Paper short abstract:

This paper will assess the comic form's ability to offer new political insights into post/colonial urban landscapes as specifically hyper-capitalist and deeply segregated spaces at this stage in the development of the world-system, focusing on the city of New Delhi in particular.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will assess the comic form's ability to offer new political insights into, and perspectives on, post/colonial urban landscapes as specifically hyper-capitalist and deeply segregated spaces at this stage in the development of the world-system, focusing on the city of New Delhi in particular. It will argue that what has come to be known as the 'graphic novel', especially in its now widely emerging sociopolitical or journalistic sub-genre, is becoming increasingly used both to represent and to analyse the multidimensional complexity and infrastructural politics of postcolonial city spaces. The article is informed by a talk and reading from Vishwajyoti Ghosh, author of Delhi Calm (2010), delivered at the second Leverhulme-funded 'Planned Violence' Network's third workshop, 'Colonial Continuities, Postcolonial Discontinuities', held at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi in October 2014, and will analyse Ghosh's long-form comic alongside Sarnath Banerjee's Corridor, A Graphic Novel (2004) and shorter comics such as Christopher Badoux's Cricket etc, collected in When Kulbhushan Met Stöckli (2009). Through readings of these graphic texts as formal responses to the increasing economic inequalities and uneven infrastructural developments of capital in the Capital, the paper will interrogate the way in which they map urban infrastructures in potentially subversive ways. Does this new multi-dimensional form contain critical, if not resistant strategies for alternative forms of inhabitation of the divided city-space?