Studying Middle Eastern history through graphic novels
Photo credit: Andrew Brodhead
A spring quarter course explored how graphic novels convey the visceral realities of living amidst political violence and conflict in a way traditional media struggle to match.
A coming-of-age story about a Palestinian youth growing up in a refugee camp during the 1960s. A childhood account of what life was like in Lebanon at the height of the country’s civil war in the 1980s. A mother’s search for her son who disappeared during Iran’s 2009 election.
These stories – as told in the graphic novels Baddawi (Just World Books, 2015), A Game for Swallows: To Die, To Leave, To Return (Graphic Universe, 2012), and Zahra's Paradise (First Second, 2012) – were some of the books Stanford students read in the spring quarter course, COMPLIT 254: The Middle East Through the Graphic Novel.
Every week, students read one or two graphic novels from a different country in the Middle East to learn about a particular moment in history.
“For any course, it is a huge challenge to talk about the Middle East – it’s a huge region with many people and countries, each with different systems of government, religion, language, and ethnicity,” said Ayça Alemdaroğlu, a research scholar and the associate director of the Program on Turkey at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) who co-taught the class with Burcu Karahan, a lecturer in comparative literature in the School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S).
“But graphic novels provide us with a way to think about those histories through stories, narratives, and observations,” Alemdaroğlu said. “Graphic novels get to the point, easily and fast.”