Colin Matthew Room, Faculty of History, George Street
The TORCH Comics and Graphic Novels network are hosting a talk on "Graphic Narratives of Haiti: From Revolution to Earthquake" with Charles Forsdick.
Charles Forsdick, James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool, explores the representation of Haiti in comics and graphic narratives, and also addresses the production of comic art in Haiti itself. Drawing on material ranging from nineteenth-century caricatures by Cham to the art of Jacob Lawrence, from Marvel's Brother Voodoo to public information comics produced in the wake of the 2010 earthquake, the paper challenges the idea that Haiti is 'graphically incarcerated’, and suggests that the capacious and flexible genre of the comic has the emancipatory potential in the contemporary Caribbean to provide a space for the exploration and narration of new national narratives.
