The Rhetoric of Identity Politics and Subversive Ethnic Representations in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese

Abstract

Ever since Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize with his graphic novel “MAUS”, graphic novels became widely recognized by literary scholars as new medium for serious literary expressions. Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian writer, also published her immensely popular “Persepolis” and the animated version of the book won a prize at the Academy Awards. In her graphic novel, she conveys her Bildungsroman experience as a little girl growing up in the fundamentalist Iran. Her work opened many discussions on how graphic novel, especially Bildungsroman graphic novel, could function as a new literary genre for the minority Asian Americans to express race and ethnic issues in America as well. This paper examines “American Born Chinese”, a graphic novel by Chinese American writer Gene Luen Yang which won many awards and also was included in the literature book reading list for American high school students. Yang combines elements of a famous Chinese folk tale and his own growing-up experiences as a minority in a white-majority environment in his work. This paper analyzes how Yang maintains his Asian identity but at the same time exposes mis-representations of Asians in American society. Furthermore, this paper focuses on the rhetorics of the identity politics and subversive mis-representations of race in Yang’s work. Finally this paper examines how the racial mis-representations and stereotypes could make comebacks even in the contemporary media and literature.