THE COMICS OF JOE SACCO: JOURNALISM IN A VISUAL WORLD
EDITED BY DANIEL WORDEN
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Drawing Conflicts, Daniel Worden
Section I: The Form of Comics Journalism
Chapter One: Time Under Siege, Jared Gardner
Chapter Two: Inside and Outside the Frame: Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde, Lan Dong
Chapter Three: Drawing on the Facts: Comics Journalism and the Critique of Objectivity,
Isabel Macdonald
Chapter Four: Views from Nowhere: Journalistic Detachment in Palestine, Marc Singer
Section II: Space and Maps
Chapter Five: Mapping Bosnia: Cartographic Representation in Joe Sacco’s Graphic
Narratives, Edward C. Holland
Chapter Six: A Thousand Plateaus: Mining Entropy in Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt,
Georgiana Banita
Chapter Seven: The Politics of Space in Joe Sacco’s Representations of the Appalachian
Coalfields, Richard Todd Stafford
Section III: The Politics and Aesthetics of Joe Sacco’s Comics
Chapter Eight: Little Things Mean a Lot: The Everyday Material of Palestine, Ann D’Orazio
Chapter Nine: John’s Story: Joe Sacco’s Depiction of “Bare Life,” Øyvind Vågnes
Chapter Ten: Sacco’s Badiou: On the Political Ontology of Comics, Alexander Dunst
Chapter Eleven: Joe Sacco’s Comics of Performance, Rebecca Scherr
Section IV: Drawing History, Visualizing World Politics
Chapter Twelve: Overtaken by Further Developments: The Form of History in Footnotes
in Gaza, Ben Owen
Chapter Thirteen: Graphic Representation of Language, Translation, and Culture in Joe
Sacco’s Comics Journalism, Brigid Maher
Chapter Fourteen: What Washes Up Onto the Shore: Contamination and Containment in
“The Unwanted,” Maureen Shay
Chapter Fifteen: Teaching World Politics with Joe Sacco: Safe Area Goražde in the Classroom,
Kevin C. Dunn
Appendix: Joe Sacco’s Primary Works
Notes on Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Georgiana Banita is Assistant Professor of US Literature and Media at the University of Bamberg and Honorary Research Fellow at the United States Studies Center, University of Sydney. She is the author of Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11 and is currently completing her second book, a wide-ranging study of American literature that shows how petroleum and energy discourses shaped the relationship of the national imagination to global space.
Ann D’Orazio is a PhD student at the University of New Mexico where she works on comics studies, medieval literature, and critical theory. She is currently at work on a critique of the emerging comics studies canon.
Lan Dong is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield. She is the author of Mulan’s Legend and Legacy in China and the United States and Reading Amy Tan, and a number of journal articles and book chapters on Asian American literature, children’s literature and popular culture. She is the editor of Transnationalism and the Asian American Heroine and Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives. Currently, she is editing a two-volume Encyclopedia of Asian American Culture.
Kevin C. Dunn is Associate Professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where he teaches courses on International Relations and African politics. His recent publications include Politics of Origin in Africa and the textbook Inside African Politics.
Alexander Dunst is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Paderborn. His research focuses on US cultural history and the relations between state and cultural forms. He has published in Parallax, New Formations and Textual Practice, and he is the co-editor of The World According to Philip K. Dick. He is currently preparing a book manuscript titled “Mad America: Psychopolitics and Cold War Culture, 1946-1991.”
Jared Gardner is Professor of English and Director of Popular Culture Studies at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Projections: Comics and the History of 21st-Century Storytelling, The Rise and Fall of American Magazine Culture, and Master Plots: Race and the Founding of American Literature.
Edward C. Holland is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post- Soviet Studies and Visiting Assistant Professor in International Studies at Miami University. Trained as a human geographer, he has a diverse set of research interests, including critical geopolitics, political violence in the North Caucasus, and religion in post-Soviet Russia. He has previously published on Joe Sacco’s work in Geopolitics and authored a chapter for the forthcoming edited volume Comic Book Geographies.
Isabel Macdonald is a doctoral candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. She is also a freelance journalist and the former communications director of the media watch group FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting). Her work has been published by The Nation, the Guardian, and the Toronto Star, amongst other publications.
Brigid Maher is Lecturer in Italian Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Her main research interests are literary translation, humor translation, crime fiction, and the translation of comics. She is the author of Recreation and Style: Translating Humorous Literature in Italian and English and co-editor of Words, Images and Performances in Translation and Perspectives on Literature and Translation: Creation, Circulation, Reception.
Ben Owen is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the Ohio State University. He has published in Screen on race and early sound-era Hollywood cinema and is currently working on a dissertation examining the history and politics of cartoon aesthetics in the early 20th- century United States.
Rebecca Scherr is Associate Professor of American literature in the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European languages at the University of Oslo. Her most recent research and publications focus on the graphic novel and human rights.
Maureen Shay is Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds an MA in Indo-Caribbean literature from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, and a PhD in the refugee narrative and global migration from UCLA. She has published on V.S. Naipaul’s early fiction, transatlantic Caribbean modernisms, and comic books dealing with conflict zones. Other interests include issues of geopolitics, borders, and national sovereignty as they impact the postcolonial state, migrants in Ireland, and Australian hip-hop.
Marc Singer is Associate Professor of English at Howard University. He is the author of Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics and the editor, with Nels Pearson, of Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World. He served as the chair of the International Comic Arts Forum, and his research on comics has twice won the M. Thomas Inge Award.
Richard Todd Stafford is a graduate student in the Cultural Studies department at George Mason University. His essay on the relationship between affect and knowledge in Joe Sacco’s comics reportage has appeared in Public Knowledge Journal, and he is currently working on a project involving the cultural transformations associated with the transition away from coal mining in the Appalachian region.
Øyvind Vågnes is the author of Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture (University of Texas Press, 2011), which received honorable mention at the American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence in 2012. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Copenhagen where he is affiliated with the research project "The Power of the Precarious Aesthetic". Among recent publications are ”The Unmaking of the World: Trauma and Testimony in Two Stories by Joe Sacco” in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, “Showing Silence: On David Small’s Stitches” in Studies in Comics, and “Inside the Story: A Conversation with Joe Sacco” in Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.
Daniel Worden is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of the award-winning book Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism and the editor, with Ross Barrett, of Oil Culture. His work on comics has appeared in The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking, Modern Fiction Studies, and Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature.