Please join the Disability Studies and Transnational Comics Studies RIWs for our upcoming discussion of English PhD candidate Crystal Yin Lie's chapter: "Drawn to History: Dementia, Temporality and Graphic Life Narrative."

Abstract: How do the formal qualities of graphic memoirs about dementia contribute to disability studies critiques of able-bodied temporalities; grapple with broader questions about representing trauma, history, and identity; and innovate as well as challenge what we think of as “comics”? Because comics stage time as space, examining graphic temporalities help expand our view of how dementia affects one’s orientation to normative constructions of time.

Both Dana Walrath’s Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass (2016) and Stuart Campbell’s webcomic These Memories Won’t Last (2015) exploit the affordances of graphic narrative’s multimodal ability to visually layer stories and disrupt time, enabling the examination and reframing of cultural fears and stigmas surrounding aging and memory impairment. They each explore a family member’s experience with dementia as one that requires the recognition of alternate realities and a more flexible approach to expectations placed on their sense of past, present, and future. The stakes of visualizing dementia’s reorientations to time and history take on particular significance in these works as Aliceheimer’s and These Memories also navigate the telling of stories regarding the Armenian Genocide and World War II, respectively. For Walrath and Campbell, putting dementia into graphic form is a heuristic for processing and making accessible histories of trauma, furthering possibilities of artistic expression, and crafting spaces for healing.

To RSVP and request a copy of Crystal's paper please email Elise Nagy (ecnagy@umich.edu)