Transnational regards from Serbia

This paper reads Aleksandar Zograf s Regards from Serbia: A Cartoonist's Diary of a Crisis in Serbia (2007)-a highly eclectic (and genre transgressive) volume, comprised of comic strips, e-mails, a comic diary, and graphic postcards-its production and circulation, with a two-fold aim in mind. First, by focusing on both thematic and genre concerns, I illustrate the transnational nature of the volume which is born and shaped by economic, political and cultural interactions that reach across multiple borders. Second, I am interested in the forms of affect, empathy in particular, and the role it has with reference to the US/Western rhetoric about the Balkans, as different manifestations of empathy here unsettle the power dynamics and hierarchies which have defined the Balkan "other" in Western discourse. My paper argues that the multimodality of the text, its transnational production and circulation vividly speak to us now in the present when blog posts go viral and when Facebook, Twitter, and instant forms of communication inform our understanding of contemporary events.