Recovered histories in G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey: comics as sites of remembrance and resistance

In this thesis I explore the comic form’s capacity to document experiences with war and become a witness to history by analyzing G.B. Tran’s graphic family memoir Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey. Positioning Tran’s comic as an alternative history pushing back against dominant historical remembrances of the Vietnam War in America and one-dimensional representations of Vietnamese refugees, I see his work as a radical act of historical recovery, remembrance and resistance presenting a fresh storytelling modality capable of documenting marginalized experiences and memories. I draw upon various Vietnamese American scholars to discuss the way Tran s work creatively combats erasure and misrepresentation in official American history by visualizing Vietnamese as multi-dimensional subjects, historical authors and sources of knowledge and truth. Additionally, integrating the work of several leading comics scholars I highlight the storytelling advantages graphic narratives present by discussing how the formal and structural elements of comics make the hybrid medium well equipped to reconstruct history and memory with visual affect and literary force.