Spaces of refugeetude in Matt Huynh’s Vietnamese Australian comics

Bibliographic Data

ID22003447
AuthorsWeihsin Gui (0000-0001-5392-2824, University of California, Riverside, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume16
Issue5
Pages996-1012
Publication date2025-09-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Graphic Novels & Comics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2150-4857 • E-ISSN: 2150-4865
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/21504857.2025.2542936
OpenAlexW4413202312
LanguageEN
References cited16

This essay discusses three comics by Vietnamese Australian artist Matt Huynh: The Boat, MA, and Cabramatta. After briefly introducing the comics, I explain the concepts of refugee resilience and refugeetude, summarise important spatial aspects of Australia’s policies and attitudes regarding refugees, and touch on scholarship regarding space in comics as well as Huynh’s artistic style and treatment of space. In his comics Huynh represents places conventionally associated with the marginalisation and suffering of refugees such as the boat, the camp, and the ethnic enclave and depicts them as spaces of refugeetude. Huynh’s art serves as an intermediary form that reconfigures key tropes of refugee precarity and abjection into perceptivity and agency. Combining character-driven plots of Western comics with spatial aesthetics from traditional Asian ink painting, Huynh’s blank panels and lines conjoin seemingly antinomial or disparate social and historical elements. Personal memories and historical locales are linked in moving connections that highlight the consciously creative and critical impulses of the refugee as an agentive subject

Art · Comics · Linguistics · Literature · Vietnamese · Visual arts · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Japanese History and Culture · Philosophy

Tools

Open DOI