“We chose the street”: Senegalese Graffiti Artists’ Reclamation of Urban Geography for Decolonial Pasts, Presents, and Futures

• In Event: Saint Louis to Saint Louis: Tracing Senegalese Urban Ecologies Across Class, Gender, and Language

Description for Program

Recent budding scholarship on Dakar’s vibrant Hip-Hop and graffiti culture by scholars such as cultural historian Ndiouga Benga, focuses on graffiti as a subversive counterculture for communication and placemaking in urban spaces. My project builds on this scholarship by combining components of Africanfuturism, a literary term coined by Nnedi Okorafor, with the stories of graffiti artists, scholars, and other stakeholders to examine graffiti as not only a way to communicate historical and contemporary messages and to theorize decolonial futures, but also a way for artists to place themselves within these histories, contemporaries, and futurities. Using Africanfuturism as a lens, my project highlights graffiti’s ability to deconstruct colonial linearities through world-building and communal theorization. In turn, graffiti is the mode of critique of oppressive structures and a space for exploration and imagination of artists’ own futures and passions. I examine this through three main themes: 1) the role of urban geography and infrastructure in articulating selfhood 2) the work of African Feminist graffiti and graffiti artists through an all-women graffiti crew named “Graffiti Solar Rays” and 3) graffiti artists’ role in humanitarianism and communal care. I position graffiti as a site of possibility, meaning graffiti offers a reciprocal space for artists and those who engage with their art to imagine new social realities, reconstruct historical narratives, and visually alter urban infrastructure. Graffiti artists, and their communal work, materially and ideologically reshape the contours of urban spaces and experiences, particularly for structurally marginalized people.

Author

• Maya Phelps, Washington University in St Louis