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      Black Bleeds and the Sites of a Trauma in GB Tran’s Vietnamerica

      The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship
      Open Library of Humanities
      GB Tran, Bleed, Vietnam War, Trauma, Cathy Caruth

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          Abstract

          ‘The gutter’ is the space between panels where panel transitions happen—readers fill in the blank space by connecting panels to make sense of the story. In GB Tran’s Vietnamerica ( 2010 ), however, black gutters become part of black ‘bleeds’ (pages congruent with single panels in them) to portray the sites of a trauma. This article argues that if bleeds, as Scott McCloud claims, can depict timeless space, they could also represent the sites of a trauma where the memory of the past is intervened by the future interpretation of the memory. In Vietnamerica , the panels in black in a waffle-iron grid are simultaneously black gutters and a black bleed, where reinterpretation of trauma takes place as speech balloons are later imposed on the same recurrent waffle-iron grid. While Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory helps read Tran’s black bleeds as the sites of a trauma, the latter also extends Caruth’s notion of ‘traumatic awakenings’ since the black bleeds as the sites of a trauma turn into the places of reconciliation and healing.

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          Comics and Narration

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            Watchmen: the Graphic Novel as Trauma Fiction

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              The Time of Trauma: Rereading Unclaimed Experience and Testimony

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                10.16995/cg.104
                http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

                Literary studies
                GB Tran,Bleed,Vietnam War,Trauma,Cathy Caruth
                Literary studies
                GB Tran, Bleed, Vietnam War, Trauma, Cathy Caruth

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