Reading Footnotes: Joe Sacco and the Graphic Human Rights Narrative

This article presents Joe Sacco’s Footnotes in Gaza (2009) as a graphic human rights narrative. It argues that the text draws on established conventions in historiography and investigative journalism to present Palestinians as human subjects in international media discourse. To do so, Sacco experiments with different strategies of documentary writing and recording and critiques the ways in which received frames of representation determine who is considered, in Judith Butler’s terms, a “grievable” life in a conflict zone. Thus while Sacco plays with fragments and footnotes, eyewitness accounts and human rights reports, he is ultimately concerned with constructing alternative “frames” for viewing, reading and recognizing lives. Footnotes in Gaza, as such, serves as an example of how the comics form can be used to enhance human rights narrative.