ABSTRACT
The book’s final chapter turns to the Lebanese capital of Beirut, using the concept of ‘urbicide’—the intentional eradication of urban infrastructures, public spaces and the social interactions they sustain—to understand the city both historically during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) and in its neoliberal present. It explores how contemporary Lebanese graphic narratives depict these historical and contemporary instances of urbicide, before also attempting to reconstruct a desegregated city by recovering instances of everyday civilian resilience and community collaboration from memories and post-memories of the war. Moving through a series of examples from a range of genres, including sustained readings of the graphic memoirs of Zeina Abirached, Lamia Ziadé, Mazen Kerbaj and the American-Palestinian artist Leila Abdelrazzaq, this fifth and final chapter asks to what extent comics can themselves be thought of as a form of infrastructure. It concludes with an account of the activity of Samandal, an artistic collective and urban social movement that both depicts and occupies Beirut’s divided spaces in order to rebuild a more socially and spatially just city.
