Graphic Narratives of Migration

Graphic Narratives of Migration, and the Story of a Bolivian Migrant Woman in Buenos Aires

A Global Diversities and Inequalities Research Centre event.

Graphic narratives have emerged as a compelling medium through which experiences of migration and displacement are articulated. Frequently, in these narratives, the concept of movement serves as a thematic concern of migratory experience that intersects with the formal principle of sequential visual form. Building on this, the discussion begins with an overview of selected graphic narratives that foreground powerful stories of movement in migrant and refugee experiences from Syria, Mexico, Afghanistan, and other contexts. These works are significant in illuminating how graphic narrative art renders socio-political power dynamics through which voices and experiences take shape, and are remembered and negotiated.

The presentation then turns to a case study of the Argentine graphic novel Bolita (2013), which centres on a young Bolivian migrant woman employed as a domestic worker in Buenos Aires. I examine this work as a springboard to interrogate social imaginaries surrounding Bolivian migration, racialised otherness and urban forms of spatialised inequality embedded in Argentine national narratives. Drawing on comics theory, scholarship on Bolivian migration, and debates on subaltern agency, the analysis traces three interrelated trajectories: urban spatial mobility, ties of shared origin and situated subaltern knowledge. It reads the protagonist as a “subaltern sleuth” and proposes that her acts of cleaning enable the gathering of knowledge as a form of situated agency that engages with Spivak’s question of subaltern speech and unsettles the social and symbolic contours of representation attached to her position as a Bolivian migrant domestic worker in Argentina.

Presenter

Dr Patricia Montenegro, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communications at London Met's School of Digital Media and Computing.

The Global Diversities and Inequalities Research Centre is a home for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholarship that explores migration, diasporas, nations, regions and localities through the lenses of diversity and inequality.

This event will be delivered online. Details for joining via MS Teams will be shared once your registration is confirmed.

If you are London Met staff or student, please use your London Met email address to register.

Please contact the Research and Postgraduate Office if you have any questions about this or any of our other events - rpo@londonmet.ac.uk.

To receive notifications of future events, please follow the Research and Postgraduate Office on Eventbrite.

For internal use only XX055 XX050 XX051 XX017 XX058