Abstract
Roland Bleiker opens Aesthetics and World Politics by asking: ‘Is it trivial, or perhaps even irresponsible, to explore aesthetic themes at a time when the world is engulfed by war, genocide, terrorism, poverty, climate change and financial turmoil?’1 He declines this accusation and strongly supports aesthetic engagement in world politics. His question would seem to be even more pertinent in connection with comics and graphic novels, seemingly entertainment par excellence. Accordingly, the International Studies Association, in an innovative panel at the 49th Annual Convention in San Francisco, explored the role of cartoons and graphic novels by asking whether comics are frivolous entertainment or potent tools of communication.2 A couple of years earlier, in 2005 and 2006, the violent crisis emanating from the publication of controversial cartoons in Denmark had shown that comics are politically powerful tools occasionally triggering dynamics that, once unleashed, are difficult to control. The ‘Danish cartoon crisis’ — the instrumentalization of cartoons for political ends — sparked important debates on such issues as freedom of speech and its limits, artistic autonomy, journalistic responsibility, and the ethics of publishing. Regarding most of these questions, the jury is still out. Even among graphic artists, it is disputed whether or not these cartoons should have been published, and if so, in what form.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 1.
‘Laws and policies are not legitimate unless they have been adopted through a democratic process, and a process is not democratic if government has prevented anyone from expressing his convictions about what those laws and policies should be’. Ronald Dworkin, ‘The Right to Ridicule’, The New York Review of Books, Vol. LIII, No. 5, 23 March 2006, p. 44.
Jytte Klausen, The Cartoons That Shook the World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010);
Lene Hansen, ‘The Politics of Securitization and the Muhammad Cartoon Crisis: A Post-Structuralist Perspective’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 42, No. 4–5, August–October 2011, pp. 357–69.
Henry Jenkins,‘Captain America Sheds His Mighty Tears: Comics and September 11’, in D.J. Sherman and T. Nardin (eds), Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006), p. 95.
For historical war comics, see David Kendall (ed.), The Mammoth Book of War Comics (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2007).
Joe Sacco, Journalism (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012), p. xi. Sacco also discusses what he calls ‘trap[s] in American journalism schools’, namely, emphasizing ‘objectivity’ and ‘balance’.
Alina Curticapean, Liminality Matters: Balkanism and Its Edges in Bulgarian Political Cartoons 2004–2009 (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2011), p. 45. Counter-cultural potential can also be found in citizen photography deviating from the myth of objectivity and balance prevalent in professional photojournalism. See Fred Ritchin, ‘Between a Rock and a Soft Place’, Aperture, No. 209 (Winter 2012), p. 65.
Scott McCloud, Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 19 (except as noted, capitalizations, italicizations, and emphases are omitted from all references to McCloud’s work in this chapter; this is not a comic).
The title of this chapter is from Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), p. 30.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. A.M.S. Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. ix.
Charles M. Schulz, Security Is a Thumb and a Blanket (Kennebunkport: Cider Mill Press, 1963).
Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 176.
Ari Folman and David Polonsky, Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story (London: Atlantic Books, 2009);
Harvey Pekar, Heather Roberson, and Ed Piskor, Macedonia: What Does It Take to Stop a War? (New York: Villard Books, 2007);
Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier, The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors without Borders, trans. A. Siegel (New York and London: First Second, 2009);
Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis (New York: Pantheon, 2007);
Rutu Modan, Exit Wounds (Montreal: drawn + quarterly, 2007).
The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (London: Penguin, 2003). The academic literature on Maus is considerable. See, for example, Michael Rothberg, ‘“We Are Talking Jewish”: Art Spiegelman’s Maus as “Holocaust” Production’, Contemporary Literature, Vol. XXXV, No. 4, 1994, pp. 661–87;
Michael E. Staub, ‘The Shoah Goes On and On: Remembrance and Representation in Art Spiegelman’s Maus’, MELUS, Vol. 20, No. 3, Fall 1995, pp. 33–46;
Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 17–40;
Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), pp. 139–79;
Ole Frahm, Genealogie des Holocaust. Art Spiegelmans MAUS — A Survivor’s Tale (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006).
See also Art Spiegelman, Conversations. Edited by Joseph Witek (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007). Spiegelman has engaged with three questions permanently asked in connection with Maus: Why the Holocaust? Why comics? Why mice? — in Metamaus (London: Viking, 2011).
Robert Adams, Why People Photograph: Selected Essays and Reviews (New York: Aperture, 1994), p. 23.
Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘The Eye of the Expert: Walter Benjamin and the Avant Garde’, Art History, Vol. 24, No. 3 (June 2001), p. 421. According to Schwartz (p. 423), ‘Benjamin makes the involuntary attention that is the assumed state of the consumer …, decisive as a model for voluntary action, thinking revolution on the model of leisure activity’.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theory of Distraction’, trans. H. Eiland, in M.W. Jennings, B. Doherty, and T.Y. Levin (eds), Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 57. The relationship between reproducibility, distraction, and politicization remains unclear. I prefer to think about it in terms suggested by the use of hyphens (in German: ‘Gedankenstriche’): dashes of thought (that make you think).
David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 69.
‘Im Kino fallen kritische und genießende Haltung des Publikums zusammen’. Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, in W. Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Drei Studien zur Kunstsoziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963), p. 33 (my translation). This sentence appears neither in the original version of Benjamin’s piece, published in French in ‘L’œuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Vol. 5, 1936, p. 58 nor in the English translation used in this chapter.
Peter Gilgen, ‘History after Film’, in H.U. Gumbrecht and M. Marrinan (eds), Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 55.
Gary Panter, as quoted in Todd Hignite, In the Studio: Visits with Contemporaty Cartoonists (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 100.
Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art: Principles & Practice of the World’s Most Popular Art Form, expanded to include print & digital (Paramus: Poorhouse Press, 2006).
Frank Möller, ‘Imaging and Remembering Peace and War’, Peace Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, January–March 2008, pp. 100–6.
Ben O’Loughlin, ‘Images as Weapons of War: Representation, Mediation and Interpretation’, Review of International Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1, January 2011, p. 86.
Ivan Brunetti (ed.), An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), p.7.
See W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p.5.
Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p.274.
Scott McCloud, Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), pp. 45–6.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p.1.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Frank Möller
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Möller, F. (2013). Why — Are — We — So — Involved?. In: Visual Peace. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137020406_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137020406_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43749-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-02040-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Political & Intern. Studies CollectionPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)