SUDANESE REVULSION’S GRAFFITI AS MEANS OF COMMUNICATION: A MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Abstract

Since its emergence in the late 1970s in New York in the United States, graffiti has been associated with vandalism and crime (Bates, 2014). However, this notion has faded out in the last few decades with graffiti and street arts development. People have begun to recognize it as art rather than crime (Bates, 2014). This paper explores how graffiti is employed to communicate political messages during the Sudanese revolution between December 2018 and April 2019. Three graffiti are selected from the Sudanese Professional Association and Sudan Uprising’s pages on Facebook. The data are analyzed according to Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (VG)’s representational and interactive dimensions, which stemmed from the Multimodal Discourse Analysis. The study revealed that graffiti had become an effective means of communicating political messages during the Sudanese popular uprising. The study also found that the reproduction of graffiti on social media platforms affects the way people interact with it. Besides, while many visually based types of researches have applied VG on the analysis of advertisement and Websites, the current research found that the VG appeared to be capable of decoding the graffiti’s political messages. Accordingly, the study contributes to discourse-oriented studies of how visuals create information.