Posthuman topologies of São Paulo in recent graphic fiction

• In Event: Topologies and technologies of the city in Latin American graphic fiction

Abstract

This paper proposes a reading of the graphic novel series O beijo adolescente (2011-13) by Rafael Coutinho as an intervention into the production of space in the city of São Paulo – an intervention that can be seen as an extension of the street protests that swept across Brazil in 2013. The narrative follows the intertwined stories of a mysterious organization of teenagers with superpowers and a prodigious ability to exploit these desires commercially. I argue that the construction of the city in the comic as porous and in constant mutation – traversed by networks of secret organisations and electronic signals – embodies what Celia Lury, Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova (2012: 5) describe as the “becoming topological of culture” in their analysis of how a topological conception of space is “emergent in the practices of ordering, modeling, networking and mapping that co-constitute culture, technology and science.”

The comic creates a connection between the cultural imperative of perpetual innovation and change and the experience of urban space that it produces for the reader. The city is presented as a bewilderingly porous series of networks and temporal layerings that morph and mutate as the reader makes his/her way back and forth through the books. Through this connection between the narrative emphasis on the “becoming topological” of culture and the topological materiality of the book itself, O beijo adolescente creates a critical space of reflection on the possibility of real social change and, more specifically, the immanence of revolutionary human-nonhuman urban assemblages to neoliberal capital.

Author

• Edward C King, University of Bristol