Paper short abstract:

This paper dwells on two texts, graffiti in JNU and selected texts of Eduardo Galeano which use the graffiti form of narrative. Anecdotes, popular beliefs along with poetic and visual languages inform these texts. It attempts to understand possible overlapping between the two. This overlapping can be seen both in their forms and issues they highlight. Graffiti in JNU contain revealing phrases and slogans much like the texts of Galeano with both working to bring forth voices of differences and contestations unsettling fixed narratives of discourses of power.

Paper long abstract:

From the most recent ones in the 'Occupy' movements to social movements in Latin America, graffiti have carried voices of struggling people. Such graffiti act as site which potentiates consensus building, group formations and active subjects. Such subjects, although anonymous and invisible and merging both the makers and viewers as participants, charge the narrative of graffiti towards the production of a counter-narrative of alternative views and visions hitherto suppressed by the dominant views of 'history' through narratives validating and even constructing certain 'realities'. In highlighting historical and other specifics of these views and visions and in thus unfolding of certain issues graffiti can be seen as narratives. Through this process, signification as a process entails a continuous deconstruction of political text and/or images. Far from remaining limited to any local context, as is generally understood of graffiti, they register wider narratives of gender, class, ethnicity, race, etc. This can be seen, I argue, in the context of graffiti in JNU engaging with issues transcending barriers of territory. In their contestation to dominant views they stand in contrast to appropriation of public space by either commercial purposes or forces of political status quo in India.