The graphic narrative has exhaustively – and convincingly – been theorized as inherently disruptive, not least in the fields of diaspora studies and queer studies. For scholars of diaspora, migration, and of the transnational, graphic novels have become sites of ”foregrounding colonial legacies and (re)scripting missing or misrepresented identities” (Mehta and Mukherji 2), often constructing ”sophisticated counter-geographies and alternative, cross-national imagined communities” (Davies 127). For scholars of queer studies, graphic narratives have been understood as ”a distinctly queer mode of cultural production” (Scott and Fawaz 199) and as a form embedded with ”queer temporal openings” which ”provide a generative medium for queer world making” (McCullough 377). Against this backdrop, the following course is designed to critically engage with and apply concepts from diaspora studies and queer theory to the reading of select graphic narratives in order to explore how queer diasporic comics disrupt interdependent tensions of gender, sexuality, nation, and belonging. The first part of the course will allow students to work closely with key texts in diaspora studies and queer theory and to think through these concepts by reading several poems from Logan February’s collection Mental Voodoo and engaging with the author during a public reading and discussion. This will be followed by a two-week workshop on how to read and analyze comics. In the second part of the course, students will conduct close readings of select graphic narratives, including Messy Roots by Laura Gao, excerpts from Apsara Engine by Bishakh Som, and excerpts from Beldan Sezen’s Snapshots of a Girl.
- Lehrende/r: Rita Elizabeth Maricocchi