Palestinian Graphic Literature and the Archival Status: Strategies for Testimonial Credibility in a Transnational Field
My research project examines Palestinian archival art through the lens of graphic literature, including fanzines, graphic novels, and comic books. It seeks to understand the strategies that enable these artistic works to achieve archival status, allowing them to be and to function as archives in contexts marked by testimonial injustices against the dispossessed and displaced. The project investigates the creation, publication, and circulation strategies of these works, drawing on decolonial, comics, and Palestine studies, as well as analytical frameworks from cultural history and the sociology of literature and the arts. It explores the legitimation strategies employed by these forms to lend Palestinian testimonies social credibility within a transnational geography of creation and dissemination. The project provides understanding of the archival agency of literary and artistic works as a countermeasure to hegemonic practices of archival destruction, looting, invisibilization, and delegitimization. More broadly, it contributes to the conceptualization of “archival literature/art” from the perspective of the dispossessed.