Drawing the Invisible: A Study of Urban Space, Informal Migration of Construction Workers, and Precarity in Simon Lamouret’s The Alcazar

Abstract

This article, situated at the intersection of urban studies and comics studies, seeks to interrogate the nature of urban migration and the lives of construction workers in Simon Lamouret’s The Alcazar (2022), a comic based on and in the city of Bangalore. The article begins with a paratextual analysis of the comic, followed by a Lefebvrian analysis of the construction site, to argue that cities like Bangalore are evolving fast “beyond the plan” (Benjamin,2015) to meet the accelerating market pressure, resulting in failed urban planning, infrastructure, and urban crisis. It will further explore what Lamouret’s comic does specifically to intervene in the discourse of neoliberal urbanism and challenge that discourse. The article will also analyze the formal specificities of the comics form and the multiple visual tropes Lamouret employed to “visibilize” the migrant workers and to advance their legitimate rights to urban life in the cityscape.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ritam Sarkar

Ritam Sarkar has a PhD in Comics Studies from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. He is currently an Assistant Professor of English at GITAM University, Visakhapatnam. His research interests are rooted in areas of comics studies, visual narratives, urban cultures, social theories of space and spatiality, South Asian literature, and city in literature. He has published in journals such as Journal of Graphic Novel and Comics and Studies in Comics.

E-mail: [email protected]

Somdatta Bhattacharya

Somdatta Bhattacharya has a PhD in English Studies from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. She is currently an assistant professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. In the past, she has also taught at the University of Hyderabad (2011–2013) and at BITS Pilani, Pilani campus (2013–2018). Her research interests are rooted in areas of urban cultures, social theories of space and spatiality, crime fiction, city in literature, Indian writing in English, gender, and South Asian popular culture, and she has taught and published extensively in these areas.