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Date of Award
2018
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Department
Communication
First Advisor
Teresa Bergman
First Committee Member
Paul Turpin
Second Committee Member
Marlin Bates
Abstract
This thesis analyzes the ways in which Banksy’s street art installations are used to critique sociopolitical injustices. The street has long existed as a platform for social and political movements. In particular, street art offers unique opportunities for voicing criticisms in pioneering ways that have been proven successful in upsetting normative power structures. Anne Theresa Demo’s analysis on the Guerilla Girls’ comic politics of subversion offers an appropriate conceptual lens to analyze Banksy’s employment of perspectives by incongruity as strategies for subversion. Therefore, this thesis analyzes how Banksy’s subversive satire is rhetorical by examining three techniques that have successfully exposed hegemonic institutions: mimicry, revision, and juxtaposition. Further, I argue that Banksy’s street art gallery, Better Out Than In, utilized these techniques in a global, revolutionary manner to bolster access and widen audience participation. Banksy’s street art both spotlights contemporary injustices and provides a frame to interpret the artist’s critical perspectives. By analyzing the ways in which Banksy uses satire as subversion, this thesis illustrates how visual rhetoric can offer liberation for victims of sociopolitical injustice.
Pages
75
Recommended Citation
Harzman, Joshua Carlisle. (2018). Urban Scrawl: Satire as Subversion in Banksy's Graphic Discourse. University of the Pacific, Thesis. https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/uop_etds/3122
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