Bilden som gör förflutenhet: Den tecknade serien, medieekologi och minne i Maus och Vi kommer snart hem igen

Abstract

Title: Imagining Pastness. Comics, Media ecology and Memory in Maus and Vi kommer snart hem igen

The ethical and epistemological challenges accompanying representations of the past have been at the center of historiography at least since the days of Leopold von Ranke in the mid-nineteenth century. The artifice of representational forms, as well as the ideological entanglements of the position of enunciation, has always been in conflict with Ranke’s historiographical goal of telling the past as “it really was”. In the heyday of postmodernism and in the wake of the so-called linguistic turn, the epistemological and ethical impact of representational forms was widely debated. This paper uses two concepts presented during the postmodernist debates – Linda Hutcheon’s “historiographical metafiction” and Hayden White’s “practical past” – in a discussion of two graphic narratives about the Holocaust, Art Spiegelman’s canonical Maus. A Survivor’s Tale  (1986, 1991) and Vi kommer snart hem igen (2018) by Jessica Bab Bonde and Peter Bergting. Adapting Hutcheon’s and White’s concepts to a posthumanist and media-ecological conceptuality, in which the worldmaking power of media is highlighted as a co-productive or sympoietic process, the paper “Imaging Pastness. Comics, Media Ecology and Memory” shows how the past is not represented, but rather emerges from the embodied participation in the medium as memory technology