The Once and Future Riot

From the ground-breaking graphics journalist and author of Palestine, a revelatory investigation of the deadly sectarian riots in 2013 Uttar Pradesh, India, and their urgent global significance today<BR><BR>Compared to other episodes of lethal Indian communal violence, the clashes in Uttar Pradesh in 2013, the Muzaffarnagar Riot, were a relatively small-scale affair. It had happened before and will probably happen again: Hindus and Muslims, armed with guns and swords, riled up by vitriolic rhetoric and a tangle of accusations, turn on one another. The truth fragments along religious lines, both in the lead-up to the rampage and in its bloody aftermath.<BR><BR>Joe Sacco immerses himself in Uttar Pradesh, speaking to government officials, political leaders, village chiefs, and especially the victims, who were mostly landless peasants, in a quest to understand this riot as an archetype of political violence. In the process, he probes the role of savagery in a democracy; the power of crowds, rather than leaders, to influence the course of events; the collision of competing narratives; and the accounts that perpetrators construct to explain away their participation in bloodshed.<BR><BR>Sacco has chronicled the urgent histories that define the world around us, from the Great War to Gaza. Here, the award winning cartoonist turns his masterful visual reportage to a story that is specific to India but with implications and resonance for us all.<BR><BR>*<BR><BR>PRAISE FOR JOE SACCO: <BR><BR>'One of the masters of his craft' New Statesman<BR><BR>'A pioneer of the genre' TLS<BR><BR>'Formidably talented.' Independent <BR><BR>'The hands-down boss of his particular corner of contemporary literature' Dazed & Confused<BR><BR>'Sacco's brilliant, excruciating books of war reportage are potent territory... He shows how much that is crucial to our lives a book can hold' New York Times Book Review