Infrastructure

‘The Precarious Rule of Aesthetics: Form, Informality, Infrastructure.’ In Om Dwivedi ed., Representing Precarity in South Asian Fictions. London & New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2022, pp.69-86.

My central argument in this chapter is that the emergence of a rule by aesthetics in Delhi and India’s other megacities goes some way to explaining a coterminous trend towards the genre of literary non-fiction—as opposed, that is, to creative or literary fiction. This trend, I will acknowledge, is especially the case for Indian writing in English. This corpus tends, moreover, to be authored by writers who, though they are themselves based in India, have also lived in the global North (usually the US or Britain) for extended periods of time and have therefore accumulated—and are often explicitly writing for—a global as well as Indian readership. But it is for precisely this reason that I think the transformation of ‘world class’ aesthetics into a mode of urban governance in India can be tracked through a comparable shift from fiction to non-fiction writing. Speaking to the particular concerns of this volume, the two—rule by aesthetics and literary non-fiction—come together and clash especially around their approach to the cities’ most precarious urban dwellers. While I therefore argue that the non-fictional claim of literary non-fiction is often designed to expose India’s ‘world class’ aesthetic as a precarious fiction, I also contend that it more fully upturns this aesthetic to produce the urban precariat and other forms of informality as themselves infrastructural to the cities’ construction and ongoing function. Read more.

‘Infrastructural Forms: Comics, Cities, Conglomerations.’ In Lieven Amiel ed., Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies. New York: Routledge, 2022, pp.163-176.

This chapter responds to the “three D’s” of urbanisation with its own list of “three C’s”: it makes the case for comics as an artistic and narrative form that is particularly capable of capturing the density and dynamism of increasingly global cities, comprising as they both do a complex conglomeration of variously interrelated and unevenly autonomous moving parts. Whether the accumulations of capital that coagulate into points of urban redevelopment and gentrification, for example, or the interstices of slums and favelas that are at different times ignored by and resistant to the state, the unequal spaces of today’s cities are brought into a field of mutual play and narrative position by comics and graphic narratives. This aptitude for arresting the sociospatial dynamics of the city has been described variously as a “spatial form” (Fraser) and an “infrastructural form” (Davies), but as numerous critics have agreed, it is always a distinctly urban form (see Ahrens and Meteling). Comprising narrative building blocks and an architecture all their own, comics are able to intervene into the sociospatial dialectic of urban life (see Soja), not only revealing the infrastructure of the city as a material embodiment of competing and often invisible interests but also recalibrating and reconceiving urban space towards more socially and spatially just ends – often from the ground up. Read more.

‘Infrastructural Violence: Urbicide, Public Space, and Postwar Reconstruction in Recent Lebanese Graphic Memoirs.’ In Ian Hague, Ian Horton, & Nina Mickwits eds., Contexts of Violence in Comics. New York: Routledge, 2020, pp.128-144.

This chapter argues that the cartographic and architectural representations of the city in Ziadé’s and Abirached’s graphic memoirs expose the less visible, though fundamentally embedded, infrastructural violence that both exacerbated and actively participated in the more visible instances of Lebanon’s wartime violence. In so doing, these comics allows us, following Zižek, ‘to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible “subjective” violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent,’ to instead perceive the contours of an otherwise ‘invisible,’ structural violence (2008, 1). Published some two decades after the overt violence of the Civil War came to an unstable conclusion, these Lebanese graphic memoirs engage ‘post-memorially’ with the infrastructure space of Beirut’s wartime urban landscape. By foregrounding the deeper spatial and structural violence of the war, they seek first to emphasise how this violence endures in the present, and second, to offer a future-oriented vision of a more inclusive, desegregated post-war city space. Read more.

‘Urban Comix: Subcultures, Infrastructures and “the Right to the City” in Delhi.’ In Alex Tickell & Ruvani Ransinha ed., Delhi: New Literatures of the Megacity. London & New York: Routledge, 2020, Chapter 9.

This article argues that comics production in India should be configured as a collaborative artistic endeavour that visualizes Delhi’s segregationist infrastructure, claiming a right to the city through the representation and facilitation of more socially inclusive urban spaces. Through a discussion of the work of three of the Pao Collective’s founding members – Orijit Sen, Sarnath Banerjee and Vishwajyoti Ghosh – it argues that the group, as for other comics collectives in cities across the world, should be understood as a networked urban social movement. Their graphic narratives and comics art counter the proliferating segregation and uneven development of neo-liberal Delhi by depicting and diagnosing urban violence. Meanwhile, their collaborative production processes and socialized consumption practices, and the radical comix traditions on which these movements draw (and which are sometimes occluded by the label “Indian Graphic Novel”) create socially networked and politically active spaces that resist the divisions marking Delhi’s contemporary urban fabric. Read more.

‘Rudyard Kipling and the Networks of Empire: Writing Imperial Infrastructure in The Light that Failed and Captains Courageous.’ In Promodini Varma & Anubhav Pradhan eds., Proximate Strangers: Kipling and Yeats at 150. London & New York: Routledge, 2019, pp.192-210.

In the decade preceding the publication of Kim (1901), the novel widely regarded as Kipling’s masterpiece, he wrote two other novels: The Light that Failed (1891) and Captains Courageous (1896). Kipling’s first attempts at novel writing, unlike the short stories and poems he had already published to critical acclaim, have widely been regarded by literary critics as failures, and their publication and sales history suggests as much. I argue that Kipling, at a historical moment in which communication and transport networks were drastically expanding across the face of the globe, was struggling to write a novel that represented these imperial infrastructures and global networks in the worldly reach they were beginning to attain. In so doing, Kipling was trying to write a new kind of networked literature, one both formally and geographically expansive in scope, often with an eye on the U.S., but always with an eye on the world. The fact that these efforts failed in this regard is revealing – by counter-intuitively looking at the moments when his novels fail, this chapter asks what they might be able to tell us about imperial identity, global consciousness, and the rise of an imperial network of physical infrastructures and highways of communication and exchange that still, at least in some part, shape the world in the twenty-first century. Read more.

With Elleke Boehmer. ‘Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature & Culture.’ In Boehmer & Davies eds., Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature, & Culture. London & New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018, pp.1-25.

In this collection, we focus on the ways in which literary and cultural production is able to offer a critical purchase on planned violence, a concept we outline in more detail below. How does culture excavate, expose and challenge such violence? As importantly, we are interested in how these cultural forms contribute to more productive processes of social and infrastructural re-imagination and reconfiguration, and therefore also include three pieces of creative writing at the collection’s turning points. In these various ways we repeat and expand with respect to a range of cities the questions that cultural critic Sarah Nuttall asks specifically of Johannesburg: How does the post/colonial city ‘emerge as an idea and a form in contem- porary literatures of the city?’ What are the ‘literary infrastructures’ that help to give the city imaginary shape? What forms can build ‘alternative city-spaces’ (2008: 195)? And finally, what are the ‘disruptive questions’ that literary texts ask of urban infrastructure, ‘including in actual practice, on the ground’ (Boehmer and Davies 2015: 397)?. Read more.

Graphic Narrative

’Graphic Borders: Refugee Comics as Migration Narratives.’ In Gigi Adair, Rebecca Fasselt, & Carly McLaughlin eds., The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature. New York: Routledge, 2024, pp.280-291.

What does it mean to draw a refugee? Why have so many artists sought to tell migrant stories through hand-drawn images in recent years? Why are these drawings or paintings of refugees so often arranged into a sequential order—what we might refer to as “sequential art,” “graphic narratives,” or even “comics”? What are the affordances and politics of these “refugee comics”? Who makes them? Where are they published and how are they read? And what kinds of artistic and narrative techniques have they developed to address the complex representational, political, and cultural questions that structure the relationship between readers and refugees? These are some of the questions addressed in this chapter. Through multiple examples from a range of different genres, forms, and platforms, it aims to give a broad introduction to refugee comics as a substantive and growing contribution to literatures of migration. Read more.

‘Intolerable Fictions: Composing Refugee Realities in Comics.’ In Ralf Kauranen, Olli Löytty, Aura Nikkilä, & Anna Vuorine eds. Comics & Migration: Representation & Other Practices. New York: Routledge, 2023, pp.257-270.

In this chapter I want to argue for a different way of conceptualising the important work that refugee comics do. Rather than emphasising comics as a medium that is somehow an antidote to the prevailing photographic and filmic streams of our hyper-visua media culture, I want to instead shift our attention to their composition and more particularly to the work they do to reconfigure the dominant relationship between image and text. To grasp the full force of this shift, we must unsettle two common misconceptions that are implied by the brief quotation earlier. First is the notion that in our digitised visual culture there are “too many images” of refugees specifically, and of war and displaced people generally. Against this assumption, I would argue that there are not “too many” of these images, and that in fact there is a dearth of them. But there are too many images of unnamed refugees, too many photographs of people contained within the frame and subject to the camera’s gaze, yet deprived of access to accompanying explanatory or self-identifying text. The second and related misconception that I argue we should reconsider is the idea that the veracity and verifiable “truth” of the photographic image is in question, and that its political impact has therefore been diminished. Rather than despairing with postmodernists that the “sign” of the photograph has now utterly fragmented away from the reality it signifies, we might be better served by questioning whether the underlying premise of this notion – which assumes that there should be a direct line between the singular photograph or image of the refugee, on the one hand, and empathetic feeling or political action on the part of the viewer, on the other – is all that helpful in the first place. Read more.

‘Pages of Exception: Graphic Reportage as World Literature.’ In James Hodapp ed., Graphic Novels as World Literature. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022, pp.11-31.

I argue in this chapter that graphic reportage unsettles both the “world” and “literature” of “World Literature” in productive and pressingly political ways. With their shared inclusion of spaces of exception, the examples of graphic reportage analyzed here join up stories of otherwise disconnected, isolated, and imprisoned people, from the borders of Fortress Europe to the “Jungle” refugee camp in Calais, and from remote refugee detention centers in Canada to the militarized Mexican border city of Juárez. The artists surveyed in this chapter try to communicate stories from places where the rights-based legal fabric of the nation-state system has been cut away, withdrawn, or denied, and where a carceral humanitarianism has arisen in their place. Just as importantly, each artist uses a shared formal technique to communicate the partial mobilities of the testimonies included in their reportage, thereby insisting on nonfiction as literature, and thus troubling the notion of “literature” itself. Finally, by circulating through di&erent though sometimes connected media spaces, partially online and physically online, these pages of exception come together to form a World Literature that is not smooth or uneven, cosmopolitan or capitalist, but unforgivingly tuned into the carceral spaces that interrupt and fragment our world. Read more.

‘The Gutters of History: Geopolitical Pasts and Imperial Presents in Recent Graphic Non-Fiction.’ In Michael Goodrum, David Hall, & Philip Smith eds., Drawing the Past: Comics and the Historical Imagination in the World. Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 2022, pp.56-78.

The comics addressed in this chapter offer a contrapuntal reading of the colonial present’s Orientalist rhetoric in order to challenge it, while also challenging a tendency to fetishize the imaginative power of the comics “gutter” in much comics criticism. For it is in a contrapuntal sense that I deploy the phrase included in the title of this chapter, “the gutters of history”: the comics’ gutters materialize contrapuntal geographies and histories spatially on the page, thereby accounting for the historical omissions of the colonial present and reinserting them to effectively challenge the West’s contemporary neo-imperial interference in the Middle East. Read more.

‘Introduction: Documenting Trauma in Comics.’ In Dominic Davies & Candida Rifkind eds., Documenting Trauma in Comics: Traumatic Pasts, Embodied Histories, & Graphic Reportage. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp.1-26.

This introduction unpacks some of the many complex connections between trauma, comics, and documentary form. It begins by theorising trauma as a ‘sticky’ concept that troubles disciplinary boundaries, before suggesting that comics such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980–1991) have played a significant role in the active production—rather than simply reflection or reification—of cultural and academic conceptions of trauma. It then turns to a critical overview of Caruthian and other hegemonic models of trauma, combining this with brief outlines of each of the book’s chapters to show how they seek to unsettle a dominant ‘trauma paradigm’, or to divert away from a recognised ‘trauma aesthetic’. In its final section, the introduction emphasises the important contributions made by efforts to decolonise trauma studies, exploring how several of this book’s contributors are informed by and continuing this important work, especially through their re-evaluation of the figure of the witness. The introduction concludes by drawing out and reiterating the book’s overarching contention: that comics are a generative force at the core of trauma itself, moulding and melding it into new shapes that might provide new models for working it through in the future. Read more.

‘Crossing Borders, Bridging Boundaries: Reconstructing the Rights of the Refugee in Comics.’ In Elena Fidian-Qasmiyeh ed., Refuge in a Moving World. London: UCL Press, 2020, pp.177-192.

It is into a visual culture, both of imagistic ephemerality and of prevalent anti-migrant sentiment, that comics effectively intervene. In the age of the internet, viewers in the West are trained on a daily basis to make sense of multiple images spliced with pieces of text, as they log onto Facebook feeds or scan through Twitter. Comics, especially those published online (as is the case for these refugee comics), tap into this constant stream of information, harnessing the experience of information transmission and consumption to which viewers are becoming increasingly accustomed (Gardner, 2006). In addition, however, journalism in comics form is able to do two things: first, it can document suffering that goes un-photographed. It imaginatively visualizes oral and written testimonies in order to document human-rights violations, lending them the ‘authenticity’ that contemporary news outlets and consumers demand (Smith, 2011). Second, and perhaps even more importantly, comics’ sequential and highly mediated form offers an antidote to the ‘post-truth’ culture of our contemporary world (Mickwitz, 2016), in which photographs are detached from their original context, circulate at lightning speed through multiple framings and re-framings, and are often mobilized towards dubious political ends. The laboured etchings of comics journalism offer an antidote not only to the lack of visualization but also the decontextualization of photographic images that, in their proliferation, are reduced to insignificance. Read more.

World Literature

With Elleke Boehmer. ‘Empire: The 19th Century Global Novel in English.’ In Joel Evans ed., Globalisation and Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp.80-93.

This chapter addresses the integral role that literary writing in English, and especially the realist novel, played in imaginatively shaping, structuring and on occasion obscuring processes of nineteenth-century globalization, for which empire was the constitutive ground. We will observe how the novel composed what Raymond Williams called ‘structures of feeling’ that combined together human relationships and their wider contexts in communicable ways even when, as here, those contexts extended beyond the nation and took on global dimensions (Williams 1973: 158). Throughout, globalization will be taken as the incremental and unequal incorporation of non-capitalist regions of the world into the rising capitalist economies of Europe and then North America, a process accompanied by the uneven imposition of cultural, technological and infrastructural influence (Wallerstein 1996). We proceed in this chapter on the conviction that imperialism was an essential aspect of globalization through the long nineteenth century, redistributing wealth unevenly and restructuring the global economy in favour of imperial power. Globalization and empire were therefore folded into one another, taking on different features at their geographic and economic cores and peripheral edges. To capture two contrasting yet interestingly complementary views of this system, we therefore take our illustrative examples in this chapter from, on the one hand, Charles Dickens’s writing from the heart of empire in London, and, on the other, from the South African Olive Schreiner’s work set in – and mostly written from – zones of economic extraction. Read more.

‘Beyond Experience: The Rise of Anti-Racist Non-Fiction.’ In Emma Parker, Joshua Doble, & Liam Liburd eds., British Culture After Empire: The Contested History of Decolonisation, Migration, and Race in Modern Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023, pp.87-105.

In Britain, the ‘anti-racist non-fiction’ genre blends memoir with social and historical commentary to build similar connections between individual experiences and structural conditions, often (though not always) without conforming to the individualising inclinations of identity politics that are otherwise so pervasive in our neoliberal era. My aim in this chapter is to explore how this process works by focusing on two of the most rigorous and best-selling of Britain’s anti-racist non-fiction titles. I look first at Eddo- Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race (2017) and discuss its implications for anti-racist work. I then o!er a brief overview of a larger body of British anti-racist non-fiction, much of which is written under Eddo-Lodge’s influence, before turning to a concluding discussion of Akala’s Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire (2018). In brief moments throughout this discussion, I will link this to experiences of my own, as a postgraduate student and then academic who has worked in higher education for over a decade. My intention here is to reveal the importance of experience to analyses of institutional racism, and to undermine the rhetorical separation of ‘academic’ writing from individual biography.. Read more.

With Elleke Boehmer. ‘Postcolonialism and South-South Relations.’ In Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh ed., The Routledge Handbook of South-South Relations. London & New York: Routledge, 2018, pp.48-58.

Postcolonial studies or postcolonialism is a critical theoretical approach that emerged in the Anglo-American academy in the 1980s, and has tended to base itself at once conceptually and politically on a division of the world into ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’, even as it then sets out to challenge such distinctions. This rest was first understood to be the non-aligned ‘Third World’ or developing world, but has more recently come to be referred to as the global South. With the rise of the neoliberal order since the 1980s and subsequent increased and intensified global inequalities, there was a perceived need in the South to address such developments and foster greater cooperation and unity, and postcolonial studies was one such response. From the outset, however, this simplistic, binary geographical split was a contradictory position for the field to inhabit. The subject of its critique was precisely the formal dissolution of the imperial world from the 1940s to the 1960s, hence postcolonialism. Meanwhile, its methodology was cross-disciplinary, a mode of analysis applied to various subjects, from the literary and cultural to the anthropological and economic. Of course, there were other colonial-era disciplines that, though developed in the Western academy, referenced ‘othered’ subjects and other parts of the world, but they mostly attempted to conceal these contradictions. By contrast, postcolonial criticism was specifically concerned to question, deconstruct and undermine binary divisions of colonial self and colonised other, and to nuance, complicate and interrogate paradigms of West and rest, us and them. Read more.

With Erica Lombard & Benjamin Mountford. ‘Introduction. Fighting Words: Books and the Making of the Postcolonial World.’ In Davies, Lombard & Mountford eds., Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World. Oxford: Peter Lang, pp.1-26.

Can a book change the world? If books were integral to the creation of the imperial global order, what role have they played in resisting that order throughout the twentieth century? To what extent can anti-imperial and anticolonial resistance movements across the planet be traced back to, or be found to have their ideas rooted in, materially circulating texts? These questions undergird the fifteen chapters of which this collection is comprised, which together examine how the book as both a cultural form and material object has fuelled resistance to empire and shaped the contours of the postcolonial world in the long twentieth century. Read more.

‘From Communism to Postcapitalism: Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto.’ In Dominic Davies, Erica Lombard & Benjamin Mountford eds., Fighting Words: Fifteen Books that Shaped the Postcolonial World. Oxford: Peter Lang, pp.27-42.

History bears testament to the Manifesto’s planetary circulation, global readership and material impact. Interpretations of this short document have affected the lives of millions globally, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. The text is somehow able to outline the complex theoretical foundations for the world’s most enduring critique of capitalism in a comprehensible and persuasive language, and as such, readers of all classes, professions, nations and ethnicities have drawn on – and in many cases warped and manipulated – its valuable insights. Whilst arguing for the importance of the Manifesto as an anti-imperial book and exploring the reasons for its viral circulation, this chapter will also show that it is a self-reflexive text that predicts its own historic impact. It is the formal and generic – or, in fact, ‘literary’ – qualities of this astonishing document that have given it such primacy in the canon of anti-imperial and anti-capitalist writing. Read more.

‘Occupying Literary and Urban Space: Adiga, Authenticity, and the Politics of Socioeconomic Critique.’ In Alex Tickell ed., South-Asian Fiction in English: Contemporary Transformations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.119-138.

This chapter argues that Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower moves beyond idiosyncratic concerns around issues of authenticity to produce a discursive space of dissent in opposition to the economic inequalities and pervasive corruption of the socio-political context in which it is set. The narrative throws the wider political and socio-economic effects of neoliberalism into relief as they manifest primarily in the policies of urban land redevelopment that are symptomatic of Mumbai’s contentious history around property and land rights. The novel also uses the Bombay Rent Act of 1979 as a lens with which to shed light on the corruption and profit-oriented complicity of various national and state institutions that have, in twenty-fi rst-century Mumbai, become the servants of capital. Read more.