urban comics – Ben Katchor biographix book

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/B/Ben-Katchor3

Affordable paperback @ $20.00!! [actually only 10.00 from Nov. 1-10 2023, all UPM books are half price]

The first book dedicated to exploring the comics of Ben Katchor

Description

The recipient of a 2000 MacArthur fellowship, Ben Katchor (b. 1951) is a beloved comics artist with a career spanning four decades. Published in indie weeklies across the United States, his comics are known for evoking the sensorium of the modern metropolis. As part of the Biographix series edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Ben Katchor offers scholars and fans a thorough overview of the artist’s career from 1988 to 2020.

In some of his early strips published in the 1980s in the New York Press and Forward, Katchor introduced one of his quintessential characters, Julius Knipl, a real estate photographer. By crafting Knipl as an urban flâneur prone to wandering, Katchor was able to variously demonstrate his absurd humor and linguistic whimsy alongside narratives packed with social critique. Three volumes collecting the Julius Knipl strips, Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer; Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay; and The Beauty Supply District, helped cement Katchor as a distinguished comics artist and social commentator. Later works, such as The Cardboard Valise, Hand-Drying in America, and The Dairy Restaurant, have diversified his comics legacy.

Rooted in close analyses of the artist’s numerous series and collections, each chapter in Ben Katchor is dedicated to a distinct aspect of the urban experience. Individual pages from Katchor’s work depict not only the visual, but also the auditory, tactile, and olfactory dimensions of life in the city.

Reviews

“Through astute close readings and by framing Ben Katchor’s work along a multisensory spectrum, urban studies scholar Benjamin Fraser presents a stunning and original perspective on Katchor’s graphic narratives.”– Jan Baetens, professor emeritus of cultural studies and comics at the University of Leuven

“As well as being a substantial engagement with a diverse set of works from an important, understudied comics artist, Ben Katchor presents a compelling approach to the analysis of those works. By combining a focus on Katchor’s use of the senses with analysis of the representation of the senses in his comics, Fraser has not only found a way of eliciting specific insights from Katchor’s strips, he has also sketched out an expanded approach to the sensory analysis of comics that can be applied to a wide range of works.”– Ian Hague, founder and director of Comics Forum and Reader in Graphic Narrative at the University of the Arts London

“Ben Katchor’s comics are filled with the same sensuousness, tactility, and humor of the urban worlds they depict. In this enthusiastic author study, Ben Fraser proves an expert guide through Katchor’s cityscapes, offering a vital introduction for readers new to the artist and a valuable reappraisal for those already familiar with his work. Organizing the book’s discussion around the senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, Fraser affirms Katchor’s importance for so many vital themes in and beyond comics studies today: urban culture, multisensory reading, art and its commodification, and the centrality of community in the making of place.”– Dominic Davies, author of Urban Comics: Infrastructure and the Global City in Contemporary Graphic Narratives

Association of American Geographers Conference to be held March 23-27, 2023, in Denver

CfP: 
The Journal of Urban Cultural Studies invites submission of abstracts to be included in the interactive short paper session at the Association of American Geographers Conference to be held March 23-27, 2023, in Denver.

The Urban Cultural Studies session features innovative research that connects urban geography and cultural studies in order to better understand the culture(s) of cities. The interactive short papers will explore aspects of urban studies through humanities texts such as literature, film, graphic novels, music, art, graffiti, video games, and other textual forms of culture. This session is linked to the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies with Intellect publishers and its accompanying blog and podcast series at urbanculturalstudies.wordpress.com.

Following the model of a ‘lighting round session’, each of the 10-14 panelists in the Urban Cultural Studies session will present a 5-minute summary of research or studies in process. A 30- to 45-minute interactive roundtable discussion will follow the presentations. In order to submit an abstract, you must first register for the conference. Once registered, you will need to proceed to the abstract and session submission console. Select the New Abstract button on the console page and follow the on-screen instructions to submit the appropriate abstract type. You will receive an email message when you have successfully submitted your abstract to confirm that it has been accepted. After submitting your abstract, contact me with your assigned PIN number and I will include you in the session. 

Convened by: Stephen Vilaseca, vila616@yahoo.com

new in paperback — Barcelona, City of Comics (SUNY, 2022) with foreword by Pere Joan (discount available until Dec. 31)

Reviews

“Barcelona, City of Comics is a must-read for anyone in comics studies and in urban cultural studies—and for any reader curious about comics, Spain, cities, and architecture. Fascinating, elegantly structured, and compellingly written, Fraser deftly weaves together urban history, politics, and close attention to aesthetics, offering readers snapshots of dynamic artists who exploded the myth of unification and homogeneity after the Francoist dictatorship. A lively, significant contribution that will resonate across fields.” — Hillary Chute, author of Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere

“A superb dialogue between the creative voices of unique comic artists and the way the urban territoriality of Barcelona inspired their multicultural work.” — Ana Merino, author of El cómic hispánico and Chris Ware: La secuencia circular

“This is an amazing book. As a scholar of peninsular culture and avid reader of comics, I find Barcelona, City of Comics highly informative for experts and non-experts alike, cohesive, entertaining, well-researched, and refreshing in the agility of its prose. Fraser’s writing is unencumbered by heavy theoretical entanglements but includes just enough engagement—with comics theory, urbanism, Marxism, and cultural studies—to undergird his assertions. The strongest point of the book, without a doubt, is the richness of the individual close readings of comics and comics panels, and their strong historical contextualization.” — Eduardo Ledesma, author of Radical Poetry: Aesthetics, Politics, Technology, and the Ibero-American Avant-Gardes, 1900-2015

“A deep dive into the ways that comics intersect with the social, cultural, and political life of a great city, Barcelona, City of Comics brings together urban studies and comics studies in entirely unexpected ways. Nimbly skipping across topics and works from dozens of creators, this book shines a spotlight on a creative scene far too little understood.” — Bart Beaty, University of Calgary, author of Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s

“Barcelona, City of Comics tells a compelling story of Spanish graphic narratives in the wake of Franco, one that deserves to be more widely known. Across its several chapters, anti-fascist resistance interlocks with the emergence of new radical subcultures, feminist practices, and speculative urban worlds. Fraser moves deftly between material context and the comics page to show us the history and politics of artistic form, and to contribute to the growing awareness of comics’ ability to narrate our cities anew.” — Dom Davies, author of Urban Comics

Cities Under Stress: Urban Discourses of Crisis, Resilience, Resistance, and Renewal

Cities Under Stress: Urban Discourses of Crisis, Resilience, Resistance, and Renewal The Third International Conference of the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS) University of California, Santa Barbara on 17–19 February 2022.
Deadline for submissions: September 1
Conference website: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n/2022-conference/

Keynote speakers:

Caroline Levine (Department of English, Cornell U)
Sara Meerow (School of Geographical Science & Urban Planning, Arizona State U)

We invite proposals for contributions at the third international conference of ALUS, scheduled to take place at the University of California, Santa Barbara on 17–19 February 2022. Following earlier successful meetings in Tampere, Finland (2017) and Limerick, Ireland (2019), and sessions at the Modern Language Association Convention (MLA) in both 2020 and 2021, ALUS now organizes its first event in North America.

This conference explores the theme of crisis and response as conveyed in cultural representations of urbanity. We welcome contributions that take up any aspect of or perspective on urban crisis and response, working on any period or genre of literature, from any linguistic tradition. Proposals are invited for individual 20-minute papers or multi-paper panels that in some way work with the theme of urban crisis and response.

The 2020-21 pandemic has led to widespread speculation about how cities will change over the decades to come in response to the vulnerabilities of urban populations exposed by the virus. Other recent events have foregrounded the various roles that cities play as sites of political contestation and social conflict. These include the recent unrest over structural inequalities and police violence (in the USA and around the world), debates over public symbols of cultural memory (as in Bristol, UK), protests against gentrification (as in Berlin), and anti-inequality or pro-democracy demonstrations (as in Santiago, Hong Kong and Cairo). Meanwhile, the nexus of existential threats associated with climate change has lent even greater urgency to the question of how cities must evolve, and whether they can do so in ways that promote more sustainable, equitable, and socially cohesive modes of existence.

Of course, these are hardly the first events to have made cities face the possibility of profound and irrevocable change, nor is this the first time that fears of contagion, violence, and other threats have been concentrated on cities. Only in dialogue with the many profound changes of earlier historical moments can the present moment become explicable, a process in which the humanities have a crucial role to play. Papers concerning literary representations of numerous other crisis moments in the cities of the past are therefore warmly welcomed for this conference.

The triumphalist tone that much urban theory took on at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is being heard less. Now, it seems, is a time for recognition of profound uncertainty, a time for learning from the numerous crises cities have overcome in the past. In particular, it is a time for awareness of the particular challenges facing peripheral cities, shrinking cities, and cities in the Global South. And yet, as the United Nations’ New Urban Agenda of 2017 asserts, “If well-planned and well-managed, urbanization can be a powerful tool for sustainable development for both developing and developed countries.” Recognizing the central role that cities have played in human history in the past, for better and for worse, and stressing the apparent inevitability of increasing urban growth in the foreseeable future, the UN document expresses optimism about the future of cities, provided that they can be made “inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable.”

Many of the watchwords of the UN document–resilience, efficiency, development, consumption, sustainability–are themselves subject to critique, raising larger questions about how the proper goals of urban development should be defined and what principles should guide city planners and city dwellers in an era of proliferating challenges. What clues does the past offer? Do the kinds of representations found in literary texts offer any special insights? How do specific literary forms, including those found in poetry, drama and both prose fiction and nonfictional prose genres mediate and contest the notion of resilience? These are the questions we hope to address in 2022.

Areas you might choose to focus on include:

• –  theoretical and fictional discourses of urban resilience;
• –  urban resilience and genre: speculative fiction; creative nonfiction including life writing,travel writing, essay and reportage;
• –  environmental change including the current climate emergency and its possible impacts incultural representations;
• –  identities including queer, feminist, and intersectional literary urban studies;
• –  cities of the Global South, postcolonial literary urban studies and related decolonizingperspectives;
• –  networks of larger and smaller cities, including global measures of alpha, beta and gamma-level urban regions and representations of secondary and tertiary cities;
• –  literary representations of city subsections and divisions including but not confined to

o downtowns in crisis,
o exurbs,
o gentrifyingzones,
o informalsettlements,
o industrialzones,or
o portsandotherfrontierpoints;

• –  sites associated with mass transportation and other urban mobilities;
• –  representations of plague, epidemic and disease in any historical or national context;
• –  urban planning texts and other not explicitly literary texts read using literary studiesmethodologies;
• –  resilience as comprehended in urban poetry or drama;
• –  accounts of displacement and acts of resistance to it including squatting and rent protests.Please send an abstract of your proposed talk (max. 250 words) and a 50-word bio indicating your affiliation and any other key points to alus-sb-2022@frit.ucsb.edu by 1 September 2021. You may also direct any questions about the conference to this address or individually to the conference organizers.

Conference Organizers

Jason Finch, Åbo Akademi University
Liam Lanigan, Governor’s State University
Eric Prieto, University of California Santa Barbara

ALUS: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n/

Course on: New York City And Comics: Examining The ‘Special Relationship’

Cover illustration: Ron Frenz and Josef Rubinstein, New York, New York by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb (1985) TSR Role Playing Game booklet

It is often said that New York and the comic book share a unique relationship. It is less often said what that relationship is, exactly — beyond the use of the city as setting in text, or headquarters for the industry, historically. In this course, we look critically at the so-called “New York–comics relationship”: what it meant that the city was so often chosen as the backdrop for story, and how that pattern helped shape new, popular understandings of space, place, and belonging, using the particular narrative forms and rhetoric of the medium.

Nothing in a comic is there accidentally. It is always the result of artistic choice. No story about New York speaks to the same experience of the city, either. And no setting captures every part of it. All of this means something, framing particular, chosen images and ideas. By looking at a variety of comics set in NYC, and different themes — from superheroes and romance and crime to 9/11 and future visions of utopia and dystopia — this course offers both an overview of major tendencies in this genre of comic, and tools for understanding it.

As such, it explores how the so-called New York–comics relationship is created anew every time a creator or creative team decides to make the city its setting. And why New York is so often chosen, against other cities in the US. The course will focus on how New York City is represented, what parts of it are shown, and who in it. It also considers how structural factors, such as differing genre, format, audience, or creator, have produced sometimes wildly contrasting interpretations of the very same places, and, even, ideas.

REGISTER HERE:

https://www.gothamcenter.org/courses/course-1-65ml5

–Martin Lund is Assistant Professor in Religious Studies at Malmö University in Sweden, a comics researcher, and a former Visiting Research Scholar at the Gotham Center for New York City History. His research mostly revolves around comics in relation to different forms of religion, identity, space and place, as well as racism and whiteness. A particular topic of interest is the representation of New York City in comics, and the rhetoric in fandom, pop culture journalism, and the Academy on the so-called “New York–comics relationship.”

Call for MLA 2020 – deadline Mar. 15 – 20th/21st-century Iberian sessions

Sessions Sponsored by MLA Forum on 20^th and 21^st Century Spanish and Iberian Studies for MLA Convention 2021

Deadline for submission:  March 15

Producing Race for Contemporary Iberian Studies

Papers that explore how the racialization of Spaniards intersects with notions of the modern nation by examining contemporary literature, film and society. 250-word abstracts to jeffrey.coleman@marquette.edu or rosi.song@durham.ac.uk by March 15.

Using Digital Tools in 20th and 21st Century Iberian Studies

Seeking presentations of 5-8 minutes for a round table discussion on using digital tools in research and teaching about contemporary Spanish and Iberian studies. Abstract 250 words and CV to session organizer compitel@email.arizona.edu

Spatial (In)justice in the Anthropocene

Proposals dealing with gentrification, displacement, gender inequality, right to the city and other forms of spatial (in)justice examined in contemporary Spanish and Iberian visual culture. 250-word abstract  to session organizer  Monica Lopez Lerma monlopez@reed.edu

 

 

Repost – “In The Future” Postcards As Popular Urbanism

Great post at the official blog of the Urban History Association by Peter Soppelsa,

Here is the opening paragraph and the link below,

“This post focuses on a remarkable source for illustrating popular urbanism and urban imaginaries: European and American photomontage postcards from around 1900 to 1920 that visualize future cities. Cobbling together an online archive of over 400 future cities photomontages, I discovered an under-utilized body of evidence about popular urbanism. Visual and textual traces of the urban imaginaries of card makers and senders demands further study because they reveal a specific practice of placemaking through print culture. This archive suggests how urban historians can engage with media history, visual studies, and ephemeral sources…”

“In the Future” Postcards as Popular Urbanism

CFP Urban Cultural Studies – AAG in Washington DC April 2019

Call for Lightning-Paper Presentation Session Participants:

Session Title: Urban Cultural Studies I & II

Where:  American Association of Geographers meeting in April 2019, Washington, D.C.

Cities have been increasingly at the forefront of debate in both humanities and social science disciplines, but there has been relatively little real dialogue across these disciplinary boundaries. Journals in social science fields that use urban studies methods to look at life in cities rarely explore the cultural aspects of urban life in any depth or delve into close-readings of the representation of cities in individual novels, music albums/songs, graphic novels, films, videogames, online ‘virtual’ spaces, or other artistic and cultural products. On the other hand, while there is increasing discussion of urban topics and themes in the humanities, broadly considered, there are very few journal publications that are open to these new interdisciplinary directions of scholarship. This session is open to scholarship from any and all linguistic, cultural and geographical traditions. Presentations will cross the humanities and the social sciences while giving priority to the urban phenomenon, in order to better understand the culture(s) of cities.

This Urban Cultural Studies I session is affiliated with the double-blind peer-reviewed Journal of Urban Cultural Studies (https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=225/) and the accompanying blog urbanculturalstudies.wordpress.com. Although the journal is open to many specific methodologies that blend humanities research with social-science perspectives on the city, its central methodological premise of the journal is perhaps best summed up by cultural studies-pioneer Raymond Williams – who emphasized giving equal weight to the ‘project (art)’ and the ‘formation (society)’. We are particularly interested in presentations that achieve some balance between discussing an individual (or multiple) cultural/artistic product(s) in depth and also using one of many social-science (geographical, anthropological, sociological…) urban approaches to investigate a given city. Lightning-paper participants will ideally address both an individual city itself and also its cultural representation in a very brief 5-minute talk. Following all of the 5-minute presentations, discussion will be opened to the audience.

If you are interested in sharing a current or future project in this Urban Cultural Studies session at the AAG 2019 in Washington D.C., please contact the Executive Editor of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Benjamin Fraser (Professor at the University of Arizona) at urbanculturalstudies@gmail.com. This session is open to scholarship from any and all linguistic, cultural and geographical traditions. Presentations will cross the humanities and the social sciences while giving priority to the urban phenomenon, in order to better understand the culture(s) of cities. Lightning-paper participants will ideally address both an individual city itself and also its cultural representation in a very brief 5-minute talk.

 

“The High Multicultural Court of Wisdom” and Other Utopias by Bodys Isek Kingelez — Hyperallergic

City Dreams at the Museum of Modern Art explores how Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez envisioned a future utopia through sculptures of imagined cities.

via “The High Multicultural Court of Wisdom” and Other Utopias by Bodys Isek Kingelez — Hyperallergic

[reposted] Digital | Visual | Cultural event on 28 June 2018

Digital | Visual | Cultural is a series of events happening over the next two years, curated by Professor Gillian Rose and Sterling McKinnon III, and funded by the School of Geography and the Environment and St John’s College, University of Oxford. The first event will be at 5.30pm on 28 June 2018. Prof Shannon Mattern, professor at the New School in New York and author of Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media, will deliver a public lecture followed by a reception. Find out more about the project, and book your tickets for the lecture, via the website dvcultural.org.