Crossing Cultures/ Crossing Genres: The Re-Invention of the Graphic Memoir in Persepolis and Persepolis 2 (Critical Essay‪)‬

Migrant Intellectuals, Academic Debates and the Graphic Memoir Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoirs Persepolis and Persepolis 2 are compelling explorations of female Iranian national and diasporic identity. Satrapi uses the form of the graphic novel to creatively counter the overwhelming perception of Iranian women as oppressed subjects of Islamic religious orthodoxy. This essay is an attempt to read Satrapi's memoirs as a reworking of the traditional genre of autobiography which has traditionally privileged a universalist western subjectivity, usually male. Satrapi reinvents autobiography as a genre expressing the growth of non-western, female, Iranian subjectivity but also rescripts its terrain as encompassing the social sphere in relation to which individual subjectivity develops. Not only does Satrapi use the memoir to narrate her own growth into consciousness and artistic expression, this narrative is constantly juxtaposed against seminal events in contemporary Iranian history. Satrapi's reworking of autobiography as graphic memoir disrupts the categorization of Iranian female identity as one in direct opposition to modern western female identity, positing one as complete suppression by religious authority and the other as the apotheosis of freedom and individualism.