Movement and Mobility: Representing Trauma Through Graphic Narratives

Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies 7 (2016) 54-69 Movement and Mobility: Representing Trauma through Graphic Narratives By Stella Oh Introduction In her book Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, Hillary Chute argues that the “rich visual-verbal form of comics” is an ideal way to “represent trauma productively and ethically” (Chute 3). She analyzes the works of several female authors who narrate stories of trauma through the medium of the graphic narrative. Chute suggests that these female authors who recount their traumatic experiences “return to events to literally re-view them, and in so doing, they productively point to the female subject as both an object of looking and a creator of looking and sight” (Chute 2). From Busan to San Francisco (2012), a collective graphic narrative produced by twenty-one students at Stanford’s Graphic Novel Project, and Mail Order Bride (2001) by Canadian writer Mark Kalesniko both perform similar acts of revisiting traumatic events. From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride narrate the stories of young women from South Korea who are trafficked as sex workers and mail-order brides to US and Canada respectively. Both graphic narratives shed light on the industry of human trafficking which represents the third largest criminal enterprise in the world with an estimated 700,000 individuals, mostly women and children who are trafficked each year. While both works address topics dealing with the trade and traffic of South Korean women to countries in the West, they also diverge and differ. The collaborative process of undergraduate students who composed From Busan to San Francisco differs greatly from Kalesniko’s single-authored Mail Order Bride. In an interview with John Seven, Adam Johnson who heads the Stanford Graphic Novel Project along with Tom Kealy and Dan Archer, stated that students in the class base the graphic novel project on a true story that deals with issues of social justice. Students then research the story 1 1 Steward Chang, “Feminism in Yellowface,” Harvard Gender and Law Journal 38 (2015): 301-334, 317. See also Shelly George, “The Strong Arm of the Law is Weak: How the Trafficking Victims Protection Act Fails to Assist Effectively Victims of the Sex Trade,” 45 Creighton Law Review (2012) and Crystal Twitty, “Pretty Pennies for Pretty Faces: Trafficking of Women for the International Sex Trade,” Regent Journal of International Law 2 (2004). Stella Oh is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University where she teaches courses on Gender, Race, and Literature; Graphic Narratives; Gender and Popular Culture; and Feminist Theories. Her research on race, gender, and narrative ethics has appeared in journals such as LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, AJWS: Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, and Amerasia. She has also contributed chapters to scholarly collections including Mine Okubo: Following Her Own Road, Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander, and Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific. ISSN: 2154-2171 AALDP|Oh and engage in a graphic interpretation of the true story. Emphasizing narration and interpretation, Johnson notes “you have a duty to tell the story of others who for whatever reason can’t tell a story” since “people who have been through traumatic experiences in their lives are often the least able to speak of their experiences, and they’re the ones we need to hear from the most.” Speaking for those who are “the least able to speak of their experiences” harkens to Gayatri Spivak’s seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” What does it mean when Western voices speak for the subaltern? How does authorship by students at an Ivy Leave institution like Stanford shape this graphic narrative? In a similar vein, how do we read the representation of Kyung in Mail Order Bride, by Mark Kalesniko, a white male Canadian writer? What are the politics of speaking for the subaltern other? Both the students at Stanford and Kalesniko come from positions of economic and racial privilege. In “speaking for the subaltern” to borrow a phrase from Spivak, Kalesniko and the students at the Stanford Graphic Novel Project promote the mobility and visibility of “stories that haven’t come to people’s attention” through their narration, illustration, and circulation of those stories. Yet, it is a complicated and contested process that involves both the representation of the voices of the subaltern as well as its appropriation. These graphic narratives negotiate the complex relationship between giving voice and appropriating voice, as the female protagonists From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride are both “object[s] of looking and creator[s] of looking and sight” who struggle to “represent trauma productively and ethically” (Chute 3). As fictional works that attempt to narrate the experiences of a racialized and sexualized Other, both From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride address what Immanuel Levinas calls “ethical optics,” an optical responsibility and optical demand of the face that is a “relation without relation” (Levinas 23). This optical demand of the face of the Other is a “relation without relation,” that is, the subject that desires to understand and know the Other yet goes beyond its relational capacity (23). According to Levinas, reciprocity is what makes this visual investment ethical. The mutual engagement between the visualizing self and the visualized Other is at the core of the ethical relationship. Levinas’ notion of ethics as an optical demand is a useful starting point for thinking about how panel movements in comic structure can allow for ethical spectatorship. In particular, From Busan to San Francisco and Mail Order Bride reveal how movement functions as a form of ethical spectatorship that provides opportunities to rethink the processes and power relations in observation, representation and identification. The geographical movements of the protagonists from South Korea to US and Canada as well as the graphical movements of the panel arrangements provide a form of ethical optics that allow us to reconsider narratives of trauma and commodification and even be affectively moved. Depicting the surveillance of Asian female bodies as they move from South Korea to US and Canada, these texts provide a form of ethical optics that prompt us to reconsider the mobility and legibility of racialized and gendered individuals. In addition, panel configurations and spatial arrangements are used to interrogate identity and question how we come to see ourselves as subjects in relation to other subjects, ourselves, and the tools by which we measure such relations. 2 3 2 3 John Seven, “Passion, Ideas and Teamwork: the Stanford Graphic Novel Project” (August 24, 2010). Ibid. 55 AALDP|Oh Transnational discourses of cartog (...truncated)