The spatial politics of street art in post-Revolution Egypt

Abstract

This article is concerned with exploring the politics of street art and graffiti in Egypt in the aftermath of the uprising against former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Rather than viewing street art and graffiti as mere by-products of the revolutionary period, the article centres them as important elements of political and social struggle. I put forward a reading of Egypt’s street art and graffiti as sites of politics through both aesthetic and spatial approaches. To do so I draw on Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘dissensus’, a term referring to a political and aesthetic process that creates new modes of perception and novel forms of political subjectivity. In various writings, Rancière argues that part of the work of ‘dissensus’ is the creation of spaces where political activity can take place. As spatially bound practices, street art and graffiti can allow a visible ‘dissensus’ to take place. Through a semiotic analysis of several street art and graffiti works, the article makes a further contribution to scholarship on Egypt’s revolutionary street art and graffiti scene. Instead of focusing on the figure of the ‘rebel artist’, I centre the works in relation to the history of Egyptian nationalism, and argue that we need to complicate our understanding of street art and graffiti’s potential as modes of resistance.