Beirut Won't Cry

Beirut Won't Cry
Author: Mazen Kerbaj
Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2017-08-30
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 168396036X

BANG? BLOG! As bombs bombard his hometown of Beirut, thus begins the online diary of Mazen Kerbaj, a Lebanese painter, jazz musician, and cartoonist. Throughout the summer of 2006, during the Israeli attack on Lebanon, Kerbaj published drawings, comics, and writing giving a first-hand account of someone creating during a time of intense everyday brutality. Drawn and written in English, French, and Arabic, Beirut Won’t Cry shows us how an artist views the world and everything in it — his relationships, his family, and his creative pursuits — as it violently crumbles around him. Both historically vital and hilarious, Beirut Won’t Cry introduces Mazen Kerbaj’s unique voice and urgent pen to an American audience for the very first time, teaching readers how to carry on and resist in times of war and oppression.

Cultures of War in Graphic Novels

Cultures of War in Graphic Novels
Author: Tatiana Prorokova
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2018-07-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813590973

First runner-up for the 2019 Ray and Pat Browne Award for the Best Edited Collection in Popular and American Culture Cultures of War in Graphic Novels examines the representation of small-scale and often less acknowledged conflicts from around the world and throughout history. The contributors look at an array of graphic novels about conflicts such as the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901), the Irish struggle for national independence (1916-1998), the Falkland War (1982), the Bosnian War (1992-1995), the Rwandan genocide (1994), the Israel-Lebanon War (2006), and the War on Terror (2001-). The book explores the multi-layered relation between the graphic novel as a popular medium and war as a pivotal recurring experience in human history. The focus on largely overlooked small-scale conflicts contributes not only to advance our understanding of graphic novels about war and the cultural aspects of war as reflected in graphic novels, but also our sense of the early twenty-first century, in which popular media and limited conflicts have become closely interrelated.

Comics in Contemporary Arab Culture

Comics in Contemporary Arab Culture
Author: Jacob Høigilt
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2018-12-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1786735482

Comic books for adults have become one of the most novel and colourful forms of cultural expression in the Arab world today. During the last ten years, young Arabs have crafted stories explaining issues such as authoritarianism, resistance, war, sex, gender relations and youth culture. These are distributed through informal channels as well as independent bookstores and websites. Events like the annual Cairocomix festival in Egypt and the Mahmoud Kahil Award in Lebanon evidence the importance of this cultural phenomenon. Comics in Contemporary Arab Culture focuses on the production of these comics in Egypt and Lebanon, countries at the forefront of the development of the genre for adults. Jacob Hoigilt guides the reader through the emergence of independent comics, explores their social and political critique, and analyses their visual and verbal rhetoric. Analysing more than 50 illustrations, included here, he shows that Arab comics are revealing of the changing attitudes towards politics, social relations and even language. While political analysts often paint a bleak picture of the Arab world after 2011, this book suggests that art and storytelling continue to nourish a spirit of liberty and freedom despite political setbacks. Comics in Contemporary Arab Culture provides a fresh and original insight into the politics of the Middle East and cultural expression in the Arab World.

Urban Comics

Urban Comics
Author: Dominic Davies
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2019-02-21
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1351054481

Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives makes an important and timely contribution both to comics studies and urban studies, offering a decolonisation and reconfiguration of both of these already interdisciplinary fields. With chapter-length discussions of comics from cities such as Cairo, Cape Town, New Orleans, Delhi and Beirut, this book shows how artistic collectives and urban social movements working across the global South are producing some of the most exciting and formally innovative graphic narratives of the contemporary moment. Throughout, the author reads an expansive range of graphic narratives through the vocabulary of urban studies to argue that these formal innovations should be thought of as a kind of infrastructure. This ‘infrastructural form’ allows urban comics to reveal that the built environments of our cities are not static, banal, or depoliticised, but rather highly charged material spaces that allow some forms of social life to exist while also prohibiting others. Built from a formal infrastructure of grids, gutters and panels, and capable of volumetric, multi-scalar perspectives, this book shows how urban comics are able to represent, repair and even rebuild contemporary global cities toward more socially just and sustainable ends. Operating at the intersection of comics studies and urban studies, and offering large global surveys alongside close textual and visual analyses, this book explores and opens up the fascinating relationship between comics and graphic narratives, on the one hand, and cities and urban spaces, on the other.

Tar Beach

Tar Beach
Author: Faith Ringgold
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 19
Release: 2020-08-18
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0593377869

CORETTA SCOTT KING AWARD WINNER • CALDECOTT HONOR BOOK • A NEW YORK TIMES BEST ILLUSTRATED BOOK Acclaimed artist Faith Ringgold seamless weaves fiction, autobiography, and African American history into a magical story that resonates with the universal wish for freedom, and will be cherished for generations. Cassie Louise Lightfoot has a dream: to be free to go wherever she wants for the rest of her life. One night, up on “tar beach,” the rooftop of her family’s Harlem apartment building, her dreams come true. The stars lift her up, and she flies over the city, claiming the buildings and the city as her own. As Cassie learns, anyone can fly. “All you need is somewhere to go you can’t get to any other way. The next thing you know, you’re flying among the stars.”

Targeted: Beirut

Targeted: Beirut
Author: Jack Carr
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2024-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1668024357

Based on comprehensive interviews with survivors, extensive military records, as well as personal letters, diaries and photographs, the full story is revealed behind the deadly truck bomb that exploded at the U.S. Marine Corp barracks in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983.

Documenting Trauma in Comics

Documenting Trauma in Comics
Author: Dominic Davies
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2020-05-21
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 3030379981

Why are so many contemporary comics and graphic narratives written as memoirs or documentaries of traumatic events? Is there a specific relationship between the comics form and the documentation and reportage of trauma? How do the interpretive demands made on comics readers shape their relationships with traumatic events? And how does comics’ documentation of traumatic pasts operate across national borders and in different cultural, political, and politicised contexts? The sixteen chapters and three comics included in Documenting Trauma in Comics set out to answer exactly these questions. Drawing on a range of historically and geographically expansive examples, the contributors bring their different perspectives to bear on the tangled and often fraught intersections between trauma studies, comics studies, and theories of documentary practices and processes. The result is a collection that shows how comics is not simply related to trauma, but a generative force that has become central to its remembrance, documentation, and study.

The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Culture

The Performance of Listening in Postcolonial Francophone Culture
Author: Jennifer Solheim
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2018-01-23
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1786948451

In considering cultural works from French-speaking North Africa and the Middle East all published or released in France from 1962-2011, Solheim’s study of listening across cultural genres will be of interest to any scholar curious about contemporary postcolonial France.

The Arsonists' City

The Arsonists' City
Author: Hala Alyan
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Total Pages: 467
Release: 2021
Genre: Domestic fiction
ISBN: 035812655X

"The Arsonists' City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga, but in Alyan's hands, one family's tale becomes the story of a nation--Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States. It's the kind of book we are lucky to have."--Rumaan Alam A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home The Nasr family is spread across the globe--Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they've always had their ancestral home in Beirut--a constant touchstone--and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell. The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets--lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame--that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, those secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold this family together. In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that "fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us" (NPR).

In The Shoes of the Other

In The Shoes of the Other
Author: Samia Mehrez
Publisher: Al Kotob Khan for Publishing and Distribution
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2019-12-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9778031134

In the Shoes of the Other Interdisciplinary Essays in Translation Studies from Cairo “This anthology continues a tradition that is intended to give impetus to the development of Egyptian and Arab discourses on translation both within and beyond the American University in Cairo. It is a welcome and important contribution to raising the profile of translation, in all its forms, and of translators in the region.” Mona Baker, University of Manchester “Since its founding, the Center for Translation Studies has hosted an astonishing number of academic events that are among the most intellectually serious and internationally prominent of AUC’s activities in the humanities; this has been noted by universities across the world. Indeed, the “In Translation” lecture series is, without any exaggeration, the most impressive public lecture series of its kind anywhere, and far beyond anything comparable in Africa or the Middle East.” Adam Talib, Durham University “AUC’s Center for Translation Studies has proved itself a vital interpreter of texts and events generated by Egypt’s turbulent political history and fervent artistic culture. I know of no other group of scholars with equal competence in these matters and with an equivalent respect in the field.” Anthony Cordingley, Université Paris VIII