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A Graphic Self

This essay traces a crucial transition in the enactment of the autobiographical text and addresses its creative appropriation by Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian immigrant living in France, in Persepolis. I will examine her use of comics – a thematically and representationally complex form that deploys the strategic juxtaposition of sequential text and image – as the medium for her memoir that enacts her process of self-identification and negotiation of cultural and/or national affiliation. Here, the juxtaposition of image and words constitutive of graphic narratives yields a new artistic, literary, and creative experience – a revised aesthetic. Combining theories on the childhood memoir and comics, I argue that we must approach contemporary graphic autobiographies as increasingly sophisticated forms of inscribing the past and read Satrapi's text as a site for the negotiation and management of the memory of childhood perceptions and positioning, family, history, politics, religion, and art.