Appropriating the (Colonial) Icon: BEF’s Uncle Bill as a Counternarrative of Exploration

pp. 58-76 This article explores Bernardo Fernández “BEF”’s Uncle Bill (2014), a graphic biography of U.S. writer William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) which focuses on Burroughs’s years in Mexico City. It analyzes how BEF intermingles autobiographical details with key events in Burroughs’s biography, such as the killing of his wife, Joan Vollmer, so as to decipher and deconstruct his own admiration for this controversial figure of U.S. counterculture. The article argues that the result is a narrative of exploration which shows parallelisms with traditional travel accounts and appropriates Burroughs as an icon of the Global North. To that end, the article locates Uncle Bill within BEF’s comics production and traces the Burroughsian presence in comics; then, drawing from decolonial and postcolonial theory, it portrays BEF’s position as a master narrator of Burroughs’slife and defines the different strategies used in the description of his object of study.