ENGL 10203: Composition II

The article presents a literary criticism of the graphic narratives "American Born Chinese," by Gene Luen Yang and "Strange Fruit: Uncelebrated Narratives From Black History," by Joel Christian Gill. It outlines racial issues and the experience of minority groups in the U.S., the struggle of Asian Americans since the 19th century and the sufferings of African Americans. The integration of realism and genre fiction in the narratives is discussed.

This paper describes and interprets how preservice English teachers explore constructions of race and identity in the graphic novel, American Born Chinese, with a small group of adolescents from a mostly white community in the U.S. in the space of a virtual classroom. Findings indicate that the secondary students constructed characters' feelings of racial and cultural inferiority as a matter of the individual rather than as a result of institutional forms of exclusion. The author argues for educators to attend more closely to the social, historical and political context within which a critical approach to teaching literacy is implemented. Implications for using technology to mentor preservice English teachers to explore systemic forms of oppression in their development as critical educators are discussed.

In "Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel" Michael A. Chaney analyzes Gene Luen Yang's "American Born Chinese" and David B.'s "Epileptic" for the way each graphic novel represents animal-human characters and themes and for the way these texts engage, more broadly, with a recent set of theories regarding the animal as a critique of the human. American Born Chinese appropriates and updates Chinese mythology and uses various representations of monkey-human character hybrids in order to foreground animality and race (or animality as race) in its psychic splittings.

The article offers the author's insights on how the book "American Born Chinese," by Gene Luen Yang motivates her Special Education English class. The author says that the book helps the students explore the symbolism and theme concepts. She mentions the essentials of discussing stereotyping to help navigate the lessons of the sensitive issues of the book. She states that the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 implies children to continue their education.

Recent applications of Freud's theory examine the social value of the lost love object as a way of understanding the suffering of non-majority groups. Rather than pathologizing the individual suffering the loss, the lens of racial melancholia pathologizes the discourse that constitutes racially marked others as alien to the majority. Through a close reading of image and text, Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides applies David Eng and Shinhee Han's theory of racial melancholia to Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese. Sarigianides argues that texts such as American Born Chinese provide grounds for a public language for examining the suffering that ensues from the failure of assimilation as a desired outcome for immigrants in the United States.

Yang successfully pokes fun at ignorant teachers who cannot get Asian students' names right, who assume that Chinese social customs entail all kinds of bizarre practices, and who think anyone with an Asian name must be a newly arrived immigrant.

Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese demonstrates the difficulty of following the development of Asian American racial formations. It does so through the skillful use of its medium, comics, prompting readers to consider how much the meaning of race has changed, in what ways, and where this change might lead.

Early in Gene Luen Yang's young-adult graphic novel American Born Chinese, the protagonist, Jin, responds to an elderly woman's question about what he wants to be when he grows up by saying that he wants to be a "Transformer. " Since he has one of the eponymous toys with him, he shows her how it can change from a truck to a robot, becoming "more than meets the eye" (28). [...]Chin-Kee's action can be read not just as another instance of his stereotypically comic antics, but as a potent act of revenge and subversion. [...]in an article written for Language Arts, Yang explains how he has even used graphic novels to teach algebra. [...]teachers interested in learning more about the potential of comics in the classroom might enjoy perusing Yang's website at http://www.humblecomics.com/ comicsedu.

[Gene Luen Yang]: I first became interested in the Boxer Rebellion in 2000, when, in a first for the Roman Catholic Church, the pope canonized 120 Chinese saints, many of whom were martyred during the conflict. On one side were European missionaries, merchants, soldiers, and Chinese Christian converts. On the other were poor, illiterate Chinese teenagers who believed they could call the Chinese gods down from the heavens through a mystical, superpower-granting ritual.

In this article, in what is one of the first-ever journal articles in graphic novel format, educator and graphic novel author Gene Yang makes a case for using graphic novels in classrooms.

Biography of Gene Luen Yang.

"Autobiographical Essay"