This book foregrounds the figure of the perpetrator in a selection of British, American, and Canadian comics and explores questions related to remembrance, justice, and historical debt. Its primary focus is on works that deliberately estrange the figure of the perpetrator-through fantasy, absurdism, formal ambiguity, or provocative rewriting-and thus allow readers to engage anew with the history of genocide, mass murder, and sexual violence. This book is particularly interested in the ethical space such an engagement calls into being: in its ability to allow us to ponder the privilege many of us now enjoy, the gross historical injustices that have secured it, and the debt we owe to people long dead.

Dragö Manea is a Lecturer in the American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest, Romania, where he teaches contemporary American literature, media studies, cultural memory studies, and perpetrator studies.

Autorentext

Dragos Manea is a Lecturer in the American Studies Program at the University of Bucharest, Romania, where he teaches contemporary American literature, media studies, cultural memory studies, and perpetrator studies.

Inhalt

1. Introduction: Perpetration, Estrangement, and Historical Debt

   2. "Nothing was spared": Monstrosity and the Sympathetic Perpetrator in Manifest Destiny (Chris Dingess and Matthew Roberts, 2013-)

   3. "Divine the future, but beware of ghosts": Romanticism, Satire and Perpetration in The New Adventures of Hitler (Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell, 1989)

   4. "May they never get their hands on a monster like that": Perpetration and Moral Ambiguity in Kieron Gillen's Über (2013-)

5. Who are you crying for? Perpetration and Punishment in Nina Bunjevac's Bezimena (2019)

6. "Unable to protect anyone": Terrorism, Salvation, and Cultural Intelligibility in Gene Luen Yang's Boxers & Saints (2013)

7. Conclusion