17. Migrant Detention Comics and the Aesthetic Technologies of Compassion

Comics by European and North American cartoonists about migrant detention centres introduce new forms of immediacy and intimacy to graphic memoir, documentary, and journalism as they detail atrocities of the present. This chapter explores how British cartoonist Kate Evans’s Threads: From the Refugee Crisis (2017) and Canadian cartoonist Tings Chak’s Undocumented: The Architecture of Migrant Detention (2014) use different framing strategies to draw subjects caught between displacement and emplacement. I argue that the hand-drawn, intersubjective form of comics allows cartoonists to disrupt the dominant ocular logic that over-documents and spectacularizes the migrant body, especially in mass media, and under-documents and hides the carceral spaces in which they are detained. Drawing on Kelly Oliver’s work on ‘carceral humanitarianism’, Nicholas Mirzoeff’s concept of ‘the right to look’, and Lauren Berlant’s theories of compassion, this chapter analyses each comic’s formal techniques, from perspective to page layout to facial caricature, as aesthetic technologies that cultivate compassion as a social relation, rather than an organic feeling, between Western spectator and migrant subjects. As such, these ‘compassion comics’ relocate the experiences of migrants from elsewhere to here, and their traumas from past to present, through visual practices of immersion, projection, and dislocation that seek to detain the reader in narratives of migrant detention.