"On Their Own Terms": Agency, Advocacy and Representation in Refugee Webcomics

In Australia, refugees remain on the margins of the public imaginary as subjects of aversion, erasure and suspicion. The unknowability of the foreign Other carries sharp political dimensions borne out in policies of strict border control and mandatory detention that have restricted public access to the voices and stories of refugees for over two decades. However, recent life narratives by refugees provide an antidote to this dominant discourse, by testifying to the traumatic precariousness of living in detention and confronting readers with unflinching visual displays of subjects often silenced and invisible. Safdar Ahmed's Walkley Award-winning documentary webcomic, Villawood: Notes from an Immigration Detention Centre (2015), documents the lives, experiences and drawings of detainees in Sydney's Villawood Immigration Detention Centre. This article reads Villawood as an example of the vital rhetorical and representative work done by webcomics to expose the violences of Australia's border spaces and put the personal stories of detainees in dialogue with vast audiences online. By attending to the collaborative and mediated process of its construction, this article maps the critical literacies needed to interpret webcomics as testimony and considers what this medium might offer life narrative studies and the project of ethical witnessing more broadly.