Graphic Novels Amplify Climate Crisis Narratives: Nayar

 HYDERABAD: Graphic novels can capture the intensity of environmental crises by combining visual and verbal storytelling and by bringing marginalised histories and non-human perspectives into climate narratives, says University of Hyderabad professor Pramod K. Nayar.

Speaking to DC, Nayar said the graphic novel’s “doubleness” amplifies the experience of those affected by disasters. “A look, an expression, a sound (of both human and nonhuman) within the space of 1-2 panels communicated in both visual and verbal form surely amplifies our understanding of what the crisis-afflicted go through,” he said. Even a panel without words, showing “empty landscapes of ruin”, can capture “the pathos, the extent of disaster”.

Nayar, Senior Professor and Head of English at the University of Hyderabad and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies, is author of The Environmental Graphic Novel: How Green Is the Panel, which examines climate change, disaster, justice, resistance and resilience.

He said eco-apocalyptic narratives often deploy fear but cannot be the only way of understanding the crisis. Memoirs, life writing and travelogues reveal “layered histories” including colonial exploitation and damage to indigenous communities. Fables, he added, can “give voice to the nonhuman” and bring folk and indigenous worldviews into storytelling.

The book also examines “infrastructures of ecoprecarity”, showing how systems from colonial plantations to multinational corporations produce crises. Waste industries and large systems such as data centres, he said, can be represented through “landfills, damaged lands, lives lost” to create “a new social imaginary around loss, excess and advocacy”.

Nayar noted the variety of artwork and themes, attention to human and “more-than-human” life, racialised and gendered histories of exploitation, and narratives of “survivance (survival plus resistance)”.