Political Street Art: Communication, Culture and Resistance in Latin America

ISBN-13: 9781138384927 / Angielski / Miękka / 2018 / 148 str.

Holly Eva Ryan

Opis

This book explores the evolving political role of street art in Latin America. It examines the use, re-configuration and re-appropriation of public spaces through graffiti, muralism and street performance, drawing on empirical work undertaken in across three Latin American countries and the Caribbean. It demonstrates how cultural and political identification may be fomented through both the content and production of these acts and interventions. Bringing together a range of insights from social movement studies, aesthetics, communications and anthropology, the book highlights the difficulties in theorizing and understanding the complex interplay between art and politics. It seeks to explore what art can do in protest, and in so doing, makes a significant contribution to discussions of political communication, culture and resistance.

Recenzje

"Political street art, the locus of Ryan’s inquiry, remains a deliberately open conceptual term, ‘a loose category for interventions whose creative and material use of the street is in some way tied to their political meaning’, (p. 5) allowing her to draw together examples ranging from campaign posters and political murals to slogan writing and street performances. Relying on original interviews and archival research, the book follows a geographical structure, working through three sets of case studies located within the national contexts of Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina, each chapter interrogating the capacity of political street art to performatively ‘mediate within, challenge and even alter the political status quo’ (p. 141).  Political Street Art is an exceptionally rich resource that will benefit new generations of researchers in street art and graffiti studies while also offering critical incursions into social movement theory and regional studies. Likewise, Ryan’s considerations of the aesthetic object in public space as an agent of political change will be of interest to scholars of visual culture: ‘Art is not for the illuminated, art is to illuminate. Signed: The street’." - Julia Tulke, University of Rochester, USA

O autorze

Holly Eva Ryan is Lecturer in International Political Sociology at Queen Mary University of London, UK.