Katherine Kelp-Stebbins’ Comics Keynote: “Materializing Multilingualism in Comics from Haida Gwaii to Beirut”
Tuesday, November 1st, 2022, 3:30-5pm, Zoom

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Abstract: How might the visual grammar of comics be drawn upon to highlight the labour, theory, and practice of translation? At the intersection between the world republic of letters and the domain of images, comics necessitate techniques and physical spaces for reading that challenge assumptions of linguistic–and cultural–equivalence. Examining Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas’ A Tale of Two Shamans and the trilingual Lebanese comics magazine Samandal, Prof. Kelp-Stebbins considers the comics page as a site that brings together a wide swath of encounters between peoples, cultural techniques, nomenclatures, spatial demarcations, and commodity objects. By compelling readers to reflect on differences between spaces of language, the multilingual pages of A Tale of Two Shamans and Samandal articulate relations between and among readerly practices. These works remind us that the co-presence of Xaad Kil, French, Arabic, and English texts alongside images on the space of the page does not imply parity between languages; rather, the page orients a reader to anticolonial struggles for recognition and literacy within the world system of comics.

Bio: Kate Kelp-Stebbins (she/her/hers) is Assistant Professor of English and Associate Director of Comics and Cartoon Studies at the University of Oregon. She examines comics and visual media as tools for rethinking world literature and remapping transnational media flows. Her book How Comics Travel: Translation, Publication, Radical Literacies (2022) uses comparative methodology to analyze world economies of comics through the apertures of translation, cultural imperialism, and print cultures. Her work has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Media Fields, Studies in Comics, and anthologies including The Oxford Handbook of Comic Book Studies, Comics Studies Here and Now, and The Comics of Alison Bechdel. She is also the curator of The Art of the News: Comics Journalism exhibition (Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art 2021-22; The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum 2022-23).

Register for Katherine Kelp-Stebbins’ Comics Keynote (Tuesday, November 1 @ 3:30pm) “Multilingualism in Comics from Haida Gwaii to Beirut” here.