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  • The Human Rights Graphic Novel: Drawing it Just Right by Pramod K. Nayar
  • Martha Kuhlman (bio)
The Human Rights Graphic Novel: Drawing it Just Right Pramod K. Nayar Routledge, 2021, 221 pp. ISBN 9780367030544, $190.00 hardback; ISBN 9780367626822, $62.95 paperback.

Pramod K. Nayar, the author of over a dozen books, has considerable expertise in the fields of postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, Indian literature, and human rights. The Human Rights Graphic Novel represents the fusion of a few of his previous works: Writing Wrongs (2012), Human Rights and Literature (2016), and The Indian Graphic Novel (2016). In bringing together the field of human rights with the graphic novel, Nayar seeks to expand what Michael Galinsky terms "the culture of Human Rights," and citing Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's concept of "globalectics," seeks to generate a "global critical literacy around HR" (5). Although there have been several books dedicated to the study of trauma as represented in comics, notably Hillary Chute's Disaster Drawn (2016), Andrés Romero-Jódar's The Trauma Graphic Novel (2017), and the anthology Documenting Trauma in Comics (2020) edited by Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, to date Nayar's study is the only work that places graphic narrative into a human rights framework.

Alternating among the positions of victim, perpetrator, and bystander in a human rights context, the book contains chapters on staging vulnerability, cultural trauma, witnessing, and resilient resistance, concluding with a discussion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to bring together the study's thematic strands. To limit the book's scope to a manageable corpus of texts, Nayar excludes graphic narratives concerning the Holocaust, as that subject constitutes its own field. I especially appreciate Nayar's study for how he places Indian graphic narratives in conversation with comics from an array of other times and places including South Africa, Syria, Rwanda, Iran, the former Yugoslavia, and the American South during the Civil Rights era—to name just a few. While there have been more studies of Indian graphic novels in recent years, including the author's own contribution, it is rare to see scholars venture beyond the standard canon of anglophone American and francophone Belgian examples in thematic overviews. In this respect, Nayar does an admirable job of considering a truly global selection of graphic narrative texts available in English translation through the lens of human rights concerns. [End Page 405]

One of the more resonant chapters is about the subject of cultural trauma, as it pinpoints a crucial strategy in human rights activism––mobilizing sympathy for an oppressed group through the example of the individual story. Statistics on human rights violations can be difficult to process in abstraction, but an image, even a hand-drawn one, can be much more emotionally affecting. Citing Jeffrey Alexander's Trauma: A Social Theory, Nayar argues that the "personalization of the victim" in these graphic narratives is inescapably linked to the "cultural traumas of the community." Nayar demonstrates that in The Arab of the Future, Riad Sattouf's representations of conflicts within his family and among his classmates echo long-held beliefs about the Arab-Israeli conflict that the characters themselves were too young to experience firsthand (92). Nayar also considers how Srividya Natarajan and S. Anand's text in Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability personalizes the plight of Ambedkar, a Dalit, when he is denied water, housing, and transportation due to his caste. The story of Ambedkar's individual experience is given a broader context when it is followed by "atrocity reportage from around India—Dalits killed for digging their own wells or for using the public water pump" (97). To reflect the persecution and systematic starvation of Ukrainians under Stalin's rule, in The Russian and Ukrainian Notebooks Igort represents the stories of specific individuals—Serafima Andreyevna, Nikolai Vasilievich, and Maria Ivanova—to call attention to the atrocities of the Holodomor, and also provides further context in his preface. In juxtaposing these various examples, Nayar concludes, "the individual replaces the primary historical actor-agent: the Kulak, the Jew, the Arab or the Dalit, a feature that results from the personalization of the victim" (94).

On the one hand, it can...

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