Dr. Melissa Schuh // guest talk : Anglophone Asian Voices in Contemporary Graphic Memoir and Life Writing: Questions of Self-representation and Mental Illness
26. May
16:15-17:45 | C 12.101 - all welcome
Alongside popular media representations of Asian American lives, such as the 2018
blockbuster romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, life writing by Anglophone Asian authors has
garnered critical interest and acclaim in recent years. The particular experiences of racism,
discrimination, and othering that Asian Americans face are often addressed in such writing, for
example in the context of the model minority myth of Asians as supposedly more successful and
hard-working immigrants which places Asian Americans in a racial hierarchy towards other racially
minoritised groups.
Taking the essay collection Minor Feelings (2020) by Cathy Park Hong and the graphic memoir In
Limbo (2023) by Deb JJ Lee as case studies, this paper will explore the relationship between a
sense of self-fragmentation and the affective experiences of immigration and racial othering due to
related trauma and mental illness. While the essay and the graphic memoir engage in different
formal and generic conventions of contemporary life writing, the examples of Hong’s and Lee’s work
serve to illustrate how Anglophone Asian authors use forms of life writing that provide narrative
possibilities of representing lives that challenge expectations of autobiographical unity and
cohesion of the self. Rather than adhering to such conventional tropes of autobiography, Anglophone
Asian life writing foregrounds the difficulty, ambiguity, and disruption of lives through narrative
representations of self-fragmentation, thus making readable otherwise overlooked or neglected
experiences of othering and self. Drawing on theories of orientalism and Xine Yao’s concept of
disaffection (2021), this paper will discuss the specific affordances that the essay form and the
graphic memoir offer with regard to rendering fragmentation as well as dissolution and loss of self
in the face of anti-Asian racism and trauma.
Contact: PD Dr. Jennifer S. Henke: jennifer.henke@leuphana.de