Comics – Signs in Motion: Semiotic Perspectives on Migration

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CFP: Panel „Comics« : Signs in Motion: Semiotic Perspectives on Migration

The 18th International Congress of the German Semiotic Association, Signs in Motion: Semiotic Perspectives on Migration, the University of Education Schwäbisch Gmünd, from 28 September to 02 October 2027. To achieve its goals, the German Semiotic Association organizes conferences, colloquia, workshops, courses, and lecture series in core areas of its research fields. Moreover, the association holds an international congress every three years. As part of the 18th International Congress Signs in Motion: Semiotic Perspectives on Migration (Schwäbisch Gmünd, 28 September – 02 October 2027), the section « Comics » will organize a panel on the topic « Comics » and invites paper proposals.

Migration has been part of the history of comics since the origins of the medium. Early newspaper strips such as Richard F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid, Rudolph Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids, and George McManus’s Bringing Up Fatheremerged within urban societies shaped by migration and negotiated questions of origin, language, and cultural belonging. Today, comics and graphic novels rank among the most productive forms for narrating experiences of flight, exile, diaspora, mobility, and cultural hybridity. Works such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, Cyril Pedrosa’s Portugal, Riad Sattouf’s L’Arabe du futur, Marguerite Abouet’s Aya de Yopougon and Akissi, as well as Reinhard Kleist’s The Boxer, demonstrate that migration in comics extends far beyond the level of plot. It shapes narrative perspectives, visual arrangements, page layouts, language shifts, and the position of readers.

The beginnings of exile literature studies in Germany emerged in the 1970s, initially focusing on flight from Nazi Germany (1933–1945). Today, Bischoff and Komfort-Hein’s seminal volume (2013) is regarded as a decisive impulse for a radical transcultural and postcolonial expansion of the field. Building on this methodological reorientation, subsequent studies integrated the debate into current discussions of contemporary literature (Hardtke, Kleine and Payne 2016), systematically opened exile studies to visual media such as film (Bauer, Nies and Theele 2019), and established the concept of « post-exile » as a crucial theoretical bridge for contemporary memory studies (Bannasch and Sarkowsky 2020).

Analogously, though somewhat later, comics studies have also opened up to questions related to migration since the 2010s. Early contributions such as Mark McKinney’s The Colonial Heritage of French Comics (2011) examined the colonial foundations of graphic storytelling, while Naghibi, Rifkind and Ty (2020) highlighted the significance of autobiographical « graphic life narratives » for the representation of migration, exile, and diaspora. In the German-speaking context, Barbara Eder’s Alienation: Migration in Graphic Novels (2022) examines how graphic novels represent migration between alienation, memory, and identity construction, and which specific aesthetic strategies the medium of comics provides for this purpose. The edited volume Krieg und Migration im Comic (War and Migration in Comics, Icon Düsseldorf 2020) likewise constitutes an important reference point for the systematic study of flight and migration in comics. Internationally, the field has been further consolidated by Comics and Migration: Representation and Other Practices (Kauranen et al. 2023), which approaches migration as an aesthetic, medial, and cultural practice of comics. At the same time, migration is increasingly understood in intermedial and transcultural terms, as exemplified by the edited volume Achsen und Spektren der Migration in romanischen Literaturen und Bildmedien des 21. Jahrhunderts (Axes and Spectra of Migration in Romance Literatures and Visual Media of the 21st Century, Schuchardt, Struve and Tauchnitz 2024).

Due to their multimodality and polyphony, comics are particularly suited to representing pluricultural processes of negotiation: different languages, visual styles, temporalities, cultural references, and sign systems do not exist separately from one another but interact, overlap, and transform each other within the same page. Comics therefore do not merely represent migration; they organize processes of cultural translation and negotiation through the specific means of their own semiotic system.

The field has also become increasingly visible at an institutional level. An early expression of this development was the major collaborative research and exhibition project between the Musée de la bande dessinée in Angoulême and the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris, which dedicated an extensive retrospective to the subject under the title Bande dessinée et immigrations. Un siècle d’histoire(s) (Marie and Ollivier 2013). Since 2022, the Prix BD de la Porte Dorée has additionally recognized comics addressing migration, exile, and plural identities. The major retrospective devoted to Marguerite Abouet at the International Comics Festival in Angoulême (2023) further placed one of the most influential voices of Francophone migration narratives at the centre of international attention.

Against this background, the panel invites contributions that examine comics from a semiotic perspective. The focus lies on the question of how experiences of mobility, alterity, memory, and belonging are produced through image, text, layout, materiality, and multilingualism. We deliberately understand migration in a broad sense: as spatial movement as well as linguistic, cultural, medial, or biographical transition.

Possible topics include:

Contributions are welcome from the fields of semiotics, comics studies, literary and cultural studies, media studies, art history, linguistics, as well as related disciplines.

Primary works mentioned in the call

Secondary literature mentioned in the call

Comics Studies, exile and migration studies, multimodality and semiotics, transculturality, memory-cultural narratives, multilingualism, postcolonial studies

Information regarding the congress organization

The congress will be held from 28 September to 02 October 2027 at the University of Education Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany.

Please send your proposals in German or English (20 minutes), along with a short academic CV, by email to Marie Schröer ( [email protected] ) and Thomas Sähn ( [email protected] ) no later than 30 November 2026. The document should include title, name of the author, summary of the topic (max. 300 words), affiliation, email address, short bio, and a short list of publications (max. 5).

Talks should not exceed 20 minutes. Selected contributions will likely be published. The panel languages are English and German; slides and discussions should be in English. Please note that some panels may be held in German only.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us: Marie Schröer ( [email protected] ) and Thomas Sähn ( [email protected] )

Conference conception and organization: Prof. Dr. Daniel Rellstab (Chair of the DGS).

For additional information please visit https://www.semiotik.eu/signs-in-motion-2027 and https://kultursemiotik-potsdam.de/aktuelles/detail/call-for-papers-signs-in-motion-semiotic-persepectives-on-migration.html . We also recommend the calls of the other sections.