How to Cite

Herche, Victoria: Mediating Traumatic Memory: The Potential of Interactive Digital Migrant Fictions, in Wergin, Carsten and Affeldt, Stefanie (Eds.): Digitising Heritage: Transoceanic Connections between Australia and Europe, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2024 (Cultural Heritage: Materiality—Text—Edition (KEMTE), Volume 4), p. 139–153. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.1305.c18424

License (Chapter)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Identifiers (Book)

ISBN 978-3-96822-223-3 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-96822-224-0 (Hardcover)

Published

09/26/2024

Authors

Victoria Herche

Mediating Traumatic Memory

The Potential of Interactive Digital Migrant Fictions

Abstract Mediated representations and news coverage of boat migration play a vi­tal role in constructing discourses of the situation of refugees and asylum seekers at large, often in generalising ways. Whether as an image of potential danger and hostile threat or as the image of vulnerability, danger, and crisis, the iconic refugee boat evokes ambivalent and emotionally charged associations with notions of trans­oceanic migration. This chapter discusses the potential in the recontextualisation of individual migrant memories – by processes of fictionalisation and digitisation – to provide a transcultural perspective on memory and to contribute to the construc­tion of collective memory and public awareness. By referring to two interactive web-based graphic stories, adaptations of Khaled Hosseini’s Sea Prayer (2018) and Nam Le’s The Boat (2009), this chapter discusses the choice of authors and media artists to accompany or adapt fictional migrant stories into interactive and interme­dial forms. Hereby I argue that the interactive digital format provides particularly productive ways to represent the absences and gaps inherent to traumatic migrant memories and allows readers/viewers to be active participants in the re-conceptu­alisation of the representation of boat migration in public discourse and narrative.

Keywords Graphic Novels, Interaction, Memory, Migration, Storytelling