Performativity, Cultural Construction, and the Graphic Narrative

Leigh Anne Howard, Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw, Leigh Anne Howard, Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429561122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Performativity, Cultural Construction, and the Graphic Narrative draws on performance studies scholarship to understand the social impact of graphic novels and their sociopolitical function.

Addressing issues of race, gender, ethnicity, race, war, mental illness, and the environment, the volume encompasses the diversity and variety inherent in the graphic narrative medium. Informed by the scholarship of Dwight Conquergood and his model for performance praxis, this collection of essays makes links between these seemingly disparate areas of study to open new avenues of research for comics and graphic narratives. An international team of authors offer a detailed analysis of new and classical graphic texts from Britain, Iran, India, and Canada as well as the United States.

Performance, Social Construction and the Graphic Narrative draws on performance studies scholarship to understand the social impact of graphic novels and their sociopolitical function. Addressing issues of race, gender, ethnicity, race, war, mental illness, and the environment, the volume encompasses the diversity and variety inherent in the graphic narrative medium. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the areas of communication, literature, comics studies, performance studies, sociology, languages, English, and gender studies, and anyone with an interest in deepening their acquaintance with and understanding of the potential of graphic narratives.

1 Introduction, or transformations and the performance of text and image

Leigh Anne Howard and Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw

In this volume, we draw on Performance Studies scholarship to offer, as Hillary Chute suggests, a different rubric for understanding the impact of graphic narratives (“Reading” 452). This rubric positions Performance Studies scholarship and its decades of research about literature, interpretation, textual bias, embodiment, transaction, and sociopolitical function as central to understanding more about how graphic narratives work and their potential for social and political change. Both performance and comics—in their role as product and process, their reliance on the verbal and visual, their insistence on audience engagement, and their subversion of a long-established textual bias—exist in what Dwight Conquergood calls a “borderland terrain” (“Ethnography” 80). Informed by Conquergood’s model for the way performance functions, this collection of chapters makes links between these seemingly disparate areas of study to open new avenues of research for comics and graphic narratives. Following Conquergood’s terminology, we have divided this collection into three parts—mimesis, poiesis, and kinesis—to illustrate the three functions graphic narratives have for social construction and audience engagement.

From cartoons to graphic novels to manga—the variety of comics, in combination with an awareness of their expressive potential, has generated both popular and scholarly interest over the last decade. Comics has experienced a revival and reassessment in the form of book-length, often more sophisticated, and better produced graphic narratives. Their readership has expanded beyond the young, male demographic to interest people of all ages, genders, races, and ethnicities, as attested by Elaine Martin’s survey of international developments in graphic narratives. This increased readership in combination with excitement about the genre itself has initiated a wave of publications that focuses on comics and their expressive potential. The first wave addressed how educators might utilize these narratives and their unique properties in the classroom at the middle school, high school, and post-secondary levels (e.g., Burger 2018; Carter 2007; Dong 2012). These publications emphasized or justified comics as a legitimate area of study. Because of its hybrid form and unusual conventions, comics had long been considered a lesser genre and form, and its value was seriously contested by readers and scholars. For the longest time, the graphic narrative could not be taught in schools or discussed in academic articles without fear of scorn or ridicule, though perhaps ironically they were seen as a gateway to reading and understanding “better” or “real” literature. So, scholars interested in the graphic narrative sought to explain its merit—and potential.

Part of the scholarly justification entailed determining what to call texts that include words and images and how to distinguish between the different ways those texts appear and function on the page. Building on the ground-breaking work of Will Eisner, Scott McCloud embraced the idea that comics is essentially “sequential art” (5) or, in a more comprehensive definition, “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (9). Having laid the groundwork for more detailed and complex analyses, McCloud’s definition still offers a solid starting point. The next generation of scholarly ventures is well represented through the work of Hillary Chute who was among the academics who first promoted inquiries into graphic narratives in well-respected journals, such as Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, and Critical Inquiry. For Chute, “[c]omics might be defined as a hybrid word-and-image form in which two narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially” (452). She distinguishes comics from the graphic novel which she sees as a “book-length work in the medium of comics” (453).

As a result of the work of Eisner, McCloud, and Chute, among other scholars, we have seen the emergence of an exciting scholarly approach which examines comics through numerous critical lenses or with a range of theoretical orientations. For example, the field of narratology has entered the quickly growing arena of Comics Studies with an issue of SubStance edited by Jared Gardner and David Herman and an edited collection by Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. In their 2011 introduction to a special issue of SubStance, Jared Gardner and David Herman, deploring the absence of detailed applications of narrative theory to the comics genre, introduce a variety of narrative approaches to diverse comics and graphic narratives. In addition, as Bart Beaty has suggested, comics scholars have applied the terminology of film, cinema, and other technologies to their discussions of comics and graphic narratives or explore transmedia narrative strategies. Writing in Cinema Journal, Bart Beaty reflects on current developments in Comics Studies through comparisons with Film Studies fifty years earlier. Like Film Studies, he believes that Comics Studies will have to develop its own terminology and “move beyond the narrowly thematic readings of key works and begin to offer critical insights into comics as a social and aesthetic system that has broader transmedia and intermedia implications” (108).

Matthew Smith and Randy Duncan in 2011 have paved a path for moving the study of comics forward. With their 2011 publication, they call for a new form of Comics Studies (4) that they hope can operate outside of established fields to embrace new technologies and new media. Each chapter in Smith and Duncan’s book illustrates a particular approach to the study of comics through a variety of critical lenses, such as feminism, Marxism, and reader response. Each chapter also includes a sample critical reading. Unfortunately, their excellent book, while addressing Comics Journalism and ethnography, does not include Performance Studies or cinema.

We hope our volume can contribute to this critical conversation. By focusing their critical lenses, the authors in this anthology initiate robust, critical conversations about how comics forms work and how they might contribute to our social, cultural, and political understanding. Though some of the comics discussed in the anthology are written expressly as a graphic narrative, many have been adapted from source works of fiction and non-fiction from multiple genres—the novel, film, animation, memoir, and news headlines, as well as other graphic narratives and comics styles. This ability to move between genres and across media illustrates what we might call a “transmedia performativity” in that they can easily cross now defunct boundaries, transform ideas, and challenge reader perceptions.

Because of the disciplinary “silos” academics so frequently inhabit, one of our greatest challenges has been gaging the levels of knowledge our reader may have about both comics and performance so that we neither overestimate the reader’s familiarity with those areas, nor patronize the readers who have a more sophisticated grasp on the scholarship in comics and performance. Our intended reading audience resembles our friends who, like us, enjoy reading comics and graphic narratives, perhaps have even taught them and want to find out what others think about them or want to expand their knowledge of graphic narratives beyond superhero stories. We also anticipate an academic audience with more familiarity with comics than with Performance Studies, and so, in this introduction, we review some basic ideas central to Performance Studies and to the connection we are making in the volume about a performance-centered approach to the graphic narrative.

Performance, performativity, and the graphic narrative

Few scholars have shown an interest in connecting Performance Studies with comics scholarship. Some of this reticence may be attributed to Scott McCloud’s claim that comics is not like a performance (McCloud 69). Two notable exceptions include Jonathan Gray’s article, “Comics and Performance/Experiments and Inquiry,” which reminds us performance is more than entertainment but is a potential mode of inquiry for “phenomena not usually considered performance” (n.p.). The other exception is Lisa Annalisa di Liddo’s book, Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel, which takes an interest in Alan Moore’s work because, in addition to doing comics, Moore is also a performing artist (22). Unfortunately, she addresses performance only in the conclusion of her book when she mentions Moore’s theatricality and his dedication to an “intrinsically performative medium like comics, where the illusion of mimesis is incessantly broken by the blatant antirealism of the lines that intertwine on the page” (164). In both cases, these scholars reference a connection between Performance Studies and comics that warrants more exploration given the similarities between these two dynamic, multimodal forms.

One way to unravel perceptions of disparity about the connection between the graphic narrative and performance requires understanding what we mean by performance and what performance shares with graphic narratives and other comics. For one thing, “performance,” like comics, is a contested term, as well as a contested site of knowledge. People use the term “performance” to reference any number of activities: we seek to perform well in the workplace to have positive performance evaluations; we might attend a performance in the form of a concert or other types of staged art; we perform identities of gender, race, culture, age, and ethnicity; we perform in everyday life when we converse; and when we display wit, humor, or satire, we employ conventions of verbal performance. However, of equal importance to the performance scholar is how performance is a process and what those processes uncover. Thus, as Mary Strine explains, “performance” may mean any number of “activities, events, and processes, all of which share the common dimension of ‘restored behaviors’ or expressive (re)presentation of experience for someone, typically for an audience” (312). While performance scholars explore a range of performance activities as components of their scholarly agenda, several shared understandings about performance are pertinent particularly to our discussion of performance and the graphic narrative. These understandings can be broadly summarized according to performance as product and performance as process. Using this frame, we can also see the relationship between performance and comics, and how this relationship expands our consideration of the way comics can also function as product and process.

Comics and performance as product

A focus on performance as a product—event, activity, staged production—means clarifying what kinds of performance and in what way they function. Though certainly the productions staged by many performance scholars may use the conventions of traditional dramatic productions, performances from a Performance Studies perspective usually look quite different than the plays with which most people are familiar. One difference entails the material performed. Traditional theatre usually means acting out the roles in dramatic literature (i.e., a staged play). This form’s meaning is conveyed when characters show on stage what audience members need to know to follow the plot. Performance Studies, in contrast, take on a wider variety of source materials—non-fiction, ethnographic materials, popular culture, poetry, and prose. With these types of sources, a performance practitioner can extend the modes of conveying meaning. These modes comprise another difference between traditional drama and staged performances from a Performance Studies perspective. Certainly, characters can show audience members what they see, hear, and experience. However, these performances may also engage in “telling,” a lyrical mode that permits the personae on stage to communicate directly to audience members, or they may use a combination of showing and telling, or an “epic mode.” In these types of performance, one or even more narrators appear on stage alongside the characters to provide additional clues to enhance audience understanding. These modes also present another difference pertinent to our conversation: unlike dramatic productions that establish a fourth wall as a barrier between audience performers, the personae in Performance Studies productions use a presentational performance style that embraces techniques—such as direct address—that acknowledge the presence of audience members and let them share the action. These productions also rely on suggestion through minimal props, costumes, and sets. In contrast to the representational style of drama—using conventions to provide every detail to help audience members sink into the staged scene—performance practitioners stage scenes which rely on the power of suggestion. They establish markers audience members need to complete in order to follow the story or characters and that completion must be made by them to determine an understanding of what they see. Each of these factors establishes a performance event that requires more engagement of an audience than one might expect in a traditional dramatic production.

Function is another point to consider when describing staged performances. Mary Strine, Beverly Whitaker Long, and Mary Frances HopKins assert that performance appeared in multiple locations to accomplish multiple goals. Consequently, they explain, performance has multiple “sites” that can function as sites of “aesthetic enjoyment,” as well as a form of “intellectual inquiry,” “cultural memory,” “political action,” and therapeutic practice (Strine, Long and HopKins 186–188). Performances are entities that build social relationships as they serve social functions.

Like staged performances, comics is also a product—a work, text, series of panels, and frames and images—usually that appears in print form, a form that might make performance an unusual approach. Because it emerges in print form and is usually seen as a literary genre, comics may seem fixed or static at first glance; this status as text corresponds to a similar paradigm Conquergood identified for Performance Studies in that the text creates a domination that distances, detaches, and denies the transactional nature of performance, and, as we argue, the graphic narrative. Comics, like performance events, is subject to a textual bias, one that denies the dynamic interaction a comic has with its readers, or given this performance-based rubric, audience members.

Although we see very keen connections between comics and performance, McCloud sees comics and performance as very different. He attributes them with separate reading strategies and mental processes. Although he acknowledges that comics panels look like slow-motion movie shots, he insists film or performance requires less interactivity than comics (Chute and Jagoda 3; McCloud 69). With these conclusions, though, McCloud may be falling prey to the false assumption that “performance” means a dramatic production in the “showing” rather than the epic mode valued by performance practitioners and that requires both showing and telling. Moreover, when one looks at key features of the forms, one can see connections between performances and comics: they both embrace multiple source materials; they rely on the verbal and visual—a showing and a telling—to help audiences engage; they rely on the power of suggestion to encourage that audience engagement; and that suggestion is carefully crafted or balanced in terms of what they provide and what they leave for the audience to provide. In short, both require audiences to engage, like Leslie Irene Coger explains, in a “theatre of the mind” (157).

Comics and performance as process

For decades, Performance Studies scholars have offered insight about performance as a way of knowing, particularly as an overarching lens to clarify literature, popular culture, and human behavior. Performance Studies, like comics, suggests that “reading” the words and images on the page is only the start of the audience member’s experiences with the narrative and that the “real” work comes not when individuals encounter the written work—words and images—but when they take on the process of analyzing the work, “trying on” the experiences, and decentering texts to include a wider range of interpretive activity. Performers offer a physical display of embodied thinking; and audience members do not just read and look at the images, but they recognize that they must give more to the process by making leaps between what is apparent, what is suggested, and what is left off the pages a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and table
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction, or transformations and the performance of text and image
• Part I Mimesis: imitating and illustrating
• Part II Poiesis: making and constructing
• Part III Kinesis: breaking and remaking
• Index