Overview

In Silence in the Quagmire Harriet E. H. Earle uses silence to construct a narrative of the Vietnam War via U.S. comics. Unlike the vast majority of cultural artifacts and scholarly works about the war, which typically focus on white, working-class American servicemen and their experiences of combat, Earle’s work centers less-visible players: the Vietnamese on both sides of the conflict, women and girls, and returning veterans. Earle interrogates the ways this conflict is represented in American comic books, with special focus on these missing groups. She discusses how-and more critically why-these groups are represented as they are, if they’re represented at all, and the ways these representations have affected views of the war, during and since. Using Michel Foucault’s understanding of silence as discourse, Earle considers how both silence and silencing are mobilized in the creation of the U.S.-centric war narrative. Innovative in its structure and theoretical scaffolding, Silence in the Quagmire deepens our understanding of how comic books have represented the violence and trauma of conflict.  

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9781496240545

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Reviews

“A compelling exploration of how comics shape historical memory, Harriet Earle’s study of marginalized voices provides an inclusive and nuanced understanding of the Vietnam War’s portrayal in American comics. Essential for those interested in the intersection of culture, history, and memory.”—Stephen Connor, associate professor of history at Nipissing University “Absent speech, scenes concealed in the gutter, the ambiguity of a figure: these are the traces expertly tracked and analyzed in Harriet Earle’s exploration of narrative silences within the American mythogenesis of the Vietnam War. This study offers arresting insights for both comics scholars and historians and could offer an interesting counterbalance for teachers who would wish to teach history through comics or other popular media.”—Elizabeth Allyn Woock, assistant professor of English at Palacký University “This is an important and timely contribution to a neglected but significant part of American comic book history. Although much academic work has concentrated on superhero comics, the war comic has been a hugely popular and important form that has been hugely under-researched. Earle demonstrates that the Vietnam War had an immense impact on the war comic genre. . . . The complexities of the differing, and continuing, responses to the war in comics are clearly explained in a perceptive and accessible analysis. This is an essential guide for anyone studying the representation of conflict in the comic form.”—David Huxley, editor in chief of Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

“A compelling exploration of how comics shape historical memory, Harriet Earle’s study of marginalized voices provides an inclusive and nuanced understanding of the Vietnam War’s portrayal in American comics. Essential for those interested in the intersection of culture, history, and memory.”-Stephen Connor, associate professor of history at Nipissing University “Absent speech, scenes concealed in the gutter, the ambiguity of a figure: these are the traces expertly tracked and analyzed in Harriet Earle’s exploration of narrative silences within the American mythogenesis of the Vietnam War. This study offers arresting insights for both comics scholars and historians and could offer an interesting counterbalance for teachers who would wish to teach history through comics or other popular media.”-Elizabeth Allyn Woock, assistant professor of English at PalackÝ University “This is an important and timely contribution to a neglected but significant part of American comic book history. Although much academic work has concentrated on superhero comics, the war comic has been a hugely popular and important form that has been hugely under-researched. Earle demonstrates that the Vietnam War had an immense impact on the war comic genre. . . . The complexities of the differing, and continuing, responses to the war in comics are clearly explained in a perceptive and accessible analysis. This is an essential guide for anyone studying the representation of conflict in the comic form.”-David Huxley, editor in chief of Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics

Author Information

Harriet E. H. Earle is a senior lecturer of English at Sheffield Hallam University and a research fellow at the Centre for War, Atrocity, and Genocide at Nipissing University in Canada. She is the author of Comics: An Introduction and Comics, Trauma, and the New Art of War.    

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