Dominic Davies & Candida Rifkind Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2025, pp. 264 ISBN: 9781771126915 Reviewer: Raúl Alberto Mora

Download PDF

Book Overview

The educational potential of the graphic novel has been extensively studied (Botzakis, 2010; Brozo et al., 2014), but Davies and Rifkind’s Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (the second book in the Crossing Lines series by WLU Press) examines its potential to challenge deficit or colonizing views of refugees. Instead of telling refugees’ stories as protagonists in privilege-driven narratives, they examine ‘refugee comics’ or ‘graphic narratives that are about, by, or collaboratively produced with refugees’ (p. 6, emphasis added).

The comics are analyzed using three concepts:

• Critical refugee studies shape the authors’ political and ethical stance towards refugees, challenging state-centric definitions.
• Architectural and infrastructure studies examine refugee camps, border crossings, detention centers, and ruined cities as political technologies affecting mobility and life.
• Postcolonial theory enhances the political critique by analyzing the citizen/refugee binary driven by imperial histories and neocolonial power relations.

This framework illustrates the main point that understanding of modern refugees requires understanding of the long histories of racial capitalism and empire that cause mass displacement.

 

Toward a Transformative View of Refugee

The authors’ definition of refugee comics reminds us that Graphic Refuge challenges refugee stereotypes. It does so by highlighting texts that challenge those stereotypes, using four key terms to guide the analysis:

• ‘Implicated subjects’ (pp. 7-8): The authors use this concept to acknowledge ‘the security of [their] academic positions and the privileges of whiteness’ (p. 8) as the starting point for a longer reflexivity about what it means to move from allies to co-conspirators (Love, 2019).
• ‘Citizen-viewer’/’Citizen-reader’ (p. 9): This idea is about citizens who read refugee comics from the affordances of a stable lifestyle. The authors claim refugee comics expose stateless complicity by challenging privilege.
• ‘Reading for refugeetude’ (p. 10). Following Nguyen’s (2019) refugeetude, Davies and Rifkind describe reading for refugeetude as a ‘historicized and politicised analysis’ that moves ‘away from the scholarly focus on empathy to concentrate instead on the portrayal of refugee refusals in comics.’ Citizen-readers are encouraged to ‘re-cognize’ their refugee related situation.
• ‘Refugee refusal’ (p. 16): This idea is key to re-centering agency in the book. It shows active resistance, not passive suffering. Situations such as a migrant’s refusal to claim asylum in their first European country of arrival, as required by the Dublin Regulation (p. 18) highlight the refusal of refugees and change perceptions of migration. They also disregard an unfair international order that empowers people and challenges border regimes, rather than merely promoting escapism.

The book’s biggest theoretical contribution is consistent rejection of the ‘empathy paradigm’ (pp. 16-17). Displacement from empathy and trauma in refugee narratives is political and decolonial, not just a critical preference. This logic of this intervention has several steps. First, it acknowledges that traditional humanitarian narratives can unintentionally create a neocolonial power dynamic by evoking sympathy for others. The safe ‘citizen-viewer’ may sympathize with the vulnerable ‘refugee’. This relationship makes refugees passively dependent on ‘citizen-viewer’ kindness.

Davies and Rifkind want to end this ‘humanitarian schema of recognition’. Instead of asking: ‘How does this comic make me feel sorry for the refugee?’ they ask: ‘How does this comic show the refugee as a political actor who is fighting against a global system that I, as a citizen-viewer, am a part of?’ This crucial, decolonial change prioritizes political analysis. It views refugees as individuals with wants and needs, rather than as victims, inviting readers to approach comics from both political and self-reflexive perspectives that revisit their status as ‘implicated subjects’. This prevents readers from viewing graphic novels as impartial or empathetic, but rather frames them as calls to action.

 

A Look at the Chapters

Davies and Rifkind each contribute three chapters as solo authors. In their Introduction, they state that writing individual chapters allows them to combine scholarly analysis with personal insight while compiling the collaborative volume.

 

Foreword and introduction

The introductions present the book’s main moral and theoretical ideas. In the Foreword, ‘Refuge is graphic’, Vinh Nguyen discusses the book’s visuality and the ‘citizen-viewer’. In their Introduction, Davies and Rifkind explain their analysis in ‘Reading Refugee Comics’. It defines ‘refugee comics’, introduces ‘citizen-reader’ and ‘refugee refusal’, and shows their shift from empathy to political reading, or ‘reading for refugeetude’.

 

Part 1: The sea and the camp (the material spaces of displacement)

The book begins with an examination of the physical, geographic, and architectural aspects of modern migration. The comics in these chapters focus on how location and space shape refugee narratives rather than the person.

Chapter one – Clandestine crossings: Refugee comics at sea. Through the graphic novels The Unwanted (Sacco, 2012), A Perilous Journey (PositiveNegatives, 2016), An Empty Promise (PositiveNegatives, 2018), The Borders of Shame (Porquié & Tervonen, 2016a), and Drowned Identities (2016b), Davies focuses on the trip itself, zeroing in on ‘crossing the ocean, especially the Mediterranean Sea’. His analysis examines how comics portray dangerous, ambiguous, and uncharted places. Davies expands on the use of graphic narratives as counter-forensics in the chapter titled ‘Clandestine Crossings’, documenting state-hidden journeys.

Chapter two – The postdocumentary turn: Refugee camp comics. Using the graphic novels The Unwanted Stories of the Syrian Refugees (Brown, 2018) and Escaping Wars and Waves (Kugler, 2018), Rifkind shifts the emphasis to the location of arrival and residence: the refugee camp. Analyses that go beyond reporting are called ‘postdocumentary’ and require a critical examination of the camp as a political and visual construct, as well as the viability of objective documentation in a highly emotional context. This chapter challenges the idea that the camp is isolated from the world rather than its byproduct by exploring the nebulous space between them.

 

Part 2: Visual technologies (the mediation of displacement)

The second section applies the analytical framework to technological and ideological systems that contextualize, portray, and facilitate the representation of global refugees.

Chapter three – Unknown knowns: Refugee comics and the war on terror. Drawing on Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘War on Terror’ quote, this chapter examines how political and visual cultures represent refugees. This chapter uses the graphic novel Rolling Blackouts: Disinformation from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq (Glidden, 2016) and the stories of journalist Dan and refugee Sam to demonstrate how comics have challenged the media’s portrayal of Middle Eastern and sub-Saharan African migrants and refugees as security threats.

Chapter four – Digital humanitarianism: Interactive refugee comics. Rifkind discusses webcomics and interactive online comics in this chapter, which examines the ethics and effects of ‘Digital Humanitarianism’ using Exodus (Rietman, 2018) and Sea Prayer (Hosseini & Williams, 2018). Rifkind believes interactive digital comics can offer a more visceral experience of refugee struggles. However, as the stories may provide glimpses, rather than in-depth narratives, citizen-viewers must avoid taking a neutral stance or falling into White saviourism.

 

Part 3: Ruins and refuge (the temporalities of displacement)

The concluding section covers history, memory, trauma, and identity across generations, moving beyond contemporary spaces and media.

Chapter five – Remote sensing: Refugee comics in ruins. Davies analyzes the destruction of Syrian and Gazan cityscapes in several graphic stories, including Syria’s Climate Conflict (Queen & Roche, 2014), East of Aleppo (Brick, 2017), Freedom Hospital (Sulaiman, 2017), The Battle for Home (al-Sabouni, 2017), and Brothers of the Gun (Hisham & Crabapple, 2018). This chapter argues that refugee comics can illustrate the effects of inward refugeetude and mitigate the sensationalist impact of satellite or drone imagery on social media, thereby better explaining the cost of cityscape destruction.

Chapter six – Diasporic displacements: Second-generation refugee comics. A graphic account of refugees entering the USA concludes this volume. Rifkind analyzes Baddawi (Abdelrazaq, 2015), The Best We Could Do (Bui, 2017), and Cabramatta (Huynh, 2019), set in the USA and Australia, where people are moving to new homes. The focus is on artists dealing with their parents’ displacement trauma and how graphic stories spark conversations about inherited memory, cultural identity, and long-term displacement.

 

Concluding Thoughts

Most published books offer valuable contributions to their fields. Some volumes are timely, welcomed, and relevant. Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics is one of them. It is a welcome addition to comics and graphics research and an urgent call to end forced migration. As Davies and Rifkind admit, discussing these issues is difficult, so the book must be detached from social media realities. In his foreword, Vinh Nguyen highlights how graphic novels can convey the humanity and struggles of refugees. Reading Graphic Refuge was, in fact, a reflexive experience for me. It reinforced 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.

 

Bibliography

Abdelrazaq, Leila (2015). Baddawi. Just World Books.

al-Sabouni, Marwa (2017). The Battle for Home: Memoir of a Syrian Architect. Thames and Hudson.

Brick (2017). East of Aleppo: Bread, Bombs, and Video Clips. Fire Leaves Publications.

Brown, Don (2018). The Unwanted. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Bui, Thi (2017). The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir. Abrams ComicArts.

Glidden, Sarah (2016). Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Drawn and Quarterly.

Hisham, Marwan & Crabapple, Molly (2018). Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War. Penguin Random House.

Hosseini, Khaled (2018). Sea Prayer. Bloomsbury.

Huynh, Matt (2019, Oct/Nov). Cabramatta. The Believer, 127. https://www.thebeliever.net/cabramatta

Kugler, Olivier (2018). Escaping Wars and Waves: Encounters with Syrian Refugees. Myriad.

Pourquié, Jeff & Tervonen, Taina (2016a). The Borders of Shame. Drawing the Times.

Pourquié, Jeff & Tervonen, Taina (2016b). Drowned Identities. Drawing the Times. https://drawingthetimes.com/story/drowned-identities

PositiveNegatives (2018). An Empty Promise. https://positivenegatives.org/story/an-empty-promise

PositiveNegatives (2016). A Perilous Journey. https://positivenegatives.org/story/a-perilous-journey/a-perilous-journey-comics/

Rietman, Jasper (2018). Exodus. Submarine Channel.

Sacco, Joe (2012). The Unwanted. In J. Sacco (Ed.), Journalism (pp. 109-157). Jonathan Cape.

Sulaiman, Hamid (2017). Freedom Hospital: A Syrian Story (Francesca Barrie, Trans.). Jonathan Cape.

 

References

Botzakis, S. (2010). A book by any other name? Graphic novels in education. The ALAN Review, 37(3). https://doi.org/10.21061/alan.v37i3.a.8

Brozo, W. G., Moorman, G., & Meyer, C. (2014). Wham! Teaching with graphic novels across the curriculum. Teachers College Press.

Love, B. L. (2019). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Beacon press.

Nguyen, V. (2019). Refugeetude: When does a refugee stop being a refugee. Social Text, 37(2), 109-131. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7371003

 

 

Dr Raúl Alberto Mora is an associate professor at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana and chair of the Literacies in Second Languages Project. Based in Trondheim, he researches second-language literacies in urban and gaming contexts and mentors emerging scholars. His recent books include The Handbook of Critical Literacies and Reimagining Literacy in the Age of AI.