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Title POST-PANOPTICON AND ‘RIGHT TO THE CITY’: A STUDY OF SELECTED EUROPEAN GRAPHIC NOVELS

Author(s) Zinnia Ali

Abstract Title: Post-Panopticon and ‘Right to the City’: A Study of Selected European Graphic Novels This research explores surveillance and policing in contemporary literature in English, specifically the graphic novels Soft City (2016) by Norwegian artist Hariton Push Wagner and Paris 2119 (2020) by Zep and Dominique Bertail. This study argues that the surveillance and policing in the urban spaces, in the narratives, create a disciplinary architectural space of post-Panopticon, which compartmentalizes and reterritorializes citizens into controlled and altered spaces, thereby denying the citizens' right to the city and their bodies. The theoretical concepts of post-Panopticon, coded desire, hyper-information, and reterritorialization by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, along with Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city, help substantiate the argument. The methodology utilized by the study is the qualitative inquiry of the primary texts to investigate the city spaces reconstructed into post-Panopticon and resulting in the depravity of rights to these spaces. This study utilizes a social semiotic Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MMDA) devised by Kress and Van Leeuwen. In both narratives, urban spaces are deterritorialized and reterritorialized by the state-corporate into active sites of production through consumer seduction and information surveillance. In the continuous flow of surveillance, the natural interaction of citizens is brutally interrupted, resulting in the dismissal of human rights. Post-Panopticon is pivotal for the state-corporate in propagating the agenda of control, discipline, and conformity in urban spaces and among the masses. Citizens are reduced to commodities and data nodes.

Type Thesis/Dissertation

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Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2025-06-22

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