Content area
Full Text
Abstract: Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's prominent graphic autobiography, depicts her coming-of-age in Iran during and after the Islamic Revolution. It offers an intriguing perspective that challenges preconceived ideas and stereotypes about Iran and the region overall. In light of the story's success as a graphic novel and a film on the international arena, this genre has become very popular among several Middle Eastern writers and artists such as Zeina Abirached, Lena Irmgard Merhej, Magdy El Shafee, Leila Abdelrazaq, and Riad Sattouf, who used it to shed light on personal, sociopolitical and cultural issues in the Arab/Muslim world. In this article, we examine the literary, aesthetic, and thematic influences of Satrapi on other North African and Middle Eastern graphic novelists. The corpus we selected encompasses five main countries (Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Turkey) as well as the Maghreb (e.g., Tunisia, Algeria, Libya) due to the strong linguistic and religious ties with the Middle East. We conclude by commenting on a highly controversial graphic novel entitled L'Arabe du Futur, which, like Persepolis, provides a problematic political and ideological representation of the region.
Keywords: Satrapi, Persepolis, graphic novels, Middle East, representation
Introduction
Marjane Satrapi is one of the best-known graphic novelists in the world today. She rose to fame after publishing Persepolis, a graphic novel in which she describes the history and context of a life lived in part in the turbulent political context of the contemporary Middle East. This book was published between 2000 and 2003 in France, then quickly translated into English and published in two volumes by Pantheon Books in 2003 and 2004. It was also translated into many languages including Arabic (2001), Hebrew (2005), Turkish (2009), and Farsi (2011),1 the four main languages of the Middle East.
The success of Persepolis within the rising movement of the graphic narratives on a world scale,2 the importance of the Middle East during the global "War on Terror" (after 9/11), and subsequent "Arab Spring" (after 2011) have produced many comparable titles of varying quality and emphasis. As a result, it is now common to read graphic novels set in or about the region. Some follow Satrapi's autobiographical voice, while others deploy a reportage approach (as developed by Joe Sacco), take up a more historical fiction or even...