Through a close reading of Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), a graphic novel about the struggle of the Dene people in Canada’s Northwestern territories, this article shows how Sacco effects a “peripheral realism” that draws the systemic continuities of different phases of colonial modernity into view. The article then describes Sacco’s “terrestrial realism,” which combines his peripheral realism with the dialectical participation of the reader as well. Finally, in a concluding theoretical discussion, I consider how the practice of drawing allows us to think through a response to modernity’s combined and uneven development that is both materialist and decolonial at the same time. Although the former typically insists on singularity and totality, and the latter promotes a contradictory plurality, the peripheral and terrestrial realisms of Paying the Land suggest a way for theorists of world literature to find a point of methodological solidarity that is both in and against capitalist modernity’s gravitational force.

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.