Making Visible the Nativism-Ableism Matrix:
The Rhetoric of Immigrants’ Comics

Abstract

Nativist ideology, which dominates public discourse, implements ableist hierarchies to reduce immigrants to diseases of the body politic. Immigrants’ graphic narratives, on the other hand, reveal the disabling effects of xenophobic environments. Rhetoricians have begun to recognize comics’ persuasive potential but thus far have not explored their role in immigration rhetoric. Using this medium’s affordances, immigrants critique the nativism-ableism matrix, as exemplified by Parsua Bashi’s comics memoir about immigrating to Switzerland from Iran, Nylon Road (2006/2009). Bashi’s self-worth, displaced by her unreceptive context, depends on accepting a mental (dis)ability. Her comic counters nativism’s eugenic underpinnings by visualizing variation.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Rhetoric Review reviewers David Beard and Christina Cedillo provided detailed guidance on earlier drafts of this article. I thank them for their role in the revision process. I also thank Susan Squier for teaching the seminar in which this project originally developed. Finally, I am grateful to Kein & Aber, the publisher of Nylon Road: Eine Graphische Novelle (the original, German-language version), for permitting me to reproduce images. The figures in this article appear thanks to their generosity.

2 Counterstory is “a method to empower the marginalized through the formation of stories with which to intervene in the erasures accomplished in ‘majoritarian’ stories or ‘master narratives’” (Martinez 214).

3 This sample is necessarily a limited selection of various migrant comics; for some references, see synopses in Rifkind and in Reyns-Chikuma and Ben Lazreg. Only English-language titles are included in the sample, leaving out important works like the series Petit Polio by Farid Boudjellal, which depicts a child of Algerian immigrants growing up in France from 1958 to 1974. Margaret Flinn notes that in the series, immigrants’ “bodies that are perhaps ‘disabled’ but at the same time resolutely morally ‘whole’ . . . [show] the embrace of difference functioning as a necessary part of the contemporary French everyday” (355). Clearly, intriguing intersections between immigration, disability, and comics are happening in languages besides English.

4 For more of my analysis of Bui’s memoir, please see my article in Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, “No Reclaimed Homeland: Thi Bui’s Postcolonial Historiography in The Best We Could Do.”

5 Besides Nylon Road, Bashi has published several other books: a children’s book in Farsi, A Baby’s First-Year Calendar of Memories (1999); an art book collaboration with photographer Matt Walker, Persische Kontraste: Orientalisches Memo (2008); and a collection of essays in German, Briefe aus Teheran (2010).

6 Julia Watson’s treatment of Nylon Road was the only scholarly article centering on this text I found in my initial research (subsequently, another analysis, by Mehraneh Ebrahimi, was published). Watson reads the memoir through the lens of autobiography studies, focusing on Bashi’s identity: “The narrator, whether as leftist Iranian resister in the Islamic Republic or ‘liberated’ Euromigrant, is a dialogical subject whose dynamic and ever-incomplete project of self-invention is inflected by her multiple, conflicting identity positions” (99). Watson assesses Bashi’s social critiques, as I do here, but does not identify disability as a prominent theme.

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Notes on contributors

Layli Maria Miron

Layli Maria Miron is a PhD student at Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on rhetorics of immigration and religion. She can be reached at [email protected].