Reading comics for the field of International Relations: Theory, method and the Bosnian War
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| European Journal of International Relations 23(3) sensible, the reader has to be able to see some continuity from one image to the next and something needs to be filled into make that continuity. That something has a crucial status as simultaneously absent and present absent in that it is located in the gutter that separates panels, present in that it is required for us to string the panels meaningfully together. The gutter becomes the space that it is assumed that the reader can most easily fill in, but it might also be a demarcation of the limit to what can be represented. In the latter usage, the gutter is not something that connects reading, but where reading stops it articulates where a visual-textual discourse can no longer fully account for what is or has taken place. As a consequence, we should ask not only what is depicted in images and stated through text, but what takes place between panels and frames. Connecting comics A practical intertextual approach Approaching comics from an IR perspective, we should understand them as always inter- textually situated (Der Derian and Shapiro, 1989; Weldes, 2001). The theory of intertex- tuality holds that texts simultaneously quote other texts, yet are also destabilized through such quotations (Aradau and Huysmans, 2014; Hansen, 2006). Quotations can be textual, but we might also think of imagery as providing visual intertextuality. Given the medium of drawing, comics have a wide-ranging register through which to make inter- textual quotations to other texts and images. Such quotations can run through a factual epistemic register, but they might also be satirical, ironic or beautifying. From an IR perspective, the question is how comics make references to events and practices in world politics and how they engage with discourses already articulated within the broader public sphere. Yet, intertextuality does not simply reside within the text itself it is one that analysts constitute in a particular manner by selecting specific texts, by posing specific questions to these texts and by reading them in relation to one another. In short, the analyst makes a series of substantial and methodological choices when an intertextual study is carried out. Aradau and Huysmans’s analysis of the differences between Julia Kristeva’s theorization of intertextuality and the intertextual approach presented in Security as Practice Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War is instructive in this respect, particularly as concerns the selection of cases and texts (Aradau and Huysmans, 2014: 605–606; Hansen, 2006; Kristeva, 1980). For Kristeva, argue Aradau and Huysmans (2014: 606), the world is in the first instance inside the text and not connected to institutional sources and political contestation’; this implies that Any text can be used to analyse the non-foundational nature of meaning. Security as Practice, in contrast, provides a set of specific methodological guidelines for which texts should be read based on relative quantity of being referenced and the institutional sources of the text (Aradau and Huysmans, 2014: 606). Aradau and Huysmans point out that intertextual theory can lead to different methodological choices, and that textual selections are driven by substantial — and different — research interests. Kristeva is a semiotician concerned with the sign system of language Security as Practice is focused on the empirical study of foreign policy discourse. Taking this to the study of comics as international relations, a third position located between Kristeva’s any text and the quite specific guidelines of Security as Practice might be advised. Drawing on the general intertextual insight that there is not one given Hansen 591 intertextual pattern that arises from within texts themselves, the choice of question through which we assemble and read text becomes important. No comic generates by itself an IR question, nor is there ever only one question that can be asked to one or a body of comics. The choice of IR question can be driven by a range of theoretical and empirical research concerns, and these concerns should, in turn, be considered when specific comics are selected for analysis. To connect to Aradau and Huysmans’s analysis, contra a Kristeva-derived approach, selection criteria do seem warranted, yet contra the approach advocated in Security as Practice, these should be allowed to vary depending on the particular objective of the comics study. The choice of IR question and the choice of comics selection criteria should, in short, be matched. Within this more flexible, yet theoretically driven, approach to comics intertextual- ity’, the following selection criteria should be considered the number of comics (inter- textual analysis usually requires a thorough analysis of a smaller number of texts, yet one might also want to account for the dispersion of a phenomenon, which would require a larger body of comics the impact on foreign policymaking and diplomacy (there area few cases of comics in this category, though not many circulation (comics as part of popular culture comics as marginal, critical discourse comics that are granted higher cultural legitimacy (through academic engagement and by critics comics that break the general practices of comics production, circulation and reception style and genre (similarity or variation and the ability to further theorizing in IR. The discussion so far has been centred on an intertextual model where an IR question guides the selection of comics. One should note, though, that comics might also be part of ‘mixed-media’ studies including other forms of textual and visual expression. Download 1.29 Mb. Share with your friends:
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