Graphic Heritage: Exploring Postcolonial Identities and Vietnamese Spaces in the Francophone Graphic Novel

ABSTRACT

Similarly to novels, graphic-literary forms of expression have mapped the evolution of historical, social, and cultural issues. One such case is the political and cultural relation between France and Vietnam, from the Indochinese colonization period to the Francophone Vietnamese Diaspora. It can be argued that the manner in which places are represented in Francophone graphic novels articulates Vietnamese colonial and post-colonial identities. Francophone graphic novels present how the issues of space and power are historically central to the ideology of colonialism. This article therefore analyzes two graphic novels, Maltaite and Lapière's Le Carrefour de Nâm-Pha (1987) and Truong and Leroi's Le Dragon de bambou (1991), and the promotion of imperialist power in the Francophone authors’ depiction of colonial regions like Vietnam. These areas are portrayed as physically and psychologically dangerous, threatening to consume the white colonizer. In contrast, this article looks at Clément Baloup's Quitter Saigon: Mémoires de Viet Kieu (2006) and suggests that his inventive graphic and textual practices create new spaces of belonging for transnational subjects. Baloup's emotionally provocative variations in traditional comic art style, which consist of a detailed focus on human bodies and landscapes, and sacrifice of visual realism, allow him to visually create what Homi Bhabha calls a “third space,” a space of new forms of cultural meaning and production that blurs the limitations of existing boundaries and calls into question established categorizations of culture and identity (34–35). The article thus establishes that, in this “third space,” both the author and readers are participating in the reassessment of a Western conception of Vietnam's heritage and in the reinscription of Vietnamese collective trauma into a transnational history.

KEYWORDS:

• Vietnam
• French Indochina
• colonial stereotypes
• post-colonial studies
• French comics
• graphic novels

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aurélie Chevant

Aurélie Chevant-Aksoy is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Soka University of America. She finished her PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara in June 2013. Her research sheds new light on the matrilineal underpinnings of Vietnamese society, on the post-colonial implications of being identified as a “Francophone” writer, and on the complex cultural and social identity of the Vietnamese Diaspora. She also works on the use of graphic novels and comics in the second-language classroom, on the graphic representations of historical trauma and exile, and on the implications of pictorial Vietnamese historical and personal testimonies in Francophone post-colonial contexts.