Through her use of the graphic novel genre, Satrapi strategically seizes control of the reader’s imagination. For years Satrapi was forced to ingest the images and cultural artifacts imposed on her from without by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Indeed Satrapi uses the graphic novel to coopt the images, signs and history that the Islamic Republic of Iran exercised over her and her people. By illustrating her memories as a subaltern Iranian female, Satrapi aggressively contests the Islamic Republic’s sole claim to write history.
Through her illustrations Satrapi creates her own – as Chakrabarty calls it – “alternative histor[y] in the heartland of ideology” (113). While Kraniauskas focuses on alternative temporalities to “global narratives of capital”, Satrapi’s novel comes closer to formulating an alternative temporality to the totalitarian fundamentalist Islamic regime; “- in other words, [Satrapi successfully enunciates her own] cultural practices rather than mere false consciousness” (113). Both Kraniauskas’s and Satrapi’s conceptions of temporality challenge the hegemonic narratives imposed on the subaltern from without.
Parry (1994, 5) emphasizes the ‘enunciative act’ more than the substance of the narrated event. Likewise Bhabha (1994) is more interested in the enunciative process that creates a cultural difference which in turn challenges any single person’s, group’s or regime’s claim to cultural authority (118). While Satrapi’s narration of the Iraq-Iran war and other historical events is important, these events form the backdrop to another history: that of a female who bravely sets out to live her own life.
Through the enunciative act of her graphic novel, Satrapi causes disjunctures in the hegemonic temporalities of both European modernity and Islamic fundamentalism. Too Iranian for Europe and too European for Iran, Satrapi manages to forge her own hybrid identity and struggles to stop outside forces from shaping her subjectivity. To this extent then we can talk about alternative temporalities in two regards: that of the subaltern to the hegemonic and that of the interior to the exterior.
Satrapi exists in what Bhabha refers to as “hybrid time”. The image that Dr. Baer showed us with the split Socialist/Islamic imagery and corresponding unveiled/veiled Satrapi demonstrates how she had to inhabit different temporalities simultaneously. Likewise, the Islamic Republic’s “attempt to dominate” the cultural images was an attempt to shape individual’s subjectivities from outside to inside. Satrapi’s graphic novel is revolutionary to the extent that she cultivates her own semiotic language to challenge from the inside the external hegemony of the Islamic Republic (118). It is she and not the oppressive government who employs the signs, images and language to narrate and describe historical and cultural events. According to Marx and others it is the ruling class who controls the images and cultural artifacts, and so Satrapi’s use of graphic novel as an alternative form of historical narration is very radical.
Each cel of Satrapi’s graphic novel could be said to represent a point of disjuncture from the Islamic Republic’s writing of history. Furthermore, by aligning each disjunctive enunciation in her own desired order she is creating an alternative temporality that is based on her subjective experiences and memories. According to Bhabha “disjuncture – the return of the colonial repressed – happens in and through the present of enunciation” (121). Like splicing a broken film reel, Satrapi uses her graphic novel to cause a “temporal break in representation” and use her own images to create a hybrid history (121).
While abroad in Austria, Satrapi undergoes dramatic physical, emotional and psychological changes. Furthermore, she had accumulated cultural experiences that were at odds with the historical trajectory of the Islamic Republic. Her return to the Islamic Republic was akin to stepping into a time warp: having enjoyed the European luxuries of modernity for several years she would later return to a largely unchanged Islamic Republic, one which repudiated her new-found feminist identity. Both Europe and the Islamic Republic offered two different versions of hegemonic temporalities: one modern and capitalistic and the other archaic and religious. Like the Colossus of Rhodes, Satrapi straddles both temporalities and in so doing enunciates through language and images her own subjective understanding of history, a third space through which the reader can traverse.
I find it really interesting how you connect Bhabha’s ideas of cultural hybridity and fragmented temporalities into an analysis of “Persepolis.” For Bhabha, the nation functions because of its hold on pedagogical time, and we see the reinforcement of the nation through performative aspects–for example, in America, the pledge of allegiance is stated at the beginning of each day in public schools.
Bhabha also talks about the “double time” of the nation, in which this repeated pedagogical time is interrupted. In “Persepolis,” we see several instances where Marjane publicly acts against her teachers so as to disrupt the ritual of the nation that is being reinforced in Iranian schools. Further, we see how Marjane sees herself as a part of a “third space” somewhere in between the space/time of Austrian and Iranian life.
I also find it interesting how you consider Marjane to be a subaltern, even though she differs to an extent from the traditional, Gramscian or Spivakian idea of the subaltern. Nonetheless, I’ve seen several theorists apply the subaltern status to people of different classes, genders, nationalities, and other various positions. I’d like to think more about the concept of the subaltern, and how this status can be applied and appropriated in the era of transnationalism, where traditional lines and categories can easily be blurred.