Postcolonial Comics ─ Texts, Events, Identities

This collection examines new comic book cultures, graphic writing and bande dessinee texts as they relate to postcolonialism in contemporary Anglophone and Francophone settings. The individual chapters are framed within a larger enquiry that considers definitive aspects of the postcolonial condition in twenty-first century (con)texts.

Authors demonstrate that the field of comic book production and circulation in various regional histories introduce new postcolonial vocabularies. These scripts employ visual grammars, image-texts and iconic performances that reconstitute conventional "image-functions" in established social texts and political systems, and thus re-envision competing narratives of resistance, rights, and freedoms. In this sense, postcolonial comic cultures are of particular significance in the context of a newly global and politically recomposed landscape.

This volume introduces a timely intervention within current comic book area studies that remains firmly situated within the US-European and Japanese manga paradigms and their reading publics. It will be of great interest to a wide variety of disciplines including postcolonial studies, comics area studies, cultural studies and gender studies.

Binita Mehta is Professor of French and Director of the International Studies Program at Manhattanville College, USA where she teaches a variety of courses in French language, literature, and film. She has published a book and several articles and book chapters on French and Francophone literature and film, South Asian diasporic cinema, and on the Francophonebande dessinee.

Pia Mukherji earned her doctorate in English Literature from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, USA in 2004. Her research and publications are in the areas of British Modernism and new media and diasporic cultures. She has taught a variety of courses on Modernism, Postcolonial literatures, film studies, and writing in the New York and Boston areas.