Migrating Things, Multimodal Forms: Twenty-First-Century Graphic Literature and the Mapping of Global Mobilities through Objects

The French Caribbean theorist and writer Patrick Chamoiseau offers models of critical engagement that are ecocritical and island-centric, yet global in scope. His Creole space is diverse and interconnected – a ‘constituent mosaic’ (Bernabé, Chamoiseau & Confiant 1993). In Migrant Brothers, Chamoiseau’s visual conceptualisation of the Mediterranean archipelago is similarly unbounded. It is relational and centred in living ecosystems distinct from one another but shaped by their interconnections. This chapter seeks to project Chamoiseau’s reimagined map of Europe onto several recent multimodal texts that explore the subject of migration through maps and other visual and material representations. Metonymic things standing in for human life reoccur over and over in contemporary graphic portrayals of migration. What is our relationship as spectators or consumers of these objects that they move us even in the absence of a human face or story? Exploring a range of contemporary graphic work from across Europe, the ‘peculiar map-like features of comics’ spatial grammar’ (Peterle 2017, 2021) will be foregrounded in this chapter, along with the aspects of material culture that feature prominently in these texts.