Resources on Iran and the Iranian Revolution

Brief History of Iran

BBC timeline

NY Times Guide to Iranian Revolution 

BBC documentary

Censoring Persepolis?

Check out this article about a recent censorship scandal involving Persepolis and the Chicago public school system.  How does this censorship debate connect to the conversation we're having in class about the Muhammed cartoons in Denmark and Spiegelman's argument about them? How do we determine when/ if visual images are too graphic or upsetting to be shared?

Open space for posting on comics!

Consider this space to be like the blank, cartoon face above--a tabula rasa in which you can write about and post anything you like, comics-related--whether that be links to comics you like, thoughts on class discussion, or comments on comics events around town.

Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi was born in Iran in 1969 and lived through some of the most difficult years of the nation's history. Satrapi's family was a politically-active one with members critical of both the Shah of Iran and the Islamic regime that came to replace him. In Persepolis, Satrapi tells the story of her own childhood but also explores the complexities of Iranian history, the politics of imperialism, the strictures of religious fundamentalism, and the possibilities for survival in exile.

Like Maus, Marjane Satrapi's graphic narrative, Persepolis, is a memoir that marries text and image to tell a story of historical and personal rupture. Persepolis tells the story of Satrapi's childhood experiences during the time of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and her later exile from her homeland. How is Satrapi's story different from the usual coming-of-age narratives we are used to reading in novels and short stories? How does the visual aspect of Persepolis allow Satrapi to show/ not show the graphic violence perpetrated during the bloody revolts and warfare that took place in Iran during the time she was growing up? Persepolis has recently been made into a film. Is Persepolis the graphic narrative already somehow cinematic?

Maus and Race

In class, we discussed the way in which Art Spiegelman played off of Nazi racial theory in his choice to depict Jewish characters as mice and Nazi characters as cats.  How else does he thematize race and ethnicity and, particularly, what Ian Haney-Lopez called "the social construction of race" in the essay you read for class?  How does the image that opens Book II of Maus, Art's notebook filled with sketches of his wife Francoise as a mouse, a frog, a French poodle, and a moose, provide a commentary on racial thinking?  What can we make of the use of masking in Book II as it relates to the same topic?

Welcome to ENGL 3042--Topics in Ethnic American Literature: Comics, Race, and Ethnicity

Welcome to the blog for our ENGL 3042 course!  A number of you have approached me asking for more space to continue our classroom conversations, as well as to post thoughts and links to comics-related material you find in between our classes.  For this reason, I've decided to open up a blog for our course.  I will try to make sure to post at least once for each book/ topic we treat in class, leaving room for you to make comments.  I can also give you all permission to post on the blog about issues that interest you.  If you have a gmail account or are willing to sign up for a blogger account, you should be able to post on this site.  Please let me know if you have any problems posting and I look forward to chatting with you on this site!