Katherine Kelp-Stebbins (Comics Studies Program, University of Oregon) presents a new framework for defining and reading comics as a global medium. She draws on anti-colonial, feminist, and anti-racist methods, as well as ideas from comics studies, world literature studies, and translation theory. Pointing to representations of diversity, nationalism, and imperialism, she reinterprets graphic narratives including Metro, Tintin, Persepolis, Carpe Fin, and Red: A Haida Manga, as well as Lebanese trilingual comics journal Samandal. The book contains b&w illustrations. Annotation ©2022 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Engages with comics as sites of struggle over representation by developing a new methodology of reading for difference in transnational contexts.
In
How Comics Travel: Publication, Translation, Radical Literacies, Katherine Kelp-Stebbins challenges the clichéd understanding of comics as a “universal” language, circulating without regard for cultures or borders. Instead, she develops a new methodology of
reading for difference. Kelp-Stebbins’s anticolonial, feminist, and antiracist analytical framework engages with comics as sites of struggle over representation in a diverse world. Through comparative case studies of
Metro,
Tintin,
Persepolis, and more, she explores the ways in which graphic narratives locate and dislocate readers in every phase of a transnational comic’s life cycle according to distinct visual, linguistic, and print cultures.
How Comics Travel disengages from the constrictive pressures of nationalism and imperialism, both in comics studies and world literature studies more broadly, to offer a new vision of how comics depict and enact the world as a transcultural space.
