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Davies, Dominic. Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives. Routledge Advances in Comics Studies. London, New York: Routledge, 2019. 
Added by: joachim (02/12/2019, 18:01)   
Resource type: Book
Language: en: English
ID no. (ISBN etc.): 9781138483583
BibTeX citation key: Davies2019a
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Categories: General
Keywords: Architecture, City
Creators: Davies
Publisher: Routledge (London, New York)
Views: 11/524
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Abstract
Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives makes an important and timely contribution both to comics studies and urban studies, offering a decolonisation and reconfiguration of both of these already interdisciplinary fields. With chapter-length discussions of comics from cities such as Cairo, Cape Town, New Orleans, Delhi and Beirut, this book shows how artistic collectives and urban social movements working across the global South are producing some of the most exciting and formally innovative graphic narratives of the contemporary moment.
Throughout, the author reads an expansive range of graphic narratives through the vocabulary of urban studies to argue that these formal innovations should be thought of as a kind of infrastructure. This ‘infrastructural form’ allows urban comics to reveal that the built environments of our cities are not static, banal, or depoliticised, but rather highly charged material spaces that allow some forms of social life to exist while also prohibiting others. Built from a formal infrastructure of grids, gutters and panels, and capable of volumetric, multi-scalar perspectives, this book shows how urban comics are able to represent, repair and even rebuild contemporary global cities toward more socially just and sustainable ends.
Operating at the intersection of comics studies and urban studies, and offering large global surveys alongside close textual and visual analyses, this book explores and opens up the fascinating relationship between comics and graphic narratives, on the one hand, and cities and urban spaces, on the other.

Table of Contents

List of Figures (viii)
Preface (xi)

Introduction. Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives (1)
– Introduction: the Camp and the City (1)
– Form and Infrastructure (6)
– Infrastructural Form (13)
– Comics Collectives as Networked Urban Social Movements (18)
– Image-Making in the Global City (22)
– Five Southern City Case Studies (30)

1. Drawing Public Space: Revolutionary Visual Cultures and the Right to the City in Cairo (47)
– Introduction: Revolutionary Visual Cultures and Gendered Public Spaces (47)
– Egyptian ‘Comix’, Online and Offline (51)
– Urban Cairo in Text and Image (55)
– Vision and Visibility in Magdy El Shafee’s Metro (2008) (59)
– Volume and Verticality in Deena Mohamed’s Qahera, the Webcomic, Not the City (2013–2015) (67)
– Building Comics, Building Cities (76)

2. Image-Making in the Global City: Eco-Speculative Fictions and Urban Social Movements in Cape Town (91)
– Introduction: South African Cartoons, Comix and Co-mixed Visual Cultures (91)
– Privatisation, Segregation and Image-Making in the Global City (96)
– Afrofuturism, Solarpunk and Water Politics (98)
– Flooding the Cape Town ‘Utopia’ (107)
– Turning to Townships: Urban Social Movements in Cape Town (114)

3. Graphic Katrina: Disaster Capitalism and Tourism Gentrification in New Orleans (132)
– Introduction: ‘There’s No Such Thing As A Natural Disaster’ (132)
– Voyeurism and Voluntourism in the ‘Drowned City’ (137)
– Vertical Perspectives in Josh Neufeld’s A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge (2009) (142)
– Comics and Zines in New Orleans: Gentrifying Forms, DIY Cities (153)
– Autographics, Art and Activism in Erin Wilson’s Snowbird (2013) (158)

4. Comics, Collectives, Collaborations: Engineering Pedestrian and Public Spaces in Delhi (172)
– Introduction: The City-as-Circuitboard (172)
– ‘Engineering’ Comics: Orijit Sen and the Pao Collective (177)
– World Class Delhi: Politics in the City ‘Inside-Out’ (183)
– Pedestrianism and Penmanship in Sarnath Banerjee’s Graphic Narratives (185)
– Histories of the Neoliberal Present in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm (2010) (197)
– Gendering the Right to the City: Women’s Maps, Women’s Lines (206)

5. Comics as Infrastructure: Public Space and Post-war Reconstruction in Beirut (218)
– Introduction: Post-war Reconstruction in the Neoliberal Era (218)
– Weaponised Infrastructure in Wartime Beirut (221)
– Rebuilding the City in Zeina Abirached’s Graphic Memoirs (225)
– Lamia Ziadé’s Bye Bye Babylon, Beirut 1975–1990 (2011): the City as Witness (234)
– Urban Warfare and Civilian Life in Text and Image (239)
– New Geographies of Beirut: Samandal as Urban Social Movement (247)

Conclusion. Bordered Forms, Bordered Worlds (259)

Index (269)


  
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