ABSTRACT
Persepolis, at its simplest, tells the story of Marji, an Iranian child who grows up through the Iranian Islamic Revolution and subsequent Iran-Iraq war, waiting out much of the latter in Austria, where she spends her teenage years, before returning to Iran to try and live under an oppressive theocratic dictatorship. While they might seem like dramatically different narratives, Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, and Taiyo Matsumoto's Tekkon Kinkreet are both intensely interested in the individual's ability to participate in the articulation of cultural identity when overwhelming external pressures seek to deprive them of this power. Both Persepolis and Tekkon Kinkreet show how one might express a difference between cultures while at the same time safeguarding the right to difference within them, in a manner that opposes other, global narratives that radically simplify and foreclose upon national and local identities. The uneasy layering of the material object with symbolic weight is ubiquitous in Persepolis.
