Political Graffiti Research Articles

The writing on the wall: Identity, placemaking and territoriality in Karachi's graffiti culture

The writing on the wall: Identity, placemaking and territoriality in Karachi's graffiti culture

“New Others”

Abstract This article deals with mostly negative ideological images of refugees, as they erupted in political graffiti and street art (stickers, stencils, various inscriptions) in Slovenia during the so-called refugee crisis from the fall of 2015 on. Its basic questions are three: How is the ideological process of othering the refugees constructed in political graffiti? How does this relate to dominant discourses and practices in Slovenian society (from official politics to mass media)? What were the reactions against such sprayed hate speech (so pro-refugee graffiti)? The process of othering progresses in two steps: refugees are first imagined as an unified mass that is radically different from imaginary notions of “Slovenianism” and “Europeanism,” which then serves as the basis for differentiation between more and less acceptable of them. On these grounds, four different ideological images are created: a refugee as a criminal, a refugee as an uninvited visitor, a refugee as a powerless victim, and a refugee as a global proletarian. About 150 original photos of anti- and pro-refugee graffiti, mostly from Slovenia (but for comparative reasons also from the whole region), are analyzed using the semiotic method as developed by its classics and finally interpreted with Theodor Adorno and Alexander Mitscherlich's concepts of “displacement of hatred” and Seymour Martin Lipset's concept of “extremism of the center.”

Speaking Graffiti: Imaging Human Rights from Belfast to the West Bank

The human rights conditions of Northern Ireland and Palestine have been analyzed up, down, and sideways by a robust scholarly literature, this article provides a fresh approach to the analysis of media with respect to cultural aspects of human rights conundrums through images of localized as well as globalized “graffiti.” From the near universal influence of the painting of George Washington and company crossing the Delaware River, to brave but dangerous anti-regime graffiti in North Korea, the political nature of private artists operating in the public realm for human rights is recognized as a potentially destabilizing and regime-busting act. With a lens pointed on Palestine and Northern Ireland, we examine this cultural artifact’s power to get attention, obstruct persecution, and ultimately to mitigate some human rights abuses. How does such graffiti work? What are the similarities and differences in their power for enhancing human dignity through different times and places? We also look at the relationship of human rights graffiti to current political trends internationally. Images are used here as method of analysis that may help explain the broader implications of political graffiti for the study of a particular medium of transmission for the study of cultural and societal norms.

The political work of graffiti during the Covid-19 pandemic: a view from Tottenham, London

Graffiti and its ancillary forms have been used for a wide variety of purposes including ornamentation, territorial demarcation, commercial announcements and political contestation. This visual essay takes up Lyman Chaffee’s notion that graffiti can constitute an alternative media system that offers a glimpse into emerging and evolving political discourses. Using ‘walking-as-method’ in a north London neighbourhood, it surveys the array of political graffiti produced in the context of the UK’s first wave of Covid-19 and accompanying period of lockdown. In so doing, it presents a visual chronology of shifting popular opinion on the British state’s handling of the pandemic and illuminates the ways that the politics of pandemic management has intersected with other national and local concerns, from the resourcing of public services to the Black Lives Matter campaign.

Contested Anniversary – Celebrating November 29, Republic Day (of Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia) in Present-Day Slovenia

Summary: The article is based on the study of informal features of celebrating the former national holiday, the Republic Day (of the SFRY), in post-socialist Slovenia: Yugonostalgic parties, concerts, political graffiti and street art, songs, various public events, news in the media and internet events (holiday greetings, Facebook groups, blogs, virtual Yugoslavias etc.). In the research I applied a combination of the usual cultural-studies methods (urban ethnography, sociology of time and critical visual semiology), which deals with these phenomena from the point of its production (top-down) and from the point of its reception (bottom-up). These celebrations are, on the one hand, increasingly commodified (in the sense of pop-resistance, painless provocation, pure entertainment or profitable market niche), while on the other hand, they present a critique, challenge, opposition and symbolic alternative to contemporary Slovenian dominant ideological currents and politics (ethno-nationalism and neo-liberalism).

Political graffiti in May 2018 at Nanterre University: A linguistic ethnographic analysis

Political graffiti in May 2018 at Nanterre University: A linguistic ethnographic analysis

Political graffiti in May 2018 at Nanterre University: A linguistic ethnographic analysis

Fifty years after May 68, spring 2018 in France was marked by mass student protest against the Parcoursup/ORE reform of university entry. After a riot police intervention on campus, Nanterre University was blocked and occupied. It was profoundly affected, both as a community and as a physical site. This linguistic ethnographic study proposes a systematic analysis of more than 500 physical interventions (political graffiti, tags and posters) on the campus during that period, to identify the functions of graffiti as political discourse. The graffiti (1) expressed resistance, reclaimed the university’s identity and manifested presence on site; (2) established dialogue with local and national authorities and (3) anchored the movement in a larger web of historical references and sites of political resistance. A striking feature was the complex indexicality of the graffiti. Each item was relevant at multiple scales beyond the here and now, anchoring graffiti in larger networks of relations, which endowed them with political power.

The Matter which may be: Sectarian Dilemmas of Materiality in Bahrain

This article discusses different approaches to materiality and material expressions of cultural identity in contemporary Bahrain, a small Arab Gulf state. Various Islamic traditions have different understandings of materiality and its ontological qualities. In the contemporary Gulf this difference is often understood as a sectarian difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims, a division that has gained increasing political importance in recent years. In this article I discuss how these traditions view materiality in religion, in particular focusing on the role of material mediation for Shia Muslims, exemplified by the use and meaning of the turba prayer stone. With this as a point of departure I discuss two other forms of materiality—political graffiti and martyr images—that in the wake of the uprising in 2011 have also been imbued with sectarian meanings, but where this is less clear. I therefore argue that vernacular understandings of material culture show ambiguous identifications that challenge the clear dichotomies with which people—locally and analytically —often operate.

A City of Walls. A Photo Essay on Writing on Walls in Alexandria, 2011-2017

Outdoor walls of Alexandria are full of writings. Stencil graffiti, sprayed messages, painted advertisements, ball-pen notes, stickers and billboards create a mostly anonymous conversation of different messages struggling for space, mostly transient and at times poetic. Especially political graffiti during and after the 2011 revolution became the site of an often uncivil debate made up of deletions, crossings-out and changes to graffiti by others. But also love messages, religious phrases and advertisement have important messages to tell.The writings on the cityʼs three-dimensional walls often mingle with the metaphorical walls of social media feeds as inhabitants of the city are engaged in poetic, transient conversations and commentary on their phones while they move through their city. Sometimes the different poetics and materialities of wall-writing also converge when social media mimes reproduce or simulate photos of graffiti.In Alexandria today, both ways to write on walls are common and productive of spaces and social relations in the city. These forms of everyday textual conversation and presence push the limits of conventional understandings of literary vs. ordinary language. They also tell important stories of the coexistence of different visions and ways of life in a plural but not pluralistic city.

Linguistic landscape of Gezi Park protests in Turkey

Abstract Gezi Park protests that rocked Turkey in 2013 left a significant mark in the country’s collective memory and contributed to the construction of a new language of political resistance. To challenge an increasingly authoritarian government, the protesters used novel repertoires of contention, particularly political graffiti. To better understand different types of linguistic and symbolic communication tools used in the public space during Gezi Park protests and their impact on different set of audiences, this article explores the following research questions: (i) What indexical properties are used in the languages used in graffiti, and what do they mean for understanding the various audiences that the protesters engaged? (ii) What counter-narratives are created in the graffiti produced during Gezi Park protests?

Dead Spaces, Living Architecture and the Functionality of Death in Post-Conflict Settings

Death has the ability to influence an architectural site in such a way that it defines its identity. Bullet holes, political graffiti, and scarred buildings are evidence of past events that have involved death and continue to do so. However, recognizing death through these sites allows post-conflict nations a chance to construct a narrative that was once hidden away. These sites allow death to function in a positive manner—if amnesia-driven urban development projects do not erase them first, that is.

A Beautiful Mess

No abstract available

Assembling a Revolution: Graffiti, Cairo and the Arab Spring

This essay examines the ways revolutionary desire was articulated and interpreted through graffiti in Cairo, Egypt during the Arab Spring and its immediate aftermath. For writers in Cairo, graffiti was one of many in a constellation of resistances that undermined everyday life in Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and the SCAF-controlled interim government. Ordinary surfaces of the city were illegally marked, displaying revolutionary potentiality by allowing the seemingly powerless rhetorical openings of engagement. Far from being a monolithic discourse, graffiti created geographies of material protest that were locally enacted but globally contextualized. Political graffiti, like the overall protests of the Arab Spring, emerged in large numbers at particular moments, but its numerous roots spread distinctly into the past. First contextualizing Cairo graffiti as a tool for revolutionary protest, the article then examines specific writers (Mahmoud Graffiti, Ganzeer), particular ‘battleground' spaces (Tahrir Square, Mohamed Mahmoud Street), different graffiti mutations (tags, pieces, murals) and contrary aesthetic manipulations of the form (‘No Walls’ campaign, graffiti advertisements by multinational corporations) in order to assemble a graffiti scene in Cairo as it follows the ebbs and flows of revolutionary desire.

Image, Precariousness and the Logic of Cultural Production in Hong Kong

Interpretations of culture in Hong Kong have tended to portray the city in terms of the vanishing present, in some combination of the instant, fleeting and disappearing. This article redresses such language of lack to consider instead how the idea of precariousness in the realm of the cultural has been less a condition of cultural production than a cultural strategy. Street art, including alternative performance art and political graffiti, has made the city itself the site of roving cultural production: walls, street surfaces and passageways accommodate forms of expression that the city’s cultural institutions have only more recently and uneasily embraced. In these different modes of time-space, contemporary alternative art occupies transitory territory and locates its ‘precariousness’ in lack of definitive status and uncertain future – mimetic conditions of defining culture in Hong Kong society itself. Its measures, by contrast, emerge in Jacques Rancière’s distribution of the sensible: the ways in which they render what is visible, knowable and ultimately sayable. As objects generating negotiation, such contemporary cultural projects anticipate instabilities of the present, identify hegemonic political economic logics and seek modes of resistance. Within these perspectives, this discussion juxtaposes two simultaneous events: the exhibit ‘Memories of King Kowloon’ on the historic graffiti of Tsang Tsou-choi, and the stenciled graffiti of Ai Weiwei in public space during April and May 2011.

Байкальская Сибирь: Фрагменты социокультурной карты. Альманах-исследование ред. по М. Я. Рожанского, и Байкальская Сибирь: Предисловие XXI века. Альманах-исследование ред. по М. Я. Рожанского (review)

Байкальская Сибирь: Фрагменты социокультурной карты. Альманах-исследование ред. по М. Я. Рожанского, и Байкальская Сибирь: Предисловие XXI века. Альманах-исследование ред. по М. Я. Рожанского (review)

‘The anger management is not working’

At a time of post-9/11 millenarianism, of the continued engagement in Iraq, and when the spectacle is at war with itself, the relative lack of cultural politics in the UK is perhaps surprising. Onto that scene has crept a latter-day Situationist armed with a spray-can, a sharp eye and an ironic sense of humour. Bansky has fostered a reputation to rival Debord's enigmatic mystique, appearing and disappearing to disrupt, subvert and amuse. It is unclear whether Banksy is a single person, a collective or a 'tagging' current inspired by multiple participants. Banksy's interventions have involved him disguising himself as a pensioner, shuffling into the Tate Modern and sticking one of his own pieces onto the wall to cut out the middle-man of the arts industry. He has placed a rat, armed with spray-can and microphone, in a glass case in the Natural History Museum. He produces graffiti artwork of monkeys with weapons of mass destruction; smiley-faced police officers; girls hugging cruise missiles. He has given us live graffiti cows stencilled with the Banksy logo; pigs in checked police officers' uniforms; and sheep, some stencilled with convicts' arrows and others with multiple Andy Warhol faces. His helicopter gunship with a small pink bow on its head, swooping over take-away shops, or his legion of rat stencils in various parts of London streets excite more, as artistic experiences, than the antiseptic, big-money and alienated experiences of London's new art establishment. At traditional landmarks, his graffiti often declares 'This is not a photo opportunity'. On establishment buildings, he may inform us that 'By Order National Highways Agency This Wall is a Designated Graffiti Area', or embellish unused areas of urine-soaked pavement with 'Official Picnic Site' notices. Banksy's output of printed matter has consisted of two small art books, Existencilism and Banging Your Head Against A Brick Wall, and his latest is forthcoming. His cover design for Blur's album, Think Tank, might cement his reputation as a contemporary cultural contributor. Using the city as his canvas, Banksy has created artwork that inspires, criticises and beautifies. It brings humour, candour and colour to the dour physical and political landscape. Reminiscent of the Situationists' strategies of detournement, these tactics have been effectively employed in order to rework the urban fabric. Just as the Situationists created philosophising cowboys or dialectical fashion models, Banksy pokes fun at authority figures with graffiti-spraying, dope-smoking police officers, and police transit vans bearing images of large, pink pigs. His work follows a rich vein, from the Surrealists and Duchamp's ready-mades; the political graffiti of May '68; punk, and Jamie Reid's cutup image of the Queen; to The KLF'S burning of a million pounds on the island of Jura. For Guy Debord, art needs to be connected to a political project. Debord says, in his Society of the Spectacle, that 'Dadaism sought to abolish art without realizing it and Surrealism sought to realize art without abolishing it'. …

Some Cunts: Graffiti, Globalisation, Injurious Speech and 'Owning' Signification

This article examines the way in which processes of signification in contemporary culture are governed by motifs of ownership--who has the 'right' to make the 'right' kind of signification, whose significatory powers can be considered to be dominant, and what sorts of ethical considerations can be applied to the granting of meaning and implication. By examining contemporary political graffiti, issues of globalisation and debates over the figurative term 'cunt', the article discusses the inefficacy of claims to significatory 'ownership' while making a case for contingent practices of 'fixing' signification for local political praxis.

Mike Alewitz, Labor Muralist

The reappearance of the mural marks the return of painting from the museum to its public role in the human community. The work of muralist Mike Alewitz and the collective character of his projects draw upon centuries or eons of collaborative activity, from cave paintings to Michelangelo, the Dada and Surrealist movements to political graffiti. Alewitz's approach is ideally suited to the postmodern and post-state socialist era when everything rebellious must be created anew and when "culture" along with "labor" is urgently needed to salvage a world from eco-disaster, perpetual war, and the plundering of human possibility. The art of Alewitz and Co. (with the Co. constantly changing) has already been part of labor's recovery from decades of poor leadership, part of the struggle for democratic unions in a changing global marketplace and with a rapidly changing workforce.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Private Restroom Graffiti: An Analysis of Controversial Social Issues on Two College Campuses

We collected 428 pieces of graffiti from men's and women's restrooms on two American campuses (one college and one university) in a small town in upstate, New York. The graffiti were coded by sex, institution, and type of building, and then sorted into 19 content categories. Chi-squared analyses indicated that compared to women's restrooms, men's restroom graffiti contained significantly more insulting (especially antigay) and scatological references but not more sexual graffiti. Women's restrooms had more political graffiti than men's, but contrary to previous research, very few romantic inscriptions. The university sample from a more diverse student body than that of the college, contained more racist and political graffiti. Compared to residence halls, libraries across both college campuses contained more inflammatory graffiti. Based on these findings, private restroom graffiti appear to provide a useful and unobtrusive method for investigating controversial and sensitive social issues.

Signs of Resistance, Voices of Dissent: The Political Graffiti of El Salvador

Signs of Resistance, Voices of Dissent: The Political Graffiti of El Salvador