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language makes the book digestable for academics lacking background in

Turkish history or Istanbul’s past. Türeli ultimately interprets the anxieties
of the Istanbulites and how they imagine the future of their city – a place
where media representations and urban issues of the past affect the present.

References
Bozdoğan S and Akcan E (2012) Modern Architectures in History: Turkey. London:
Reaktion Books.
Gül M (2009) The Emergence of Modern Istanbul: Transformation and
Modernisation of a City. London and New York: IBTauris.

Sezen Kayhan
Koç University, Turkey
Email: skayhan15@ku.edu.tr

Holly Eva Ryan, Political Street Art: Communication, Culture and Resistance
in Latin America. Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2017. 148 pp. ISBN 978
1 138 85288 4

25 years ago, in the fall of 1993, political scientist Lyman D. Chaffee published
Political Protest and Street Art: Popular Tools for Democratization in
Hispanic Countries, an extensive survey tracing the significance of ‘posters,
wallpaintings, graffiti, and murals’ (p. 4) for political movements aimed at
bringing about social change. While Chaffee’s main account follows/assumes
a distinct regional focus – Spain, the Basque region, Brazil and Argentina
form his main examples – the book’s introductory chapters gesture towards
an abundance of historical examples in which street art was employed as a
movement tactic, including anti-fascist resistance during the Second World
War, the struggle for Palestinian autonomy and the 1989 student uprising in
China. Political Protest and Street Art has been out of print for many years –
affordable hardcopies are a coveted commodity – yet the book remains one of
the most important resources for researchers working on street art and graffiti
as mediums of political expression today. Within this growing field, Holly Eva
Ryan’s Political Street Art: Communication, Culture and Resistance in Latin
America is the first book-length study to follow up on Chaffee’s work, at once
an homage and a reexamination from a contemporary perspective.
Two powerful disciplinary interventions serve as the point of departure for
Ryan’s inquiry. First, she offers an incisive critique of the Anglo-centric bias
prevalent in street art and graffiti studies, specifically historical narratives
asserting that public writing has its origins in the New York City of the late
1960s and early 1970s and developed into a global phenomenon by cultural
transmission. Working against this paradigm, Ryan’s book is invested in
carefully excavating unwritten histories of street art and graffiti that precede
and run parallel to the New York narrative, providing complex analyses
that are culturally and politically situated. Her second intervention is aimed
   
Books  257

at contemporary social movement theory, a field shaped by its ongoing

commitment to structuralism, causalism and rational action. Advocating
for an aesthetic turn in the field, Ryan locates within affect theory the
possibility for a more nuanced approach to social movements and their
creative strategies; ‘[T]he concept of affect,’ she argues, ‘makes it possible
to consider the ways in which activists are sometimes moved to produce
political street art, not in response to some clear strategic imperative, but
rather as a non-rationalised form of expression’ (p. 27).
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).
The first and briefest of the three case studies traces political street art in Brazil
from the poster campaigns of the interwar period to oppositional graffiti created
during the military dictatorship of the 1960s and 1970s. The most intriguing
story told in the chapter is that of Grupo Tupinãodá, a collective of artists
and designers formed towards the end of the dictatorship whose members
sought to foster experimental encounters with the urban fabric of São Paulo,
first through individual projects and later through collectively produced large-
scale murals showing abstract patterns and fantastical creatures. Although
these artworks did not put forth/promote explicit political messages, they
punctured the everyday life of city dwellers in meaningful ways: ‘Even if the
onlookers did not understand these gestures to other worlds, the presence
of unsanctioned inscriptions across the city signaled a breach of the regime’s
machinery and capacity for total control’ (p. 47).
Considering the case of Bolivia, the fourth chapter of the book highlights
street art as a means of ‘protest, pedagogy and political expression’ (p. 62)
within the context of indigenous struggle throughout the 20th century. Ryan
also examines the legacy of the so-called social painters, a group of artists
tasked with creating a ‘historical record of the [1952] revolution through art’
(p. 71). Following the tradition of Mexican muralism of the 1920s, public art
was here harnessed by the young state to visualize and disseminate a new
cultural identity to a largely illiterate public. The majority of the resulting
artworks were destroyed during the military dictatorship that took rule in
the 1970s, a period that in turn spurred a new wave of clandestine art
interventions that successfully ‘undermined the regime’s attempt to project
a public image of dominance and order’ (p. 75). After the collapse of the
regime, political street art remained a crucial mode of resistance. Mujeres
Creando, for example, a queer feminist art collective founded in 1985,
raised questions about the gendered reproduction of everyday life in the
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public sphere vis-a-vis the neoliberal order, championing slogans such as

‘the woman is the proletariat of the proletariat’ (p. 81).
The final and most compelling case study is devoted to Argentina. Echoing
the previous two chapters, Ryan details early poster campaigns, resonances
with Mexican muralism – in fact David Alfaro Siqueiros himself is said to
have taught the technique of stenciling to local activists during a visit to
Buenos Aires – as well as anti-dictatorship street art. Similarly, readers may
recognize the Grupo Artistas de Vanguardia as another example of an
activist art collective seeking to relate their creative practice to the political
concerns of everyday life through experimental interventions into urban
space. The most striking passages of the chapter, however, are reserved
for responses to the so-called ‘Dirty War’, a brutal period of military rule
lasting from 1976 to 1984 which saw an estimated 30,000 oppositional
citizens forcibly disappeared. While explicit political inscriptions became
increasingly absent from public space, the mothers and grandmothers of
the disappeared established a persistent presence of dissent by holding
weekly gatherings in the Plaza del Mayo. Donning white kerchiefs
embroidered with the names of their missing family members, their
appearance manifested a kind of visual street performance. The mothers
also co-organized the ‘Siluetazo’, a haunting intervention during which
hundreds of people produced life-size paper silhouettes representing the
disappeared that were subsequently pasted onto the walls of the square.
This affectively charged accumulation of bodies enacted, as one observer
notes, ‘what everybody felt’ (p. 122). After the fall of the dictatorship street
art and street-based performances continued to function as a repository of
collective memory and processing.
Ambitious in scope and historical depth, Political Street Art offers an
important contribution to the emerging field of street art and graffiti studies.
At a time when most considerations of the practice’s political significance
are set in the post-2011 moment, most notably the context of the Arab Spring
and the European anti-austerity movements, Ryan shifts the focus towards
a region that has not, with the exception of Brazil, received broad scholarly
attention in recent years, taking a lateral, historicizing approach. As she
carefully uncovers moments of creative resistance, her narrative is most
compelling where she was able to conduct interviews with practitioners. It
is also in these first-person testimonies that the significance of affect theory
so evocatively laid out in the beginning of the book resonates most strongly.
The full analytic potential of affect as a mode of inquiry, however, remains
to unfold over a series of more thorough object readings.
The conclusion of Ryan’s book is fairly straightforward, reiterating the
capacity of political street art to recount a kind of social history from the
margins:
From indigenous peoples in Bolivia and anti-dictatorship activists in Brazil
to the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina, street art has offered voice
and prominence to groups that have been ‘excommunicated’ from political
   
Books  259

processes by raced, gendered and socio-economic hierarchies, repression

and fear. (p. 140)
While there is no doubt that the case studies cited in the book illustrate
this matter well throughout differentiated political constellations, the three
chapters are guided by somewhat similar historical trajectories, at times
leaving want for a slightly greater modulation of contexts. The geographical
organization of the book is, in the end, as much a source of strength as it is
a formal restriction.
That notwithstanding, 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’.

Reference
Chaffee LG (1993) Political Protest and Street Art: Popular Tools for
Democratization in Hispanic Countries. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Julia Tulke
University of Rochester, USA
Email: julia.tulke@rochester.edu