Visualizing erasure: Co‐creating comics and animation from revolutionary street art to Nubian memories of displacement in Egypt

This article discusses how Faye Ginsburg's work on Indigenous filmmaking and commitment to shared anthropology inspired us to pursue unconventional forms of visual anthropology adapted to our own ethnographic contexts in post‐revolutionary Egypt. Specifically, we discuss Hamdy's work on the collaborative graphic novel Lissa and Moll's collaborative animation short Hanina. The affordances of these illustrated genres and mediums for collaborative co‐creation with our interlocutors enabled better ways to depict that which is no longer tangibly present yet persists in memories and longings. The specific histories of each media resonated with how the communities sought to represent themselves, a powerful example of what Ginsburg calls “aesthetic accountability.” We also reflect on how comics and animation, through greater anonymity, can help us attain safety as a production value under authoritarianism.