The Once and Future Riot
Oct 2025 · Sold by Metropolitan Books
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From “our greatest living comics journalist” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), a revelatory investigation of deadly sectarian riots in Uttar Pradesh, India, that explores the mechanics, dynamics, mythologies, uses, and abuses of political violence everywhere
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—some scores of people were killed and several tens of thousands displaced. 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.
In The Once and Future Riot, 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.
Hailed as “the heir to R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman” (Economist), Sacco has chronicled the urgent histories that define the world around us, from the Great War to Gaza. Here, he turns his masterful visual reportage to a story that is specific to India but with implications and resonance for all precarious multiethnic, multiracial societies everywhere.
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—some scores of people were killed and several tens of thousands displaced. 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.
In The Once and Future Riot, 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.
Hailed as “the heir to R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman” (Economist), Sacco has chronicled the urgent histories that define the world around us, from the Great War to Gaza. Here, he turns his masterful visual reportage to a story that is specific to India but with implications and resonance for all precarious multiethnic, multiracial societies everywhere.
From “our greatest living comics journalist” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), a revelatory investigation of deadly sectarian riots in Uttar Pradesh, India, that explores the mechanics, dynamics, mythologies, uses, and abuses of political violence everywhere
Compared to other episodes of lethal India...
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About the author
Joe Sacco is the author of Footnotes in Gaza, for which he received the Ridenhour Book Prize and the Eisner Award, as well as Paying the Land, Palestine, Journalism, Safe Area Goražde, and War on Gaza, both also Eisner Award winners. His comics reporting has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, and Harper’s Magazine. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Joe Sacco is the author of Footnotes in Gaza, for which he received the Ridenhour Book Prize and the Eisner Award, as well as Paying the Land, Palestine, Journalism, Safe Area Goražde, and War on Gaza, both also Eisner Award winners. His comics reporting has appeared in the New York Times Magazin...
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