Teaching Situation And Rationale
I teach at a magnet school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Booker T. Washington has a diverse student body, ranging from students who help support themselves and their families to those who are extremely wealthy. This unit will be written for my IBHL Literature I classes, but the information and texts will be useful for other grade levels as well.
Bringing Marjane Satrapi’s black-and-white graphic novel Persepolis into my junior IB English class is intentional. Many world issues are seen as black and white. You are either for this side or the other one. There is no room for questioning, no room for grey areas. Although Satrapi created her graphic novel Persepolis in black-and-white illustrations, she does so ironically. Sabrina Citra comments on Satrapi’s binary color palette saying “that [it] carries both aesthetic and symbolic weight…it visually echoes the stark dualities imposed by ideological systems—light and darkness, right and wrong, faith and freedom. Yet Satrapi resists moral binaries in her storytelling and opts to be expansive in her language and by extension, her illustrations. Instead, her world is populated with contradictions, compromises, and pain.”6 Satrapi exposes a world full of hypocrisy, nuances, and grey areas, especially where tyrannical power rules. Reading and analyzing Persepolis gives students the framework to not only learn about a world and history they are unfamiliar with, but also gives them the insight into the universal black and white power struggles in politics, in social class, in gender, and in individual expression. This graphic novel also makes students recognize the importance of resistance in times when human rights are violated, as well as the consequences of that rebellion – not to scare students but to make them aware that when power and tyranny are threatened, the powers-that-be will do anything to suppress resistance.
In a world where there are 30-second summaries on TikTok and AI to condense years of historical content in a paragraph, I want to meet my students where they are. By using what seems to be a “simple” graphic novel, I will pair Persepolis with Aristotle’s definition of tyranny, protest posters of the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Ayatollah’s propaganda, and brief excerpts from Remembering Akbar to bring this 2-D black and white story into a collage of color, rendering the historical context of the novel into something that they can see, understand, and explore, focusing on the lens of power and resistance.
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