- How children figure into ideas about citizenship and human rights;
- The mobility of children, across national borders as well as other social and political borders;
- The ways children forge their own identities on the move, specifically in relationship to migration;
- The way experiences of im/migration, citizenship, and national belonging intersect with other aspects of identity, such as language, education, class, gender, sexuality, and ability;
- How comics and graphic narratives capture and represent child and adolescent perspectives and epistemologies on the page;
- How comics’ formal borders (panels and frames) represent and reframe national borders, particularly as they affect migrant children and youth.
Our panel includes four speakers. While we recognize that this allows less speaking time, we think it is important to include a diverse range of scholarly perspectives and textual examples in this session on migration, which has broad appeal to those within and beyond the study of comics and graphic narratives and children’s and young adult literature. To ensure there is at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion, we will keep introductory remarks to a minimum and ask presenters to keep their presentations under thirteen minutes.
Our first two panelists examine depictions of child and youth migration in Latinx graphic narratives. Angie C. Bonilla explores how Julio Anta’s Home, a comic book that reimagines the superhero genre by granting powers to a child migrant from Guatemala, centers touch as an aesthetic strategy and epistemological framework that resists the logics of detention. Charles Hatfield argues that “language becomes both social divider and bridge” in Jose Pimienta’s middle-grade graphic novel Halfway to Somewhere, a fictional coming-of-age story of a Ave, a non-binary middle schooler who immigrates from Mexico to the United States. Both papers examine experiences of family separation, state violence, cultural alienation, and linguistic violence while emphasizing children’s agency and aesthetics of resistance.
Our final two speakers discuss depictions of children and youth in graphic memoirs of migration from Southeast and East Asia to the United States. Gowri Nair analyzes Thi Bui’s depiction of and confrontation with her childhood self in The Best We Could Do, a story of her family’s refugee migration from Vietnam after the war. Ishita Sehgal offers a comparative analysis of Robin Ha’s Almost American Girl, which examines the teen author’s “linguistic isolation and cultural misplacement after immigrating from South Korea to the United States,” and Laura Gao’s Messy Roots, which “revisits the author’s childhood immigration from Wuhan” and explores queer immigrant identity. Both papers explore comics-making as a way of documenting traumatic experiences of migration, depicting complex identities, and drawing oneself into community.
These papers explore migration from a variety of geographic, sociopolitical, and linguistic perspectives. All of our speakers approach the topic of migration through interdisciplinary and intersectional frameworks. Our panel also includes speakers from different departments (Latina/o Studies and English), universities (R1 and teaching-focused public universities), and ranks (graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and full professors). Our panelists also speak to the topic of migration from their own diverse positionalities, including their own linguistic, geographic, racial, and gendered identities.