The Post-Colonial Enterprise of Trillium: Maps, Language, Histories, and Multilateral Consciousness

Ormrod, JM (2017) The Post-Colonial Enterprise of Trillium: Maps, Language, Histories, and Multilateral Consciousness. In: The Canadian Alternative: Cartoonists, Comics, and Graphic Novels from the North. University of Mississippi Press. ISBN 1496815114

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Abstract

This chapter examines Jeff Lemire's Trillium (2014) which, like many time travel narratives, reflects ideas of colonialism in the appropriation of territory and time by future scientist, Nika and British explorer Billy's respective cultures. The paper uses postcolonial theories of writers such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Frantz Fanon and bel hooks to draw parallels between colonial discourses of mapping and language in European voyages of discovery of the 16-20th centuries with that of the cultures of the British Empire and the future remnants of humanity. In his comments on mapping, language and communication, Lemire shows how language and histories are tools of aggression against the Atabithians. Lemire, therefore, proposes alternate reading practices, histories and social orders by playing with the comic form, language and spatiality. In doing so he destablises reader's commonsense perceptions of realism, time and history.