Kairos and Comics: Reading Human Rights Intercontextually

in Joe Saccos Graphic Narratives

Rose Brister, Belinda Walzer

College Literature, Volume 40, Number 3, Summer 2013, pp. 138-155

(Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/lit.2013.0032

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lit/summary/v040/40.3.brister.html

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KAIROS AND COMICS: READING HUMAN

RIGHTS INTERCONTEXTUALLY IN
JOE SACCOS GRAPHIC NARRATIVES
ROSE BRISTER AND BELINDA WALZER

To analyze why an image and the meanings attributed to it are persuasive, culturally resonant, and politically viable at any given historical
moment, or kairos, is to consider the texts and contexts with which it is
entangledto read intercontextually.
Wendy Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics
But comics is not only an art of fragments, of scattering, of distribution; it is also an art of conjunction, of repetition, of linking together.
Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics

From Maus to Persepolis to The Burma Chronicles to Joe Saccos multiple works,
the graphic narrative is increasingly utilized as a genre in the representation of
human rights atrocities in complex and productive ways.1 Recent scholarship,
notably Hillary Chutes groundbreaking work on Art Spiegelmans Maus and
Wendy Kozols analysis of ethical spectatorship in Saccos Palestine, has focused
primarily on issues of historical representation in graphic narratives, especially
when considering archival work and the depiction of traumatic histories.2 This
paper extends this nascent conversation located at the intersections of human
rights studies and graphic narrative studies to a nuanced understanding of contextual reading practices. It does so by analyzing the graphic narrative through
the ancient rhetorical theory of kairosoften defined as the opportune moment
and appropriate measurewithin the terms of current theories of comics
narratology. We consider Joe Saccos sophisticated comics journalism in two
COLLEGE LITERATURE: A JOURNAL OF CRITICAL LITERARY STUDIES 40.3

Print ISSN 0093-3139 E-ISSN 1542-4286

West Chester University 2013

Summer 2013

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of his more recent texts which both address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
Palestine (2001/2007), first published in serial form between 1993 and 1995, and
Footnotes in Gaza (2009). When used as a literary lens, kairos focuses on the multiple, simultaneous contexts operating within Saccos graphic narratives as they
stake claims for human rights in Palestine. When coupled with recent comicsstudies scholarship that looks at the spatio-temporal dynamics of the form,
kairos can disrupt the linear notions of time and bounded spaces involved in the
denial of Palestinians rights to property and land and their right of return. In
other words, kairos offers comics studies a way of grounding the representations
of an aspirational human rights regime in material contexts, drawing attention to the urgency of Saccos human rights project even while he questions its
efficacy. In this way, Saccos work presents particularly important ramifications
for ethical reading practices and human rights advocacy through the graphic
narrative.
The journalist Joe Sacco did not begin his career with the intention of producing, in his words, comics journalism, much less producing graphic narratives
advocating human rights. However, he notes that his persistent desire to stick
[his] nose in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict set him on a course toward addressing the plight of the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories through the
comics medium (Sacco 2007, viii). After reading about the conflict in something
other than American newspapers (ix), Sacco imagined that he might create an
illustrated travelogue rather than illustrating human rights reports in order
to avoid the unrelentingly grim (and dull) words and pictures that would have
resulted (ix). Taking an oblique approach to human rights work, he arrived in
the Occupied Territories, his reflections suggest, with an eye toward observing
and recording human rights violations verbally and graphically. As Sacco travels
in Israel and the Occupied Territories during the waning of the First Intifada in
the winter of 19911992, he begins his human rights work in earnest as depicted
in Palestine (2001). At the outset he goes on a tour of what he ironically terms
Refugeeland, the refugee camp Jabalia in the Gaza Strip, sponsored by the
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).3
Although UNRWA will want to add you to a group of Swedes or Japanese,
Sacco sarcastically urges the reader to insist they take you out alone because
youll want your refugee experience to be an intimate thing (Sacco 2001, 145).
Indeed, in the following pages, Sacco presents himself alone on tour in a van,
viewing scenes of poverty, misery, and an anger roiling below the surface, as figure 1 shows. First we see children standing in the rain, staring back at us; then,
a group of young men, every one glaring at us; then a group of Israeli Defense
Forces (IDF) soldiers on patrol in the area, the soldier in the foreground looking
at us (146-49). He ends the tour at a rehabilitation center for deaf children, where
teachers and students demonstrate to Sacco that, despite open sewage and omniscient IDF towers, progress is being made (149).
While this sequence is not the first in Palestine to address specific human
rights abuses, it does represent Saccos first encounter with existing human rights

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Figure 1. From Palestine by Joe Sacco. Joe Sacco, 2001. Used by permission of Fantagraphics
Books, Inc.

discourses and agencies tasked with remediating basic human rights for Palestinians. Further, although Sacco experiments with perspective and other aspects of
the comics form in previous chapters, this is the first sequence where he aligns
the reader explicitly with his own project of human rights witness and advocacy
through formal strategies. As Scott McCloud posits, because the reader assumes
narrative action and progress in the space between panels (the gutter), the comics artist is aided and abetted by a silent accomplicethe reader, who assigns
the gutter a linear temporality and one-dimensional spatiality (McCloud 1993,
66-68). This process is what McCloud names closure, a largely unconscious

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fill-in-the-blank process of meaning-making between reader and text (1993, 67).4

Hillary Chute observes that it is this counterpoint of presence and absence:
packed panels (also called frames) alternating with gutters (empty space) that
[moves comics] forward in time through the space of the page (2008a, 452).
This particular example of Saccos work demonstrates how the explicit point of
view within panels and the space between them operate in tandem to effect linear time and progressive movement through space; while the reader makes meaning from the form through its unique gutter-closure mechanism, the artists use
of the form guides the construction of the narrative. Sacco is surely aware that
the reader might impose a linear narrative of progress (both temporal and spatial)
on this panel sequence, thus he draws attention to the UNRWA tours temporal
context, which is at once linear yet recursive, starting with the children, moving
through images of the men to the IDF soldiers. Furthermore, the readers point
of view within the frames foregrounds Saccos simultaneous curiosity (bordering
on voyeurism) and his unease at being on tour at all. Just call up UNRWA,
Sacco claims, giving the reader the phone number, and theyll set you up (147).
Looking at poverty and oppression where admission is free (147) signals for
Sacco a kind of invidious consuming of bodies and re-inscription of discourses of
abjection. Sacco highlights the readers complicity in creating these narratives as
well. Like a fantastical theme park, Refugeeland, Sacco implies, will afford the
reader a personalized and intimate experience; yet the van maintains a separation between the consumer-tourist and the danger and poverty of occupation,
symbolically mimicking the actual distance of the reader from these rights violations that the graphic narrative provides.
As this example suggests, Palestine requires a reading practice that accounts for
multiple and simultaneous contexts as it both foregrounds Saccos deployment of
the UNs discourse of progress and development that is likely to be recognizable
to Western readers and incorporates them as participants while simultaneously
indicting them as disaster tourists. While Sacco cannot entirely resist spectatorship, defined by Wendy Kozol as passive looking, he does draw attention to
the politics of looking as a way to mobilize the viewers sense of responsibility
(Kozol 2012, 166). In other words, as Kozol argues, Saccos use of techniques from
documentary film and photography embedded in the comics medium enacts a
pedagogical model of ethical spectatorship (167) that attempts to teach the
reader that he/she should be uneasy with the act of looking and, consequently,
should examine his/her motives for looking. Kozol analyzes the readers (awareness of his/her) complicity in circuits of spectatorship in Palestine through the use
of news media and documentary reportage with attention to the ways in which
the graphic narratives gutter-closure mechanism aids in visual-textual movement, both linear and nonlinear. However, the central use of the gutter-closure
mechanism is only one of several formal strategies that Sacco deploys throughout
Palestine, and later Footnotes, as he sketches out and draws attention to the embedded times and spaces of human rights discourses. Thus, his early work in Palestine
challenges readers to employ a reading practice that highlights the reciprocity

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between the multiply articulated elements of the form and the embedded contextsthe intercontextuality (Hesford 2011, 10)of human rights discourses.
Therefore, we turn to recent comics studies scholarship and then to the rhetorical theory of kairos to aid us in theorizing Saccos sophisticated use of the comics
form in relation to his human rights advocacy.
Recent comics studies scholarship expands the scope of work on human
rights in literary studies by placing the latters work on historical time, trauma,
and ethical witnessing in direct conversation with comics narratology, thereby
demonstrating the potential of the form to record the breadth and complexity of
of human rights violations. Whereas McCloud focuses on the gutter as the most
productive space in comics, Thierry Groensteen, in his consequential The System
of Comics (2007), offers an innovative theory of the forms narrative strategies,
which he terms a system of the articulation of all narrative elements of the
comics, with the panel as the central unit of analysis. The art of conjunction, of
repetition, of linking together of elements on the page and across pages (2007,
22), what he calls the arthrology of comics, productively moves the reader out of
the gutter, so to speak, and suggests a more complex interaction with the entirety
of the form.5 Indeed, Groensteen asserts that, rather than the story determining
the form, to the contrary, the form generates the story (2007, 21).
Saccos work suggests that just such a holistic approach to the form is
necessary in order to understand the layered histories evoked in any given panel
sequence or across an entire comic. In Palestine, Sacco takes the reader further
than simply riding in a van with him, positioning the reader visually and rhetorically positioned as the colonial tourist on holiday to see the natives or the
perhaps as a well-meaning but seriously misguided disaster tourist. The Gaza
Strip is Disneyland for a journalist, offering the opportunity to get a splash
page for the comic (Sacco 2001, 217) with burning tires and automatic fire to
add to [the] collection (125). Sacco transitions from disaster tourist to war photographer when he gets out of the UNRWA van and takes up the role of witness.
For example, after many Saturday mornings loitering about Ramallah, Sacco gets
what he is after (fig. 2). Between tires burning and a crowd protesting, he knows
he has a story on his hands, but he notices another bystander with a camcorder
in front of him capturing the action: Hes standing in the street like its no ones
business . . . like its his intifada. Im the one who spent those Saturdays waiting,
Sacco thinks indignantly (121; emphasis in original). As he waits for his intifada
in Ramallah, a skirmish between Palestinian youth and IDF soldiers ensues, and
Sacco attempts to convey spatial and temporal confusion. The reader intuitively
scans from the top to the bottom of the page, suggesting only the loosest narrative track, in contrast to the clearly implied linear order in figure 1. Among the
disheveled panels, Sacco includes a Rat-tat-tat-tat to augment the automatic
fire box at the top of the page. Instead of blank white or black gutters, Sacco
draws many sharp, cross-hatched black lines in the gutter space to suggest the
upset of spatial and temporal progress. The gutter echoes the black lines within
the panels that Sacco uses to suggest the motion of the youths running. Addition-

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Figure 2. From Palestine by Joe Sacco. Joe Sacco, 2001. Used by permission of Fantagraphics
Books, Inc.

ally, this panel uses the bleed effect that implies an all-encompassing time-space,
analogous to a panoramic lens that captures a 180-degree view. Building on the
linearity of time-space in figure 1, Sacco manipulates the formal qualities of the
comic in figure 2 in order to invoke both immediate historical context (the First
Intifada) and long-term histories (the original dispossession of the Palestinians).
While Sacco plays the role of the Western adventurer who goes abroad to conquer (or at least consume) exotic landsI am Lawrence of Arabia . . . Tim Page
. . . Dan Rather and his Afghanistan stubble, he exclaims, the first white man

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into Jenin . . . Dr. Livingstone, I presume! (27)he upends even that familiar
adventurism by supplanting visual and discursive recognition with contextual
chaos. A coherent narrative, formed by the left-to-right articulation of presence and absence across the gutter, is undermined by the fractured time-space
disrupting closure and opening the reading to a deeper attention of the context
of violence caused by the military occupation. Sacco uses visual juxtaposition,
zip lines, and bleeding panels to unmoor the reader from the familiar gutterclosure mechanism in order to present the multilayered and chaotic time-space
produced by the occupation. In both of the works under analysis, Sacco makes
present-day violations of rights and property legible to the reader. However,
Palestines formal experimentation prefigures Footnotes formal sophistication,
wherein he deliberately positions narratives of present-day violations alongside
narratives of historical violations of original dispossession. The temporal layering juxtaposes chronological rights violations (both recognized and not) and the
continuing denial of the right of return and of a resolution to the conflict. This
temporal layering and contextual complexity of both the political situation and
the comics form consequently call for a more nuanced understanding of rhetorical time involved in the depiction of rights violations that have become almost
normalized.6 Thus, we now turn to kairos to offer an additional way of understanding the relationship between the spatial elements in a comic (arthrology)
and the temporal elements in the graphic narrative as they together depict the
embedded, material contexts of human rights discourses.
As a rhetorical concept, kairos has enjoyed a recent resurgence, but its application to human rights advocacy and narrative is underexamined. Although
difficult to translate directly, the Aristotelian term kairos suggests grasping or
recognizing the opportune or ethical moment for persuasion, sometimes referred
to as the time between, which locates kairos as an issue of temporal and spatial
context on its most basic level.7 Kairos is often juxtaposed with chronos or sequential time, which is the traditional time of the graphic narrative as defined by
McCloud. However, as we and others have already suggested, comics inscrib[e]
the context in its graphic presentation by depicting time in complex, often nonlinear paths across the space of the page (Chute 2008, 457, 453-54). Thus the
process of closure does not, in fact, imply a closed circuit of meaning-making at
all; rather, it works through what can more accurately be called a poststructural
opening in meaning-making, a process pregnant with infinite temporal and spatial possibility dependent upon contextual interpretation and the arthrology of
comics. Given the complexity of the articulation of space-time in the graphic
narrative, we argue that kairos provides a more productive way of considering the
materiality of space-time. It encourages an understanding of time that Frank
Kermode describes as poised between the past and the future, with a meaning
in the present that can be derived from its relation to the end, yet which points
to space as the locus of the significance altogether (quoted in Harker 2007, 82).
As Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee note, kairos refers to the situational
understanding of space and time and to the material circumstancesnamely the

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cultural climateof rhetorical situations (quoted in Hesford 2011, 207). If kairos demands the need for contextual attention to the cultural climate of the
rhetorical moment, this also implies contextual attention to the ways in which
that meaning is made. The lack and the presence of the graphic narrative form
reflect this contingency of meaning-making: each moment in the chain of signification relies upon a larger contextual understanding of what is and is not on the
page, which requires a kairotic reading practice. Such an approach to the graphic
narrative illuminates the process by which the author and reader construct context specific spaces and times in more material terms. Wendy Hesford calls this
approach to reading intercontextual, which she defines as foregrounding how
meaning is produced, materialized, and experienced between and among multiple, ever-shifting contexts (2011, 10). To read intercontextually, then, is to
pay close attention to internal and external contextual references the text makes
as well as to be reflexive about the interpretation and production of texts within
and against normative discursive frameworks (Hesford 2011, 11). Kairos as a reading practice, with its emphasis on multiple contexts (discursive and material) of a
given rhetorical moment, offers readers a way to account for this contextual juxtaposition of multiple temporalities in the graphic narrative as it moves through
layered spaces and multiple histories.8 In this way, the reading process that we
define as kairotic is located between the two epigraphs cited at the beginning of
the paper: kairos enables a recognition of Saccos use of the comics form in the
graphic narrative genre as intercontextual, formally self-referential, and externally, politically referential.
Ultimately, when read through the holistic theoretical framework that comics studies provides and the contextual analytical framework offered by kairos,
the graphic narrative can reveal the process of naming and graphically rendering
human rights as well as the readers complicity in what Wendy Hesford calls the
spectacle of human rights, or the discursive relationship that links author and
reader as participants in human rights texts and discourse.9 That is, we contend
that Saccos graphic narratives formally capture the multiple and overlapping
times and spaces of the historically contested land of Palestine. Moreover, a kairotic reading practice highlights the process by which Sacco makes Palestine a
locus of significance within the visual economy of human rights and makes the
violation of rights legible to the reader. Indeed, the approach we advocate here
reveals how the reader becomes what Juan Li calls a performer of context, defining situations, identifying relationships and goals in human rights discourse
(quoted in Hesford 2011, 10).
If Sacco largely uses Palestine to emphasize the material consequences of present-day rights violations, his most self-serious role to date is his deep engagement
in Footnotes in Gaza with the history of trauma and dispossession involved in what
Palestinians term the original catastrophe (al-Nakba). In this later work, the
mocking tone and the sometimes-cartoonish faces of Palestine are largely absent.10
In Comics Form and Narrating Lives, Chute posits that Sacco uses the graphic
narrative genre to do important archival work that visualizes history based on

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Figure 3. Panel sequence on p.235 of the book Footnotes In Gaza by Joe Sacco. 2009 Joe Sacco.
Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

oral testimonies he solicits from others, in a sense producing an archive from

non-archived material (2011, 108). In Footnotes, Sacco is more than a journalist;
he is a historian and an archivist who productively complicates the dominant discourses of physical dispossession and bodily trauma of al-Nakba.11 He highlights
the process of articulation between peoples and land bound up in the Zionist
mantra A land without a people for a people without a land (Palestine 2001, 12)
in order to reveal the material consequences of competing claims to property and
land and, importantly, to name past human rights violations previously elided in
the historical record. Moreover, in Footnotes he links past human rights violations
(1947 and 1956) with present ones (1987 and 2003), using the form intercontextually to depict present violations in relation to the past and vice versa.
After his travels in the Occupied Territories in 1991 and 1992, Sacco returned
to Gaza in the spring of 2003 to add to his history of Arab-Israeli conflict by
attempting to unearth the facts of two violent episodes that happened within
days of each other in November 1956 in the towns of Khan Younis and Rafah.
In Footnotes, he chronicles the footnotes of a side show of a forgotten war, by
which he means the 1956 Suez War, as part of the larger Arab-Israeli conflict
(Sacco 2009, 8). In addition to amending what he sees as an incomplete historical
record, acknowledgment of these events, Sacco suggests, will help to explain the
present-day conflict. However, his hosts urge him to account for a fuller his-

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tory of the original disposession, al-Nakba, from the Palestinian perspective. In

response, he offers the reader background dating from 1948 when Israel declared
independence and Arab armies attacked the nascent state (21). Assuming care
of the wars refugees from Quaker aid groups (22), UNRWA fed and offered
shelter to the Palestinian refugees, as Sacco depicts in Footnotes (24). In one of
several such instances, Sacco juxtaposes the refugee camp of the mid-1950s with
its present-day iteration (27-29). The squat clay and brick multi-family structures
of mid-century (27) give way to a hodgepodge of vertical buildings and infrastructure (28-29). Sacco implies that the UNRWA refugee housing, meant to be
a temporary solution, has become a kind of permanent, material intransigence.
The immediate evidence of historical dispossession, Sacco suggests in Palestine and later in Footnotes, is the very material conditions of the refugee camps
and towns. In Palestine Sacco introduces his readers to the shabby permanence
of the refugee camps in Gaza (2001, 42-43), and in Footnotes he further suggests
just how permanent the refugee housing really is. He demonstrates what he terms
densely packed permanence (2009, 30) in Footnotes by a full-page panel of camps
as imagined in 1948 to 1950 (27), which is juxtaposed to a two-page, frameless
panel of the same camp in 2003 (28-29). In fact, the history of refugee housing
that Sacco attempts to record is drowned out and overwritten by the continual
demolition of that housing: The demolition of Rafahs houses is the present-day
white noise over which we are listening for the sounds of another time, 1956.
The distant voices of the conquerors, at least, still come through loud and clear
(168). The demolitions, then, are an ever-present reminder of the original expulsion and erasure of Palestinian presence.12 Even as the Israeli state methodically
demolishes each Palestinian home, it seeks to bury all traces of the home itself
as a marker of Palestinian presence and the evidence of its demolition. To this
end, the IDF bulldozers bury the houses by churning the land and covering the
remnants of the homes in pits. Saccos friend Abed tells him, Into these pits they
push and bury the homes they destroy (256).
Yet Palestinian erasure is belied by the very presence of the temporary
housing and by the people themselves. Saccos visual rendering of bodies and
bodily trauma indicates a kind of productive intransigence for Palestinians. Ilana
Feldman identifies this presencing as sumud, or steadfastness, which means staying put in the face of Israeli occupation, . . . an explicit part of resistance to Israeli
dominance over the West Bank and Gaza (2012, 158). Thus the violent burial
of material presence (houses) happening in the narrative present (2003) echoes
both the Palestinians burying their dead during the 1956 massacres and the more
recent First Intifada (1987-1993). For example, in Palestine Sacco represents a
public funeral with a processional to the gravesite (2001, 99-101) and his visit to
the hallowed and oft-visited grave of Hatem Sissi, the first person killed in the
Intifada: Political slogans have been written over the grave in his blood and
lacquered over (223). In contrast, Sacco presents the necessarily furtive location
and burial of bodies in Footnotes after the massacre at Khan Younis, where Palestinian families must hurry and bury bodies (2009, 101, 126). Burying houses

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and bodies signals for the Israeli state a means of making Palestinian presence
invisible and thus erasing claims to land. In contrast, burial for Palestinians is a
ceremonial marker of mourning.
Once more Sacco demonstrates the discursive and material entanglement
of human rights histories through the comics form. Saccos linking of Palestinians material presence with the concurrent Israeli effort to erase that presence is
nowhere more stark than in his rendering of physical bodies in Footnotes as they
are marked by these embedded histories. In his effort to reconstruct the incidents of 1956, Palestinians also re-inscribe their presence through the re-enactment
of the physical and psychological traumas of the Khan Younis and Rafah massacres. One example that emphasizes the importance of the re-enactments is
Saccos depiction of Mosa Abdullah el-Hajj Mohammeds experience in the
Rafah detention area (see fig. 3). As he re-enacts his beating at the hands of an
IDF soldier, Sacco draws Mosas arm up in self-defense such that the image of
Mosas extended arm is both a separate panel and the gutter between the other
two panels at the bottom of the page, bridging both the narrative present of 2003
and the past of 1956 (Sacco 2009, 235). When read with attention to kairos, Saccos
bending of the graphic form makes manifest the overlaying of the time and space
of Rafah in 1956 and 2003: the text is thus able to make present to the reader the
multiple spaces and times of the long history of rights abuses. This bridging of
1956 and 2003 not only materializes history for the reader, but also inscribes the
event as simultaneously both present and past, archiving the heretofore unrecognized history of Khan Younis.
Indeed, rather than a linear through-line in the historical record of human
rights violations, Saccos presentation suggests that these contexts are embedded
within a complex and differentiated present. In the foreword to Footnotes, Sacco
laments that Palestinians never seem to have the luxury of digesting one tragedy
before the next one is upon them, creating a remorseless continuum of trauma
(2009, xi). A Palestinian he meets later in the text concurs: Events are continuous, one after the other (252). However, Sacco also characterizes the violent
conflict as a historical blur (xi). Despite the use of the words continuum and
continuous, Saccos use of blur suggests that the violations of human rights
against the Palestinians and his production of a human rights spectacle to record
those violations are, in fact, less linear than recursive. For example, the chapter
entitled Armageddon chronicles the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq as Sacco
observes it while in Rafah. In one panel sequence, Sacco draws himself both
in the narrative present (2003) and in the historical past (1956) by embedding
panels of each time and drawing half of his body in each panel. Im elsewhere,
he notes forlornly (2009, 360). While he ostensibly treats the violent episodes of
1956 and of 2003 separately, he links them through visual representation, clearly
suggesting that Israeli oppression of the Palestinians in the past is inextricably
connected to the continued dominance of Israeli occupation, which will only
be solidified through the war on terror. That is, an American victory would
assure Israel of its never-ending supremacy (370). Thus, while Sacco himself pos-

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its a notion of human rights history in Israel-Palestine as a continuum, a kairotic reading practice of the form leads to an understanding that is perhaps more
accurately called an accretion or sedimentation of human rights violations over
time, rather than their being plotted in a linear chronology. What this reveals is
a necessary intercontextuality and entanglement of the discursive and material
effects of those violations. In other words, the episodes of 1956 resonate with
the Iraq War in 2003 as represented in Footnotes and with the First Intifada as
represented in Palestine.
A kairotic reading practice, then, highlights the context-driven spaces and
times of Palestinian dispossession and trauma in Saccos work, and the form itself
catalyzes this intercontextuality. As the analysis above demonstrates, such an
approach can also chart the historical record of human rights violations, suggesting that contexts, histories, and violations are embedded within each other.
The forms amenability to the complex and layered histories of human rights
violations is most evident in Saccos concluding chapter to Footnotes, Sea Street.
Ultimately, Sacco uses the overlapping technique from the Armageddon
chapter to render graphically the intercontextuality of these rights violations,
thereby bringing into relief the ethics of spectatorship and consumption. In Sea
Street, both the rambling Lawrence-figure of the UNRWA tour and the texts
manipulation of the gutter-closure process, as shown in figure 1, give way to the
ambivalent transnational consumer of the human rights spectacle made visible
through the deconstruction of the graphic form. Sacco depicts himself leaving
Rafah after finishing his work through a series of three parallel panels that show
the present-day sites of the 1956 Rafah incidents (2009, 385). Then, as depicted in
figure 4, the setting changes from present-day Sea Street to the street as it was in
1956; the the point of view also changes from an exterior, birds eye view to a first
person point of view, where the reader is positioned as Abu Juhish, a man who
experienced violence and humiliation at the hands of the IDF in 1956 (386-88).
In a pensive mood, Sacco considers the pain of rememberingthe pain he
has, in fact, forced these men to relive. Arguably, we are the worlds foremost
experts [on November 12, 1956], he asserts, but he chides himself: How often
we forced the old men of Rafah back down this road lined with soldiers. . . . How
often we shoved the old men between the soldiers with sticks through the gate
(2009, 383). In these passages, the we might be Sacco and his guide and translator, Abed. However, Sacco suggests that the reader is culpable as well: The
historian could keep on digging, Sacco offers, but hes tired now, he wants to get
on with his own life, and he knows the reader does, too (382).
Further, Sacco suggests that, despite his unrelenting desire for detail and the
story, he does not adequately record (or even acknowledge) the mens fear and
psychological scarring from this trauma, which floods him with shame and guilt
as he leaves Rafah. Consequently, Sacco leaves us with the narrative present melting into the past and the material space inscribed with the trauma of both events.
In the last pages, Sacco aligns the reader again with Abu Juhishs point of view
in 1956 as he moves, at gunpoint, toward the schoolyard where Palestinian men

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Figure 4. Panel sequence on p.385 of the book Footnotes In Gaza by Joe Sacco. 2009 Joe Sacco.
Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

have been corralled by IDF soldiers. As he enters the front gate, the last image
shows Abu Juhish about to be hit with a bat; the last panel is solid black (2009,
389). The final black panel can be read as the mans blackout from the beating.
However, while the historian (Sacco) and the reader might wish to finish telling
the story of human rights violations, to let the rest slide into oblivion (382),
in his words, Sacco denies himself and the reader any comfortable ending that
absolves responsibility. Kairotically, the oblivion of the black panel signifies two
related contexts. It stands in for Abu Juhishs physical abuse and his psychological trauma and it signals the reader who would, along with Sacco, finish the story
when it suits him/her. In the end, the ease with which Sacco can move between
times and spaces discomfits him, drawing attention to the ethics of naming rights
violations and of commodifying the history of those rights violations for sale to a
transnational reading public. The implication of the Sea Street chapter is that
Sacco and the reader can be finished with the story and find an end to the continuum of dispossession and violence, extracting themselves from the historical

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blur (2009, xi). We might, however, consider a third context for the ending of
Footnotes. Instead of re-inscribing a linear temporality that echoes his UNRWA
tour in Palestine (albeit a movement backward), thereby undermining his complex
engagement with time-space elsewhere, this graphic narrative might instead be
indicating the limits of the comics form itself within human rights advocacy.
That is, the archivists fade-to-black ending in Footnotes is a bleak rejoinder to the
rambling journalist-adventurer of Palestine: Saccos effort to translate the materiality of human rights violations and their embeddedness in layered historicalpolitical contexts may simply fade to black when the reader closes the book.
As evidenced in Footnotes, Saccos work changes from a provisional foray into
journalism to crucial archival work (the work of remembering) that is made possibleindeed, made materialby the graphic form, a potentially powerful historiographical tool in his hands. In fact, a kairotic reading of Saccos title, Footnotes
in Gaza, highlights the relationship he draws between narrative, history, materiality, and the Palestinian territories. The choice of the preposition in rather
than on (Footnotes on Gaza would ostensibly make more grammatical sense) suggests the footnotes are not added, extraneous information about Gaza; rather
they are stories that are always-already written in, embedded in the discursive
history, territory, and people of Gaza and demand to be read and recognized as
more material renderings. Locating the footnotes in Gaza also denotes a more
material relationship with the territory itself. If the title of Palestine, which Sacco
originally wrote in the early 1990s at the end of the First Intifada, designates a
narrative about both nation and territory, the title Footnotes in Gaza, written in
the early to mid-2000sa period that saw the Second Intifada, an all but end to
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, increased Israeli settlements, and further economic, political, and cultural restrictionsdesignates a different relationship
to the territory of historical Palestine: one that accounts for the contemporary
political context, which in our view is less hopeful of realizing the right of return.
Saccos latest collection, Journalism (2012), and his collaborative effort with
Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), a graphic history of
American poverty, suggest that the author will continue to use the comics form
to create human rights spectacle. Hesfords challenge to readers of human rights
literatureswho are we becoming in this spectacular discourse? (2011, 203)
questions the relationship of the human to the political and what literature can
do to bridge that space. A kairotic reading practice, aided by comics studies,
productively highlights the work of human rights in/and literature by enjoining
the reader to account for the specific contexts of naming the violations of human
rights and calling attention to the advocacy, reportage, and humanitarian work
surrounding the effort to prevent further violations.

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NOTES
The graphic narrative has a varied history, but its role in human rights literature is relatively new. Other graphic narratives featuring human rights issues or humanitarian work
include: J. P. Stassens Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda (2000); Joe Saccos Safe Area Gorade:
The War in Eastern Bosnia (2000) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009); Guy Delisles Pyongyang: A
Journey in North Korea (2004), Burma Chronicles (2008), and Shenzhen: A Travelogue from
China (2006); Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichons Pride of Baghdad (2006); Miriam
Katins We Are On Our Own (2006); Aleksander Zografs Regards From Serbia (2007); Ari
Folmans Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story (2009); and Emmanuel Guibert et al.s
The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders (2009).
2
Throughout this article we use the term graphic narrative to refer to the genre and
comics to refer to the medium, following Hillary Chute. And, following Chute, we
use the term graphic narrative instead of graphic novel to describe the novel-length
genre in the medium of comics depicting nonfictional stories: In graphic narrative, the
substantial length implied by novel remains intact, but the term shifts to accommodate
modes other than fiction. A graphic narrative is a book-length work in the medium of
comics (Chute 2008a, 453).
3
Established in December 1949 in response to the 1948-1949 Arab-Israeli war, the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)
was tasked with providing basic sustenance and housing to refugees in Israel and surrounding countries, such as Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon (Bartholomeusz 2010, 452).
Over time, the General Assembly subtly strengthened the role of UNRWA in relation to measures to uphold the legal and human rights of Palestine refugees. In 1988,
the General Assembly urged the Secretary-General, in consultation with UNRWAs
Commissioner-General, to continue their efforts in support of the upholding of . . . the
legal and human rights of the Palestine refugees in all the territories under Israeli occupation in 1967 and thereafter (468). See also Bocco (2010) on the history of UNRWA
in Israel-Palestine.
4
Eric Berlatsky emphasizes, however, the readers contributions: The juxtaposition of
frames, he notes, directs reader interpretation of texts without determining it (2009,
185).
5
For example, defining the form as a hybrid word-and-image form in which two narrative
tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially (2008a, 452), Hillary
Chute has insightfully analyzed how Spiegelmans graphic narrative Maus represents
history through the time and space of the comics page (2006, 201). Marianne Hirsch
has considered the same text as both a manifestation of this kind of visual-verbal
bi-ocularity and a meditation on traumatic seeing (2004, 1213). Additionally, Sidonie
Smith considers how human rights activists utilize different genres of what she terms
crisis comics, particularly focusing on the graphic autobiography (autographics) in
order to create variously situated boxes of witnessing, thereby hailing multiple reading publics (Smith 2011, 63-64). Finally, considering gendered and racialized spectacles
of violence in Saccos Palestine, Wendy Kozol argues that the graphic narrative enables
an ethical spectatorship, that is, forms of representation that foreground the dialogic
interactions between ethical looking and the role of spectacle in transnational visual
witnessing of human rights crises (Kozol 2011, 166-67).
6
See Ilana Feldmans (2012) work on the culture of humanitarianism in UNRWA refugee
camps.
1

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As rhetoric historians James Kinneavy and Catherine Eskin note, rhetoric is not so much
the act of persuasion as it is the art of finding the existing means of persuasion within
any circumstance or occasion. Put another way, then, rhetoric is the art of observing the
available means of persuasion at a particular kairos or contextual moment of time (2000,
434). Additionally, the concept of kairos has a direct link to epeiekeia (equity or justice/
fairness within and beyond the written law); thus kairos actually refers to the opportune
ethical moment in which to persuade or discuss. See Kinneavys Kairos in Classical and
Modern Theory in Baumlin and Sipiora (2002, 68).
8
This concept of kairos in relation to human rights and the graphic narrative has much
more potential than there is room to discuss here. For further reading on kairos, see
James S. Baumlin and Phillip Sipioras collection Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History,
Theory, and Praxis (2002).
9
Wendy Hesfords Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (2011)
examines works that represent and raise consciousness of human rights violations
throughout the worldspectacular discourses (95)in order to determine the moral
publics those visual representations of human rights abuses construct, what Hesford
calls spectacular rhetorics. In analyzing the spectacular rhetorics of human rights,
Hesford asks how these representations of abuses become legible in normative human
rights discourse, specifically in the West, and who we become in those spectacular
discourses.
10
See Rosenblatt and Lunsford (2010) for an analysis of the cartoony-ness (bordering
on caricature) of Saccos early work, including Palestine (71-73). See also Rosenblatt and
Lunsford (2011) for an extension of their study of Saccos work.
11
While Sacco acknowledges that Footnotes carries a bias, an unavoidable measure of
refraction (2009, x), he nonetheless applies himself in earnest to the task of augmenting
the historical record by freez[ing] the churning forward movement and examin[ing]
one or two events (xi). Further, the extensive appendices at the end of Footnotes suggest
the gravity with which Sacco approaches his archival work.
12
On the history of Palestinian refugee camps and towns in Lebanon, see Sanyal (2011).
See also Youssef (2007) on Israels demographic problem, namely the physical presence of Palestinians and other non-Israelis in Israel-Palestine.
7

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ROSE BRISTER is an Adjunct Professor of English at Stevenson University. She

received her Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2012. Her research explores the ways in which Anglophone literatures of
the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries imagine competing claims to place.
BELINDA WALZER is a faculty member in the Wake Forest University Writing
Program. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of North
Carolina at Greensboro in 2012. Her research examines rhetorical approaches
to contemporary human rights discourse in/and literature and to transnational
gender studies.