‘La frontière tirée au cor-deau de sang dans la ville’: Les lieux-Sarajevo dans la narrative graphique d’Enki Bilal

Abstract

In the futuristic comics of Enki Bilal –author of Yugoslavian origin emi-grated to France– various socio-cultural issues related to the boundaries between the singularity and the group are being questioned. Through science-fiction narrative and its graphically marked cyberpunk aesthetics, he shows the danger of manipulative powers, fanaticism, religious intransigence, xenophobia and globalization. This results in a increasing loss of identity for the individual, who looks for himself, split into a hybrid, in places like Sarajevo, ground-zero areas, urban areas of destruction. By way of politics-fiction and the dystopias of the Trilogie de Nikopol and the Tétralogie du Monstre, Bilal draws the boundaries, not only spatial and cultural but also existential, between self and the Other.