Visualizing the Spaces of Childhood in Graphic Memoirs

In this chapter, the author explores the process of remembering and representing childhood in autobiographical projects. How do authors call to mind childhood memories and represent them in ways that make them credible to readers? How are those memories documented? To address these questions, Maynes focuses not on conventional text autobiographies, but rather on graphic memoirs. This genre began to flourish only in the late twentieth century; the particular histories of childhood it can inform are those of a more recent era. However, the genre has also gone global, making possible broad cross-regional comparisons of childhood. Maynes examines a selection of six graphic memoirs by authors born in different regions (the U.S., South Africa, East and Southeast Asia) between 1945 and 1960. Her focus is on how the authors reconstruct and document childhood memories through images-attempts to convey what they saw through their own eyes as children-and in particular, how their ways of representing the spaces of childhood vary across their quite different global-historical locations.