EUME
2020/ 2021

Rasha Chatta

Arab Comics in/of Migration: A Comparative Study of (Im)migrant Stories, War Narratives, and Conflicted Memory

Previous Fellowships: 2019/ 2020, 2018/ 2019, 2017/ 2018

earned her PhD in Cultural, Literary, and Postcolonial Studies from SOAS, University of London, with a dissertation titled “Marginality and Individuation: A Theoretical Approach to Abla Farhoud and Arab Migrant Literature”. She holds an MA in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from SOAS and a BA in History of the Middle East and North Africa from Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris I) and “Classes préparatoires” in Humanities. She has held teaching positions at SOAS, Bard College Berlin, and NYU London. In 2009, she was Community Outreach Director at the Cairo-based Resettlement Legal Aid Project. Her research interests include visual aesthetics and memory, approaches to world literature, migrant and diasporic literatures, and war literature with a focus on Lebanon and Syria. Her recent publications include the chapter “Conflict and Migration in Lebanese Graphic Narratives”, in Smets, K. et al. (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Media and Migration (London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2019). She is a EUME Fellow in the academic years 2017-21, affiliated with the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.

2019-2021

Arab Comics in/of Migration: A Comparative Study of (Im)migrant Stories, War Narratives, and Conflicted Memory

This research project seeks to offer a comparative study of the Arab migrant graphic novel and comics by examining the visual and creative portrayal of (im-)migrant experiences in the aftermaths of the Lebanese civil war, the Israeli-Lebanese war of summer 2006, and the Syrian war in the wake of the Arab spring. It also focuses on the role of memory in bridging dislocated narratives between the Near East and Europe. The project engages analytically with the creative forms of expression attending the current mass migrations, offering historical depth to the understanding of the cultural roots of recent movements and experiences. While aiming to bring the expertise of area studies to bear on the radical new artistic forms, the study also aims to contribute on the side of visual studies and the study of comic and graphic narratives. It seeks to do so both by expanding the reach of these fields to include contemporary authors of Arab background writing in Arabic and different European languages, and by exploring the possibility of a comparative approach to the visual aesthetics of conflicted memory.

2017-2019

The Arab Migrant Graphic Novel: A Comparative Study of (Im)migrant Stories, War Narratives, and Conflicted Memory between the Near East and Europe

This research project focuses on the graphic novel, a sub-genre that is traditionally less examined in Arab and Middle Eastern Studies. It seeks to offer a comparative study of the Arab migrant graphic novel by examining the visual and creative portrayal of (im-)migrant experiences in the aftermaths of the Lebanese civil war, the Israeli-Lebanese war of summer 2006, and the Syrian war in the wake of the Arab spring. It will also focus on the role of memory in bridging dislocated narratives between the Near East and Europe. The project engages analytically with the creative forms of expression attending the current mass migrations, offering historical depth to the understanding of the cultural roots of recent movements and experiences. While aiming to bring the expertise of area studies to bear on the radical new artistic forms, the study also aims to contribute on the side of visual studies and the study of comic and graphic narratives. It seeks to do so both by expanding the reach of these fields to include contemporary authors of Arab background writing in Arabic and different European languages, and by exploring the possibility of a comparative approach to the visual aesthetics of conflicted memory.


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