Sinophone Comics as a Thirdspace. Two Case Studies from the Italian Context

This chapter employs David Der-wei Wang’s post-loyalist conceptualization of the Sinophone (2014) as “a critical interface” to investigate the sentiment towards China and Chineseness expressed in Matteo Demonte, Ciaj Rocchi, and Yi Yang’s graphic novels published in Italy. Demonte and Rocchi’s semi-autobiographical work, Primavere e Autunni(Springs and Autumns, 2015), retraces and problematizes the story of a man from Zhejiang – Demonte’s grandfather – who establishes roots in Italy. Easy Breezy(2021), Yi Yang’s first graphic novel as the main author, is a fictional work that tells the story of two young adults running for their lives in a small Chinese town. The first part of the chapter proposes a theoretical reflection on the concept of ‘Sinophone comics’ as articulated through the notion of Thirdspace (Bhabha 1994, Soja 1996), which, in my contention, helps to integrate the postcolonial approach associated with the notion of Sinophone and Thirdspace on the one hand, and with visual and multimodal (i.e. comics-specific) methodologies on the other. The following sections of my contribution aim at applying this theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of the two graphic novels, to explore how Sinophone creators can narrate and elaborate on multifaceted, non-monolithic notions of China and Chineseness.