Date: Wednesday, May 8, 2013. 6:00 PM.
Location: Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center
How cartoonists—especially survivor or second-generation survivor cartoonists—framed their lives in the 1970s established comics globally as an urgent form of visual witness and changed the landscape of visual and popular culture. In Japan, Keiji Nakazawa’s breakthrough stand-alone comic book I Saw It (1972), a pioneering account of war, shattered taboos about expressing the devastation wreaked by the atomic bomb and pictured the author’s own experience of surviving August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima. That same year, in San Francisco, Art Spiegelman created, for an underground comic book, his three-page comics story “Maus,” about his immigrant family’s survival of Poland’s death camps. In 1972, some of the earliest works of nonfiction comics emerge from both “sides” of WWII, establishing the power of comics as a form to document war. During earlier decades in both countries, the subject of the war and the status of “survival” were still largely shrouded in silence or taboo. However, by the opening of the 1970s, especially after the artistic, cultural, and political upheavals of the 1960s, the issues that had been simmering under the surface—what does it mean to survive, to remember?—demanded articulation. The form of comics was motivated by the urgencies of re-seeing or re-visioning the war, and allowing its new hand-drawn images to be widely accessible, to circulate in and expand realms of the popular. In this paper, in which I examine various hand-drawn visual traditions stemming from WWII, such as post-war pamphlets picturing life in the camps, I argue that WWII created the conditions for the emergence of contemporary comics in its legacies of urgent visual witnessing.Hillary Chute is the author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia UP, 2010) and Associate Editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus (Pantheon, 2011). Her essays have appeared in American Periodicals, Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Twentieth-Century Literature, and WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. In 2006 she co-edited the Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies special issue on Graphic Narrative. Her current book project is titled “Disaster is My Muse”: Visual Witnessing, Comics, and Documentary Form. She is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in English at the University of Chicago and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Location: Board Room, Stanford Humanities Center
How cartoonists—especially survivor or second-generation survivor cartoonists—framed their lives in the 1970s established comics globally as an urgent form of visual witness and changed the landscape of visual and popular culture. In Japan, Keiji Nakazawa’s breakthrough stand-alone comic book I Saw It (1972), a pioneering account of war, shattered taboos about expressing the devastation wreaked by the atomic bomb and pictured the author’s own experience of surviving August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima. That same year, in San Francisco, Art Spiegelman created, for an underground comic book, his three-page comics story “Maus,” about his immigrant family’s survival of Poland’s death camps. In 1972, some of the earliest works of nonfiction comics emerge from both “sides” of WWII, establishing the power of comics as a form to document war. During earlier decades in both countries, the subject of the war and the status of “survival” were still largely shrouded in silence or taboo. However, by the opening of the 1970s, especially after the artistic, cultural, and political upheavals of the 1960s, the issues that had been simmering under the surface—what does it mean to survive, to remember?—demanded articulation. The form of comics was motivated by the urgencies of re-seeing or re-visioning the war, and allowing its new hand-drawn images to be widely accessible, to circulate in and expand realms of the popular. In this paper, in which I examine various hand-drawn visual traditions stemming from WWII, such as post-war pamphlets picturing life in the camps, I argue that WWII created the conditions for the emergence of contemporary comics in its legacies of urgent visual witnessing.Hillary Chute is the author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia UP, 2010) and Associate Editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus (Pantheon, 2011). Her essays have appeared in American Periodicals, Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Twentieth-Century Literature, and WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. In 2006 she co-edited the Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies special issue on Graphic Narrative. Her current book project is titled “Disaster is My Muse”: Visual Witnessing, Comics, and Documentary Form. She is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in English at the University of Chicago and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.