Alicia Lambert

Alicia Lambert holds a BA degree (UNamur) and MA degree (UCLouvain) in Modern Languages and Literatures (English-Dutch). She started her PhD project in October 2020 under the supervision of Véronique Bragard (promotor) and Sabrina Parent (co-promotor). Her PhD is part of the larger research project "Literature and decolonization" (ECR research centre).

Panels in Tensions, Memories in Dialogues: Comics and the Belgian Colonial Imaginary (2000-2022)

In the last twenty years, the issues related to decolonization have progressively become central in Belgian public, political and mediatic debates. The present project examines comics and graphic novels published in the same period (2000-2021) that generate critical and reflexive distance with Belgian colonial imagery, thereby contributing to the decolonial process occurring in the country. By exploring an international corpus including different artistic approaches, it offers a large variety of perspectives. Drawing both on recent theoretical approaches on how comics may deconstruct colonial ideologies and representations, as well as decolonial studies, the analysis examines how the multi-focalization and polyphony of the medium reveal and subvert the omissions at the basis of a Belgian colonial imaginary, while also recontextualizing and complexifying the debate through, among others, the parodic vein and the redrawing of colonial imagery.