Migration, Exile, and Diaspora in Graphic Life Narratives

[para. 1]: "Graphic life narratives, especially memoirs, diaries, and auto|biographies in the form of comics, have flourished in the three decades since the landmark publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. As a distinct field that combines life-narrative studies and comics studies, graphic life narrative scholarship has gravitated toward texts that visualize stories of the self in relation to memory, history, trauma, and reconciliation within familial, cultural, and national contexts. Indeed, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies has published over fifteen critical articles on graphic life narratives in the past decade on a variety of topics: illness, ageing, and disability; childhood and intergenerational life narratives; history and biography; and the pedagogy of graphic life narratives in the postsecondary classroom. At the same time, prose life writing by migrants, refugees, exiles, and subjects of multiple (sometimes multigenerational) diasporas has come to the fore. In her essay on the trajectories of life writing studies, “Migrations and Metamorphoses,” Eva Karpinski highlights the confluences between critical interdisciplinarity and transformation and human migrations and movement. Citing French philosopher Catherine Malabou, Karpinski provides a crucial context for understanding the recent critical interest in the proliferation of migrant, exilic, and diasporic graphic life narratives, as well as new forms, such as comics: “change is at once migratory and metamorphic: life writing praxis changes its trajectory and takes new directions while it also changes its form, allowing for new materializations of becoming. Hence life writing is always en route to change (for example, shifting its focus from subjectivity to affective ‘relationscapes’) and in the process of internal differentiation (experimenting with new media and practices).”