Graphic Refuge

Graphic Refuge is the first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South. Co-written by two leading scholars of nonfiction comics, the book explores graphic narratives about a range of refugee experiences, from war, displacement, and perilous sea crossings to detention camps, resettlement schemes, and second-generation diasporas.Through close readings of work by diverse artists including Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden, Don Brown, Olivier Kugler, Jasper Rietman, Hamid Sulaiman, Leila Abdelrazzaq, Thi Bui, and Matt Huynh, Graphic Refuge shows how comics challenge dominant representations of the displaced and bring a radical politics of refugee agency and refusal into view. Rather than simply affirming the “humanity” of the refugee, these comics demand that we apprehend the historical construction of categories such as “citizen” and “refugee” through systems of empire, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism.Building on scholarship in critical refugee studies, architecture and infrastructure studies, and postcolonial theory, Davies and Rifkind argue that refugee comics move us through this wider recognition and towards more expansive ideas of refuge as a lived political relationship.

Dominic Davies is Senior Lecturer in English at City St George’s, University of London. He writes widely on infrastructure, empire, and migration in literature and culture. He is the author of Urban Comics (Routledge 2019) and The Broken Promise of Infrastructure (Lawrence Wishart 2023), and co-editor of Documenting Trauma in Comics (Palgrave 2020), among other books.Candida Rifkind is Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, where she specializes in alternative comics and Canadian literature. In addition to numerous publications, she co-edited Documenting Trauma: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories & Graphic Reportage in Comics (Palgrave 2020) and Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2016).