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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2019
This piece foregrounds the relevance of the question of witness in Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, and the ways in which the elasticity of the comics medium lends itself to Sacco’s representation of life under occupation. It asks how the nature of occupation is visible in the land and architecture of the contested territory and explores the capacity of comics to register—and to represent—this. Later, distinctions are drawn between Sacco as character, narrator, and author, arguing that the inherent polyphony of comics allows a plurality of narratives to be woven into a nuanced portrayal of the land and its inhabitants and that these are transcribed through the lens of Sacco’s trademark self-deprecation and consciousness of his own biases. Sacco’s Palestine narratives are, it is concluded, a rendering of what Sacco himself perceives to be the “essential truth,” without assuming false superiority or objectivity.
This article contains images from Joe Sacco’s Palestine, reproduced with permission from FBIComix at Fantagraphics.
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