“A terrible beauty is born”: Interrogating Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza
Sameera Mehta
Publication: Volume 1 Issue 3
Abstract
The paper focalizes Joe Sacco’s seminal contributions to graphic journalism, Palestine (1993) and its thematic continuation Footnotes in Gaza (2009), through the lenses of the violent and the visual, to interrogate their interrelatedness. ‘What does the graphic mode do for a sensitive and traumatic geopolitical issue?’ is the question that undergirds the argument. Additionally, due to the vast temporal gap between the two graphic novels, a comparative framework is constructed to excavate the efficacy, similarities, and divergences in Sacco’s evolving comic aesthetic.
Keywords: Journalism, Graphic Novel, Comic, Palestine, Terror, Trauma, and Visual, Joe Sacco
Sameera Mehta (sameera0607@gmail.com) is a Research Scholar at the Department of English, University of Delhi. She has taught English Literature and Communication at Shri Ram College of Commerce, Dyal Singh College, Kalindi College and Ramanujan College of Delhi University. She has previously published research articles with Umbra, Lapis Lazuli, The Criterion and South- Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies.