Traumatic Peregrinations: Intergenerational Memory and Migration in Nina Bunjevac’s Fatherland
This essay analyzes images of both movement and immobility in Nina Bunjevac’s Fatherland, a Canadian graphic memoir in which the author/illustrator traces her father’s involvement in a Serbian nationalist terrorist cell. Although, as scholars such as Mihaela Precup have convincingly argued, Bunjevac...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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European Association for American Studies
2023-11-01
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| Series: | European Journal of American Studies |
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| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/21099 |
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| Summary: | This essay analyzes images of both movement and immobility in Nina Bunjevac’s Fatherland, a Canadian graphic memoir in which the author/illustrator traces her father’s involvement in a Serbian nationalist terrorist cell. Although, as scholars such as Mihaela Precup have convincingly argued, Bunjevac depicts her father as trapped by historical circumstances he cannot control—and her larger family as “frozen in disbelief, anger, and sadness” (220)—I maintain that such immobility is paradoxically the consequence of constant movement. In the course of her narrative, Bunjevac, while she does not excuse her father’s actions or even depict him sympathetically, nevertheless shows how three generations of wartime displacement and transnational migration traumatized her father and in turn her immediate family. Thus, I maintain that her graphic narrative demonstrates how Astrid Erll’s concept of “travelling memory” might be enlarged to address how traumatic memories follow, and become uncannily reenacted by, migrants and displaced people. Bunjevac’s text is a particularly effective demonstration of this dimension of travelling memory because its very form as a graphic memoir necessarily depends on such elements of fracture, repetition, and difference. |
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| ISSN: | 1991-9336 |