Emotion, memory and storytelling: postmemorial emotion work in Vietnamese American graphic narratives

The article demonstrates how graphic narratives become a medium for managing inherited emotions in Vietnamese American second-generation works, GB Tran’s Vietnamerica and Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do . Highlighting the intergenerational transmission of emotions in Vietnamese American families through parental stories about the Vietnam War, the article argues that the authors’ attempts to represent these family stories transform graphic literature into a medium for postmemorial emotion work. While drawing theoretical insights from the sociology of emotions, the study employs textual analysis to thematically close read Vietnamerica and The Best We Could Do to understand the graphic strategies that aid emotion work. The graphic recreation of stories, which are narrativised versions of their inherited trauma memories, can offer potential trauma resolution and autobiographical clarity while fostering communal bonding. The analysis finds that in the works, emotion work is facilitated by various literary strategies, such as affective genealogies, affective geographies, affective pasts, and postmemorial re-embodiment. In a broader sense, the study concludes that graphic narrative strategies can aid in postmemorial emotion work for second-generation refugees grappling with inherited trauma, incoherent autobiographical knowledge, and detachment from the community or family.