This event discusses how Asian American young adults understand, consolidate, and articulate their identities in comics. Using examples from graphic memoirs by Laura Gao (Chinese American and queer), Malaka Gharib (Filipino Egyptian American), Robin Ha (Korean American), Thien Pham (Vietnamese American), and others, it examines how comic creators are tasked with avenging their immigrant parents’ failed dreams, how they strive to follow and/or disentangle themselves from their parents’ hopes, and how they take ownership of their own aspirations. When immigrant parents fail or only partially succeed in their dreams of assimilation, social acceptance, professional recognition, and economic success, they sometimes project their irritations and disappointments onto their children, expecting them to be their avengers. Using textual and visual narrative to tell one’s experiences enables the artists to make sense of the past, to reflect on the microaggressions and hurts they have encountered, and to empower themselves.
Dr. Eleanor Ty is Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She was the Fulbright Canada Research Chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2018-2019 and the recipient of several grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. She has published on life writing, graphic novel, Asian North American, and 18th-century British literature. She has published 12 books, including The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives (University of Toronto Press, 2004), Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), Asianfail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority (University of Illinois Press, 2017 and winner of the Asian Pacific American Librarian Association’s 2017 best non-fiction book award), and Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives (Ohio State University Press, 2022 and winner of the Comics Studies Society’s 2022 Prize for Edited Book Collection).
* Eleanor Ty will be joining us in Brookens Auditorium on the “big screen” via Zoom to present this lecture and will participate in a discussion after the presentation.
