Bibles, Guns, and… Comic Books? Re-Conceptualizing (Non-)Violent Selves and Others in a Postcolonial Era By Derek J. Maisonville PhD Candidate, Dept. of Political Science, York University Researcher, York Centre for International and Security Studies
[email protected] Paper Presented at the 2008 Canadian Political Science Association Annual Conference During Panel D1(c): Interrogating the Popular Logic(s) of IR and the Aesthetics of Hegemony I Wednesday, June 4 2008 1 “The broader philosophical implication of many comics, to one extent or another, is: there is another world, which is this world” (Wolk 2007, 134: Emphasis as in original). Following what has been called the “aesthetic turn” in International Relations (IR) (Bleiker, 2001) there has been an increase in theorizing the interconnections between pop culture and global politics. Despite (limited, but existent) engagement in other disciplines, comics have been essentially untouched by this ‘turn’ as its IR manifestations have tended to focus on other media, such as film, television, poetics, literature, the internet, and news imaging.1 This non- engagement has roots in IR’s disciplinary practices (Beier and Arnold 2005), but presumably also reflects the widespread perception that comics are juvenile and lack the substantive content required for serious scholarly analysis. However, if we accept the role of social performativity as fundamental to the constitution of states, security, threats, and even the field itself (Butler 1990; Campbell 1998), such grounds for exclusion seem irrelevant. Comics not only reflect popular conceptions about the socio-political world, but further serve to participate in an intertextual construction of the world in ways no less substantial than films, for example, even if they are sometimes less ‘sophisticated.’ By examining cultural understandings of global politics through comics, I am not claiming that scholars should cease studying traditional IR indicators (such as state actions).