Documenting Trauma: Comics and the Politics of Memory
4 July 2017
The TORCH Comics and Graphic Novels network are hosting a symposium on ‘Documenting Trauma: Comics and the Politics of Memory’. With talks from comics artist Nicola Streeten and comics critic Hillary Chute, this symposium will address the following questions: why have so many comics and other graphic narratives, the production and publication of which has exploded in recent years, been framed as memoirs or non-fictional documentaries of traumatic events? Is there a relationship between the comics form, as distinct from film and written narrative through its inclusion of multiple visual panels, and the remembrance and recovery of trauma? How do the interpretive demands made by these disjointed formal attributes impinge on readers of comics and shape their relationship to historical traumatic events?
