Jean-Philippe Stassen, Joe Sacco, Shaun Tan, Zabus & Hippolyte, Yvan Alagbé, and Bill) will give a critical insight into the artistic scope, the testimonial truthfulness, and the political significance of these graphic productions. Selective readings of post-2000 works by Francophone and Anglophone authors (e.g. This article deals with the multifaceted and increasingly visible topic of migration in contemporary graphic literature. While Tan’s ‘new-world metropolis’ is shown ‘through the bewildered eyes of a newly arrived immigrant’ (Tan 2010: 20) suffering the pain of arrival, it is also a postmemorial reinterpretation of the new home that can exist for future immigrants.
Set in a dreamlike, imaginary ‘utopian city’ (Tan 2010: 20), the postmemorial home I argue, is one based on ‘imaginative investment, projection and creation’ (Hirsch 2008: 107). The paper also addresses how the immigrant’s new home has been re-presented in a ‘time and place … impregnated with a sense of unreality’ (Bachelard 1994: 58). This paper examines how Tan reinterprets silenced trauma in The Arrival, and how in his wordless novel, the narrative is able to be read by first- and post-generations as a re-presentation of their own personal, familial, and cultural journeys. In fact, the visual re-presentation is the narrative, embodying many metaphoric and silenced fears, and trauma associated with immigration. Although Tan’s work depicts the immigrant journey and success story solely via images, it ‘is far from a facile narrative about immigrant experience’ (Boatright 2010: 470).
In ‘the traditional immigrant journey’, states academic Madelaine Hron, ‘it is assumed the immigrants will eventually ‘arrive’ and successfully integrate or assimilate into their new host society’ (2009: 16). Through Shaun Tan’s award-winning graphic novel The Arrival (2006), the journey and arrival into the imagined home are examined in terms of the narrative characteristics within the immigrant genre.
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