Regimes of Visibility and Forms of Memory

Abstract

This issue investigates the iconotext as a device in which words and images do not simply add up, but co-produce meaning through friction, montage, ellipsis, and paratextual thresholds. Against the backdrop of the visual turn, sixteen contributions—grouped by linguistic areas (Anglophone studies on the United States; Francophone studies on Québec, Lebanon, and the Antilles; studies on Spanish America)—are presented as thematic constellations that cut across geographical and disciplinary boundaries.
The first constellation foregrounds devices, the page, and materiality: genealogies of phototext and migrant writing, editorial practices (illustrated editions and magazines), and poetics in which photography becomes a model of attention and viewpoint. The second constellation focuses on archives, counter-archives, and the politics of visibility: photographic documents are questioned as sites of power, where race, postcolonial histories, and war require strategies of intervention, slowing down, and anti-spectacular ethics. The third constellation addresses migration, autobiography, and testimony: graphic memoirs, phototexts, and wordless narratives show how displacement also works as a form (discontinuity, sequencing, ellipsis) and how silence can operate as a mode of care for trauma. Taken together, the essays propose a shared methodological compass: a “double-entry” reading that combines attention to material features (supports, layout, paratexts, rhythm) with an analysis of pragmatic effects (what images enable, postpone, contradict, or keep unsaid).