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Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, and Graphic Reportage Dominic Davies and Candida Ri&ind, editors Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, xxi + 345 pp. ISBN 9783030379971, $119.99 hardcover. ISBN 9783030380007, $84.99 paperback.
Documenting Trauma in Comics emerges from a 2017 conference held at the University of Oxford, "Documenting Trauma: Comics and the Politics of Memory," and the expanded title, referencing the distinct sections of the collection, speaks to the scope of its scholarly project. In this well-edited, cohesive, and comprehensive volume, Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind have selected essays that propose to retheorize trauma through comics, and to reconceptualize graphic narrative and its medianarratology through the study of trauma. Davies's introductory chapter lays out this agenda admirably, and each of the four sections-"Documenting Trauma," "Traumatic Pasts," "Embodied Histories," and "Graphic Reportage"-unfolds with attention to the dynamics among personal and collective or social trauma, assumptions about representation that have driven trauma theory, and the generic affordances and materiality of graphic memoir and comics reportage. Life writing scholars will appreciate Documenting Trauma in Comics for its expansive theorization of multimodal narratives of trauma beyond the generic, discursive, and affective expectations of the trauma aesthetic, even as they learn of the ways comics themselves shaped that aesthetic and have come to interrogate it.
Hillary Chute, who spoke as the keynote of the 2017 conference, provides an afterword that summarizes the salient features of the volume. Chute makes a case for its value, including the urgency and relevance of the theme; the proliferation of comics attending to trauma necessitating sustained study; the multiple approaches to the fields of trauma studies and memory studies evinced by the volume, as well as to comics, narrative, ethics, and human rights; the political, ethical, and affective force of images and visual storytelling as illuminated by the eighteen scholars and artists gathered; and the materiality of comics, their "process and practice," and the centrality of these to the work they are able to do through politically engaged readers, creators, and their networks (337). Chute's own Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form is essential reading in the field, and almost all of the contributors draw on its analysis. Chute also acknowledges the prioritizing of the dynamic between personal and communal or social trauma...