This article reads the emerging cinema of the National Capital Region (NCR) of India as a primary archive that documents urban transformation in the rapidly developing area and examines the representation of space within the same. Using three films set in the region – Aurangzeb (Atul ), Titli (Kanu ) and Gurgaon (Shanker ) – the article reads the effects of privatized city-making and the deeply unequal growth reflected within the diagetic place-making of the region and argues that theoretical frameworks like gentrification are not adequate to register the urban transformation in these postcolonial post-liberalization contexts, and that the films themselves serve as primary archives that offer a means to visibilize the unique nature of spatial change that also distort social ties in the region.
{"title":"‘My father’s village, my city’: Place-making in the cinema of NCR","authors":"R. Gangopadhyay","doi":"10.1386/jucs_00064_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs_00064_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article reads the emerging cinema of the National Capital Region (NCR) of India as a primary archive that documents urban transformation in the rapidly developing area and examines the representation of space within the same. Using three films set in the region – Aurangzeb (Atul ), Titli (Kanu ) and Gurgaon (Shanker ) – the article reads the effects of privatized city-making and the deeply unequal growth reflected within the diagetic place-making of the region and argues that theoretical frameworks like gentrification are not adequate to register the urban transformation in these postcolonial post-liberalization contexts, and that the films themselves serve as primary archives that offer a means to visibilize the unique nature of spatial change that also distort social ties in the region.","PeriodicalId":36149,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45445953","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies enters its tenth year of publication, this first instalment of a two-part editorial turns towards questions of memory and urban life. The vehicle for thinking through these questions is the actual, tactile puzzle that comics artist Chris Ware released as an extension to his Building Stories box set. In the guise of a review-style piece, that is, a close reading of the puzzle as an urban comics text in its own right, this instalment indirectly introduces themes to be continued in the second editorial, due out later this year.
{"title":"Chris Ware’s Building Stories jigsaw puzzle (2021)","authors":"Benjamin Fraser","doi":"10.1386/jucs_00061_2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs_00061_2","url":null,"abstract":"As the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies enters its tenth year of publication, this first instalment of a two-part editorial turns towards questions of memory and urban life. The vehicle for thinking through these questions is the actual, tactile puzzle that comics artist Chris Ware released as an extension to his Building Stories box set. In the guise of a review-style piece, that is, a close reading of the puzzle as an urban comics text in its own right, this instalment indirectly introduces themes to be continued in the second editorial, due out later this year.","PeriodicalId":36149,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45779810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ling Ma’s Severance () offers an interesting take on urban life after a pandemic and a resultant zombie apocalypse have turned New York City into a ghost town. The dystopian speculative fiction novel intertextually references the literary and media histories of science fiction and horror. Yet, it exceeds their often exclusively White and cis-male focus for a more comprehensive understanding of how the processes of gentrification are gendered and racialized. This contribution argues that Ma’s novel expands the repertoire of storytelling about gentrification through several stylistic and thematic features. For example, the ways that urban experiences are mediated through stories and enmeshed in global capitalist structures of consumerism. Further, the contribution explores the list of gentrification as an essential stylistic feature of urban fiction and the theme of pregnancy and its relevance in the gentrifying city.
{"title":"‘To live in a city is to consume its offerings’: Speculative fiction and gentrification in Ling Ma’s Severance (2018)","authors":"M. Sulimma","doi":"10.1386/jucs_00066_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs_00066_1","url":null,"abstract":"Ling Ma’s Severance () offers an interesting take on urban life after a pandemic and a resultant zombie apocalypse have turned New York City into a ghost town. The dystopian speculative fiction novel intertextually references the literary and media histories of science fiction and horror. Yet, it exceeds their often exclusively White and cis-male focus for a more comprehensive understanding of how the processes of gentrification are gendered and racialized. This contribution argues that Ma’s novel expands the repertoire of storytelling about gentrification through several stylistic and thematic features. For example, the ways that urban experiences are mediated through stories and enmeshed in global capitalist structures of consumerism. Further, the contribution explores the list of gentrification as an essential stylistic feature of urban fiction and the theme of pregnancy and its relevance in the gentrifying city.","PeriodicalId":36149,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Cultural Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43079998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The introduction to this Special Issue considers how literary and cultural representations of cities in transition contribute to interdisciplinary vocabularies for describing urban change beyond gentrification. By ‘urban change’ we refer to shifts in city and regional planning and real estate development, but also to environmental events, patterns of migration and informal uses of the city that shape how urban places transform. The introduction frames scholarship about what gentrification can and should describe as a debate about language and representation. We revisit critical discussions of gentrification and turn to areas of urbanist scholarship that have effectively modelled more specific approaches to describing urban change. We introduce the five articles in the Special Issue and contextualize how their engagement with representations of urban change in London, metropolitan Delhi, Lubumbashi, New York and Manchester intervene in interdisciplinary urban scholarship by offering new tools for describing urban change amid neo-liberal globalization.
{"title":"Representing a long emergency: New approaches to urban change in literary and cultural studies","authors":"Hanna Henryson, Davy Knittle","doi":"10.1386/jucs_00062_2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs_00062_2","url":null,"abstract":"The introduction to this Special Issue considers how literary and cultural representations of cities in transition contribute to interdisciplinary vocabularies for describing urban change beyond gentrification. By ‘urban change’ we refer to shifts in city and regional planning and real estate development, but also to environmental events, patterns of migration and informal uses of the city that shape how urban places transform. The introduction frames scholarship about what gentrification can and should describe as a debate about language and representation. We revisit critical discussions of gentrification and turn to areas of urbanist scholarship that have effectively modelled more specific approaches to describing urban change. We introduce the five articles in the Special Issue and contextualize how their engagement with representations of urban change in London, metropolitan Delhi, Lubumbashi, New York and Manchester intervene in interdisciplinary urban scholarship by offering new tools for describing urban change amid neo-liberal globalization.","PeriodicalId":36149,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46697372","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article analyses three novels which employ speculative fictional elements to explore gentrification: Reggie Nadelson’s Londongrad (2009), K. Chess’s Famous Men Who Never Lived (2019) and N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (2020). Although these novels are set in western cities – London and New York – Peacock argues that their speculative conventions reflect a conception of the city as ‘planetary’, as what Hyun Bang Shin describes ‘as unbounded space, understood as being constituted through its relationships, including flows and networks, with other places’. These novels use the trope of alternate worlds partly as metaphor for the clash of different views of authenticity in gentrifying spaces; partly as metaphor for diversity, migration and the alienation of global extraterritoriality; but also partly as a means of decentralizing the western city or to propose multiple, competing centralities at all spatial levels – domestic, neighbourhood, civic and beyond. In so doing they offer, in divergent ways, critiques of and symbolic alternatives to neo-liberal gentrification.
{"title":"Other neighbourhoods, other worlds: Gentrification and contemporary speculative fictions","authors":"J. Peacock","doi":"10.1386/jucs_00067_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs_00067_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses three novels which employ speculative fictional elements to explore gentrification: Reggie Nadelson’s Londongrad (2009), K. Chess’s Famous Men Who Never Lived (2019) and N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became (2020). Although these novels are set in western cities – London and New York – Peacock argues that their speculative conventions reflect a conception of the city as ‘planetary’, as what Hyun Bang Shin describes ‘as unbounded space, understood as being constituted through its relationships, including flows and networks, with other places’. These novels use the trope of alternate worlds partly as metaphor for the clash of different views of authenticity in gentrifying spaces; partly as metaphor for diversity, migration and the alienation of global extraterritoriality; but also partly as a means of decentralizing the western city or to propose multiple, competing centralities at all spatial levels – domestic, neighbourhood, civic and beyond. In so doing they offer, in divergent ways, critiques of and symbolic alternatives to neo-liberal gentrification.","PeriodicalId":36149,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49441925","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article revisits Ruth Glass’s essay ‘Aspects of change’ (1964), in which the urban sociologist reputedly coins the term gentrification. Whereas other readers are content merely to quote Glass’s description of gentrification, I consider how she situates the phenomenon within a broader complex of urban change. Doing so, I suggest, provides a useful optic for considering later literary engagements with gentrification in London. I examine two fictional texts – Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Innocent and the Guilty (1971) and Maureen Duffy’s Capital (1975) – and argue that they follow Glass by providing ‘expanded narratives’ of gentrification. This narrative mode is distinctive for the way that it frames highly visible and seemingly localized phenomena, such as gentrification, within broader cultural, geographical and historical contexts, in order to ask larger questions about the nature of urbanity. A concern with mobility and infrastructure defines these expanded narratives, which illuminate how these aspects of the city shape perceptions of urban change. I conclude by outlining how expanded narratives might also provide the basis for a useful reading strategy which contrasts with the extractive procedures that characterize readings of Glass and certain scholarly approaches to urban literature.
本文回顾了Ruth Glass的文章《变化的方方面面》(Aspects of change, 1964)，据说这位城市社会学家创造了“绅士化”一词。虽然其他读者仅仅满足于引用格拉斯对中产阶级化的描述，但我考虑的是她如何将这种现象置于更广泛的城市变化综合体中。我认为，这样做，为考虑后来与伦敦中产阶级化的文学接触提供了一个有用的视角。我研究了两个虚构的文本——西尔维娅·汤森德·华纳的《无辜与有罪》(1971)和莫林·达菲的《资本》(1975)——并认为它们通过提供“扩展叙事”来延续格拉斯。这种叙事模式的独特之处在于，它在更广泛的文化、地理和历史背景下，构建了高度可见的、看似局部的现象，比如士绅化，从而提出了关于城市本质的更大问题。对流动性和基础设施的关注定义了这些扩展的叙事，这些叙事阐明了城市的这些方面如何塑造城市变化的感知。最后，我概述了扩展叙事如何也可能为一种有用的阅读策略提供基础，这种策略与格拉斯阅读的提取过程和某些城市文学的学术方法形成鲜明对比。
{"title":"Expanded narratives of gentrification: Mobility, infrastructure and urban change in 1970s London literature","authors":"M. Dines","doi":"10.1386/jucs_00063_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs_00063_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article revisits Ruth Glass’s essay ‘Aspects of change’ (1964), in which the urban sociologist reputedly coins the term gentrification. Whereas other readers are content merely to quote Glass’s description of gentrification, I consider how she situates the phenomenon within a broader complex of urban change. Doing so, I suggest, provides a useful optic for considering later literary engagements with gentrification in London. I examine two fictional texts – Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Innocent and the Guilty (1971) and Maureen Duffy’s Capital (1975) – and argue that they follow Glass by providing ‘expanded narratives’ of gentrification. This narrative mode is distinctive for the way that it frames highly visible and seemingly localized phenomena, such as gentrification, within broader cultural, geographical and historical contexts, in order to ask larger questions about the nature of urbanity. A concern with mobility and infrastructure defines these expanded narratives, which illuminate how these aspects of the city shape perceptions of urban change. I conclude by outlining how expanded narratives might also provide the basis for a useful reading strategy which contrasts with the extractive procedures that characterize readings of Glass and certain scholarly approaches to urban literature.","PeriodicalId":36149,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45501931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
My article explores complex urbanisms of the Global South enmeshed in the enduring aftermath of colonialism. I examine Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s novel Tram 83 that fictionalizes Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, built and developed around exploitative mining and forced migrant labour, and mediates and captures forms of urban change beyond the metrics of gentrification. The novel charts the volatile existence of miners, students and ordinary citizenry of ‘the City-State’ where they work from dawn to dusk deep in the bowels of the earth and between dusk and dawn cavort deep in the belly of nightclub Tram 83. There seems to be an acceleration and contraction of life itself, available only in limited, repetitive futures, and a drive towards total expenditure. Mujila’s novel, however, also uncovers tempo-spatialities within these extractive spaces that allow openings into other forms of urban liveability. Mujila mobilizes the affective and embodied lives of the mining city as a constitutive aspect of urban informality that at once exceeds and clarifies colonial infrastructural remains.
{"title":"Representing postcolonial urban change: Recursive infrastructures and forms of liveability in Tram 83","authors":"Rituparna Mitra","doi":"10.1386/jucs_00065_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs_00065_1","url":null,"abstract":"My article explores complex urbanisms of the Global South enmeshed in the enduring aftermath of colonialism. I examine Congolese writer Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s novel Tram 83 that fictionalizes Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, built and developed around exploitative mining and forced migrant labour, and mediates and captures forms of urban change beyond the metrics of gentrification. The novel charts the volatile existence of miners, students and ordinary citizenry of ‘the City-State’ where they work from dawn to dusk deep in the bowels of the earth and between dusk and dawn cavort deep in the belly of nightclub Tram 83. There seems to be an acceleration and contraction of life itself, available only in limited, repetitive futures, and a drive towards total expenditure. Mujila’s novel, however, also uncovers tempo-spatialities within these extractive spaces that allow openings into other forms of urban liveability. Mujila mobilizes the affective and embodied lives of the mining city as a constitutive aspect of urban informality that at once exceeds and clarifies colonial infrastructural remains.","PeriodicalId":36149,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48242398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Some of the world’s most ambitious urban development projects today are first expressed as hyper-realistic, computer-generated images (CGIs). These fictional worlds increasingly shape megalomaniac visions and collective imaginaries about the future of cities. Digital media about speculative urban environments are often produced remotely by design professionals and subsequently employed to secure investment and finance. Disguising marketing media as planning documents deeply challenges the traditional role and responsibilities of the urban planning practice. In a spectacular and experiential proposition, Qiddiya’s master plan animation celebrates consumption and techno-utopianism, concealing forms of post(colonial) invisible labour and oppressive digital infrastructures. A careful analysis of ‘Qiddiya’s Journey’ illustrates how CGI-generated media doubles as a development strategy and propaganda, ignoring critical implications of building a theme park city in the middle of a desert. Beyond the neo-liberal agenda of tourism and entertainment, Qiddiya’s vision reveals ethical lapses in the use of CGIs for urban planning purposes. Moreover, it exemplifies how seductive aesthetics can enable an authoritarian regime to advance contentious development programmes that discretely launder its image clean of social and environmental controversies.
{"title":"Qiddiya’s Journey: A case study in urban imagineering and image laundering","authors":"Andrés F. Ramirez","doi":"10.1386/jucs_00056_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs_00056_1","url":null,"abstract":"Some of the world’s most ambitious urban development projects today are first expressed as hyper-realistic, computer-generated images (CGIs). These fictional worlds increasingly shape megalomaniac visions and collective imaginaries about the future of cities. Digital media about speculative urban environments are often produced remotely by design professionals and subsequently employed to secure investment and finance. Disguising marketing media as planning documents deeply challenges the traditional role and responsibilities of the urban planning practice. In a spectacular and experiential proposition, Qiddiya’s master plan animation celebrates consumption and techno-utopianism, concealing forms of post(colonial) invisible labour and oppressive digital infrastructures. A careful analysis of ‘Qiddiya’s Journey’ illustrates how CGI-generated media doubles as a development strategy and propaganda, ignoring critical implications of building a theme park city in the middle of a desert. Beyond the neo-liberal agenda of tourism and entertainment, Qiddiya’s vision reveals ethical lapses in the use of CGIs for urban planning purposes. Moreover, it exemplifies how seductive aesthetics can enable an authoritarian regime to advance contentious development programmes that discretely launder its image clean of social and environmental controversies.","PeriodicalId":36149,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49515026","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the representation of walking and the narrativization of borders in Troubles-era Belfast in Anna Burns’s 2018 novel Milkman. I argue that the protagonist, Middle Sister, develops her own narrative form and walking method as ‘tactics’ to challenge the city’s imposed sectarian geographies and as a response to navigating a city of intense surveillance. In her narrativization, Middle Sister replaces place references with her own complex naming system and lexicon and negotiates urban space by ‘reading-while-walking’. As a result, Middle Sister attempts to dislocate the political nature of the conflict by mediating Belfast on her own terms and asserting her own spatial practices. However, as I demonstrate in the final section in conversation with trauma theory, there are limitations to Middle Sister’s walking practice, which is disrupted by the urban hauntings of her troubled city, triggering particular psychosomatic responses and traumatic memories.
{"title":"Spatial violence and everyday borders in contested cities: Literary representations of walking in Anna Burns’s Milkman","authors":"Sunjay Mathuria","doi":"10.1386/jucs_00054_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs_00054_1","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the representation of walking and the narrativization of borders in Troubles-era Belfast in Anna Burns’s 2018 novel Milkman. I argue that the protagonist, Middle Sister, develops her own narrative form and walking method as ‘tactics’ to challenge the city’s imposed sectarian geographies and as a response to navigating a city of intense surveillance. In her narrativization, Middle Sister replaces place references with her own complex naming system and lexicon and negotiates urban space by ‘reading-while-walking’. As a result, Middle Sister attempts to dislocate the political nature of the conflict by mediating Belfast on her own terms and asserting her own spatial practices. However, as I demonstrate in the final section in conversation with trauma theory, there are limitations to Middle Sister’s walking practice, which is disrupted by the urban hauntings of her troubled city, triggering particular psychosomatic responses and traumatic memories.","PeriodicalId":36149,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43196500","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In her graphic memoir, A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return, Zeina Abirached depicts the city of Beirut during its protracted civil war, relying on her own recollections and those of family and neighbours to reconstruct an urban environment that was radically altered by conflict. This article examines the book’s depiction of Beirut as an embodied space of experience, a city that is full of life not only because of how its inhabitants adjust to the spatial disruptions of the war, but also because it lives in memory. Through both images and text, Abirached’s memoir suggests that while the body of the city reflects the trauma felt by its inhabitants during conflict, it also fosters a sense of identity, illustrating that figuratively reconstructed places can serve to memorialize both individual and collective responses to trauma and its aftermath.
{"title":"The embodied city: Reconstructing Beirut in Zeina Abirached’s A Game for Swallows","authors":"Andrea Modarres","doi":"10.1386/jucs_00057_1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1386/jucs_00057_1","url":null,"abstract":"In her graphic memoir, A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return, Zeina Abirached depicts the city of Beirut during its protracted civil war, relying on her own recollections and those of family and neighbours to reconstruct an urban environment that was radically altered by conflict. This article examines the book’s depiction of Beirut as an embodied space of experience, a city that is full of life not only because of how its inhabitants adjust to the spatial disruptions of the war, but also because it lives in memory. Through both images and text, Abirached’s memoir suggests that while the body of the city reflects the trauma felt by its inhabitants during conflict, it also fosters a sense of identity, illustrating that figuratively reconstructed places can serve to memorialize both individual and collective responses to trauma and its aftermath.","PeriodicalId":36149,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Urban Cultural Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43967970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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