The limits of the graphic narrative of migration in the public media discourse and the human rights approach

Abstract

The intensification of violence and the violation of human rights in migratory crises is currently a centraltheme in the experimentation of graphic narratives, which have given rise to the hybrid and critical genrerepresented by the graphic chronicle and the graphic novel of migration. The verbo-visual treatmentis analyzed in the series of twelve graphic chronicles of migration “My life as an immigrant in Chile”(2018) of Sábado Magazine, in the newspaper El Mercurio, an agent of public discourse that has consolidatedstereotypes and prejudices about the migrant population. Through qualitative content analysis ofthe image-text articulation, the verb-visual strategies of the graphic chronicle of journalistic and literarytone are examined. The elements that confer authenticity, reliability and veracity to the chronicle wereestablished according to the use of testimony, portraits of the protagonists and contextual data. Likewise,literary elements were determined such as the staging of vulnerability, enhancement of the culturalfabric, multiple narrative voices and the recreation of resilient resistance, which together allude to thehuman rights perspective. The graphic chronicle intensifies the use of the testimonial voice and omitsthe author (witness), but the latter appears in the verb-visual articulation in biases and introduction ofthe ambiguity of migration experiences, and in the relationship with the “distant near”. The graphicchronicle of migration can be significantly modulated by the mediatized public discourse, weakening itscritical reading of reality.