Category: memory

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Photographs and Memory in Thi Bui’s “The Best We Could Do”: Part II

In my previous post, I started writing about photographs and constructions of memory in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do. Over the past year, I’ve been drawn to the ways that graphic memoirists use actual photographs within their work. Occasionally, they use actual copies of the photographs, but for the majority of the texts that I have looked at, creators reproduce the photographs, … Read More Photographs and Memory in Thi Bui’s “The Best We Could Do”: Part II

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Photographs and Memories in Thi Bui’s “The Best We Could Do”: Part I

In my last post, I looked at the role of photographs in Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream. Today, I want to continue that discussion by looking at the ways that Thi Bui depicts and deploys photographs in The Best We Could Do, a graphic memoir about her family’s escape from South Vietnam and immigration to the United States in 1970s. On the … Read More Photographs and Memories in Thi Bui’s “The Best We Could Do”: Part I

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Photographs and Memory in Malaka Gharib’s “I Was Their American Dream”

A few weeks ago, I read Malaka Gharib’s I Was Their American Dream. Gharib’s graphic memoir details coming of age as a first generation American immigrant, the daughter of a Filipino mother and Egyptian father. She explores the ways that she struggled with her identity, and the ways that she felt pulled, a lot of the time, in at least three directions in this … Read More Photographs and Memory in Malaka Gharib’s “I Was Their American Dream”

The Memory Beneath Our Feet

A couple of weeks ago I received my copy of Box of Bones, a project created by Ayize Jama Everett and John Jennings. Book one contains five stories, each written and illustrated by different artists. The overarching connective tissue within Box of Bones is Lindsay Ford, a PhD student in Folklore/African American Studies at UC Berkeley. Ford’s work centers on the Box of Bones, … Read More The Memory Beneath Our Feet

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Dream and Reality in Craig Thompson’s “Blankets”

Over the course of this semester, one of the recurring discussions in the graphic memoirs class has been about the ways that these texts approach memory and the past. I’ve written about this already with Kristen Radtke’s Imagine Wanting Only This where I discuss Radtke’s movement back and forth between specific scenes in the text. In this post, I want to look at this … Read More Dream and Reality in Craig Thompson’s “Blankets”