Mardi 23 avril 2024, 18h, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, salle 126 Saint-Charles 1 et en visioconférence.
Séminaire organisé par Claire Omhovère dans le cadre de l’axe « Faire commun » d’EMMA. Intervention de Eleanor Ty (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada).
In Our Dreams, Ourselves I examine three graphic memoirs by 1.5 and second-generation Asian American and Asian Canadian creators who are exploring their ethnic and gender identities, as well as their professional aspirations. I argue that in contemporary US and Canadian society, many children of Asian immigrants struggle to separate their own wishes from that of their parents. Because of parental and cultural pressures, guilt, feelings of responsibility and indebtedness, children of Asian American parents often suppress their own dreams for the sake of pleasing their family. In addition, they experience misidentification, stereotyping, and alienation from the society outside.
In this presentation, I will look at three graphic memoirs: Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream, about the experiences of growing up mixed-race Filipina and Egyptian; Kimiko Tobimatsu and Keet Geniza’s Kimiko Does Cancer, about the challenges of a queer woman who is diagnosed with cancer; and Laura Gao’s Messy Roots, created during the pandemic when anti-Chinese sentiments were high, to show how comics enables these authors to express their uneasiness with the ghosts within them, find ways to escape, and discover their own desires. Their graphic memoirs reveal the pain, pressures, and pleasures of living as minoritized and underrepresented subjects.
Présentation de l’intervenant: Eleanor Ty, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and Fulbright Canada alumna, is Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has published on life writing, graphic novel, Asian North American, and 18th-Century British literature. She is author of Asianfail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority (U of Illinois P, 2017); Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives (U of Minnesota P, 2010), and The Politics of the Visible in Asian North American Narratives (U Toronto P 2004). Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives (Ohio State UP, 2022) won the Comics Studies Society’s 2022 Prize for Edited Book Collection.