This presentation examines Palestinian comics and graphic narratives as a field where testimonial practices intersect with archival imaginations. While early scholarship in comics and media studies has focused on Joe Sacco's “comics journalism” as a counter-narrative to mainstream media, this American-centric framework limits our understanding of the epistemic challenges that undermine the credibility of Palestininan testimonies in a transnational regime of mediation. Through a comparative reading of multilingual body of texts that goes back to the late 1960s, the talk discusses the meaning of the documentary fever in these graphic narratives. Comics tendancy to include oral, visual, and written testimonies into graphic narratives reveals negociations of epistemic and political conditions under which Palestinian voices are heard, mediated, and rendered credible. These productions emerge here as sites of mediation, where testimonial credibility is reframed within transnational systems of perception. Drawing on the concepts of archival status and archivability, the talk posits that comics do not merely visualize Palestinian experiences but more significantly, construct an archival art of the dispossessed. To this end, the presentation explores the process and strategies through which Palestinian graphic testimonies acquire an archival status, a recognition by the public of their capacity to be sources of acess to knowledge, thus (re-)configuring the apparatuses of their perception.
Ammar Kandeel is a EUME Fellow in the academic year 2025/26 and associate member of the Institute of Study and Research on the Arab and Muslim Worlds (IREMAM) at Aix-Marseille University. He earned his Ph.D. in French and Comparative literature from the University of Montpellier 3 (France). His research focuses on the creative strategies of countering testimonial injustices by Palestinian literature and arts on a transnational level. In this regard, he studies the connections between literary texts, visual arts (film and photography), new media platforms, and comics. His work on comics was published by the French Journal of Contemporary Arab Literature and Culture (title: “Palestinian Comics in the West and Committement of a Transnational Creation,” 2023) and by the Journal of Graphic Studies: Comicalités (title “Palestinian experiences of the Colonial Anthropocene: Counter-visualities in French comics”, 2025).
Rasha Chatta is a comparative literature and cultural studies scholar specialising in the contemporary Arab world and its diasporas. A former EUME fellow, she is the co-PI of a Volkswagen-funded comparative project on feminist comics in the Arab Mediterranean and Latin America. She has published scholarly articles on Arab migrant narratives, war literature, visual archives, and Arab comics, in addition to numerous magazine entries and podcasts on comics. Her book Esquisser la révolte. La bande dessinée à l'heure des féminismes arabes [Sketching Revolt. Arab Feminist Comics] is forthcoming with Éditions Lorelei. She is co-editor of the online magazine Untold Mag.
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