This session is a guaranteed session sponsored by the forum on Comics & Graphic Narratives for MLA 2026. All prospective presenters must be current MLA members by April 1, 2025.
In their introduction to Crucial Comix’s recent anthology Cartoonists for Palestine, editors Yazan al-Saadi, Syah Mirk, Andy Warner, and Tracy Chahwan urge that, “in the face of calamity, artists still have a role to play” (4). While the editors speak specifically to the “forced displacement and killing of Palestinian people,” which has been ongoing since 1948 but recently become more visible, they also place their work within a transnational tradition of comics depicting genocide across time and place, from “those who used art to reckon with the death camps of the Holocaust in Europe to those who employed art to fight against Apartheid in South Africa, and more.” If genocidal violence is often normalized and invisibilized, particularly as it is happening, then how do comics “as a form of documentary, as a form of witnessing,” according to comics scholar Hillary Chute, make these calamities visible (Disaster Drawn 1)?
Thinking alongside the crucial, urgent work of Cartoonists for Palestine, this panel invites papers that consider how comics remember, represent, and respond to genocidal violence across geographic, cultural, and temporal contexts. While there are some well-wrought works that come to mind, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Joe Sacco’s Palestine, we are especially interested in proposals that analyze marginalized and understudied works, particularly those created by or in collaboration with those whose lives and families have been most impacted. Ultimately this panel considers how comics not only represent and bear visual witness to historical and contemporary genocides, but if they also might provoke change and/or envision pathways to repair and justice.
Send 250-word abstracts & bios (in English) by Friday, March 14, 2025, to Adrienne Resha (adrienneresha@gmail.com ) and Maite Urcaregui (maite.urcaregui@sjsu.edu).