Refractions of a Grim Future: Figuring Dissonant Beirut in Barrack Rima’s Speculative Graphic Narratives

This essay discusses the speculative turn in recent Arab literature and arts by focusing on the comics genre. It first attempts to outline the genealogies and ramifications of a growing canon of graphic narratives—qiṣaṣ muṣawwara as they are known in Arabic—concerned with the speculative element as a lens or tool to deal with socio-political aspects. Moreover, it focuses on the analysis of selected works by the Lebanese comic artist Barrack Rima in order to examine the ways in which speculative fiction figures the city of Beirut as the central nexus of dystopias, thereby responding to present anxieties and providing realms for projecting future visions. Paying particular attention to recurrent key tropes in Rima’s multi-layered and multi-temporal dystopic narratives as well as aesthetic and literary strategies, the genre’s potential suitability to engage with speculative futurity is explored.