Reanimating Historical Violence in Multi-Ethnic Graphic Narratives

Abstract

Abstract The ongoing damage of hurricanes impacting the Gulf regions of the United States, and beyond, resurrect the legacies of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina exposed the degree to which militarized humanitarianisms linked the “natural” disaster of the hurricane and US military violence in Iraq. In cultural production, scholarship, and social critique, Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War are historically linked discourses. Understanding both events through the fragmented representations of graphic narratives, in particular, compels reconsiderations of the hurricane and the war. In my examination of two graphic narratives, Mario Acevedo and Alberto Dose's Killing the Cobra: Chinatown Trollop (2010) and Mat Johnson and Simon Gane's Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story (2010), I analyze how the recurring presence of Iraqi civilian murder by the US military entwines the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina. The graphic narratives lay bare the liberal maintenance of transnational violence that undo simple distinctions between “at home” and “abroad.” Indeed, both graphic narratives attend to fractures as form and content to structure the geohistorical dynamics of militarized duty in Iraq with foundational legacies of racism in the United States. How the graphic narratives frame the war—spatially fragmented, aggressively nonlinear—reanimates the intertwined cultural histories of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War. In their representations of mourning civilian deaths, and the convergence of humanitarian and military force in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, Killing the Cobra and Dark Rain graft the war-sanctioned violence against Iraqi civilians onto militarized registers of US domestic space, tracing the fractures of transnational humanitarian empire.