ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |21 pages

Introduction

In the Shadow of Liberty: Immigration and the Graphic Space

part 1|110 pages

Shaping Comic Traditions, Portraying Immigrants

chapter 1|14 pages

Of Birds and Men

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

chapter 2|15 pages

“How Quickly We Forget”

Immigration and Family Narrative in James Sturm’s The Golem’s Mighty Swing and Unstable Molecules

chapter 3|18 pages

Postcards from the Past

The 1893 Chicago World Fair and Immigration in Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

chapter 4|17 pages

From Immigrants to Filibusters

The Curious Case of R. F. Outcault’s Yellow Kid

chapter 6|16 pages

More than a Cockroach

Dreaming and Surviving in Will Eisner’s A Life Force

chapter 7|14 pages

Stranded by Empire

The Forced Migrants of Shirato Sanpei’s Kieyuku shōjo

part 2|106 pages

Border Crossings, Immigrant Identity

chapter 8|14 pages

Once Upon a Time on the Border

Immigration and Mexican Comic Book Westerns

chapter 10|11 pages

Brodeck’s Report (Manu Larcenet)

A Study in Intermediality

chapter 11|16 pages

Migra Mouse

Immigration, Satire, and Hybridity as Latino/a Decolonial Acts

chapter 12|15 pages

Tracing Trauma

Questioning Understanding of Clandestine Migration in Amazigh: itinéraire d’hommes libres

chapter 14|14 pages

African Diaspora and Black Bodies

X-Men’s Storm