CFP: Special Issue a/b: Auto/Biography Studies on

“Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in Graphic Life Narratives.”

Guest Editors: Nima Naghibi (Ryerson University) and Candida Rifkind (University of Winnipeg)

Graphic life narratives, especially memoirs, diaries, and auto/biographies in the form of comics, have flourished over the three decades Maus. As a distinct field that combines life narrative studies and comics studies, graphic life narrative scholarship has gravitated towards texts that visualize stories of the self in relation to memory, history, trauma, and reconciliation within familial, cultural, and national contexts. This special issue seeks to expand the scope of graphic life narrative studies to consider how migration, exile, and diaspora are prominent experiences in print and digital auto/biographical comics.
 
We invite submissions on graphic life narratives from both traditional centers of comics production (North America, United Kingdom,South Asia, the Caribbean). We are especially interested in submissions that take up issues of form as well as content within the transcultural contexts of graphic life narratives about migration, exile, and diaspora.
 
Some questions this issue may consider:
 
·       How can cartoonists mobilize the visual-verbal form of comics to represent experiences of forced and voluntary movement in their own lives and the lives of others?
 
·       How do graphic life narratives of migration, exile, and diaspora contend with memory, trauma, history, and survival in individual lives and across generations?
 
·       What visual tropes, techniques, and traditions are emerging in migration, exile, and diasporic graphic life narratives? How can comics accommodate transcultural life experiences visually?
 
·       How does the visual-verbal form engage the reader’s and/or the cartoonist’s sense of responsibility to bear witness to political and personal crises that have prompted the mass movement and displacement of peoples across borders?

We invite contributions that expand disciplinary approaches tocommunications, art history, narrative studies, performance studies, disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, war and conflict studies, childhood and youth studies, and critical race theory.
 
Possible topics could include: 
 
·      autobiographical coming-of-age in exile/in the diaspora
·      intergenerational and intercultural conflict
·      sexuality and sexual coming-of-age
·      racial, cultural, and religious conflict
·      class inequities and differences
·      family dynamics across borders
·      transnational identities
·      border crossings/transgressions/surveillance
·      web comics and digital diasporas
·      memory and nostalgia
·      childhood and the figure of the child
·      maps, mapping, place and placelessness
·      family archives, photographs, albums, and artifacts
·      trauma and resilience
·      testimony and witness
·      domesticity, domicility, hospitality, and home-making
·      visual tropes of movement and mobility
·      ethics of representation and collaboration
·       cultural translation and questions of audience
 

Include a coversheet with your name and contact details withth Edition.

This journal supports the inclusion of both black & white and color images and publishes ancillary digital and multimedia texts on the journal’s Routledge website. Inquiries welcome.

Images with captions must be submitted in a separate file asreprint. 

All essays submitted for the special issue, but notSubmissions are due October 1, 2018.

Please email submissions to the co-editors: Nima Naghibi [log in to unmask] and Candida Rifkind [log in to unmask]