Description
Joining the "human rights comics" (Hong) genre popularized by Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and including Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Joe Sacco’s Palestine, Malik Sajad's graphic novel Munnu (2015) seeks to expose human rights violations in Kashmir to an international audience. This paper will closely consider how Munnu constructs its human rights claims on behalf of Kashmiris by recourse to the non-human. Attending particularly to Sajad's use of the humanoid hangul to figure the Kashmiri, and to the presence of (non-humanoid) dogs everywhere in the novel, this paper will ask: how does the non-human come to figure -- in surprisingly gendered ways -- the rights-worthiness of humans in an occupied territory? How does it reinscribe or contest the primacy of the human enshrined in human rights discourses? And how might an attention to non-human figures reconstruct studies of the occupation and claims to human rights in Kashmir?
Humans, Hanguls and “Indian Dogs” in Kashmir
Joining the "human rights comics" (Hong) genre popularized by Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and including Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Joe Sacco’s Palestine, Malik Sajad's graphic novel Munnu (2015) seeks to expose human rights violations in Kashmir to an international audience. This paper will closely consider how Munnu constructs its human rights claims on behalf of Kashmiris by recourse to the non-human. Attending particularly to Sajad's use of the humanoid hangul to figure the Kashmiri, and to the presence of (non-humanoid) dogs everywhere in the novel, this paper will ask: how does the non-human come to figure -- in surprisingly gendered ways -- the rights-worthiness of humans in an occupied territory? How does it reinscribe or contest the primacy of the human enshrined in human rights discourses? And how might an attention to non-human figures reconstruct studies of the occupation and claims to human rights in Kashmir?