Sounding the Occupation: Joe Sacco’s Palestine and the Uses of Graphic Narrative for (Post)Colonial Critique

Working at the intersection of postcolonial literary studies and comics narratology, this paper argues that Joe Sacco’s graphic narrative Palestine contributes a spatial and sonic record of territorial occupation to the Palestinian national narrative. Sacco utilizes the comics form to represent the complex of physical borders and spatial narratives he encounters in the Occupied Palestinian Territories at the end of the first Intifada . Further, he renders graphically the epiphenomenal sonic regime resulting from spatial management. Rather than an absence or gap in the Palestinian narrative, Sacco understands spatialized sound as a presence or marker of materiality. Ultimately, Palestine suggests the rich potential of the comics form for postcolonial literary studies. Sacco’s graphic narrative reinvigorates the field’s engagement with literary representations of Israel-Palestine by demonstrating the continued utility of the (post)colonial paradigm and by challenging the fields’ scholars to forge new interdisciplinary links to comics studies.