Skip to Content

COLT 370 - Comparative Comics

CRN: 40647

Instructor: Tera Reid-Olds

Term: Summer 2018

Caribbean and Mediterranean Comics

The Mediterranean and the Caribbean seas are sites of linguistic and cultural exchange. How do artists and writers navigate questions of national and regional identity at these geographic crossroads? We will explore the way that graphic narrative – as a genre of crossroads – constructs Mediterranean and Caribbean identities. We will also discuss the impact of visual media on present-day regional conflicts. We often think of comics in terms of American popular culture, but in this course we will examine representations of Italy, Greece, Egypt, Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti as we investigate how visual culture shapes the Mediterranean and the Caribbean shores. Beyond studying the engagement of comics with stereotypes and representations of violence, we will also grapple with the role of translation in these texts. Our discussions will stem from a foundation in comics theory as we compare a variety of graphic narratives – heroic fantasy, science fiction, reportage, (auto)biography, and adventure stories against a backdrop of social unrest and war – in order to better understand the unique capacity of comics to illustrate and complicate the tension between national and regional identities in these spaces.