Clara Han’s Seeing Like a Child: Inheriting the Korean War (Fordham University Press, 2021) describes war’s dispersal into everyday life, intimacy and the domestic. Departing from genres of testimony, as well as auto-ethnography, Han seeks to write from a child’s perspective, both as the daughter of parents displaced by the war and who migrate to the United States, as well …
Mild
‘[A] large portion won’t notice that they have it’. ‘Another substantial portion will have very, very mild symptoms’. ‘A small portion will have a very significant reaction’. So runs UK’s Home Officer Deputy Science Advisor Rupert Shute’s assessment, in April 2020, of what the 80% of the UK public he says are predicted to get Covid-19 will experience (Ahmed, 2020).…
Angela was angry—even now, when I listen to the audio recording, I can hear the bitterness in her voice. We sat in the conference room of the public library near her home, where we had met for a formal interview, and she detailed the reasons for her anger, starting right in even before I had turned on the recorder, such …
For my doctoral research, I interviewed family members living with a loved one with early-onset dementia, a diagnosis that one receives under the age of 65. Jans, not his real name, was the fourth person I interviewed in April 2015. Since he lived in a remote village in the east of the Netherlands, we met at a train station to …
In the class I teach on illness narratives, cancer comes after the plague. In the realm of representation and cultural memory, infectious diseases have a long visual and allegorical pedigree. Pestilence is always already more than an epidemiological reality. With cancer culture things are different. A cursory search for early modern images of cancer in the U.S. National Library of …
Lissa: A Story About Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution
Written by Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye
Illustrated by Sarula Bao and Caroline Brewer
Lettering by Marc Parenteau
University of Toronto Press, 2017. 304 pages.
For several years many anthropologists have engaged in questions about the possibilities of a graphic anthropology. “Graphic,” here specifically references comics and graphic narratives and …