Documenting De-colonial Practices through Comics: Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2785-3233/16131Keywords:
Joe Sacco, documentary comics, Dene people, Canada, colonialismAbstract
Being a “cool medium” (McLuhan 1964) comics provide less sensory information and therefore demands more involvement and/or ‘completion’ by the reader/viewer. They ask for slowness, as the viewer has to recompose, understand, and question the existing relation between words and pictures. This mode of fruition contrasts with the rapid way we generally consume news (even though they might use a similar visual-verbal syntax). Their slowness help comics visualize the stories of those who have been ignored/neglected by the international arena and makes the reader witness human rights violation and abuses (Chute 2016). This paper aims to discuss how Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020) (re)narrates the past and present relationship between Aboriginal people and (all) Canadians. This comics testifies to the existence of allied depictions (as Joe Sacco is not of Aboriginal descent and does not appropriate Indigenous stories) that aim to break (even controversially) the silence about past and present sufferings of the Dene peoples in Canada, but also shows forms of Indigenous activism and healing practices that aim to re-construct community ties.
References
Albertazzi, Silvia. 2017. Letteratura e fotografia. Roma: Carocci.
Alfred, Taiaiake & Jeff Corntassel. 2005. “Being Indigenous: Resurgences against Contemporary Colonialism.” Government and Opposition 40(4), 597–614.
Baetens, Jan & Hugo Frey. 2015. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Ricard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bolter, Jay David & Richards Grusin. 1999. Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Bombay, Amy, Kimberly Matheson, & Hymie Anisman. 2014. “The intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools: Implications for the concept of historical trauma.” Transcultural Psychiatry 51(3), 320–338.
Brown, Chester. 2017 (2003). Louis Riel. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly.
Cartier-Bresson, Henri. 1999. The Mind’s Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers. New York: Aperture.
Chute, Hillary L. 2010. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chute, Hillary L. 2016. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press.
Cohn, Neil. 2010. “The limits of time and transitions: Challenges to theories of sequential image comprehension.” Studies in Comics 1(1), 127–147.
Cohn, Neil. 2013. The Visual Language of Comics. Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Comics. London: Bloomsbury.
Cohn, Neil. 2014. “Building a better ‘comic theory’: Shortcomings of theoretical research on comics and how to overcome them.” Studies in Comics 5(1), 57–75.
Cohn, Neil. 2019. “Being explicit about the implicit: Inference generating techniques in visual narrative.” Language and Cognition 11(1), 66–97.
Cook, R. T. 2012. “Drawings of Photographs in Comics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70(1), 129–138.
Cooper, James Fennimore. 1986 (1826). The Last of the Mohicans. New York: Penguin.
Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cutter, Martha J. and Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (eds.). 2018. Redrawing the Historical Past: History, Memory, and Multiethnic Graphic Novels. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Duncan, Randy, Michael Ray Taylor, & David Stoddard. 2016. Creating Comics as Journalism, Memoir, and Nonfiction. New York: Routledge.
Earle, Harriet E. H. 2017. Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Eisner, Will. 2005 (1985). Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. New York: WW Norton & Company.
Elias, Brenda, Javier Mignone, Madelyn Hall, Say P. Hong, Lyna Hart, & Jitender Sareen. 2012. “Trauma and suicide behaviour histories among a Canadian indigenous population: an empirical exploration of the potential role of Canada’s residential school system.” Social Science & Medicine 74(10), 1560–1569.
Estren, Mark James. 1993. A History of Underground Comics. Third edition. Berkeley: Ronin.
Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.
Gardner, Jared. 2015. “Time under siege.” In Daniel Worden (ed.), The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, 21–38. Jackson: University of Mississippi.
Groensteen, Thierry. 1999. Système de la bande dessinée. Paris: Presse Universitaire de France.
Groensteen, Thierry. 2011. Bandes dessinées et narration. Paris: Presse Universitaire de France.
Groth, Gary. 2011. “Joe Sacco on Footnotes in Gaza.” The Comics Journal 301, 376–426.
Hatfield, Charles. 2005. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Herr, Michael. 1977. Dispatches. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Hescher, Achim. 2016. Reading Graphic Novels. Genre and Narration. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Hirsch, Marianne. 2010. “Visual Culture”. In David Herman, Brian McHale, & James Phelan (eds.), Teaching Narrative Theory, 208–220. New York: The Modern Language Association of America
Hirsch, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetic of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction. New York, London: Routledge.
Justice, Daniel Heath. 2018. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Kabbani, Rana. 1988. Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myth of Orient. London: Pandora.
Kaur, Raminder & John Hutnyk. 1999. Travel Worlds: Journeys in Contemporary Cultural Politics. London: Zed Books.
Kavaloski, Joshua. 2019. “Discordant discourses: history and journalism in the graphic novels of Joe Sacco.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 10 (1), 122–139.
Kress, Gunther & Theo Van Leeuwen. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge.
LaCapra, Dominick. 2001. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Lau, Lisa. 2009. “Re-Orientalism: The perpetration and development of Orientalism by Orientals.” Modern Asian Studies 43(2), 571–590.
Lunsford, Andrea A., & Adam Rosenblatt. 2011. “Down a Road and into an Awful Silence: Graphic Listening in Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism.” In Cheryl Glenn & Krista Ratcliffe (eds.), Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts, 130–146. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Mailer, Norman. 2018 (1968). The Armies of the Night. London: Penguin Modern Classics.
Maracle, Lee. 1990. “Ramparts Hanging in the Air.” In Telling It Book Collective (eds.), Telling It: Women and Language Across Culture, 161–172. Vancouver: Press Gang.
McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics. The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Collins.
McKinney, Mark. 2016. Redrawing French Empire in Comics. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
McLuhan, Marshall. 2017 (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Berkeley: Ginko Press.
Meyer, Christina. 2019. Producing Mass Entertainment: The Serial Life of the Yellow Kid. Columbus Ohio State University.
Mickwitz, Nina. 2016. Documentary Comics. Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Miodrag, Hannah. 2013. Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form. Jackson: University Press of Mississipi.
Nyberg, Amy Kiste. 2012. “Comics journalism: Drawing on words to picture the past in Safe Area Goražde.” In Matthew J. Smith & Randy Duncan (eds.), Critical Approaches to Comics, 116–128. Oxon: Routledge.
Owen, Ben. 2015. “Overtaken by Further Developments: The Form of History in Footnotes in Gaza.” In Daniel Worden (ed.), The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, 203–221. Jackson: University of Mississippi.
Pedri, Nancy. 2011. “When photographs aren’t quite enough: reflections on photography and cartooning in Le photographe.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies 6(1), 1–18.
Pedri, Nancy. 2015. “Thinking about photography in comics.” Image & Narrative 16(2), 1–13.
Rheault, Sylvain. 2020. “A Surge of Indigenous Graphic Novels.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 11(5-6), 501–521.
Ritchin, Fred. 2013. Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen. New York: Aperture.
Rosen, Jay. 2009. “He Said, She Said Journalism: Lame Formula in the Land of the Active User.” PressThink, 12 April 2009 http://archive.pressthink.org/2009/04/12/hesaid_shesaid.html [last access on 15/10/2022].
Said, Edward W. 1979 (1978). Orientalism. London: Penguin.
Said, Edward W. 1994. Representations of the Intellectual. London: Vintage.
Sacco, Joe. 2003 (1996). Palestine. London: Jonathan Cape.
Sacco, Joe. 2000. Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992–1995. Seattle: Fantagraphics.
Sacco, Joe. 2009a. Footnotes in Gaza. New York: Metropolitan.
Sacco, Joe. 2009b. The Fixer and Other Stories. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly.
Sacco, Joe. 2012. Journalism. New York: Metropolitan.
Sacco, Joe. 2020. Paying the Land. London: Jonathan Cape.
Sacco, Joe & W. J. T. Mitchell. 2014. “Public Conversation: May 19, 2012. Introduced by Jim Chandler.” In Hillary Chute & Patrick Jagoda (eds.), Comics & Media. A Special Issue of “Critical Inquiry.” 40(3), 53–70. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Samiei, Mohammad. 2010. “Neo-Orientalism? The relationship between the West and Islam in our globalised world.” Third World Quarterly 31(7), 1145–1160.
Semali, Ladislaus M., & Joe L. Kincheloe. 2002a. What Is Indigenous Knowledge? Voices from the Academy. New York: Routledge.
Semali Ladislaus M. & Joe L. Kincheloe. 2002b. “What is Indigenous Knowledge and Why Should We Study It?” In Ladislaus M. Semali & Joe L. Kincheloe (eds.), What Is Indigenous Knowledge? Voices from the academy, 3–58. New York: Routledge.
Schmid, Johannes C. P. 2021. Frames and Framing in Documentary Comics. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2011. Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence. Winnipeg: Arbeiter.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2017. As We Have Always Done. Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Smith, Matthew J., & Randy Duncan (eds.). 2012. Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods. Oxon: Routledge.
Sontag, Susan. 2008 (1977). On Photography. London: Penguin.
Sontag, Susan. 2004 (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin.
Sousanis, Nick. 2015. Unflattening. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Strate, Lance. 2017. Media Ecology. An Approach to Understanding the Human Condition. New York: Peter Lang.
Talaga, Tanya. 2020. All Our Relations. Indigenous Trauma in the Shadow of Colonialism. London, Scribe.
Taylor, Mark. 2003. The Vietnam War in History, Literature, and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Tuck, Eve & Wayne K. Yang. 2012. “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1(1), 1–40.
Versaci, Rocco. 2008. This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature. New York, Continuum.
Watson, Julia. 2008. “Autobiographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home.” Biography 31(1), 27–58.
Winslade, John & Gerald D. Monk. 2008. Practicing Narrative Mediation: Loosening the Grip of Conflict. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons.
Witek, Joseph. 1989. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Worden, Daniel. 2015. “Introduction: Drawing Conflicts” In Daniel Worden (ed.), The Comics of Joe Sacco: Journalism in a Visual World, 3-18. Jackson: University of Mississippi.
Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” Journal of Genocide Research, 8(4), 387-409.
Zelizer, Barbie. 2010. About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. New York: Oxford University Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Mattia Arioli
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
