History in the Gutters: A Critical Examination of Chester Brown's "Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography".

My analysis traces Louis Riel's treatment of its unsettling subject with a concentration on the image-textual operations of the bio-graphic narrative. In particular, a postcolonial critique of the graphic text's symbolic implications is undertaken. The context of this critique is the situating of Riel, the Metis people, and their conflicts with the Canadian government in the doubly-inscribed space of the settler-colony. This study posits Brown's bio-graphic narrative as a locus of negotiation between binaristic assumptions, where history flows through the hybrid spaces between the comic panels ("the gutters") in a condition of productive possibility.