Honorable Mention, 2024 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Middle Eastern Studies
“Santesso’s Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarship on comics about and by Muslim people.” —Adrienne Resha, International Journal of Comic Art
“Santesso’s analysis gives a meaningful range of experiences and achieves both breadth and specificity. ... Rigorously researched and documented, sound in its reasoning and conclusions, well written and clear ... this excellent work of scholarship significantly contributes to many sub-disciplines of literary and cultural studies.” —Susan McKay, Rocky Mountain Review
“Santesso offers an astute analysis ... This book would be an engaging addition to a literature or media studies course on graphic narratives by expanding the types of stories that are told about the Muslim experience.” —Kristin M. Peterson, Nova Religio
“A book like this, which gives the representation of Muslim lives in comics the critical attention it deserves, is long overdue. Santesso’s sophisticated close readings and remarkable range of scholarship make Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing an essential addition to the field.” —Kate Polak, author of Ethics in the Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics
Recent decades have seen an unprecedented number of comics by and about Muslim people enter the global market. Now, Muslim Comics and Warscape Witnessing offers the first major study of these works. Esra Mirze Santesso assesses Muslim comics to illustrate the multifaceted nature of seeing and representing daily lives within and outside of the homeland. Focusing on contemporary graphic narratives that are primarily but not exclusively from the Middle East—from blockbusters like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis to more local efforts such as Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi—Santesso explores why the graphic form has become a popular and useful medium for articulating Muslim subjectivities. Further, she shows how Muslim comics “bear witness” to a range of faith-based positions that complicate discussions of global ummah or community, contest monolithic depictions of Muslims, and question the Islamist valorization of the shaheed, the “martyr” figure regarded as the ideal religious witness. By presenting varied depictions of everyday lives of Muslims navigating violence and militarization, this book reveals the connections between religious rituals and existence in warscapes and invites us to more deeply consider the nature of witnessing itself.
Esra Mirze Santesso is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Georgia.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface Muslims in Comics
Introduction
Chapter 1 Muslim Comics: Politics and Aesthetics
Chapter 2 Reluctant Witnesses in Prison Camp Narratives
Chapter 3 Vulnerability, Resistance, and False Witnesses
Chapter 4 Shaheed and Border Witnesses
Chapter 5 Surrogate Witnesses and Memory
Conclusion The Future of Muslim Comics
Works Cited
Index
