Abstract
Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives is a timely and wise interdisciplinary reflection on the fast-changing form of comics in the contemporary (digital) era and on the relationship between cultural products and contemporary urban environments in the time of neoliberal urbanism. Contributing to both comics studies and urban studies, Davies offers a decolonization and reconfiguration of both fields. Placing itself within a ‘postcolonial comics’ perspective, 1 this volume stresses the political urgency of recognizing the centrality of comics – together with arts, literature and the ‘cultural sphere’ more generally – in the production of our built environments.
Davies’ work seizes the opportunities offered by the intrinsically ‘indisciplinary [sic.] nature’ of comics. 2 While Urban Comics does not openly refer to literary geography, or to comic book geographies/cartographies, it nevertheless represents a useful contribution to these interdisciplinary geographical subfields. The books address some of their core issues, such as the relationship between page and place, the textual, the visual and the spatial, the narrative and the urban, written/drawn space and the built environment. The volume also explores comics ‘as they happen’, 3 namely in their socio-spatial, geographical, economic and political contexts, taking into account the materialities and geographies of their production, circulation and reception.
Based on the premise that ‘urban comics’ serves as a flexible label embracing ‘alternative comix’, webcomics, printed comics series, anthologies, graphic journalism reportages and graphic novels, Davies proposes a re-visioning of the global city through a fundamental reversal of perspective. In fact, the author offers an effective de-centring of ‘both an academic and popular geographic preoccupation with comics from and about the global North by pointing to an array of formally innovative graphic narratives emerging from Southern cities across the world’ (p. 3), through case studies from Egypt, South Africa, India and Lebanon. Starting from Cairo’s comics production connected to the 18-day Revolution, and challenging the neoliberal image of the city promoted by the project ‘Cairo 2050’ (Chapter 1), Davies moves his gaze towards the socio-economic spatial stratifications and divisions imposed by neoliberal urban development in both Cape Town (Chapter 2) and post-disaster New Orleans (Chapter 3). Moreover, through Delhi (Chapter 4) and Beirut (Chapter 5), he explores contemporary comics and artistic collectives especially when they claim a more socially inclusive urban space. Finally, the last chapter focusses on the borders of the world’s nation states and migration, using examples from Mexican comic production.
A renewed sense of the right to urban life seems to animate all the authors and collectives analysed in the book. Their plural voices, coming from a ‘street level perspective’ (i.e. from below), create a chorus that calls for a more democratic and public urban space. Contemporary cities are designed and built not only through neoliberal urban planning (i.e. from above) but also through everyday urban practices, and comics (through writing, reading and drawing practices) represent a significant site for cultural resistance in urban space. Even though Davies acknowledges the importance of the Internet in questioning cultural borders and distance through the possibility of circulating contents on a wider and faster scale, he points out that in contemporary urban culture, online and offline networks and spaces reinforce each other. Furthermore, the ability of comics to make social bodies ‘visible’, through an inherently textual and visual form, and through their power to mobilize artist collectives as well as single readers, represents an opportunity to revise contemporary cities and envision potential urban futures.
From a geographical point of view, the most significant contribution by Davies is his idea of moving beyond the consolidated study of the spatial architecture and grammar of comics, by proposing ‘infrastructural reading’ as a methodological perspective to explore the relationship between urban comics genres and forms and urban material structures. Furthermore, Davies takes the ‘force of representations’ 4 seriously when he affirms that graphic narratives, beyond merely representing our urban spaces, impact on our society and politics, as they represent a constructive and reparative exercise; ‘a socially productive, perhaps even emancipatory, site of cultural interaction’ (p. xiii). If we admit that the construction (both physical and metaphorical) of the ‘global city’ is connected to image-making, comics intervene in the production of urban space. Urban comics ‘from below’ – which means from both the street and the Global South – represent counter-visual narratives that are able to re-produce contemporary cities by making infrastructural injustice and division visible, as well as creating new collective infrastructures that act as an alternative site of urban planning and resistance.
