Graphic Positioning Systems: Global Comics, Radical Literacies

This dissertation asks how comics allow us to rethink the imagination and representation of the world and its inhabitants. I argue that by making questions of translation visible, comics provide tools to rethink world literacies. Rather than utilize comics to create a more universal world literature I use comics to map out spaces of untranslatability, misrecognition, and resistance. This investigation considers comics in three dimensions, theorizing beyond the representational and the semantic in order to assemble reading models attentive to geopolitical and historical locations. If we think of the page as but one component of the encounter a reader makes with a media object, how might we implicate other components of that encounter in new considerations of the local and the global? My research focuses on comics from a variety of linguistic, cultural, and historical positions. Advocating for decolonial and feminist literacies, I apply theoretical frameworks provided by Judith Butler, Rey Chow, Hillary Chute, Johanna Drucker, Donna Haraway, Caren Kaplan, Gayatri Spivak, et al., to global comics, including Herge's Tintin, Joe Sacco's Palestine, Charles Burns' X'ed Out, Mazen Kerbaj's Une semaine sans la voix de Samir, Zeina Abrached's A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return, Magdy El Shafee's Metro, and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. My project locates these works geopolitically, while drawing attention to the historical and material conditions of their production and dissemination.;Each chapter explores a different technological paradigm: othering, targeting, humanizing, and mapping. The first chapter is guided by the question, what are the medial conditions of possibility for generating legibility of self and other? Drawing from post-colonial theory, I use Tintin to examine how colonial ideology underpins reading modalities and enables legible demarcations of difference. The second chapter furthers the project's investigation of identity and difference to consider targeting as a form of verbal/visual knowledge production. Comics function as frames that may, through stereotype, target the other. Conversely, comics provide self-reflexive frames that can be used to critically intercede in verbal/visual epistemological regimes. The third chapter considers how boundaries between and within corporeal entities might be reimaged and reimagined. I scrutinize the technology of humanizing and the ways in which human animals, works of art, and systems of knowledge are recognized and delineated as such. I conclude by considering comics in terms of cartographic technology in order to locate the feedback loop between the translation and reception of comics and transnational media flows. The circulation of comics depends on highly delimited discursive locations as well as highly mobile object orientations. By analyzing comics as graphic positioning systems I reframe maps of cultural and capital networks, and trace the capacity of media objects to locate subject positions. I argue that by using comics as a tool in order to theorize the tensions between locative identities and media technologies, we may develop radical literacies to intervene in the world of global mediascapes.