Project Narrative Visiting Scholar Tarun Athmika will be presenting his research in a hybrid event.
This paper will examine the notion of 'feeling implicated' while reading graphic narratives of madness. The implicated reader is one who is, among other things, reminded of the positionality they occupy in the social structure, and who either benefits or contributes to the regime of injustice. To 'feel implicated' is the affective demand any narrative makes on its reader/viewer, who bears witness (as opposed to mere witnessing) to the political violence, or the 'violence of infrastructure', narrativized in many graphic narratives. In graphic memoirs of madness, authors engage in institutional critique, revealing the various epistemic injustices the sufferers receive at the hands of both biomedical/psychiatric and social institutions. Unlike prose, the graphic narrative form offers unique 'affordances' (following Caroline Levine) for the transmission of meanings. More importantly, these narratives have a politics of their own—if politics, understood in Ranciere's terms, is a disruption of the constituted (political) order—and narratives actively engage in revealing our (readers') implicatedness in structures of violence. This paper will examine Madison Clell's Cuckoo and LB Lee's All in the Family—both graphic memoirs about dissociative identity disorder—to show how thematic and formal aspects come together to create the implicated reader/spectator, one who is moved to take responsibility affectively politically, ethically, and existentially.
Zoom information:
Meeting ID: 925 8218 5611
Password: 838658
