual systems that kind of dictate and frame our. Our ways of seeing. And one of the ways Glidden does that is through these painstaking panel after panel where she documents not so much there are some refugee stories in her book, but it's much more a story about the way in which the journalists are going around Iraq and Syria getting stories with refugees and how actually their own biases and their prejudices and their desires and what they want to achieve, sort of warp the refugee stories that they're trying to tell. So it's much more of a kind of self reflexive. And this is kind of why I think comics are particularly, particularly strong. They help us to see how we're seeing, if that makes sense. We sort of see the world twice, we see the refugee story, but what we really see is we see how that refugee story is being framed, how that refugee is being set up as a victim, set up as a criminal. And they help us to think critically about how we might think, you know, reframe stories in different ways.
- [32:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It's really interesting to think about the use of time as part of this medium. And there's of course also the question of the sort of physical medium itself. I think so far, I believe most if not all of the comics we've been discussing have been primarily in print as the first instance. But there's of course digital comics too, that still fall within the categories of focusing on the same sorts of issues as the ones we've been discussing so far. So to what extent is that different? If the kind of content or the type of thing that's being this kind of story being told is the same or similar, but we've got it in print versus in a digital form, what's different, especially from the sort of reader. Citizen reader perspective.
- [33:38]
Dr. Candida Rivkind
Yeah, I'll pick up on that because that's something that I think about a lot in this book. And I want to be clear that quite a lot of the print comics that we discuss are available online, basically as ebooks or scanned PDFs of the original. That's not quite what I'm looking at in the chapter on digital comics. What I'm interested in are what we might call low interactive comics. So I turn more to game theory in that chapter to think about these comics where the artists have created them online, they were made to be used online. And they also take some cues from all the affordances of digital media. So things that might matter in print comics, like page layout or page flip, you know, the artist can use the page flip to create surprise. Those get replaced by things like scrolling or hypertext or clicking through or soundtracks. Because of course, digital comics now can use the medium of sound. So there are obvious practical differences. Digital comics tend to be more accessible. They're often free, and you just need a WI fi connection and a computer to read them so they can be disseminated and distributed much more widely. They're often much more affordable, not just for citizen viewers or anyone using them. But for the artists themselves. A lot of emerging comics artists are posting things online, whether through social media apps like Instagram or through these more interactive kind of softwares. So in terms of the experience, I think there's a number of things to think about. One is that most of us are on our computers all day long and we might encounter these comets within the flow of our day, where we're receiving all kinds of information, some of it about migrants and refugees. So it's not as much of a kind of bracketed reading experience as settling in with a comic or a book, a print one. And so it can become part of that flow of information, whether the comic perpetuates stereotyped images of migrants or disrupts them. So when I look at some online interactive comics, I'm really interested in the degree to which the artist is handing control over to the user. And that's why Game Theory comes up here, because in a comic like Jasper Reitman's Exodus, which is a fictional speculative comic about a kind of non identified Middle Eastern state that goes through all the stages of authoritarian regime destruction of the city and people having to leave through the desert and get on boats, in that comic you can scroll back and forth. So the print version was actually a fold out comic that was many meters long when you unfolded it. So that was already quite unconventional. But when you look at it online, you can go back and forth in time and that suggests that this experience is ongoing. It's not just a linear trajectory. Also, as you go through, the user triggers sound effects. So there's a sense that you are in some way creating or participating in this world. Another one that we both talk about at various points in the book is a very well known online interactive comic by Matt Nguyen, who's a Vietnamese Australian artist. It's a kind of animated version of Nam Lee's short story the Boat. And it is about people fleeing Vietnam for Australia during the American war in Vietnam. But the screen actually tilts and shifts like you're on the boat with them. And it can be quite upsetting and disorienting if you tend towards seasickness. Also, it scrolls down through the screen like you're falling down with the people on the boat into an unknown future. So there's lots of interesting things that online technologies can do to immerse the viewer into the comic at the same time. At the end of my chapter, I sound a cautionary note because I think we tend to get really excited in things like comic studies about new technologies, but we have to Remember that a lot of the technologies that make these comics possible are things like aerial views from drones, things like mapping technologies and surveillance technologies that can depict people on the move. And of course, these are the technologies that also frame people as refugees and lead to their surveillance and detainment. So it's kind of a mixed blessing, I think. But I think there is a lot of potential there for digital comics.
- [37:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I'm glad you mentioned that point about drones and the way in which they're used for surveillance, because that leads me very nicely to my next question, which is why, given that sort of mixed blessing nature of that kind of viewpoint, why did you decide to include a chapter on drone warfare in the book?
- [38:10]
Dr. Dom Davies
Yeah, so I'll respond here.
- [38:12]
Dr. Candida Rivkind
And.
- [38:13]
Dr. Dom Davies
Well, I think partly because comics, I mean, comics are one of the things that comics do so well, and refugee comics in particular is they're responding to profound shifts in our visual culture as we've kind of been talking about. And one of those is, you know, the kind of, I guess, a kind of paradox or even a sort of conundrum, I suppose, brought up by the drone is that it's not only then, you know, when you see something, it's no longer, you know, simply seeing something isn't just a sort of. Isn't a political act anymore, it's not a documentary act. But actually, in the drone, you know, if you're seen by a drone, that usually means that you're going to be killed and destroyed in the next instance. So suddenly seeing is now not just a kind of radical act or a liberatory act. It's actually the very opposite. To be seen is to kind of be subject to violence. So this is why the kind of. This is why I think comics are really. One of the reasons they're drawn to drones is because they want to play with this idea that vision and sight has become a sort of a source of. Has been weaponized, I suppose, as a way of destroying the very homes that then drive. Lead people to displacement. And that's another reason why we included this chapter. So I look at a few different comics. Hamid Suleiman's Freedom Hospital is a great graphic novel that uses these kind of incredible black and white aesthetics to implicate its reader as if they were a kind of drone operator. It includes lots of kind of aerial shots looking down on destroyed cities in Syria, but also at different times, it gets the reader to sort of look through the lens of a sniper rifle just before someone's killed. So there's this constant insinuation of getting the reader to think critically about how they see and what they're seeing might actually be doing their. Might their vision be complicit in the violence of these new kind of military technologies. But also, I looked at some illustrated memoirs, so Maw El Sabuni's Battle for Home, where she is more of a kind of a piece of prose writing, but it's littered with or scattered throughout are these drawings. She's an architect by training, and these drawings have destroyed Syrian cityscapes reduced to rubble. And she spends a lot of time thinking about the affective dimensions of those cityscapes. And I think that's also what I wanted to think about, you know, behind the visual culture of the migrant crisis, of all these people, these decontextualized people arriving on boats and being demonized as criminalized as criminals or, you know, or as threats to the nation or somehow, you know, actually behind them is this infrastructural devastation. And again, I've said this already, but we kind of finished. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about the epilogue in a moment. But we finished the book in October 2023, shortly after the Al Aqsa flood led by Hamas on Israel, and then obviously, the subsequent annihilation of Gazan infrastructure, where the stuff that had been going on in Syria, that kind of obliteration of cityscapes, suddenly became center stage. So it felt very, very important to point out that the refugee comics had been doing this and pointing our attention not only to the physical bodies that are destroyed by bombs, but to the cityscapes and how that is a source of. It's one of the sources of displacement, the driving forces of displacement.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So both of these answers that we the last two answers in particular the last two chapters you've each spoken to are really interested in looking at how these comics are confronting uses of violence, uses of seeing as violence. And so I noticed in both of them and discussed towards the end of the book as well, there's this tension that Canada mentioned earlier kind of coming up in a bunch of different places around what is the balance between challenging these uses of seeing as violence, for example, by state actors, and resisting it, but also by reproducing some of those same images. Right? It's something that we see, for example, with journalism and news around, kind of what images should be shown or need to be shown, that doesn't then just go into kind of glorification of violence or reifying the violence. So given that the visuality here is really important, even though it's not for photographs, that's not the type of visual we're talking about. How do comics navigate this tension of depicting what's actually happening, but not just kind of re inscribing the same sorts of images they might even be trying to push back against?
- [44:59]
Dr. Candida Rivkind
That's a fantastic question. And it's something that I'm sort of thinking about going back to our earlier work on trauma. Because when I teach some of these comics, some of the students in my class have gone through these experiences. Experiences. And I'm always wondering, am I re traumatizing them by, you know, asking them for credit and for essays and so on, to look at images of things that they might have experienced, particularly images of violence. And, of course, comics and violence have gone together since the very beginning. Some of it is what we might think of as cartoon violence, Like a cat throwing a brick at a mouse, like in Crazy Cat. And of course, superhero comics are full of violence, but we understand that in some way, to be cartoony violence, it's not real. Whereas here in these comics, the violence is very real. And some artists do draw on photographs of violent events, of bombings, of what Dom thinks about through domicide, the destruction of home through things like drone warfare. So there is that history in comics, and I think it's part of the legacy of the form. What I think about in this is that comics are a framing form, right? We've talked about borders in the comics page layout. And this is where the very structure of comics comes into play, because comics produce drawings of reality. And we are very aware the whole time that these are drawings of reality because they're put into frames, into those panel borders. So there's a kind of. Some might say an artificial effect to the things depicted, although they're very real. But I think of it more as a kind of alienating effect so that the reader sees the framing of war visually on the page, framed in a panel, but also in the kind of sense Judith Butler talks about. She writes about how framing has these double meanings. The meaning to put inside a visual frame, but also to frame as it is set up or to make, you know, legally culpable. So I think comics can put images of war into frames. They contain them, and they make us aware of the structures that frame them and produce them. So in comics theory, we talk a lot about the gutter, which is that white or black space between each panel, where cartoonists can ask the reader to project meaning, but they can also leave things undrawn or unsaid. And I think we do see that in some comics where we are asked, perhaps, to draw on previous photos or films to understand that war happened or that violence happened, but that many of the comics draw the consequences instead. So the consequences may be on individuals. Like in the Best We could do, which is Thi Bui's graphic memoir of her family's history in Vietnam and then in the US we see that her father has emerged from that experience severely depressed and withdrawn and occasionally prone to violence. So we may not see actual images of the violence that caused that, but we see its effect. We can also see effects on landscapes and ecosystems. And Jaska Reitman shows that in Exodus as a city has been completely destroyed. And in another book I talk about Don Brown's the Unwanted, which is about Syrian refugees in Iraq after 2315. We see how putting up these massive tent cities in the desert changes the ecosystem and the landscape. And he even pays some attention to animals like rats coming into an environment where they never existed before. So I think there is a lot of emphasis on the before and after of violence in some of these comics and less on those moments themselves.
- [48:21]
Dr. Dom Davies
Yeah, I might just jump in and add something there about. I mean, another theorist that is kind of quite a source of inspiration for us is Jack Rancier's writing on visual culture. And kind of, you know, one of the things he says is that feeling or that fear that somehow the more we look at images of war, there are too many images of war. We see too much war, and that makes us kind of banal and anesthetized to it. And we, you know, we lose any kind of desire to sort of be political in response because we see it's so normalized. And he says, actually we don't see too many images of war. We do see too many images of our people suffering without any ability to describe their own suffering. And one of the ways that's upheld in our visual culture is through the relationship between text and image that refugees are always. And displaced people are always contained to the image and their situation. Their image is always described by an authority figure who has access to the text. You know, whether that's a politician standing in front of a, you know, an anti immigrant sign or whether that's a journalist speaking on the news, you know, in front with, you know, a newsreader with the kind of image of a small boat sinking in the. In the Mediterranean next to them. And what I think, you know, comics are this kind of systemic form, right? They kind of every. All the images, images and text are all operating multidirectionally in relationship with one another. And so they kind of flip and rewire that quite hierarchical relationship between image and text. And they also allow refugees access to the text in a way that overwhelmingly our visual culture doesn't. So I mean, to give one example, positive negatives who are an NGO who Made a whole bunch of refugee comics. They allow, they kind of go to, you know, they go to refugees and they, they take their stories down verbatim and they write that refugee character into the comic and they allow that refugee as a character to frame their story on their own terms and to tell it on their own terms. And so suddenly the kind of image of the boat out at sea or you know, the so called flood in inverted commas of migrants coming over, you know, an Eastern European border suddenly is being explained by someone who's actually experiencing that condition. And that upends that sort of long standing hierarchy between image and text. And that's something that comics do really well.
- [50:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you both for those responses that I think do a lot to kind of talk across the different chapters of the book. But Canada, in your answer you mentioned a particular comic that I think we haven't talked as much about yet. So before we finish our conversation, I want to hear a bit more about second generation refugee com and the way in which they are and are not different to some of the other ones we've discussed so far.
- [51:19]
Dr. Candida Rivkind
Yeah, for sure. So in the final main chapter of the book, I look at second generation refugee comics. And these tend to be by the children of people who came as adults, as refugees to, in the examples I look at the US and Australia. And so these are comics by artists, children, not so much by Western or European artists working with the testimony of refugees, but by those who have lived experience in the homes of refugees and who have inherited a lot of those experiences themselves. So they are similar and they are different. They tend towards life writing, whether it's the autobiography, which is the case with tbu, is the Best We could do or biography. The dawi, as I mentioned, is about Edgar Zak's father. And the other artists I really am interested in is Mad Wynne I mentioned as the artist behind the belt. But he's done a lot of more personal comics that he's posted online. And one that fascinates me is called Cabramata, which was the suburb of Sydney where many Vietnamese refugees were housed once they arrived in Australia. And so he's telling the story of his own family and of himself as a young man and a child, but also of his community. So what we see in these much more sort of family oriented refugee comics is concerned with how the individual who's telling the story has been shaped by their family history and the kind of geopolitics that shape the family. So we often see the artist drawing themselves talking to their parents Parents who are variously reticent or not to talk about their own past and what they experience. Sometimes it becomes clear the parents don't want to remember or they did things in the past they don't want to reveal. Sometimes they have just forgotten and other times they've suppressed memories. So memory becomes a really important theme in these second generation comics and secrets as well. And a lot of them seem to be kind of coming of age stories for the young refugee artists understanding why they are the way they are and why their parents are the way they are. The other thing I'll add is that it's a different kind of research in many of these comics. So you might see comics journalists like Joe Sacco or Sarah Glidden doing interviews with subjects and doing kind of traditional journalistic research. In these comments, we often actually see scenes of the artists taking oral histories from their parents. We might see them going through photo albums, we might see them looking in family archives in the attic. And we might also see them doing that more formal research as well. So they're longer stories. They're often stories about the personal in relationship to parents in particular, and also to those larger histories.
- [54:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting, especially the aspect about research. I'm glad you added that in, and it's been, I think, a consistent thread throughout our conversation as well. But I did promise that I wasn't going to ask you both to go into every detail of the book. So I think having touched on a number of the key arguments and the key texts as well that you both analyse in detail, that's probably a good place to begin to draw our discussion to a close. Leaving me to just ask what each of you might be working on now that this book is out in the world. I don't know, Dom, maybe you want to start?
- [54:33]
Dr. Dom Davies
Sure, yeah. Well, it's worth saying that in the epilogue of the book, which I kind of gestured to earlier Candid, and I look at some of the comics that were made in the very first few months of the latest assault on Gaza. You know, really that kind of first autumn before the kind of, you know, South Africa had had their case in the International Criminal Court and so on. Right from the very beginning, there was an incredible response among lots of comics artists working mostly on Instagram, because obviously that's such a quick publishing platform, doing very quick kind of doodles, short comics, almost all digital comics, almost all kind of appearing on social media to reflect on the experience of watching that kind of devastation and what would, you know, eventually come to be recognized by everyone now as a genocide, from a distance and primarily and also everyone. We not just from a distance, but through social media. Right. Because it wasn't being adequately covered on mainstream news channels, at least in kind of European countries in America. So we spent some time looking at comics artists like Maison Cabaj, whose Instagram comics have actually now been collected into a book because it's been two years, unbelievably called Gaza in my phone. And there's also some really interesting similar projects. Mohammed Sabana's 30 seconds from Gaza is another sort of collection of his cartoons drawn in response to the latest genocide. So Kanda and I picked up on that because it seems such a sort of politically important way to end the book. And it's something I'm continuing to do some research on at the moment.
- [56:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for sharing. Candida, what about you?
- [56:30]
Dr. Candida Rivkind
Well, similar to Donna, I can't help but notice that, you know, if anything, these types of comics are proliferating under the current climate. And I'm interested in continuing these investigations closer to home to me in Canada and thinking about the comics that are and will come out of the current era with ICE in the US and one cartoonist I'm interested in is Becky Burt. She's a fairly young Welsh cartoonist who was detained by ice, tried across the border from the US into Canada because she didn't have the right work permit and, you know, detained without kind of any rationale and so on. And she posted some comics to Instagram and is now under contract to produce a full graphic narrative about her time in detention and mostly the women that she met there who tended to be from South American countries and from the Middle east, and working through her kind of privilege at having got out in the end thanks to an international campaign and to lawyers. But, you know, thinking back to that very recent experience, so I'm definitely keeping an eye on that. That said, I think Dom might agree that sitting with this material for so long is hard. This is difficult material. And not to say that I'm going to move on to completely leap material, but I am interested in the growing interest in culinary comics. So comics by cooks and chefs, but just about food. And one thing that I'm interested in is the way that diasporic immigrant and refugee cartoonists are using comics to kind of thicken our understanding of food ways. So, for instance, there's comics by Lebanese artist Zainabed, who about hummus. You know, we all know hummus we can get in any supermarket just about anywhere in the world. But she's drawing comics that bring it back to the rituals and traditions of Nesse in Lebanon and, you know, the smell of the air and the sound of the birds and trying to really situate these globalized commodified foodstuffs within particular cultures through comics and recipes. So that's an interest of mine that I think I'm just going to keep going. I'm very interested in the history of illustrated cookbooks rather than photographic cookbooks, and it's something that I'm going to keep developing.
- [58:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, all of that sounds very interesting from the both of you, so best of luck with the many projects that you've just given us sneak previews to. And while you are off exploring them, listeners can of course read the book we've been discussing titled Graphic Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics, published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in 2025. Dom Candida thank you both so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [59:06]
Dr. Dom Davies
Really.
- [59:06]
Dr. Candida Rivkind
Thanks Wanda. Thank you for having us.
- [59:20]
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