"A Dance Between the Visible the Invisible": Fragments of (forced) Migration in Comics from Italy and the Mediterranean

该项目以讲述地中海(被迫)移民经历的漫画为重点，调查漫画形式和美学中蕴含的政治潜力。作为一种文化边缘化的媒介，这项研究将漫画作为“次要叙事”来研究(Deleuze和Guattari 1986)，并断言这种媒介的文化污名化对其政治潜力和被边缘化社区采用都是至关重要的。在考虑漫画的政治承受能力时，谁的故事被讲述，谁的声音被听到，以及单个机构如何得到重申，都是关键问题。该项目综合了文学理论、形式主义漫画学术、移民和全球化研究，特别关注意大利和地中海地区，旨在关注讲述2000-2020年间意大利(被迫)移民经历的不同漫画语料库。研究分析了漫画挑战主流叙事的潜力，这些主流叙事普遍存在移民经验，并考察了媒介的形式和美学潜力，模糊了个人和集体叙事形式之间的界限。漫画被理解为重申移民是流动的(Burns 2018)、政治的(Sigona 2014)和体验的主体(Eastmond 2007)。根据三个不同的视角(自传、报告文学、自传)，本研究首先调查了对移民进行外部报道的图形记者漫画，如马尔科·里佐和利里奥·邦阿瓦索的纪录片漫画《Salvezza》(2018)。其次，这项研究调查了意大利漫画艺术家对移民的虚构描述，但却是从移民个人的角度进行叙述，如塞尔吉奥·纳扎罗和卢卡·费拉拉的《地中海》(2018)。第三，该项目着眼于自传体和共同创作的漫画，移民承担着直接表达他们经历的代理作用，例如意大利-突尼斯漫画家塔库瓦·本·穆罕默德(Takoua Ben Mohamed)的自传体漫画《GelSomini》(2018年)和合作漫画《Etenesh》(2015)，这是一名埃塞俄比亚妇女前往兰佩杜萨的真实故事。

Focusing on comics narrating the experience of (forced) migration in the Mediterranean, the projectinvestigates the political potential embedded in comics' form and aesthetics. As a culturally marginalizedmedium, the research studies comics as "minor narratives" (Deleuze and Guattari 1986) and asserts thatthe medium's cultural stigmatization is essential both for its political potential and for its adoption bymarginalized communities. Whose stories are told, whose voices are heard, and how individual agency isreaffirmed are pivotal questions when considering the political affordances of comics. Drawing togetherliterary theory, formalist comics scholarship, migration and globalization studies, with a specific focus onItaly and the Mediterranean area, the project aims attention at a variated corpus of comics narrating theexperience of (forced) migration produced in Italy between 2000-2020.The research analyses the potential of comics to challenge dominant narratives that universalizemigratory experience and examines the medium's formal and aesthetics potential to blur the boundariesbetween forms of individual and collective narration. Comics are understood to reaffirm migrants asmobile (Burns 2018), political (Sigona 2014), and experiencing subjects (Eastmond 2007). Followingthree different perspectives (autobiography, reportage, autofiction) in a comparative approach, theresearch first investigates graphic-journalist comics giving an external account of migration, such asMarco Rizzo and Lelio Bonaccorso's documentary comic "Salvezza" (2018). Second, the study inquiresfictional accounts of migration by Italian comic artists, yet narrated through the perspective of migrantindividuals, such as "Mediterraneo" (2018) by Sergio Nazzaro and Luca Ferrara. Third, the project looks atautobiographical and co-authored comics where migrants bear agency in directly voicing theirexperience, such as in the autobiographical comic "La rivoluzione dei gelsomini" (2018) by Italo-Tunisiancartoonist Takoua Ben Mohamed and collaborative comic "Etenesh" (2015), the true story of an Ethiopianwoman's voyage to Lampedusa.