Memory is continuously shaped in the present, and increasingly so through the use of new media. Indeed, the proliferation of new media technologies, products and aesthetics is inextricably linked to changing ways of remembering. Digital media, for example, have witnessed a “[g]lobal explosion of public participation” (Van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age, 2007, p. 2), stimulating a more self-reflective form of memory work where the act of storing, presenting, and sharing data determines the way the past is recalled and identities are reconstructed in the present. Moreover, different forms of media tend to merge, resulting in a multidisciplinary, transmedial and interartistic approach to art that subverts widely accepted canons. The graphic novel, which combines text and image, is a good example of such an experimental, transmedial form of narrating. It is gaining momentum, as the very recent Comics and Graphic Novels network demonstrates.
More than simply merging textual and visual media, many graphic novels that are published today combine a visual representation of the past with self-aware mechanisms of reconstructing individual and collective memories, more often than not in response to marginalization and social or political injustice. The intense style of Piena di niente (2015), for example, published by the politically engaged Edizioni Becco Giallo, reflects the traumatic experience of what remains a problematic issue in Italy: abortion. In spite of the abortion law being passed (after years of feminist battles), its implementation has been flawed and seen a backlash and is currently among the primary battles of contemporary feminists. Piena di niente therefore re-narrates an old debate in a new media context, offering what Valerio Varesi describes as “una voce che tocca direttamente le nostre emozioni e anticipa la riflessione. È questo il valore aggiunto dell’arte che ci trascina e ci coinvolge prima ancora di convincerci.”
Varesi’s observation was initially made in reference to another graphic novel published in the same year, Femministe. Una storia di oggi, which again explores the female universe and addresses a feminist audience. It takes to heart the complex interplay between feminist legacies, memories and identities in a contemporary, multicultural society through the visual stories of three women from different generations and cultures, who are seemingly tied together by their common condition of women and feminists, yet also prone to conflict, mutual distrust and miscommunication. Thus the feminist veteran Irma fails to look beyond her Western idea of women’s self-determination by indulging in racial and religious stereotypes as she attempts to “emancipate” both her 30-year old domestic, the Moroccan migrant woman Hayat, and her feminist student Afkar (of African descent), when the latter decides to wear a veil as an expression of her self-determination. In this way, Femministe offers a new media context where feminist stories and debates are re-narrated and “re-mediated” as they transmigrate from written texts and public debates to a transmedia context, where they critically reflect upon and challenge the current status quo of Italian feminist theory. Thus the graphic novel encourages a more inclusive, postcolonial perspective which eludes the great hegemonic model according to which some feminisms are more “advanced” than others (Victoria Browne, Feminism, Time, and Nonlinear History, 2014). As Vincenza Perilli notes in the afterword, Femministe presents “la necessità di nuove concettualizzazioni del femminismo, capaci di superare quell’approccio etnocentrico che ha a lungo caratterizzato la maniera con cui il femminismo occidentale ha guardato altre esperienze emancipatorie.”
