“C’est vraiment un sale épisode de ma vie”: Remembering French Indochina in Clément Baloup’s Mémoires de Viet Kieu

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Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies
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Sawin, Warisara Emily
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This paper examines Clément Baloup’s graphic novel series Mémoires de Viet Kieu (Quitter Saigon, 2006; Les linh tho, immigrés de force, 2017) and its engagement with visual devices and narrative structures that resist marginalization and silence while providing a multidirectional component to the postmemory of trauma, war violence, and displacement in postcolonial France. This paper seeks to argue that Baloup’s work offers a personal perspective on small-scale history and the history of family structures, with the cartoonist serving as a mediator. Baloup’s use of the comic medium enables him to weave together fragmented multivocal testimonies from various people into a completely linear story. By exploring the themes of life as a racialized minority in France, freedom, and mosaics, the paper assesses the extent to which Baloup creates a new aesthetic of storytelling as a witness that contributes to postcolonial studies. Overall, this paper highlights the graphic novel’s unique ability to provide additional voices to postcolonial discourse outside of traditional mediums.

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CC BY 4.0