Description: The first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South, Graphic Refuge explores graphic narratives about refugee experiences, from war, displacement, and perilous sea crossings to detention camps, resettlement schemes, and second-generation diasporas.
Brief description: Dominic Davies is Senior Lecturer in English at City St George's, University of London. He writes widely on infrastructure, empire, and migration in literature and culture. He is the author of Urban Comics (Routledge 2019) and The Broken Promise of Infrastructure (Lawrence Wishart 2023), and co-editor of Documenting Trauma in Comics (Palgrave 2020), among other books.
Review Quotes: It is impossible not to learn from this book on refugee comics: it is profound, sophisticated, brilliantly constructed - and deeply urgent. With dazzling breadth and a wealth of images, theoretically deft and often moving, Graphic Refuge is crucial contribution to thinking about the borders, movement, and exchanges of contemporary life, expression, and politics. A major achievement. -- Hillary Chute, Northeastern University
Graphic Refuge is a thorough interrogation of graphic-narrative responses to the massive human migration that now challenges a Western world heavily implicated in the wars and climate change that drive it. In their willingness to question the motivations of the artists, the readers, and the terminologies and tropes that burden the refugees, I discern the humanity behind their intellectual rigor: Davies and Rifkind -- like us all -- have skin in this game. -- Joe Sacco
Graphic Refuge is a welcome addition to comics and graphics research and an urgent call to end forced migration....It reinforces the importance of including graphic novels in student literature toolkits, the need to find literature that humanizes and empowers characters, and the growing need for critical perspectives to engage in the world. --Raúl Alberto Mora, Children's Literature in English Language Education