Immigrants and Comics

Graphic Spaces of Remembrance, Transaction, and Mimesis

Nhora Lucía Serrano, Nhora Lucía Serrano

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317287674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Immigrants and Comics is an interdisciplinary, themed anthology that focuses on how comics have played a crucial role in representing, constructing, and reifying the immigrant subject and the immigrant experience in popular global culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Nhora Lucía Serrano and a diverse group of contributors examine immigrant experience as they navigate new socio-political milieux in cartoons, comics, and graphic novels across cultures and time periods. They interrogate how immigration is portrayed in comics and how the 'immigrant' was an indispensable and vital trope to the development of the comics medium in the twentieth century. At the heart of the book's interdisciplinary nexus is a critical framework steeped in the ideas of remembrance and commemoration, what Pierre Nora calls lieux de mémoire.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in Visual Studies, Comparative Literature, English, Ethnic Studies, Francophone Studies, American Studies, Hispanic Studies, art history, and museum studies.

Part I

Shaping Comic Traditions, Portraying Immigrants

1 Of Birds and Men

Metonymic and Symbolic Representations of Immigration in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival

Since its publication in 2006, Shaun Tan’s The Arrival has been held as a masterpiece of comic art for its artistry bridging the gap between illustration and graphic novels, its subtle and dignified pathos, and its visual eloquence blending realistic and surreal imagery. It has received glowing press reviews, most notably by cartoonist Gene Luen Yang, who labeled it one “of the most accomplished graphic novels in existence,” in the New York Times Book Review (Yang 2007). It has been included for discussion in secondary and university classrooms, and has generated various study guides for this purpose. Preeminent comics theoretician Thierry Groensteen granted it the ultimate consecration by discussing it as an example of the “expansion of comics as an art form,” among ten modern master works (Groensteen 2015, pp. 167–190).

If The Arrival is indeed a masterpiece, it is perhaps not only for its mesmerizing and idiosyncratic virtuosity, but also, within the thematic focus of the present book, by virtue of its systematic deviation from three norms of comics dealing with the subject matter of immigration, as they emerge from trends and practices recently on display at the Paris Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration exhibition on “Comics and Immigration, 1913–2023,” including works by French artists such as Joann Sfar, Marjane Satrapi, Farid Boudjellal, Baru, and Clément Blaloup (McKinney 2011), or American graphic productions such as Will Eisner’s Dropsie Avenue (1995), or G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica (2011). First, Tan’s story does not adopt the format of an autobiographical or trans-generational narrative, nor does it attempt to depict a specific historical or geographic context. This “Neverland” approach, while not excluding embedded first-person accounts or clear allusions to “real” times, places, and events, opts for a universalizing lens rather than a testimonial veracity, and chooses universality¹ from the onset rather than as the product of empathy with otherness or its individual experience. Second, The Arrival breaks from realistic and even ontological depiction, as it mixes photo-realism with surreal, allegorical, and metonymic modes of representation, creating in the process a hybrid semiosis seldom seen in this particular form in the realm of graphic novels, yet anchored in the very potential of comic art from its earliest date, for instance, in the whimsical dreamscapes of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo (2000), or in the medium’s propensity for anthropomorphized animals. Third and finally, The Arrival’s format challenges the commonly accepted boundaries of what defines a comic book or a graphic novel, not only by its lack of textual narrative or dialogue, but perhaps even more by its unique use of sequentiality and frame-to-frame transitions. In this chapter, I intend to focus in particular on the manner in which Tan’s storytelling relies on metonymic and symbolic devices to tell an immigration narrative.

To the extent that the symbolic element is perhaps more visible, and has thus more often been discussed, I will give priority in my analysis to its metonymic counterpart. However, a few preliminary remarks appear necessary, on the subject of symbolism. If Tan indeed aims to synthesize the collective immigrant experience in a single character’s life journey, he does so not only through narrative means—by running his protagonist through the standard events and stages of departure, travel, arrival, work, integration, and family life, as well as their corresponding psychological states, which Julia Kristeva similarly identified in Strangers to Ourselves (1991)—but also through his album’s aesthetic hybridity. On the side of realism, Tan’s graphic style borrows the legibility, archival veracity, and collective relevancy of documentary or historical black and white photography. His drawings in graphite pencil often duplicate the appearance and conventions of photographic semiosis. For instance, both inside covers of the album offer graphic equivalents of official immigration photographs of children, women, and men of various ages, ethnicities, and physical appearances (hairstyles, headdress, clothing, etc.), which blend the anthropological testimony of photography with its norming function as a state apparatus. Similarly, the panel depicting immigrants on the deck of a ship, with their families and suitcases, wrapped in blankets, takes on an equal archival quality, and was probably inspired by historical photographs (Tan 2006, p. 23²).

However, because of the ontological specificity of the photographic referent, this photo-realistic mode of depiction appears ill-suited to a generic perspective or an omnibus intent, which explains Tan’s various attempts at opening the photographic signifier to a wider variety of meanings, for instance, by blurring ethnic, cultural, geographic, and temporal markers. The resulting aesthetics achieves a compromise between the explicit verisimilitude of documentary photography and a broader parabolic interpretation. Nevertheless, in spite of the author’s generalizing efforts, the substrate of European immigration to New York in the early part of the twentieth century remains visible underneath this iconic veil of generality, most notably in details relative to clothing, city life, and work.

Another attempt at seeking universalism and non-specificity in images lies in Tan’s recurrent insertion of fantastic motifs with no immediate ontological referent in a realistic context. For instance, when the migrant’s family leaves its home at dusk to walk to the train station through barely lit streets, the shadow of a dragon tail imprints itself on the wall of a house above them (ibid., p. 9), and this image is expanded in the subsequent double-page spread showing a large section of the city with the same dragon tail weaving in and out, enveloping and constricting the buildings, visualizing an ominous atmosphere. Later in the story, although the author painstakingly reproduces the material details of his character’s immigration journey in realistic fashion, he concludes the travel section of his narrative by transforming the immigration booth through which the migrant was accepted in the country into a hot air balloon that magically drops him in a tenement section of town (ibid., p. 34)—a whimsical mode of transportation that is also employed when his family rejoins him at the end of the novel (ibid., pp. 118–119). A giant statue in the middle of the city’s harbor greets the travelers with multiple signs of hospitality and acceptance: two giant figures standing on boat-shaped pedestals, each wearing different yet unspecific ethnic garb and carrying different pets (a mammal and a bird), as well as various objects (including a suitcase on the immigrant’s side, and a large jar figuring abundance and domestic stability on the receiving party’s side) (Figure 1.1). Both statues shake hands above the water, while the host extends an apple in his other hand, as an offering of prosperity (ibid., pp. 26–27). The particularity of such images also lies in the fact that, in the universe of the story, these fantastic elements are not phantasmagorical but “real,” as they are presented not as metaphorical substitutes for the strangeness of a new world, but as the new world itself. When the main protagonist befriends a strange new pet in his apartment (ibid., p 47)—whose behavior appears mostly canine, but whose physical features blend that of a fish, a marsupial, and a rodent— the animal is presented to him and to the reader as real, as opposed to emblematic or figurative.

Figure 1 2

Source: Tan (2006).

In instances such as Tan’s reimagined Statue of Liberty, the symbolic process remains only partial and equivocal, to the extent that it retains a certain degree of opaqueness and ambivalence. In contrast to pure symbols, which C.S. Peirce classifies as signs “whose relation to their objects is an imputed character,” by virtue of accepted social or cultural conventions (Peirce 1931, p. 56), Tan’s creations do not rely on such habits or consensus, and require the reader’s active interpretation. More specifically, they compel the reader to make connections with his or her own symbolic knowledge to posit hypothetical explanations. In many instances, Tan’s alternate realities function precisely as the opposite of culturally accepted symbols, as a result of their calculated illegibility. In this regard, the numerous large panoramic panels of the new metropolis (Tan 2006, pp. 36–37, 50–51, 63, 124), in addition to the visual appeal of their surreal aesthetics,³ generate an impression of impenetrability and alienation: an accumulation of walls, cone-shaped roofs,⁴ strange statues and monuments (birds, sundials, etc.), chimneys, terraces, bridges, and roads, with an apparent architectural coherence, but no obvious grid, center, or plan to an uninformed gaze; a braided organism of intertwined arabesque shapes that the observer struggles to grasp, practically or conceptually. In this regard, it is the city’s illegibility itself that takes on a symbolic meaning, as it conveys the immigrant’s disjunctive experience of puzzlement and incomprehension, his inability to situate himself and decode urban signifiers. The same strangeness is expressed throughout the book in a variety of recurrent motifs: surreal pets, bizarre foods, peculiar machines and musical instruments, and an undecipherable alphabet.

Throughout the album, such symbols are often organized in coherent networks. For instance, an avian isotopy—in Greimas’ understanding of the term, as an organized repetition of semiotic units (Klinkenberg 1996, p. 118)—stretches across the narrative, and offers a meeting point between symbolism and metonymy. Indeed, the first image of the book is an origami bird (Tan 2006, p. 5), an object whose semiotic function is at the same time analogic or referential (as an approximation of the shape of its ontological referent), metonymic or indexical (to the extent that it results from manual craft and therefore points to its creator through previous contact), and symbolic or allegorical (as birds are given various meanings, both culturally and within the story). When the immigrant leaves his family, he gives his daughter the paper bird, hidden under his hat as a surprise, to defuse the pain of separation, as a gesture of fatherly love (Figure 1.2). She clutches this gift in her hands—indeed, the object represents her father and his bond with his family because he made it. On the ship taking him to the New World, he tears a page of his diary and makes another paper bird, a symbol of hope and connection with his family (ibid., p. 24). Just before reaching their new land, a flock of strange white birds signals the shore’s proximity to the mesmerized gaze of the immigrants on board the ship (ibid., p. 25), and ...