Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels by Golnar Nabizadeh (review)

The past decade has witnessed an explosive interest in graphic narrative, which was once dismissed as frivolous and heterodox but is now praised as innovative and flexible in its ability to accommodate both fiction and nonfiction and to address an array of topics, old or new. Among thought-provoking studies such as Hillary L. Chute’s Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010), Elisabeth El Refaie’s Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (2012), Karin Kukkonen’s Contemporary Comics Storytelling (2013) and Studying Comics and Graphic Novels (2013), Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon’s From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels (2013), Achim Hescher’s Reading Graphic Novels (2016), Kai Mikkonen’s The Narratology of Comic Art (2017), and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer’s The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks (2018), Golnar Nabizadeh’s Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels is noteworthy for its original focus. It centers on the issue of how marginalized and minority groups reproduce their memories in comic form. Nabizadeh attempts to do justice to the enormous potential of a word-image alliance to “materialize” the past, contending that the fragmented panels, the gutters, and the drawings in comics document the episodic, imaginative, reconstructive, and visual nature of memory, especially traumatic memory. Comics are valorized as an effective medium for the socially excluded and the neglected to challenge authoritative discourses and to make their suppressed voices heard. The ethics of comics that stand for occluded voices is showcased in Nabizadeh’s selection of the works analyzed. The book covers memory of sundry types of human experience and shows how the texts discussed, incorporating both fictional and non-fictional, realistic and non-realistic constituents, represent individual and collective memories through multifarious visual techniques, media, and distribution channels. Chapter 1 examines two graphic narratives that display the experience of immigrant arrival in foreign countries. When analyzing Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924 [Manga Yonin Shosei] (1999 [1931]), Nabizadeh attends to the work’s major technical features: humor, cinematic and comic elements, the appropriation of Western art styles, bilingual conversations, and, most importantly, references to influential historical events — for instance, “The Turlock Incident” — which are interconnected with episodes embodying the immigrants’ painful memories. When coming to Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006), which reproduces the experience of an unnamed migrant in an unknown place, Nabizadeh dissects references to historical facts as well as the artistic and conceptual inspirations that the book draws from films, pictures, and literary works. She discusses the material features of the book — the spine, the cover, the page color, the use of a gold ribbon — which contribute to a sense of nostalgia and make the book