"¿Tengo que comer gato?" Racial Stereotype in Quan Zhou Wu's Gente de aquí. Gente de allí. Ensayo gráfico sobre migrantes y españoles

Abstract

Abstract: Quan Zhou Wu's 2020 graphic essay, Gente de aquí. Gente de allí. Ensayo gráfico sobre migrantes y españoles ironizes racial stereotypes present in the twenty-first century Spanish cultural milieu to question the role of whiteness as an enduring signifier of national belonging in Spain. Throughout this work, which unites sociological research on race, identity, and immigration in Spain with graphic hyperbolization, Zhou Wu both draws, and draws on, offensive caricatures to parody and problematize the practice of defining national identity solely by race. In reifying visual and verbal discourses of difference, Zhou Wu reappropriates her own racialized identity as a multicultural Chinese Spaniard as a space from which to critique and contest constructs of whiteness held as fundamental to contemporary Spanish national racial imaginary. This graphic essay directly responds to the urgent need to affirm the marginalization and racialization of immigrants and Spaniards of color; at the same time, it requires its readers to bear witness to psychic damage done by a nation that maintains whiteness as an essential element of Spanish identity. Through its application of racial stereotypes, Gente de aquí subverts a cycle that would maintain an arbitrary hierarchy of humanity and thus the paradoxical binarization of racial and national identities, in which skin color is ascribed the power to dictate and define national character. Zhou Wu calls upon readers to unmake their assumptions about racialized Spaniards like herself and instead locate them within a national imaginary that, crucially, is inclusive of all who identify as Spanish.