PANA Institute for Leadership Development

Barbara Schwartz Brus, Phillips Theological Seminary:  Barbara@xeniainstitute.org

This project willexamine graphic novels as a medium through which mainstream constructions and performances of identity, particularly race and gender, are communicated and upheld, but also a medium through which identity can be reclaimed, reimagined or subverted. The alternative nature of the graphic novel, a format that has been growing in popularity and academic acceptance in recent years, provides not only a narrative field in which understandings of identity can be reshaped and bent, but also a visual one where the illustrative nature of the genre allows authors/illustrators to use readers’ expectations against them to show how fluid identity can be. That visual field emphasizes in the narrative the performative nature of identity, thus subverting mainstream understandings of identity as essentialized or natural, and creating a literary alternative space where readers who have been pushed out of the dominant culture because they do not conform to race/gender/sexuality norms may reimagine new understandings and identity enactments.

Through the examination of recently published and critically acclaimed graphic novels ––most notably works by Gene Luen Yang (American Born Chinese, The Eternal Smile, Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks, etc.), Planet Hulk by Greg Pak, and Incognegro by Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece –– I will analyze how the racial identities of the main characters are performed and reimagined within the narratives and the illustrations that accompany them. I particularly will look at how the menace of mimicry operates to use essentialized expectations of racial identity in order to simultaneously subvert them. I will map out how the writers/illustrators use the medium to visually and literarily show how the characters negotiate their social identities in the dominant culture by “passing”; that is, by allowing the performance of certain acts or embrace of certain visual cues related to race to augment the spectators’ view of who they are. While stories about passing have, in the past, been used as cautionary tales against the practice, Yang and Johnson/Pleece particularly turn the table on that narrative and emphasize in their graphic novels the performativity that exists within those acts and cues, with intention of leading the characters ––and the readers who identify with them –– toward the sublimation of their subjectivity. 

Additionally, thesegraphic novels add to the conversation about theological anthropology.  For example, the graphic novels by GeneLuen Yang, particularly AmericanBorn Chinese, focus on understandings of identity from a Christianperspective. However, the other graphic novels that deal with race/gender/classidentity also present messages of how context and self-realization are vital tothe characters’ understandings of themselves, their communities and theirrelationships with their ultimate concerns.