Rendering family history: Graphic style in GB Tran’s Vietnamerica

This article foregrounds the graphic style of Vietnamerica . It analyses how certain artistic decisions within the work’s dominant graphic style that emphasize place and space ground the reader in the narrative and lead to the redefinition of refugee space as ‘Vietnamerica’. In contrast, the use of multiple graphic styles in this work, or ‘polygraphie’ (after Thierry Smolderen), takes the reader out of the narrative through graphic citations to Socialist Realist propaganda posters and Hergé’s Tintin comics. The use of these graphic citations challenge dominant ‘image-texts’, and they highlight the mediated nature of the histories within the work. This article’s attention to graphic style fills a gap in the existing comics studies scholarship about Vietnamerica , which typically emphasizes narrative themes of family, history, identity and war, but sometimes does not pay as much attention to how analysing the marks on the page, rather than only what they represent, can contribute to the interpretation of the work.