Undesirables: Forced Mobilities in Mediterranean Bande Dessinée
Tuesday 31st October 2023, 6:00pm
This event is part of the Parkes Institute's 23/24 Event and Seminar Programme.
Does a Mediterranean bande dessinée exist? This talk will contend that a well-established genre of Mediterranean comics and bande dessinée have been created and developed by artists and authors from around the Mediterranean Sea for decades. These comics inform our understanding of the historical and social dynamics of the Mediterranean social, cultural and political zone. They offer an artistic way to explore and grapple with the complex legacies of conflict, colonialism, and nationalism as well as the opportunities and challenges of contemporary life in the region. In this talk, I propose reading Mediterranean waterscapes and geographic landscapes through comics of colonial conscripts (Senegalese tirailleurs and Moroccan goumiers), WWII refugees, and today’s migrants. I coin Mediterranean bande dessinée of mobility and migration (MED-BDM) as a reference to a natural multinational artistic project with an educational orientation to evaluate colonial pasts and postcolonial relations between both sides of the Mediterranean landscapes. MED-BD has the capacity to challenge deceptive unrepresentative photographic reportage and journalistic writing and humanize internees and refugees of WWII in North Africa and today's migrants in Europe. The MED-BD has developed into a repository of visual stories that challenge Orientalist and pictorial archives of European painters, travelers, ethnologists and photographers about southern Mediterranean landscapes.
This event is co-organised with Winchester School of Art and is part of the University of Southampton's Black History Month programme.
Details
| Location: | Southampton, SO17 1BF, England |
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