CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Chowdhury, Ayesha Rahman |
|---|---|
| Title | Role of Political Graffiti in Recreating Agency in the Public Sphere: Dewal Likhon/ Chika Mara in Dhaka, Bangladesh |
| Summary | This research looks at the growing number of political graffiti or political ‘Dewal Likhon/ Chika’- wall writings and art in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. This form of writing and art provides a relatively safer means of continuing dialogue within the public arena given that the state has a heightened capacity to impose and implement invasive surveillance tactics on other modes of communication such as the media and increasingly on online platforms, like Facebook and independent blogs. The nation and its government, proclaimed to be a democratic nation-state, is fraught with authoritarian practices, with the political reality being that of a one-party authoritarian state. In this context, Dewal Likhon/ Chika creates a means to reproduce the public sphere beyond physical proximity or the online space and serves as a mode of ensuring recurring social movements and resistance against docility/conformity to an authoritarian government. Here, I study how walls as the boundaries of and within a city are utilized in order to signal contentions and create a new cultural and physical urban space. This research follows the idea that a city is produced by its inhabitants through the interactions with the various institutions within it. Therefore, the socio-political factors depicted by Dewal Likhon/ Chika indicate the process in which the state itself develops its political, cultural and social space within a specific history of post-coloniality. Further, the class-based differences in a society stratified along multifarious intersections come forth through the discussions surrounding Dhaka’s political graffiti. |
| Supervisor | Rajaram, Prem Kumar; |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/chowdhury_ayesha.pdf |
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