Drawing (Geographies of) Disaster in the Lebanese Graphic Novel
Carla Calargé
Ingraham 206
Carla Calargé, Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Florida Atlantic University, examines how contemporary Lebanese graphic novels mobilize Beirut’s urban landscape to engage with war, memory, neoliberal reconstruction, and the succession of national disasters that have marked Lebanon’s recent history. She argues that, in the absence of an official historical narrative of the 1975–1990 Civil War, graphic narratives draw on personal memories, inherited images, and urban archives to challenge state-sponsored amnesia and its attendant erasures. She also compares the work of comics artists who experienced the war as children with that of a younger postmemory generation, and shows how distinct relationships to the past produce different representations of Beirut as a fragmented, contested, and continually transformed urban space. Nostalgia and melancholia emerge not simply as attachments to a lost past, but as critical strategies for reclaiming political agency in the present and imagining unrealized futures. Finally, Calargé traces a broader shift from postwar memory work toward more direct forms of civic and political engagement, particularly during the protests of 2015 and 2019 and in response to Lebanon’s economic collapse, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the devastating Beirut port explosion of August 2020.
Bio:
Carla Calargé’s research focuses primarily on cultural production from the Arab world, particularly Lebanon and North Africa, and draws on postcolonial studies, memory studies, feminist theory, and visual and cultural studies. Her scholarship examines questions of war and trauma, collective memory, national identity, colonial legacies, neoliberalism, and political and social transformations. She is the author of Liban. Mémoires fragmentées d’une guerre obsédante (Brill, 2017), which explores representations and memorialization of the Lebanese Civil War in contemporary Francophone cultural production. Her recent research focuses particularly on Lebanese graphic narratives and their representations of Beirut. More recently, she co-edited a special issue of Contemporary French Civilization on Exile and Migrancy in the Arabo-Amazigh world, forthcoming in 2027.
Picture from: Photo-essay by Diego Mayon: Beirut, anti-riot barricades become riot walls