Conflict Graffiti

“Conflict Graffiti strengthens our understanding of the role graffiti plays in place making and in social lives embroiled in conflict. Lennon shows that walls, and the writing on them, are formative elements of our world—they create and supersede conflict, and they represent not only human suffering but creativity and resilience. This book provides a fascinating glimpse into unknown places, movements, genres, and histories of graffiti.” * Susan A. Phillips, Pitzer College *
“Deeply researched and beautifully written, Conflict Graffiti reveals the ways in which street graffiti both detonates and documents global battles over public space, politics, property, and cultural belonging. Indecipherable to some, invitational to others, such graffiti provides a potent resistance to established authorities by hiding in the light of its own illicit visibility. Yet these same authorities in turn use their own forms of graffiti and street art to signal not resistance, but pacification and privilege. Attuned to such complexity, Conflict Graffiti brilliantly theorizes graffiti and its place in contemporary global dynamics.” * Jeff Ferrell, Texas Christian University *
“From Ferguson to Palestine, this elegantly crafted and vividly detailed text takes graffiti, an under-theorized form of political action and expression, and locates it firmly in the arsenal of resistance to oppression. Closely articulated to forms of state violence and the specificity of time and place, graffiti is a ‘tool of dissent’—speaking back and speaking to—in its demands for radical change. While never losing sight of the creative and political impulse, Lennon does not mince words in his critique of the commodification and appropriation of street art.” * Julie Peteet, University of Louisville *
“Conflict Graffiti is a thoughtful, comprehensive and engaging analysis of graffiti and the people who participate in this activity in the context of contemporary political conflicts throughout the world. It should be of interest to scholars, practitioners, and students for years to come.” * Jeffrey Ian Ross, University of Baltimore *
"As [Lennon] shows in this accessible and expertly researched monograph, graffiti has the power to educate those who take the time to read the writing on the walls. In addition to the romantic view of graffiti as artistic expression, graffiti is a window on to what the everyday inhabitants of a particular place have to say, what they think, what they desire and what they rally against, free from the pressures of profit-motivated actors and government censors... [A] much-needed lesson for a whole new audience."  * Times Higher Education *
"Lennon’s book offers a theorization of 'conflict graffiti,' a capacious umbrella term for interventions that respond to everyday experiences involving structural violence perpetrated by state oppression and racial capitalism. . . . For students, researchers, and general audiences alike, Conflict Graffiti [demonstrates] what rich scholarship can emerge when we move beyond the aesthetic abstraction of political graffiti toward interrogating its material force, what it actually does on the ground." * Winterthur Portfolio *