Visual melancholy in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival

Abstract

This paper analyses several aspects of Shaun Tan’s visual work The Arrival (2006. Melbourne: Lothian), which has found appreciative audiences among children and adults alike. The Arrival offers a meditative exploration of migration, using a muted colour scheme and landscape, which is simultaneously familiar and surreal to create an imagined city whose inhabitants are marked by some kind of ‘injury’. Drawing on scholarly debates on photography, nostalgia and gestural mimicry, the paper suggests that Tan’s work develops its affective content through a sophisticated range of visual codes and clues. Finally, the paper theorises the notion of ‘the fold’ to discuss how Tan’s representation of origami encapsulates the relation between ‘home’ and the new world. The paper suggests that it is the ability of the text to hold the imagination of readers of all ages that accounts for the widespread success of the text.

Keywords:

• Shaun Tan
• origami
• picturebook
• migration
• photography
• trauma
• repetition

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Golnar Nabizadeh

Golnar Nabizadeh is an Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia, teaching in the areas of modernist literature and film. She has published on pedagogy and cultural studies, and on works by Alison Bechdel and Art Spiegelman. She is currently working on a monograph entitled Departure and Arrival: Loss and Mourning in Literary Migrant Narratives, as well as a collaborative research project on the construction of ‘global wests’. Her broader research interests include trauma and memory studies, cultural mourning, graphic narratives, photography and transnational literature.