Abstract

The ongoing damage of hurricanes impacting the Gulf regions of the United States, and beyond, resurrect the legacies of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina exposed the degree to which militarized humanitarianisms linked the “natural” disaster of the hurricane and US military violence in Iraq. In cultural production, scholarship, and social critique, Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War are historically linked discourses. Understanding both events through the fragmented representations of graphic narratives, in particular, compels reconsiderations of the hurricane and the war. In my examination of two graphic narratives, Mario Acevedo and Alberto Dose's Killing the Cobra: Chinatown Trollop (2010) and Mat Johnson and Simon Gane's Dark Rain: A New Orleans Story (2010), I analyze how the recurring presence of Iraqi civilian murder by the US military entwines the Iraq War and Hurricane Katrina. The graphic narratives lay bare the liberal maintenance of transnational violence that undo simple distinctions between “at home” and “abroad.” Indeed, both graphic narratives attend to fractures as form and content to structure the geohistorical dynamics of militarized duty in Iraq with foundational legacies of racism in the United States. How the graphic narratives frame the war—spatially fragmented, aggressively nonlinear—reanimates the intertwined cultural histories of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War. In their representations of mourning civilian deaths, and the convergence of humanitarian and military force in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, Killing the Cobra and Dark Rain graft the war-sanctioned violence against Iraqi civilians onto militarized registers of US domestic space, tracing the fractures of transnational humanitarian empire.

中文翻译：

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复活多民族图形叙事中的历史暴力

摘要

飓风的持续破坏影响了美国的海湾地区及其他地区，使卡特里娜飓风的遗产复活。卡特里娜飓风暴露了军事人道主义主义将飓风的“自然”灾难与伊拉克的美军暴力联系在一起的程度。在文化生产，学术研究和社会批评方面，卡特里娜飓风和伊拉克战争在历史上都是相关的论述。通过图形化叙事的零散表示来理解这两个事件，尤其是迫使人们重新考虑飓风和战争。在我对两种图形叙述的考察中，马里奥·阿塞维多和阿尔贝托·多塞的《杀死眼镜蛇：唐人街》（2010）和马特·约翰逊（Mat Johnson）和西蒙·甘恩（Simon Gane）的《黑暗的雨：新奥尔良的故事》（2010），我分析了美军不断发生的伊拉克平民谋杀案如何缠绕伊拉克战争和卡特里娜飓风。图形化的叙述裸露了对跨国暴力的自由维护，从而消除了“在家”和“国外”之间的简单区别。的确，这两种图形叙述都以形式和内容来探讨骨折，以构造伊拉克军事行动的地理历史动态以及美国种族主义的基本遗产。图形化叙事如何构成战争（在空间上是零散的，具有侵略性的非线性），使卡特里娜飓风和伊拉克战争错综复杂的文化历史重新焕发活力。在哀悼平民死亡的陈述中，杀死眼镜蛇和暗雨，将战争批准的针对伊拉克平民的暴力行为移植到了美国家庭空间的军事化记录中，追踪了跨国人道主义帝国的破裂。