Postcolonial Anarchographics: Re-drawing History in the Trantraal Brothers' Crossroads

Introduction

Focusing on visual and textual representations of squatting and women's resistances against apartheid in the comic book series Crossroads (2014-2016), this article examines how graphic history may enable a more nuanced understanding of anarchic resistances in the postcolonial context. A six-part comic series created by historian Koni Benson in collaboration with political cartoonists the Trantraal Brothers (André and Nathan) and Ashley Marais, and published by Cape Town's Isotrope Comics, Crossroads tells the story of women's organized resistance to the apartheid state in the Crossroads township on the outskirts of Cape Town. Based on oral testimony from more than sixty women, Crossroads incorporates original archival press clippings, posters, photography, documentary clips, and drawings to illustrate how "women's protest were organized collectively, beyond party politics and separately from men, to confront state power with demands for the distribution of resources for basic survival" (Benson "Graphic Novel Histories" 200). In other words, Crossroads illuminates the intersectionality of a range of anti-apartheid struggles and the ways in which these manifested themselves through non-parliamentarian praxes.

In my analysis of Crossroads, I pursue two interrelated arguments. First, while these resistances are not conventionally anarchist, they share with traditional Western anarchism principles of squatting as well as organizing collectively and non-hierarchically against the state. To analyze such issues in apartheid-era South Africa in relation to anarchism, therefore, requires a shift in our understanding of what anarchism is and its political value in the postcolonial context to emphasize, rather, affinities and connections between different methods of resistance. In pursuing this shift, I argue that an examination of visual and textual representations of squatting and women's organized resistance in Crossroads contributes to current scholarly attempts to provincialize Western anarchism in relation to a larger, global tradition of anti-authoritarian and non-hierarchical ideologies and praxes.

Second, focusing on more than merely anarchic content in Crossroads, I also suggest that what I call "postcolonial anarchographics"—graphic history as an anarchist and postcolonial critique—may offer new ways to artistically and historically re-imagine resistances against statist, racist, and authoritarian policies in the postcolonial South African regime. To be clear, I argue that graphic history is an intrinsically anarchic form that is well suited for critiques of colonial regimes of power because it allows for multiple voices to be heard, combined with visual elements to be seen and the participation of the reader's anarchic eyes. In doing so, it defies conventional historical accounts that impose authoritative structure, narrative, and interpretation onto certain stories. That is not to say that all graphic histories necessarily embrace anarchist aesthetics, but the form lends itself well to both anarchist and postcolonial critiques of power through its often collaborative, non-hierarchical, and aesthetical redrawing of histories of resistance. Bringing these arguments together, this article intervenes not only in existing debates over the political potential of the graphic history form, but also in recent scholarship on global and postcolonial anarchism.

To get to this second argument, I first engage with a recent transnational turn in anarchist historiography to explore how issues of squatting, self-management, and women's collective activism in apartheid-era South Africa might productively challenge and broaden our understanding of anarchism as a global praxis of resistance. Extending this line of inquiry, the second part of the article then fleshes out the concept of "postcolonial anarchographics" as a revolutionary critique before applying this approach to my examination of Crossroads. What emerges from this analysis is a new way of thinking about the political and aesthetic value of graphic history inflected by postcolonial and anarchist criticism.

Anarchism in the postcolonial world

Acknowledging the global reach of anarchism's political impact, there has been resurging historical attention to the ways in which anarchism has influenced anti-colonial resistances across the colonial world. As Luisetti, Pickels, and Kaiser argue, such much-needed efforts to bring anti-colonialism into closer dialogue with the ideologies and practices of anarchism than previously assumed represent important steps towards "staging a productively disorienting conversation that reformulates the rich history of thought centered...