Urban Comics

Dominic Davies is a Lecturer in English at City, University of London. In 2018 he finished a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oxford, where he also completed his DPhil and established the TORCH Network, ‘Comics and Graphic Novels: The Politics of Form’. He is the author of Imperial Infrastructure and Spatial Resistance in Colonial Literature, 1880-1930 (2017), along with a number of articles and book chapters exploring the relationship between urban infrastructure, the built environment and artistic and literary cultures. He is the co-editor of Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World (2017) and Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature & Culture (2018). He is also the editor of a collection of essays and comics entitled Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories & Graphic Reportage (2019).

Preface



Introduction. Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives



Introduction: The Camp and the City



Form and Infrastructure



Infrastructural Form



Comics Collectives as Networked Urban Social Movements



The Image of the Global City



New York, New York: A Brief History of Comics and the City



Five Southern City Case Studies



Chapter 1. Drawing Public Space: Revolutionary Visual Cultures and the Right to the City in Cairo



Introduction: Revolutionary Visual Cultures and Gendered Public Spaces



Egyptian ‘Comix’, Online and Offline



Urban Cairo in Text and Image



Vision and Visibility in Magdy El Shafee’s Metro (2008)



Volume and Verticality in Deena Mohamed’s Qahera, the Webcomic, Not the City (2013-2015) Building Comics, Building Cities



Chapter 2. Image-Making in the Global City: Eco-Speculative Fictions and Urban Social Movements in Cape Town



Introduction: South African Cartoons, Comix and Co-mixed Visual Cultures



Privatisation, Segregation and Image-Making in the Global City



Afrofuturism, Solarpunk and Water Politics



Flooding the Cape Town ‘Utopia’



Turning to Townships: Urban Social Movements in Cape Town



Chapter 3. Graphic Katrina: Disaster Capitalism and Tourism Gentrification in New Orleans



Introduction: ‘There’s No Such Thing As A Natural Disaster’



Voyeurism and Voluntourism in the ‘Drowned City’



Vertical Perspectives in Josh Neufeld’s A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge (2009)



Comics and Zines in New Orleans: Gentrifying Forms, DIY Cities



Autographics, Art and Activism in Erin Wilson’s Snowbird (2013)



Chapter 4. Comics, Collectives, Collaborations: Engineering Pedestrian and Public Spaces in Delhi



Introduction: The City-as-Circuitboard



‘Engineering’ Comics: Orijit Sen and the Pao Collective



World Class Delhi: Politics in the City ‘Inside-Out’



Pedestrianism and Penmanship in Sarnath Banerjee’s Graphic Narratives



Histories of the Neoliberal Present in Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s Delhi Calm (2010)



Gendering the Right to the City: Women’s Maps, Women’s Lines



Chapter 5. Comics as Infrastructure: Public Space and Post-war Reconstruction in Beirut



Introduction: Post-war Reconstruction in the Neoliberal Era



Weaponised Infrastructure in Wartime Beirut



Rebuilding the City in Zeina Abirached’s Graphic Memoirs



Lamia Ziadé’s Bye Bye Babylon: The City as Witness



Urban Warfare and Civilian Life in Text and Image



New Geographies of Beirut: Samandal as Urban Social Movement



Conclusion. Bordered Forms, Bordered Worlds