Open Collections

Chatterjee, Meghna

University of British Columbia

This thesis investigates the futures imagined by exilic figures in postcolonial speculative graphic fiction. Sarterp Namiq et al.’s Temple of Refuge features an unnamed Kurdish refugee envisioning new futures post-displacement, while Bishakh Som’s Swandive follows two gender nonconforming Bengali Americans grappling with their place in the world. Mobilizing the theoretical apparatuses of formalist comics studies, speculative fiction studies, and critical race and gender studies, this thesis explores how the comic form’s ability to reimagine and materialize new realities engages with debates on speculative thinking and lifemaking in the postcolonial context. Chapter 1 examines the formation of the exilic figure in Temple of Refuge and Swandive. Here, “exile” is used to denote a psychological state of being “unmoored,” fostering the creation of “imaginary homelands” (Rushdie) and “oddkin” communities (Haraway). I theorize the exilic figure through the heuristic of exilic rupture, or the emotional and affective disjunct that tethers the exile from rationalist understanding of space and time. Chapter 2 delves into the comic form's support of the exilic imagination. I examine how the aesthetic strategies of both texts demonstrate exilic rupture, particularly how the Temple of Refuge employs the aesthetic of the photo album to bring spatiotemporal confusion into focus. I also look at how the gutterless pages of Swandive spur into life an imagined world of the exile. The thesis concludes with a Coda reflecting on the concept of bearing witness in speculative fiction and the implications of comic visualization for forming an "implicated subject." It raises questions about ethics, politics, and responsibility, exploring how the “ethics and politics of recognition” (Whitlock) transform when realism yields to speculation. By reading the comic page as an expression of precarious imaginaries, this thesis opens inquiries into the reader's role in supporting non-hegemonic visual cultures.

Text

2024-08-27

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89036

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/