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Part of
Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking literary realism in comparative perspectives
Edited by Svend Erik Larsen, Steen Bille Jørgensen and Margaret R. Higonnet
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXIII] 2022
► pp. 709–724

Photography and dissent in John Lewis’s graphic novel March

| University of Connecticut
This essay argues for the vitality of the graphic novel within analyses of realism. Focusing on John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell’s trilogy, March (2013‒2016), the case study embraces a definition of the real that accepts the subjectivity of historical narrative. The essay examines the photographic antecedents for images within the three novels, arguing that the texts invoke the documentary by conjuring up iconic photographs in memory. Through re-inscribing and reshaping those images in drawings, the books surprise the reader with a fresh engagement with historical experience, especially by rendering the psychological experience of landmark events. The essay also argues that March participates in a tradition of realist counter-narratives, as do texts by women writers and writers of color. Through destabilizing photography, the series embraces multiplicity, variability, and instability in order to articulate a vision of the civil rights movement as open-ended and unfinished.
Keywords: graphic novel, photography, politics, civil rights, history, counter-narrative, realism
Article outline
  • 1.American counter-narratives: Documentary in the graphic novel
  • 2.Photography and dissent in John Lewis’s March
  • 3.Contested freedom as visual experiment
  • 4.Perspective: The mutability of sequential representation
  • Works cited
Published online: 16 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/chlel.xxxiii.20cap
References (19)
Works cited
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