Global South Literary Studies

Frames, Terrains, and Worldings: Comics and Storytelling across the Global South

Comics from the Global South function as hybrid epistemic objects that are simultaneously literary, visual, political, and pedagogical, mediating between oral and written traditions, artisanal and digital practices, and local storytelling modes and global cultural circuits. Often emerging from visual and textual traditions that predate Western formulations of comics, the Global South comics developed sophisticated grammars of sequence, rhythm, and narrativity. Shaped by colonial rule, postcolonial modernity, religious pluralism, and global capitalism, Global South comics instantiate new ways of thinking about postcolonial visuality, vernacular modernities and decolonial aesthetics. These genealogies structure and inform the aesthetics and politics of comics, ranging from documentary and mythological comics to feminist, queer, and justice-oriented graphic narratives.

      This special issue approaches the Global South not as a monolithic entity but as a multipolar and heterogeneous formation, cohered through differences rather than sameness. In the contemporary moment, comics function as potent media for articulating violence, marginality, ecological crisis, illness, gendered embodiment, and the quotidian practices of decolonial resistance. Within these contexts, creators engage with nationalism, gender, and censorship; explore war memory, trauma, and urban precarity; and reinterpret myth and folklore through decolonial epistemologies. Collectively, these works constitute decolonial archives of political affect, youth experience, and contested futurities, positioning Global South comics as vital sites of testimony, critique, and world-making. What binds these diverse trajectories are shared conditions of epistemic violence and insurgent disobedience, collective commitments to justice, participatory and transformative politics of the commons, and practices of reclamation that exceed the strictures of representation.

      This special issue brings together innovative and interdisciplinary comics scholarship that rethinks the epistemic, aesthetic, political, material, and decolonial aspects of comics across the Global South. These forms prompt renewed reflection and inquiry into what it means to draw knowledge, memory, community, dissent, and futurity, while simultaneously interrogating the foundational categories of representation, authorship, narrative form, and colonial epistemology.

• How do comics from the Global South articulate epistemic justice and decolonial resistance?
• How do these works convene and address subjects, publics, and reading communities as witnesses embedded in decolonial struggles?
• What modes of witnessing, caring, documenting, or resisting are made possible through the affordances of comics?
• How do comics reshape the politics and poetics of the Global South?
• What possibilities do comics hold for pedagogies that are innovative and transformative in their engagement with local and/or imagined contexts?
• How do comics participate in world-making through decolonial aesthetics, visual epistemologies, and affective storytelling?
• What decolonial counter-genealogies to Euro-American trajectories do Global South comics offer through multimodal practices of drawing knowledge, dissent, and memory?

By foregrounding comics as critical sites of inquiry, this call invites contributions that reimagine and reconceptualise the visual as a decolonial modality of knowledge production. It asks how the drawn line may be read as a line of flight that traces histories of struggle, remembrance, and collective imagination. From a decolonial perspective, such practices foreground modes of seeing and narrating that predate and contest colonial epistemologies, thereby challenging the assumption that comics are exclusively a Western, modern form. Contemporary Indian comics, for instance, such as Bhimayana intermesh Pardhan Gond art and digna patterns to articulate a distinctly decolonial visual language, while I See the Promised Land blends Patua art with the Western comics format, reworking inherited structures to reclaim indigenous aesthetics and narrative authority. Building on these cues, this special issue welcomes submissions that examine the political, aesthetic, epistemic, pedagogic and affective dimensions of comics from the Global South.

Topics may include but not limited to:

• Indigenous visual traditions and proto-comics
• Decolonial caricature and critique
• Nation-building, pedagogy, and mythography
• Caste, gender, sexuality, and representation
• Comics journalism, reportage, documentary comics
• War memory, partition, conflict, and reconciliation
• Environmental storytelling and ecological activism
• Migration, precarity, urbanity
• Illness, disability, trauma, caregiving
• Digital webcomics, zine cultures, feminist/queer collectives
• Materiality, circulation, festivals, exhibitions, and comics economies
• Diasporic and transnational graphic worlds
• Decolonial visual epistemologies, Global South world-making, and Futurity