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

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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.