Reading comics for the field of International Relations: Theory, method and the Bosnian War
Comics as international relations A poststructuralist
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| Comics as international relations A poststructuralist framework Cultural-sociological and semiotic theories of comics provide important starting points for developing a theoretical framework specifically concerned with how comics relate to international relations the cultural-sociological approach theorizes comics as asocial institution the semiotic approach theorizes the particular way that comics communicate through images and texts. However, neither of those approaches provides an account of how comics can be read as text–image constellations that articulate political discourse. This section presents a three-part theoretical framework specifically focused on this issue. The first part concerns comics as objects in the world the second approaches comics as objects that speak about the world and the third addresses how to compose an IR reading of comics. All three parts draw on comics scholarship, but as read through a poststructuralist understanding of practice, discourse and intertextuality. Cultural legitimacy and comics practices Understanding comics as artefacts that contribute to international relations requires a theorization of the authority and legitimacy that comics enjoy. For example, if comics are perceived as childish entertainment, they have a different status than if comic books are praised by critics and prominent academics as major intellectual and aesthetic achievements. Cultural-sociological analysis of comics emphasizes that the institutions of production, circulation and consumption are significant for understanding the societal status of the medium and that their historicity therefore needs to be considered. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, Gabilliet (2010: 248) theorizes comics as afield, that is, a synchronic state of power relations between actors and institutions engaged in the search for all sorts of capital (economic, but also social and/or symbolic) around a common stake. Any society includes political, scientific, religious and artistic fields, and comics as a (potential) form of culture has a tension-ridden relationship with the latter. An inclusion in the artistic field demands that the cultural form is not anonymous mass production, but carried out by artists with distinct styles and creativity and that the medium is granted cultural legitimacy. Cultural legitimacy is not something that simply derives from the objector medium itself, but is socially produced through and evidenced by there being critics, collectors and academics engaged with the cultural form. Genre distinctions are crucial for the social status of a cultural artefact (Kiersey and Neumann, 2013: 5–6). For example, the successful introduction of graphic terms such as graphic novel, graphic narrative and graphic memoir in the Anglo-Saxon world in the s was, in part, to signal a distance between this genre and the ‘children’s magazines — and low culture more broadly — connotations that comics held (Chute and DeKoven, 2006). The format through which an artefact is presented is also significant. The albumin the Franco-Belgium tradition has a production quality that assigns Hansen 587 comics a higher aesthetic status than the normal mode of publication in the American context, where book sizes are smaller and colour is less frequent. As a consequence, the two settings provide different possibilities for identifying comics that engage with international relations. In general, the choice in the US context is more constrained and dichotomized, with comics magazines in the superhero tradition, on the one hand, and the critically acclaimed, but commercially less successful, sub-genres of the graphic, including graphic novels, graphic memoir and graphic journalism, on the other. Gabilliet (2010: 249) holds that, historically, comics carry the stigma of a low-ranking position in the cultural hierarchy, regardless of the important works produced by these forms. Yet, there are temporal and spatial nuances. In the French and Belgian cases, a shift takes place in the s when the intelligentsia and the middle class almost simultaneously elevate comics from the subordinate cultural position that they had long occupied, whereas in the US, a comparable consecration of the medium has not taken place (Gabilliet, 2010: 278). The difference in cultural legitimacy within the broader public sphere has also been mirrored in academic practice. In the context of France and Belgium, the academic study of comics has been firmly established since the s, with Marxist, structuralist, psychoanalytical, semiotic and poststructuralist approaches all making contributions (Groensteen, 2007: 1–2). In the US, even within the study of popular culture, comics have received little attention and only very recently have key francophone books of comics scholarship been translated into English (Gabilliet, 2010: 297–299, 304–306). Given that IR is (still) afield dominated by anglophone texts and institutions, it is thus not surprising that comics have not yet been much addressed. The Bourdieu-inspired cultural-sociological approach presented most explicitly by Gabilliet provides a valuable starting point for studying comics as artefacts that can contribute to international relations. Yet, it also has limitations as it is concerned with the legitimacy of comics at a very general societal level. For example, in Gabilliet’s analysis, the lower print-runs of graphic works become a testimony to the genre’s inability to overcome comics stigma. This approach provides limited room for identifying and studying comics and comics practitioners who challenge established genres and formats and who become capable of speaking with authority in public debates despite relatively low print-runs and/or sales. As noted earlier, IR scholars are concerned not only with the general status of a cultural form of expression, but also with particular instances that become publically recognized and/or provide critical accounts of international events and practices. To better account for the importance of such instances, we need to examine the publication, circulation and reception processes at the level of specific comics. Theoretically, this can be facilitated by introducing the poststructuralist-inspired understanding of practices as both general and specific (Hansen, b. The importance of general practices, that is, habits, routine performances and institutionalized doings, have been brought out by scholars bringing Bourdieu and the practice turn into IR Adler and Pouliot, 2011; Adler-Nissen, 2008; Pouliot, 2008). Yet, there are also specific performances of practices that break with the habitual Even uncontested specific routine practices are crucial to the reproduction of general practices, and we should therefore keep the relationship between specific and general practices open and examine the potential) gap between them (Hansen, b 281). For example, drawing a comic book is a performance of a specific practice that either asserts itself as a routine general |