Middle Eastern History Comes Alive in Graphic Novels

A spring quarter course taught by the Abbasi Program affiliated Stanford lecturers Burcu Karahan and Ayça Alemdaroğlu explored graphic novels that portray the realities of life amidst political conflicts in the Middle East.

"A coming-of-age story about a Palestinian youth growing up in a refugee camp during the 1960s. A childhood account of what life was like in Lebanon at the height of the country’s civil war in the 1980s. A mother’s search for her son who disappeared during Iran’s 2009 election. 

These stories – as told in the graphic novels Baddawi (Just World Books, 2015), A Game for Swallows: To Die, To Leave, To Return (Graphic Universe, 2012), and Zahra's Paradise (First Second, 2012) – were some of the books Stanford students read in the spring quarter course, COMPLIT 254: The Middle East Through the Graphic Novel.

Every week, students read one or two graphic novels from a different country in the Middle East to learn about a particular moment in history.

“For any course, it is a huge challenge to talk about the Middle East – it’s a huge region with many people and countries, each with different systems of government, religion, language, and ethnicity,” said Ayça Alemdaroğlu, a research scholar and the associate director of the Program on Turkey at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) who co-taught the class with Burcu Karahan, a lecturer in comparative literature in the School of Humanities and Sciences (H&S). 

“But graphic novels provide us with a way to think about those histories through stories, narratives, and observations,” Alemdaroğlu said. “Graphic novels get to the point, easily and fast.”"

Read the full story by Stanford Report.