Up Close and Personal: Mediated Testimony and Narrative Tropes in Refugee Comics

This chapter examines three refugee narratives in comics form, all located in the context of the European Union's external and Southern border. Produced in differing contexts and aimed at distinct readerships, all three stories describe the journey of an individual. They thus share the ambition to render complex geo-political issues intelligible at the level of lived experience. The analysis considers how processes of mediation, power differentials constitutive of both production and reception, and dynamics brought into play by narrative structures and tropes, all call into question the perceived directness of the personal story.