Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel, Persepolis, makes important strides toward altering how Western audiences perceive Iranian women. Satrapi endeavors to display the intersection of the lives of some Westerners with her life as an Iranian, who spent some time in the West. Satrapi, dissatisfied with representations she saw of Iranian women in France, decided to challenge them. In her words, “From the time I came to France in 1994, I was always telling stories about life in Iran to my friends. We’d see pieces about Iran on television, but they didn’t represent my experience at all. I had to keep saying, ‘No, it’s not like that there.’ I’ve been justifying why it isn’t negative to be an Iranian for almost twenty years. How strange when it isn’t something I did or chose to be?” (Satrapi, “Why I Wrote Persepolis” 10). In acknowledging both Eastern and Western feminism, Satrapi’s novel humanizes the female Iranian perspective in a way that can easily digested by Western audiences.
This novel acts as an autoethnographic text, a term coined by Mary Louise Pratt, in which Persepolis acts as “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them” (Pratt 35). This novel, which depicts her life so far, demonstrates a mastery of the spaces of representation. As one theorist has argued, “In discussing Persepolis in relation to the theme of women and space, we will draw upon a framework suggested by Pollock for reading the work of women artists…Pollock refers to three spatial registers: first, the locations represented by the work (and, in particular, the division between public and private space); second, the spatial order within the work itself (concerning, for example, angl...
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... and changed Western perceptions in doing so.
Works Cited
Gökarıksel, Banu and Anna Secor. The Veil, Desire, and the Gaze: Turning the Inside Out. Signs, 40, 1 (Autumn 2014): 177-200.
Miller, Ann. “Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: Eluding the Frames.” Johns Hopkins University Press: L’Espirit Createur, Vol. 51, No. 1, Spring 2011: 38-52.
Nnaemeka, Obioma. “Nego‐Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way.” Signs, Vol. 29, No. 2, Winter 2004, 357-385. Online.
Satrapi, Marjane. The Complete Perspolis. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004. Print
Satrapi, Marjane. “Why I wrote Persepolis: a graphical novel memoir: writer Marjane Satrapi faced the challenges of life in post-revolutionary Iran. She used the graphic novel format to tell her unique story.” Marjane Satrapi. Writing!, Nov-Dec, 2003, Vol.. 26(3), p. 9(5) Cengage Learning Inc.
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The story Persepolis uses the medium of graphic novel and the perspective of a child to convey her message. The events of Persepolis are very dark and in some
In America, many have come to recognize Iran as a terrorist nation, but in reality, many Americans stereotype Iranians because they misunderstand the country and how it got to that point. In Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis, she gives her readers an inside look of Iran by writing about her childhood during the Iranian Revolution and the changes in her life during that time. The frames in Satrapi’s graphic novel draw similarities and differences between advertisements and the Iranian culture. After analyzing the Satrapi’s graphic novel to advertisements we will look at the similarities and differences of how graphic novels and advertisements use words and images to establish the visual rhetoric.
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi captures life in Iran during the 1980’s through a child's eyes. Marjane Satrapi grew up during a time when both the Islamic Revolution and the Iran/Iraq War took place. Personal experiences are expressed through themes including revolution, imperialism, nationalism, religion and loss of innocence and affect Marjane personally as she grows up.
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Persepolis, a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, is not a run-of-the-mill comic book. It is written with purpose. Satrapi wrote and illustrated this book to show Americans that their perspective of her home country, Iran, is askew. She believes Americans are too focused on the “fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism” (Satrapi ii), of the nation and that they forget to notice the normality and humanness of it. Since these two perspectives have vast differences, Satrapi wants to change their minds. Thus, it is crucial that she effectively communicate this humanness of Iran to the literary audience in America. Since the literary devices in a work are needed to correctly convey a message, she found it necessary to include these and manipulate them in her favor. Satrapi uses the innocence of a child along with morals in her pictures and a relation of cultures to effectively communicate her message. It is necessary to examine how she manipulates such literary devices in order to gain a full understanding of the text.