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Abstract
Taking its cue from the recent “graphic turn” in law and humanities scholarship, this essay explores the potentially enabling possibilities of graphic literature as a site of doing justice. In particular, it connects critical work on graphic justice with recent theorisations of victims’ justice to ask whether graphic narrative(s) might provide an alternate space, or what Leigh Gilmore terms an “alternative jurisdiction,” that allows victims of international crimes and/or grave human rights violations to claim justice outside the formal bounds of law. From this perspective, the inquiry pursues two complementary aims. First, it seeks to offer new insight into the possibilities of graphic narrative to give voice to the lived experience of trauma and injustice – not just as testimony or evidence, nor as a mere humanistic gloss on the rigidly defined terrain of law, but rather as a form of justice itself. Second, it looks to present a set of fresh reflections on international law’s treatment of violent trauma, and on the sites and spaces within which victims’ justice might be effectively addressed and attained.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 I am grateful to Carla Ferstman, Steven Howe and Lars Waldorf for their feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. The comments of the anonymous reviewer for Law & Literature were also most valuable in helping the refinement of ideas.
2 Karen Crawley and Honni van Rijswijk, “Justice in the Gutter: Representing Everyday Trauma in the Graphic Novels of Art Spiegelman,” Law – Text – Culture 16 (2012): 93–118, 93.
3 Thomas Giddens, ed., Graphic Justice: Intersections of Comics and Law (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).
4 Luis Gómez Romero and Ian Dahlman, eds., Justice Framed: Law in Comics and Graphic Novels. Special Issue of Law – Text – Culture 16 (2012).
5 Kieran Tranter, ed., Seeing Law: The Comic and Icon as Law. Special Issue of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law/Revue internationale de sémiotique juridique 30, no. 3 (2017).
6 A useful conspectus of the current scholarship is provided in Hillary Chute, “Comics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities, eds. Simon Stern, Maksymilian del Mar and Bernadette Meyler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020): 821–839.
7 See Wai Chee Dimock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 2. See also Chute, “Comics,” 839.
8 Dimock, Residues of Justice, 10.
9 For Dimock, we encounter the idea of justice in law as a “provisional dictate, an incomplete dictate, haunted always by what it fails to encompass.” Dimock, Residues of Justice, 8. Emphasis in original.
10 Leigh Gilmore, “Jurisdictions: I, Rigoberta Menchú, The Kiss, and Scandalous Self‐Representation in the Age of Memoir and Trauma,” Signs 28 no. 2 (2003): 695–718, 715.
11 See Jérémie Gilbert and David Keane, “Graphic Reporting: Human Rights Violations Through the Lens of Graphic Novels,” in Graphic Justice: Intersections of Comics and Law, ed. Thomas Giddens (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015): 236–254, and Hannah Baumeister, “Drawing on Genocide,” Law and Humanities 13, no. 1 (2019): 3–28.
12 See Deborah Mayersen, “Cockroaches, Cows and ‘Canines of the Hebrew Faith’: Exploring Animal Imagery in Graphic Novels about Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal 12, no. 2 (2018): 165–178 and Laurike in’t Veld, The Representation of Genocide in Graphic Novels: Considering the Role of Kitsch (Cham: Springer, 2019).
13 See Joanne Pettitt, “Memory and Genocide in Graphic Novels: The Holocaust as Paradigm,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 9, no. 2 (2019): 173–196.
14 See Pettitt, “Memory and Genocide” and Henry Redwood and Alister Wedderburn, “A Cat-and-Maus Game: The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in Post-Conflict Comics,” Review of International Studies 45, no. 4 (2019): 588–606.
15 Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 69.
16 Mina Rauschenbach and Damien Scalia, “Victims and International Criminal Justice: A Vexed Question?,” International Review of the Red Cross 870 (2008): 441–459.
17 On this point as it relates to international criminal justice, see Luke Moffett, Justice for Victims Before the International Criminal Court (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), esp. 8–57. There is an expansive critical literature on the definition and role of victims before the ICC – see e.g. Christoph Safferling and Gurgen Petrossian, Victims Before the International Criminal Court: Definition, Participation, Reparation (Cham: Springer, 2021). For an especially astute treatment of how the victim is “figured” – and has been “reconfigured” over time – in international criminal justice, see Maria Elander, Figuring Victims in International Criminal Justice: The Case of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).
18 Cherif M. Bassiouni, “International Recognition of Victims’ Rights,” Human Rights Law Review 6, no. 2 (2006): 203–280, 205. These rights are often well-recognised in domestic jurisdictions.
19 Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power, adopted by General Assembly Resolution 40/34 of 29 November 1985, available at https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/victimsofcrimeandabuseofpower.aspx
20 The undertaking to ensure that the voices of victims are heard, and the statutory article conferring participatory rights for victims, have been hailed by Antonio Cassese as being “of great significance” and a “great advance in international criminal procedure” (Antonio Cassese, “The Statute of the International Criminal Court: Some Preliminary Reflections,” European Journal of International Law 10 (1999): 144–171, 167). Even so, doubts remain as to their practical effectiveness. On this, see Mark Findlay and Ralph Henham, Transforming International Criminal Justice: Retributive and Restorative Justice in the Trial Process (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011).
21 Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of International Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law, adopted and proclaimed by General Assembly Resolution 60/147 of 16 December 2005, available at https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/remedyandreparation.aspx
22 For a detailed commentary on the drafting of the Basic Principles, see Theo van Boven, “Victims’ Rights to a Remedy and Reparation: The New United Nations Principles and Guidelines,” in Reparations for Victims of Genocide, War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity: Systems in Place and Systems in the Making, eds. Carla Ferstman, Mariana Goetz and Alan Stephens (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2009): 19–40, and Bassiouni, “International Recognition of Victims’ Rights.”
23 Thorsten Bonacker and Christoph Safferling, “Introduction,” in Victims of International Crimes: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, eds. Thorsten Bonacker and Christoph Safferling (The Hague: Springer, 2013): 1–14, 2.
24 See Moffett, Justice for Victims.
25 Moffett, Justice for Victims, 29.
26 Moffett, Justice for Victims, 26.
27 See Moffett, Justice for Victims, 26.
28 Clare McGlynn and Nicole Westmarland, “Kaleidoscopic Justice: Sexual Violence and Victim-Survivors’ Perceptions of Justice,” Social & Legal Studies 28, no. 2 (2019): 179–201, 186.
29 McGlynn and Westmarland, “Kaleidoscopic Justice,” 186.
30 McGlynn and Westmarland, “Kaleidoscopic Justice,” 191. Emphasis in original.
31 McGlynn and Westmarland, “Kaleidoscopic Justice,” 192. Emphasis in original.
32 Sara Kendall speaks here of a “restorative turn” in the aims and practices of the ICC. Sara Kendall, “Beyond the Restorative Turn: The Limits of Legal Humanitarianism,” in Contested Justice: The Politics and Practice of International Criminal Court Interventions, eds. Christian de Vos, Sara Kendall and Carsten Stahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 352–376.
33 See for example the opening statement of the victim representative, Paolina Massida, during the Lubanga case (the first tried before the ICC): “The central interest of victims in establishing the truth about the facts and identification of those responsible and statement and declaration of who is responsible is at the root of the right to truth which was established for victims of serious violations, human rights violations. In the implementation of this right through criminal proceedings, victims have a central interest in the issue of such proceedings, shedding light on what actually happened, to fill the gap that could take place between procedural establishments of facts and the truth itself.” Lubanga, opening statement of the victim representative, 40-41. See also ICC, Prosecutor v. Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui, ICC-01/04-01/07, Transcript 16 May 2012, closing statement of the victim representative, 36: “[I]t is in the interest [of the victims] to have the truth ascertained and in return benefit from the revelation of the truth. The victims provide light on the events, and they are in a position to make a contribution to the ascertainment of the truth.” The concept of a right to truth continues to gain traction in international criminal law and international human rights law, and there is a burgeoning literature on the subject. See for example Melanie Klinker and Howard Davis, The Right to Truth in International Law: Victims’ Rights in Human Rights and International Criminal Law (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020).
34 Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
35 Richard Werbner, “Introduction: Beyond Oblivion: Confronting Memory Crisis,” in Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power, ed. Richard Werbner (London: Zed Books, 1998): 1–17, 1.
36 Homi K. Bhabha, “The Right to Narrate,” Harvard Design Magazine 38 (2014) [unpaginated].
37 This phrase is lifted from the opening statement of the victim representative in Lubanga, cited above at footnote 33.
38 Maria Elander, “The Victim’s Address: Expressivism and the Victim at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 7, no. 1 (2013): 95–115, 114.
39 Elander, “The Victim’s Address,” 114.
40 See Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness. Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and Emily Haslam also identify this as one of the crucial “tensions” that trouble the prosecution of international crimes – that “between adhering to the strictures of the legal process, while attending to the suffering of individual victims.” See Marie-Bénédicte Dembour and Emily Haslam, “Silencing Hearings? Victim-Witnesses at War Crimes Trials,” European Journal of International Law 15, no. 1 (2004): 151–177, 152.
41 Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh, Jurisdiction (Routledge: Abingdon, 2012), 3.
42 Dorsett and McVeigh, Jurisdiction, 5.
43 Daniel Matthews, “From Jurisdiction to Juriswriting: At the Expressive Limits of the Law,” Law, Culture and the Humanities 13, no. 3 (2017): 425–445, 427.
44 Gilmore, Limits of Autobiography, 143.
45 Gilmore, Limits of Autobiography, 43.
46 Gilmore, “Jurisdictions,” 696.
47 Gilmore, Limits of Autobiography, 43.
48 Hillary Chute, “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative,” PMLA 123, no. 2 (2008): 452–465, 453.
49 Chute, “Comics as Literature?,” 454.
50 Roger Sabin, Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (London: Phaidon Press, 1996): 6–7. There is much more to be said about the epistemology of the comics form, but this lies outside the theoretical purview of the current essay (and beyond my own theoretical limits). See for example Thomas Giddens, On Comics and Legal Aesthetics: Multimodality and the Haunted Masks of Knowing (Routledge: Abingdon, 2018).
51 Hillary Chute, Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics and Documentary Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 17.
52 Chute, Disaster Drawn, 39.
53 Chute, Disaster Drawn, 59.
54 Chute, Disaster Drawn, 136.
55 Chute, Disaster Drawn, 136.
56 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 24.
57 See Desmond Manderson, “Not Drowning, Waving: Images, History, and the Representation of Asylum Seekers,” in Unintended Consequences: The Impact of Migration Law and Policy, eds. Marianne Dickie, Dorota Gozdecka and Sudrishti Reich (Acton ACT: ANU Press, 2016): 159–174 and Justine Poon, “How a Body becomes a Boat: The Asylum Seeker in Law and Images,” Law & Literature 30, no. 1 (2018): 105–121.
58 Letter from the Office of the ICC Prosecutor, cited in the Guardian, 15 February 2020: “In terms of the conditions of detention and treatment, although the situation varied over time, the office considers that some of the conduct at the processing centres on Nauru and on Manus Island appears to constitute the underlying act of imprisonment or other severe deprivations of physical liberty under article 7(1)(e) of the statute [crimes against humanity].” The office of the prosecutor held, however, that the matters did not fall within the jurisdiction of the court and did not evidence the “contextual elements” necessary to warrant further investigation for prosecution.
59 Poon, “How a Body becomes a Boat,” 107.
60 Emma Cox, “Island Impasse: Refugee Detention and the Thickening Border,” The Oxford Handbook of Politics and Performance, eds. Shirin M. Rai, Milija Gluhovic, Silvija Jestrovic and Micahel Saward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001): 217–234, 221.
61 Safdar Ahmed in interview with ABC Arts, available at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-16/nsw-premiers-literary-awards-winners-safdar-ahmed-tony-birch/101069610. Chute also speaks of graphic narratives as a form of witness that “takes shape as marks and lines because no other technology could record what it depicts.” Chute, Disaster Drawn, 265.
62 See Teresa Godwin Phelps, “‘Reading as if for Life’: Law and Literature is More Important than Ever,” Studies in Law, Politics and Society 43 (2008): 133–152.
63 Katrin Trüstedt, “Representing Agency: An Introduction,” Law and Literature 32, no. 2 (2020): 195–206.
64 Trüstedt, “Representing Agency,” 198.
65 Janet Cotterill, Language and Power in Court (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 149.
66 Shonna L. Trinch, Latinas’ Narratives of Domestic Abuse: Discrepant Versions of Violence (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003), 50.
67 I borrow the term “co-creation” here from the team behind the PositiveNegatives project, who use it to describe their artistic practice. See Sara Wong, Rachel Shapcott and Emma Parker, ‘Graphic Lives, Visual Stories: Reflections on Practice, Participation and the Potentials of Creative Engagement’, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35, no. 2 (2020): 311–329, 317. See further the section “Methodology” at https://positivenegatives.org.
68 For Ahmed, the work had to be “genuinely collaborative” or else “there would have been no point in doing it.” “5 Questions with Safdar Ahmed,” Liminal Magazine, 19 May 2021, available at https://www.liminalmag.com/5-questions/safdar-ahmed.
69 Dembour and Haslam, “Silencing Hearings?,” 154.
70 See Cotterill, Language and Power in Court, 149.
71 See Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness.
72 See Elizabeth Neuffer, The Key to my Neighbor’s House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda (New York: Picador, 2001).
73 Dembour and Haslam, “Silencing Hearings?,” 158–165.
74 Katherine M. Franke, “Gendered Subjects of Transitional Justice,” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 15 (2006): 813–828.
75 Franke, “Gendered Subjects of Transitional Justice,” 821.
76 Franke, “Gendered Subjects of Transitional Justice,” 819–820.
77 We may be reminded here of Judith Herman’s claim that “if one set out intentionally to design a system for provoking symptoms of traumatic stress it would look very much like a court of law.” Judith Herman, “Justice from the Victim’s Perspective,” Violence Against Women 11 (2005): 571–602, 574.
78 Gilmore, “Jurisdictions,” 715.
79 In her work on truth commissions, for instance, Teresa Phelps writes that “storytelling settings can provide a different kind of truth than a mere recitation of facts. The testimony that a victim may give to a truth commission obviously differs significantly from that which would be given in a trial or before a tribunal. Truth commissions usually allow for far more breadth and freedom in the storytelling. Victims may talk about much that is legally irrelevant; feelings may be discussed and even displayed […]. These settings can reveal the truth about what oppression did to people – not just the recitation of events, but what oppression felt like, how it changed and destroyed lives, even lives not touched by a specific crime.” Teresa Godwin Phelps, Shattered Voices: Language, Violence and the Work of Truth Commissions (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 66.
80 See for example Peter D. Rush and Olivera Simić (eds.), The Arts of Transitional Justice: Culture, Activism and Memory After Atrocity (New York: Springer, 2014).
81 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, “Foreword,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992): xiii–xx, xv.
82 Joe Sacco, Journalism (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012), x–xii.
83 See for example the full-page image at Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), 238, in which individual testimony from several victims is placed over a background depiction of mass beatings.
84 Wibke Weber and Hans-Martin Rall, “Authenticity in Comics Journalism: Visual Strategies for Reporting Facts,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 8, no. 4 (2017): 376–397, 383.
85 On this point, see Fiona Farnworth, “‘What I Saw for Myself’: Collating Polyphonic Voices in Joe Sacco’s Palestine Narratives,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 6, no. 2 (2019): 199–219.
86 Chute offers a wonderfully succinct reading of how one such sequence of images suggests visually the continuity of past and present: “In the chapter ‘The Fedayeen’, for example, [Sacco] interviews a former guerrilla fighter who was a soldier in the 1950s. The top of the page is unbordered; in fact, it overhangs the subsequent panels – images spill out into the margins – and seems to encompass them. At the far left, the scene of 1953 begins; we enter the page, it seems, through the fighter’s body, but his present-day self also occupies the panel, sharing space. Past and present are here contiguous; the younger self has his hand on the shoulder of the older self. The body in the present halts the forward […] movement suggested by the unbordered panel from the past – what in comics (and printing) terminology is called a bleed.” Hillary Chute, “Comics Form and Narrating Lives,” Profession 2011: 107–117, 112. The page in question is at Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza, 43.
87 In the foreword to Footnotes in Gaza, Sacco writes: “As someone in Gaza once told me, ‘events are continuous’. Palestinians never seem to have the luxury of digesting one tragedy before the next one is upon them. When I was in Gaza, younger people often viewed my research into the events of 1956 with bemusement. What good would tending to history do them when they were under attack and their homes were being demolished now? But the past and the present cannot be so easily disentangled; they are part of a remorseless continuum, a historical blur.” Joe Sacco, “Foreword,” in Footnotes in Gaza: xi–xii, xi.
88 Edward Said remarks on how Sacco’s works have “a power to detain us, to keep us from impatiently wondering off in order to follow a catchphrase or a lamentably predictable narrative of triumph and fulfilment.” Edward Said, “Homage to Joe Sacco,” in Joe Sacco, Palestine (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2001), v.
89 Said, “Homage to Joe Sacco,” v.
90 Chute, Disaster Drawn, 204.
91 Chute, Disaster Drawn, 205.
92 “The encounter with another is central to any conception of bearing witness. For a witness to perform an act of bearing witness, she must address an other, a listener who consequently functions as a witness to the original witness. The act of bearing witness thus constitutes a specific form of address to an other. It occurs only in a framework of relationality, in which the testimonial act is itself witnessed by an other. This relationality between the survivor-witness and the listener-witness frames the act of bearing witness as a performative speech act.” Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas, “Introduction,” in The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture, eds. Frances Guerin and Roger Halles (New York: Wallflower Press, 2007): 1–20, 10.
93 Christine Künzel, Vergewaltigungslektüren: Zur Codierung sexueller Gewalt in Literatur und Recht (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2003): 250–251. All translations are my own, unless otherwise stated.
94 Künzel, Vergewaltigungslektüren, 251-252.
95 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 11.
96 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11.
97 Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), 8.
98 See Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth (London: Verso, 2021): 83–84.
99 Anne Whitehead notes how novelists have “frequently found that the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by mimicking its forms and symptoms”. Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 3. Emphasis added.
100 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: Harper, 1993), 67.
101 McCloud, Understanding Comics, 69.
102 Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 44.
103 Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza, 238.
104 The experience of trauma creates a “wound or ‘hole’ in the mind where representation ought to be.” Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 249.
105 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 38.
106 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 37.
107 Elizabeth V. Spelman, Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 52.
108 Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness, 85.
109 Chute, “Comics,” 839.
110 See Giddens, On Comics and Legal Aesthetics.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Clotilde Pégorier
Clotilde Pégorier is Head of Education at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. From 2015 to 2023, she was a lecturer at the University of Essex, before which she held teaching and research posts at the universities of Exeter, Lucerne and Zurich. Her main research interests lie in the fields of international criminal law and human rights law, as well as interdisciplinary studies on law and the arts. She has published a monograph on Ethnic Cleansing: A Legal Qualification (Routledge, 2013), and several book chapters and journal articles on topics including genocide denial, hate speech and the crime of persecution. Recent publications include co-authored essays on contemporary verbatim theatre (with Steven Howe) and on Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Bamako (with Lars Waldorf).