Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives (Studies in Comics and Cartoons ) (Hardcover)

Beyond the Icon: Asian American Graphic Narratives (Studies in Comics and Cartoons ) By Eleanor Ty (Editor) Cover Image
By Eleanor Ty (Editor)
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Description


Winner, 2023 Comics Studies Society Edited Book Prize

While most US-based comics studies anthologies tend to neglect race, Beyond the Icon brings it to the foreground through an analysis of the vibrant and growing body of graphic narratives by Asian North American creators in the twenty-first century. By demonstrating how the forms and styles of the comics genre help depict Asian Americans as nuanced individuals in ways that words alone may not, Beyond the Icon makes the case for comics as a crucial artistic form in Asian American cultural production––one used to counter misrepresentations and myths, rewrite official history, and de-exoticize the Asian American experience.

An interdisciplinary team of contributors offers exciting new readings of key texts, including Ms. Marvel, George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew’s The Shadow Hero, works by Adrian Tomine and Jillian Tamaki, and more, to uncover the ways in which Asian American comics authors employ graphic narratives to provide full and complex depictions of Asian diasporic subjects and intervene in the wider North American consciousness. Beyond the Icon initiates vital conversations between Asian American studies, ethnic studies, and comics.

Contributors:
Monica Chiu, Shilpa Davé, Melinda Luisa de Jesús, Lan Dong, Jin Lee, erin Khuê Ninh, Stella Oh, Jeanette Roan, Eleanor Ty

About the Author


Eleanor Ty, FRSC, is a Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is the author and editor of books on Asian North American literature and eighteenth-century British fiction, including Asianfail: Narratives of Disenchantment and the Model Minority.

Praise For…


“Eleanor Ty’s new edited volume, Beyond the Icon, is a strong and much-needed contribution to the growing but underrepresented field of critical studies of graphic literature. … The far-reaching design of Beyond the Icon gives the reader a good sense of the breadth of the genre, as well as a keen perspective into how the genre has and is transforming in historical space.” —Mark Augustus Dodge, Journal of Popular Culture

Beyond the Icon is an academic study, but these authors and others provide interesting discussions of the books they feature as well as complementary titles that this collection can also be of interest to readers who are not academics and are simply fans of graphic novels and comics.” —Susan Blumberg-Kason, Asian Review of Book

Beyond the Icon compiles a collection of outstanding and wide-ranging takes by a number of prestigious scholars in comic studies, and features a number of vitally important Asian American graphic texts. … Social issues, intersectional articulations, and contentions with stereotypes—including those emerging during the COVID-19 pandemic—ensure that Beyond the Icon marks only the beginning of many more investigations into Asian American graphic narratives.” —Leah Abuan Milne, MELUS 

“This sharply argued, clearly written book displays admirable breadth and scope. In covering an array of comic forms and making a point of including multiple Asian ethnicities, Beyond the Icon puts a full range and diversity of Asian American subjectivity and creativity on display.” —LeiLani Nishime, author of Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture
Product Details
ISBN: 9780814214947
ISBN-10: 0814214940
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Publication Date: November 8th, 2022
Pages: 208
Language: English
Series: Studies in Comics and Cartoons