Transmuting Transgenerational Trauma: Comics, Re-humanisation, and Kinship across Genocides

Dehumanisation—stripping individuals of their personhood—provides the cognitive shift that permits human slaughter, enslavement, experimentation, and other abuses normally reserved only for animals. Through making those who have lost their personhood visible and tangible, through showing the process of dehumanisation in action, comics have the power to re-humanise and to heal. I will present a series of nine interactive comics from my installation “View from the High Ground” that allow readers to experience the process of dehumanisation and tell of how making this piece and bringing this work to audiences, ranging from inner city high school students to scholars and activists from across the globe, was part of my own healing process. Focusing on nine of the many genocides that have taken place over the past 500 years (those committed against the first peoples of the Americas, African Slaves in the US, Australian Aborigines, Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Tutsi, Bosniaks, and the Rohingya). “View from the High Ground” reflects the characteristics that all these genocides share despite their spatial and historical specificity.

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