Abstract
Death of Gérard Poaillat, 1936-2022. The obituary opening of Nicolas Juncker’s comic book Trous de mémoires (2025) ignites a spiraling sequence of disputes over how to commemorate the photographer’s life and work. What begins as a modest local project rapidly unravels into a parodic microcosm of France’s fractured memory landscape. Quarrels between historians, associations, politicians, and citizens reveal that the struggle over how to remember is as contentious as the events themselves. Pushing oppositions to absurdity like a tragicomedy, Juncker deploys satire, caricature, and visual dissonance to expose the competing interests shaping memorial production: scientific authority versus lived testimony, heritage preservation versus theatrical display, colonial nostalgia versus reparative justice, and political gain versus collective healing. Memorialization emerges as an inherently fraught negotiation, marked as much by rivalry and exclusion as by recognition. This study situates Trous de mémoires within the tradition of bande dessinée engagée and broader debates on memory politics, showing how comics both participate in and critique the processes by which societies attempt to grapple with their contentious pasts. Combining visual and narrative analysis with a memory studies framework, I examine how the album stages affective conflicts to dramatize the elusive consensus in memorializing the Algerian War. Ultimately, the comic is less prescriptive than diagnostic, revealing the structural impasses and fault lines that have long hindered every effort to ‘fix’ this traumatic history in public memory. More than six decades after independence, the war and its colonial legacies remain an unfinished chapter, persistently dividing communities, institutions, and generations.
Presenters
Sophia Khadraoui-FortuneAssistant Professor / Director of French and Francophone Studies, Department of Languages and Cultures - French and Francophone Studies, California Lutheran University, California, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Memory, Algerian War, Comics, Satire, Historical Representation
