In Cartographies of Empire, Tucker-Abramson shows how the road novel struggles to break away from material spaces that expose the freedom promised by capital as a lie.

Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams riffs on the story of the American Dream and transforms it into an ethereal tale of settler colonial conquest, indentured labour, and ecological grief.

The City and the World is a meditation on how the city comes to know itself. Hens compels his reader to ‘experience’ his book as though they were a pedestrian making their way through a twenty-first-century megalopolis.

Train Dreams refuses the reader the comfort of decoupling contemporary climate disasters from the long histories of settler colonialism and racial violence that made the American frontier.

Drawn in serialised chapters in the early 1990s, in the wake of the first intifada and on the eve of the Oslo accords, Joe Sacco’s Palestine offers a snapshot of history that will open your eyes to the deprivations of the Israeli occupation of Gaza.

All cultural texts are commodities that conceal within them the conditions of their production, even if these are now spatially dispersed along chains that cross multiple locations.

If Thatcher’s claim that ‘there’s no such thing as society’ is now reproduced through the infrastructures of everyday life, the other great neoliberal myth – that the free market means more meritocracy – has been left in the dust.

Alton Towers stands as a monument to the neoliberal restructuring of the English Midlands. For all the whooshes and screams of excitement, there’s no such thing as progress in a theme park.

Comprised of multiple images arranged into sequences and interspersed with speech bubbles and caption boxes, refugee comics disrupt a media landscape that tends to reduce migrants to either threats or victims.

Composing its stories of the past from framed documents, fragmented images and scraps of text, the form of the graphic novel brings forgotten histories to life and allows readers to reflect on how those histories were recovered.

Lazarus makes the case for literature’s ability to emulate the physical strain of hard graft as a condition of experience for so many of the world-system’s most disadvantaged.

Even before the Olympics start on July 26, Paris wins a gold medal for using the Games to kickstart a radical rethink of the city, its suburbs (or banlieues) and urban inequality.

Election campaigns always seek to give the “feeling” of improved infrastructure, even when meaningful promises on major projects aren’t actually being made.

In the context of a general election campaign, when numbers are thrown around and there is uncertainty about the future, infrastructure offers a feeling of solidity that voters can begin to get on board with.

Why has the Government that won its majority on the promise of renewing Britain’s infrastructure, or ‘levelling up,’ overseen a new phase of infrastructure collapse?

Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s infrastructure are a deliberate effort to make the conditions for life impossible for Palestinians.

Wasteful spending and unprecedented levels of privatisation have weakened Britain’s basic infrastructure through disrepair and neglect, lack of reinvestment and accountability, and endemic mismanagement.

Dr Dominic Davies publishes new book The Broken Promise of Infrastructure, which investigates the cultural politics of infrastructure in Britain.

Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Dominic Davies analyses what the death of Britain’s longest reigning monarch means for the country.

Drawing on a rich tradition of comics that depict counterfactual and dystopian futures, this graphic novel breathes visual life into a world in which there was no peaceful transition of power in 2021.

‘Levelling up’ arrived in an illusory infrastructure aesthetic that saw Boris Johnson drive a bulldozer emblazoned with a Union Jack through a polystyrene wall.

Combining image and text, graphic narratives have proved particularly adept at bridging the macro scales of environmental change together with the micro scales of our everyday human lives.

Revisionist accounts of empire’s reach and effects begin not in history books, but in the literary and poetic writings of authors of colour themselves.

The colonial archive is always already public, as the biopolitical systems that were forged during the transatlantic slave trade recur spatially in the global logics of our neoliberal era.

In April 2019, UCL’s IAS hosted ‘Comic Books and Laughter: History, Politics, Aesthetics’ as part of its seminar series on the relationship between literary studies and laughter.

Akala’s autobiography shows readers how centuries of racist policy making from across the Empire continue to impinge on the life of a young black boy in Britain today.

Comics across the global South are engaged in both their form and content with a radical revisioning of violent, neocolonial urban spaces.

Who is it that we choose to see and who is ‘unseen’? How does Miéville’s novel lead us to think and respond differently to the world around us?

Contemporary SA comics are drawn to alternate, speculative worlds, where if politics do surface it is likely to be in the form of allegory rather than overt commentary.

Visual strategies that highlight the infrastructural violence of borders and state responses to refugees, and invite the audience to question their own emotional responses to displacement.

An important re-evaluation of South Asian women writers, combining readings of canonical authors such as Arundhati Roy, Monica Ali and Kamila Shamsie with lesser-known figures such as Sorayya Khan and Tahmima Anam.

Placing citizen’s rights over human rights, borders necessarily deem some people to be ‘more human’ or ‘less human’ than others.

Constructed from borders and gaps of their own, comics are unique in their ability to communicate all kinds of stories across linguistic, cultural, and geographic borders.

Baddawi is a biography of Abdelrazaq’s father, Ahmad, who spent his childhood growing up in between the urban spaces of Beirut and Baddawi refugee camp in the 1960s and 70s.

For Thieme, postcolonial literature is a form of mappae mundi, medieval maps with artistic idiosyncrasies traceable to a specific author.

These comics tell a multinational story of the global fashion industry and its varying intersections with the rights of fashion models, factory labour and sex workers.

A documentation and reminder of the remarkable positions, be they academic, creative, social, or political, that Palestinians in the diaspora have attained.

Cockburn corrects Western media’s obsessive construction of the Middle East as a region of turmoil and savagery that plays so lazily into centuries-old orientalist tropes.

A return to postcolonial theory, with its ability to self-critique so thoroughly, is necessary to recover the politics of resistance that informed the field in the first place.