Comics and Memory in Latin America
2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-7160721
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Comics and Graphic Narratives
ResumoA conference at the University of London in 2012 provided the occasion for the presentations that became this book, and its contents retain the character of proceedings. Judged from this perspective, the collection is rather well done. The editors and authors have several strengths, especially the commitment to using comics as expressions of collective and social memory. Others include the attention to lesser-known comics such as those from Peru and Nicaragua, the utilization of several theoretical approaches to memory, especially those laid out in Maurice Halbwachs's On Collective Memory and Alison Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, and the appropriate recognition of the importance of Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's Para leer al Pato Donald without resorting to its shopworn and simplistic dependency thesis.Two essays express the volume's best features. Jorge L. Catalá Carrasco's “Raising the Cuban Flag: Comics, Collective Memory, and the Spanish-Cuban-American War (1898)” addresses one issue, from the series Historietas de Inés, Aldo y Beto, entitled La emboscada (1982). The comic displays the revolutionary Cuban interpretation of the Spanish-American War with a fictional account of treachery in Santiago de Cuba, which it makes appealing especially to younger readers by the time travel of the three protagonists using the charming fantasidoscopio. Catalá Carrasco provides ample historical context for the comic's events and theoretical framework, calling on both Halbwachs and Landsberg to allow for a motivating discussion of comics, memory, and patrimony. In a rather different kind of essay, focused on an internationally famous comic character, Isabella Cosse examines Mafalda as a “talisman of democracy and icon of nostalgia for the 1960s.” This essay considers the history of this character after the artist Quino (Joaquín Salvador Lavado) stopped drawing the comic strip during the military dictatorship in Argentina. The political role given by fans to Mafalda makes for quite intriguing reading. Beyond these two essays, readers will no doubt identify their own favorites because of national allegiances or revolutionary alliances.The chapters do suffer the uneven quality typical of such anthologies in terms of what is included, what is not, and what is ignored completely. The countries discussed include Cuba, Argentina (two essays), Nicaragua, Peru (two essays), Chile, and Brazil. This geographical distribution ignores essential comics from Mexico (Rius, for example, is mentioned only in passing) as well as prominent ones from Cuba, Brazil, and Chile. There are, again as one would expect, some superb chapters, some weaker ones, and some obvious missing ones. This asymmetry makes the parts greater than the whole.The narrative of the introduction needs to be tighter, which could have been helped with better copyediting by the publisher. Examples of this need include the statement by the book's editors that the authors look at “processes of memory formation around a number of historical processes,” which leaves unclear what these processes are (p. 4). The introduction also holds that comics offer a particularly fruitful way to examine memory studies, without specifying in what ways, how, or why (p. 4). Similarly vague statements detract from the introduction's usefulness in laying out the essays' arguments and the intervention offered by the collection as a whole.Additionally, because several of the authors point to the influence of Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory in memory and identity discussions, the editors or the authors should have considered the relationship of this text's interpretation with the standard perspective offered by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Landsberg and Anderson seem to describe two sides of the same coin, but this needs serious analysis, which does not appear in the collection. This represents a glaring omission, one that the peer reviewers should have raised.As it stands, the book editors offer a volume of proceedings that provides an introduction to the topic of memory creation and comic books.
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