Tag Archives: Comics

No Reclaimed Homeland: Thi Bui’s Postcolonial Historiography in The Best We Could Do

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Front cover of Inks volume 4, issue 1

Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, vol. 4, no. 1, Spring 2020, pp. 44–65.

Abstract: Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, a graphic memoir centering on her family’s experience with war in Vietnam and with resettlement in the United States, earned critical acclaim upon publication in 2017. It touched a nerve with U.S. readers attuned to their country’s rising xenophobia, eliciting praise for humanizing refugees. Her comic certainly stirs compassion with its fusion of emotive drawings and text—but it does more. Bui subtly encourages readers to not only see refugees as human but to realize that no polity exists apart from migrancy. Situating her book in recent postcolonial theory, I read it as a commentary on the shifting nature of history and nation. Bui presents no singular homeland, past or present, implicitly calling into question Americans’ desire for a walled nation and bounded culture.

Full Text: You can download the article by clicking the link below.

No Reclaimed Homeland: Thi Bui’s Postcolonial Historiography in The Best We Could DoDownload

Making Visible the Nativism-Ableism Matrix: The Rhetoric of Immigrants’ Comics

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Rhetoric Review Journal

Rhetoric Review, vol. 38, no. 4, 2019, pp. 445-462

Abstract: Nativist ideology, which dominates public discourse, implements ableist hierarchies to reduce immigrants to diseases of the body politic. Immigrants’ graphic narratives, on the other hand, reveal the disabling effects of xenophobic environments. Rhetoricians have begun to recognize comics’ persuasive potential but thus far have not explored their role in immigration rhetoric. Using this medium’s affordances, immigrants critique the nativism-ableism matrix, as exemplified by Parsua Bashi’s comics memoir about immigrating to Switzerland from Iran, Nylon Road (2006/2009). Bashi’s self-worth, displaced by her unreceptive context, depends on accepting a mental (dis)ability. Her comic counters nativism’s eugenic underpinnings by visualizing variation.

You can download the article using this link. Thanks for reading!

Image courtesy of Rhetoric Review.