In Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory (2008), Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi tell the story of the PLO film archives, which mysteriously disappeared sometime during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1989). The film archives serve as both a literal and symbolic representation of the communal loss of much of the Palestinian visual archive: films and photos that disappeared from family and institutional collections throughout wars, migrations, and forced exiles. This disappeared archive presents an interesting challenge for graphic novelists: how to draw a communal history whose visual representation is often fragmented and displaced. Leila Abdelrazaq’s graphic novel Baddawi provides an intriguing rejoinder to this challenge by linking classic tropes of Palestinian literature with her father’s stories and iconography similar to contemporary Palestinian film in order to reconstruct a Palestinian diasporic narrative that intertwines with her own family history. To meet this challenge, Abdelrazaq draws on iconic images from film and comics about the Palestinian experience, such as Handala (Naji al-Ali), Footnotes in Gaza (Joe Sacco, 2010), West Beirut (Ziad Doueiri, 1998), and The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman, 2009). Abdelrazaq joins this iconography with representational comic elements (McCloud, 1994) as the graphic novel depicts periods of communal violence experienced in Palestine and Lebanon, with the artist herself noting that she did not have the experiences to more literally depict war. Finally, Abdelrazaq merges her father's stories with images drawn from the literary canon of Palestinian nostalgia, such as olive trees and a chessboard melding into a kefeya melding into the Lebanese civil war. Through this merging of visual, literary, and family tradition, Baddawi serves as an example of the continued presence of Palestinian resistance art, while also demonstrating how artists have built an alternative pattern of visual representations to remember diasporic communities and replace those visual representations of Palestinian lives that have been lost.

Since Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking work Maus (1991) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003) comics have been increasingly recognized as a legitimate literary medium thanks to its capability to convey content and meaning in a unique way. In particular, graphic novels have witnessed a surge in popularity as a way to engage in historical, non-fictional narrative. Graphic novels allow the reader to think outside the sanctioned conventional norms of narration thanks to its ability to subvert temporal and cultural boundaries. However, the academic interest in this genre has been largely focused on graphic novels as representation of history, its limits and its subversion (Chute 2006, James 2000, Joseph 1989, Ostby 2017) or, in the case of Muslim protagonists, in the ways the medium subverts but also reproduces Orientalist and neo-Orientalist representations (Hancock 2018, Stromberg 2011), thus overlooking processes of communal formation. This paper analyzes the ways in which a counter-hegemonic historical conscience of Iraq is articulated in Brigitte Findakly's Poppies of Iraq. Written and colored by Brigitte Findakly on the drawing of her husband, Lewis Trondheim, Poppies of Iraq is Findakly’s autobiographical graphic novel narrates her life growing up in Iraq as the daughter of an Arab Iraqi Orthodox Christian, her father, and a French Catholic, her mother. The book is both a personal and familial history and a collective interreligious history in the ways it is situated in the political and historical context of Iraq. By means of utilizing a textual, visual, and formal analysis, this paper shows that not only does Poppies of Iraq make complex historical events readable, as Chute has argued for Maus (2006), it also defuses their power and, consequently, any teleological reading of the history of Iraq and its religious minorities. By means of unsettling not only the conventions of historical memoirs, but also the conventions of graphic novels (the book makes no use of panels, chapter numbers, nor page numbers), Poppies of Iraq relegates to the background the disruptive power of historical events, such as the several coup and counter-coups that occurred in Iraq since the 1950s, thereby bringing to the fore alternative articulations of communal identities and patterns of belonging.

Ms Marvel – Kamala Khan – is a 16 year old Muslim Pakistani-American and is the first Muslim superhero to have her own headline comic. Created by G. Willow Wilson (a Muslim convert) and Sana Amanat (a Pakistani-American editor at Marvel on who the character Kamala Khan is loosely modelled), the comic was launched in 2014 to largely favourable reviews for its representation of Islam and gender. However, despite being a ‘Muslim’ superhero Kamala is, for the most part, not presented as identifiably Muslim (Arjana, 2017), or particularly religiously observant. She rarely covers her hair, attends the local Mosque, or undertakes prayer. Typically she wears jeans and a t-shirt and even in her superhero uniform, which is referred to as a 'burkini' (modest Islamic swimsuit), is not identifiable as one as she removed the head covering and opted for a mask. As a result of this, the reader is constantly reminded by other characters, such as her friend Nakia (who wears the hijab), or by members of her family like Aamir (who is a Salafi) that she is Muslim. Further to this, her chief love interest is an American-Italian boy named Bruno. Indeed, such is the narrative that comic book blogger and critic Noah Berlatsky (2014) described the series as an ‘assimilation fantasy’ and notes that Kamala is essentially just like everyone else, an awkward angst-ridden teenager. In this paper, I will argue that the claim of assimilation is an overreach, but that Berlatsky is right with regards to her being generic. Building on the work Reyns-Chikuma & Lorenz (2017) regarding Ms Marvel’s positive reception in ultra-secular France, I contend – drawing on volumes 1 through 9 (2014-18) – that the creators have intentionally muted Kamala’s Muslim identity to increase her relatability and to avoid alienating readers. Further, as a result of this choice, I argue that Kamala functions more as an icon for cultural diversity than as an icon for Islam.

In the last five years, scholars have analyzed Kamala Khan as a representative of a minority or an “Other” in American society (Pumphrey 2016), a non-sexualized superheroine (Yanora 2017), and a “Muslim feminist” (Reyns-Chikuma and Lorenz 2017). Absent from these discussions are how racial categories impact and shape the formation of a Muslim community that encompasses three major groups of people: “indigenous” Black Americans and “immigrant” South Asian and Arab descent. In a critical note, Miriam Kent argues that a feminist analysis of Ms. Marvel draws attention to the intersectionality of gender, race, and religion that Kamala Khan faces (Kent 2015). Kent does not, however, provide a discussion of how racial and Pakistani cultural identities impact Kamala and her family members’ lives. This paper expands Kent’s discussion by incorporating scholarship focused on the intersections of gender, race, and nationality in American Muslim communities as discussed by scholars Zareena A. Grewal (2009), Juliane Hammer (2014), Jamillah Karim 2009), Silvia Chan-Malik (2018), and Nadine Naber (2005). In Ms. Marvel, G. Willow Wilson, a convert to Islam, depicts the indigenous–immigrant tension within American Muslim communities that create division between American-born Black Muslims and immigrant Muslims. Despite Black Muslims’ attempts to resist what cultural anthropologist Su’ad Khabeer (2016) calls the “‘ethnoreligious hegemony’ of South Asian and Arab” Muslims,” the tension remains, as is demonstrated in conversations about intraracial and international Muslim marriages. To better understand how Wilson and co-creator Sana Amanat represent “authentic” American Islam, this paper focuses on the romantic relationship of Aamir Khan and Tyesha Hillman in two understudied volumes Ms. Marvel, Volume 4: Last Days and Volume 5: Super Famous. I argue that through dialogue and framing techniques, author G. Willow Wilson demonstrates the struggles that many children of Muslim immigrants face to self-identify racially and question the intra-racism within many immigrant Muslim communities. By challenging intra-racial ideals, Muslims from different international and cultural backgrounds are redefining what it means to be “authentically” Muslim American by crafting what sociologist Nadine Naber calls a “Muslim-first” identity.