What the Implied Reader of Refugee Comics Tells Us about the Genre and Citizenship

The Authority File

This month’s series welcomes the authors of Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics, Candida Rifkind, Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg, and Dominic Davies, Reader in English at City St George’s, University of London. In the next four episodes, we chat with Candida and Dom about the origins and unique writing process of their book, refugee comics within the comics studies discipline, and how the genre can function as a tool for political change. Further, we dig into the rise of comics journalism and the ethical relationship between a refugee and the artist depicting their experiences.

In the first episode of this series, Candida and Dom introduce us to refugee comics, defining the genre, its history, and readership. As our guests explain, comics have long chronicled the stories of outsiders—Superman as a refugee from Krypton, for example—and depicting or drawing the experiences of displacement has existed as long as displacement itself. Next, Candida and Dom contemplate the nebulous term “refugee” and how they interpreted it for their book, in addition to the importance of the reader to refugee comics’ tone and impact. As our guests point out, the main audience of refugee comics are those who have citizenship, thereby revealing a complex relationship between reader and author; as Candida underscores, “the very idea of a refugee can only exist if there is an idea of a citizen, and vice versa.”

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