Graphic Refuge is the first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South. Co-written by two leading scholars of nonfiction comics, the book explores graphic narratives about a range of refugee experiences, from war, displacement, and perilous sea crossings to detention camps, resettlement schemes, and second-generation diasporas.
Through close readings of work by diverse artists including Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden, Don Brown, Olivier Kugler, Jasper Rietman, Hamid Sulaiman, Leila Abdelrazzaq, Thi Bui, and Matt Huynh, Graphic Refuge shows how comics challenge dominant representations of the displaced and bring a radical politics of refugee agency and refusal into view. Rather than simply affirming the “humanity” of the refugee, these comics demand that we apprehend the historical construction of categories such as “citizen” and “refugee” through systems of empire, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism.
Building on scholarship in critical refugee studies, architecture and infrastructure studies, and postcolonial theory, Davies and Rifkind argue that refugee comics move us through this wider recognition and towards more expansive ideas of refuge as a lived political relationship.

Dominic Davies is Senior Lecturer in English at City St George’s, University of London. He writes widely on infrastructure, empire, and migration in literature and culture. He is the author of Urban Comics (Routledge 2019) and The Broken Promise of Infrastructure (Lawrence Wishart 2023), and co-editor of Documenting Trauma in Comics (Palgrave 2020), among other books.

Dominic Davies' profile page

Candida Rifkind is an associate professor in the Department of English, University of Winnipeg. She published Comrades and Critics: Women, Literature, and the Left in 1930s Canada (2009) and has chapters on graphic life narratives in Material Cultures in Canada (WLU Press, 2015), Canadian Literature and Cultural Memory (2014), and the journals Biography, International Journal of Comic Art, and Canadian Review of American Studies.

Candida Rifkind's profile page

VINH NGUYEN is a writer and educator. His work appears in Brick, LitHub, the Malahat Review, PRISM International, Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, the Criterion Collection and MUBI Notebook. A non-fiction editor at the New Quarterly, he curates an ongoing series on refugee, migrant and diasporic writing. He is the editor and author of three academic books, Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada; The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives; and Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. Currently, Nguyen is a cultural consultant and consulting writer for the hit CBC sitcom Run the Burbs. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and shortlisted for a National Magazine Award, and he received the John C. Polanyi Prize for Literature. In 2022, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow in non-fiction at the Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.

Vinh Nguyen's profile page