In this talk, I examine comics as a medium most suited to exploring alternate border geographies and imaginaries “beyond the line”. I contextualise Guy Delisle’s travelogues within the framework of borderscapes or, the shift from singular lines on a map to demarcate territory to an understanding of the border as mobile, processual, deterritorialized and contested – hence, “beyond the line”.   Each of Delisle’s travelogues – from Jerusalem to Burma, from Pyongyang to Shenzhen – interrupts the act or sequence of bordering by interrogating or revealing how borders become naturalised. Specifically, I focus on how Delisle deploys the cartoon map as a way to rethink geographical terms related to the border and make visible the alternate spatialities of territorial control.  At stake in this analysis of Delisle’s work is the productive relationship between comics and geography and how the shared visual emphasis and formal techniques between maps and comics can facilitate in unburdening the geopolitical imagination from dominant spatialities such as the nation-state.

Elizabeth Ho is Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong where she teaches postcolonial literature and theory. She is the author of a monograph, Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire (Continuum/Bloomsbury 2012); co-editor of a collected edition, Thatcher & After: Margaret Thatcher’s Afterlife in Contemporary Culture (Palgrave, 2010) and has published in journals such as Cultural Critique, Antipodes and College Literature. She also serves as Consultant Editor of Neo-Victorian Studies, for whom she is editing a special issue on ‘Neo-Victorian Asia’. She is now working on her second monograph, Map-able: The Politics of Postcolonial Space.

This is a free event, and open to all to attend. Registration is not required.