4 December 2013
The Centre for Contemporary Literature hosted an international guest lecture by Dr Golnar Nabizadeh of the University of Western Australia. The lecture was entitled 'The Afterlife of Images: Archives and Intergenerational Trauma in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home', and was attended by staff, doctoral students, students on our MA programmes, and visitors. Dr Nabizadeh's lecture contributed to an investigation of graphic narratives and comic books that is becoming a prominent part of contemporary cultural study.
Abstract
This paper explores the interplay between photography, personal archives and narrative construction in Alison Bechdel’s autographic story Fun Home (2006). Bechdel’s story depicts the frequently contrapuntal relationship between Alison and her father, where the formation of her autographic subjectivity and coming out as a lesbian takes place alongside the discovery of some discomfiting ‘home truths’ such as her father’s homosexuality and suicide.
Bechdel has explained that ‘[i]n many ways photographs really generated the book’, and this paper will explore the role of family photographs and other intimate archives such as diaries, as well as other archival sources. I suggest that Bechdel’s use of personal archives represents an important move towards exploring the limits of the visible in the construction of a visual life narrative, and particularly in relation to the traumatic death of her father.
Drawing on the work of scholars such as Hal Foster, Dominick LaCapra and Cathy Caruth, this paper will also theorise grief, mourning and traumatic recall in a visual setting. In this way, it is suggested that Fun Home enlivens debates about what it means to remember, and to forget, within a network of intimate archives.
About the Lecturer
Dr Golnar Nabizadeh is a Lecturer and Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia, where she is currently teaching on journey narratives. She has published on pedagogy and cultural studies, and is currently working on an edited collection of papers on children’s literature and visual texts for the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. She is also working on a monograph entitled Departure and Arrival: Loss and Mourning in Literary Migrant Narratives. Her broader research interests include trauma and memory studies, cultural mourning, photography and transnational literature.
Image by Parrish Baker under a a CC BY-NC-ND license.
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