The Human Rights Graphic Novel

Drawing it Just Right

Pramod K Nayar author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Published:26th Nov '20

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

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The Human Rights Graphic Novel cover

This book studies human rights discourse across a variety of graphic novels, both fiction and non-fiction, originating in different parts of the world, from India to South Africa, Sarajevo to Vietnam, with texts on the Holocaust, the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, the Rwandan and Sarajevan genocides, the Vietnam War, comfort women in World War II and the Civil Rights movement in the USA, to mention a few.

The book demonstrates the emergence of the ‘universal’ subject of human rights, despite the variations in contexts. It shows how war, rape, genocide, abuse, social iniquity, caste and race erode personhood in multiple ways in the graphic novel, which portrays the construction of vulnerable subjects, the cultural trauma of collectives, the crisis and necessity of witnessing, and resilience-resistance through specific representational and aesthetic strategies. It covers a large number of authors and artists: Joe Sacco, Joe Kubert, Matt Johnson-Walter Pleece, Guy Delisle, Appupen, Thi Bui, Olivier Kugler and others. Through a study of these vastly different authors and styles, the book proposes that the graphic novel as a form is perfectly suited to the ‘culture’ and the lingua franca of human rights due to its amenability to experimentation and the sheer range within the form.

The book will appeal to scholars in comics studies, human rights studies, visual culture studies and to the general reader with an interest in these fields.

"Prolific polymath, Pramod K. Nayar has done it again! Deploying his trademark nimble and piercing humanistic analytic lens, he peels back and vitally reveals how graphic narratives forcefully wake us to the traumas of our planet’s most vulnerable. In an awe-inspiring sweep of comics from Africa and Asia as well as the Indian Subcontinent, Middle East, Balkans, and Indigenous Americas Nayar beautifully articulates powerfully generative concepts that enrich deeply our sense of how visual shaping devices like the panel function as more than windows to witness brutalities, humiliations, genocides. They wake us to new ways of perceiving, thinking, and feeling that deeply connect us with the most vulnerable. They wake us to action. Nayar does with Comics Studies what Judith Butler and Barbara Harlow have done for human rights and the humanities.A must-read tour de force!" — Frederick Luis Aldama, Distinguished University Professor, Ohio State University, and Eisner Award winner for the best scholarly work in Comics Studies


'Prolific polymath, Pramod K. Nayar has done it again! Deploying his trademark nimble and piercing humanistic analytic lens, he peels back and vitally reveals how graphic narratives forcefully wake us to the traumas of our planet’s most vulnerable. In an awe-inspiring sweep of comics from Africa and Asia as well as the Indian Subcontinent, Middle East, Balkans, and Indigenous Americas Nayar beautifully articulates powerfully generative concepts that enrich deeply our sense of how visual shaping devices like the panel function as more than windows to witness brutalities, humiliations, genocides. They wake us to new ways of perceiving, thinking, and feeling that deeply connect us with the most vulnerable. They wake us to action. Nayar does with Comics Studies what Judith Butler and Barbara Harlow have done for human rights and the humanities.A must-read tour de force!' — Frederick Luis Aldama, Distinguished University Professor, Ohio State University, and Eisner Award winner for the best scholarly work in Comics Studies

ISBN: 9780367030544

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 570g

212 pages