peer reviewed
The July 2024 uprising in Bangladesh led to a proliferation of graffiti across urban spaces, turning walls into sites of political expression during and immediately after the uprising. Amid media restrictions, internet shutdowns and mounting public frustration, graffiti emerged as an accessible means of voicing grief, dissent, demands and competing aspirations. This article examines graffiti as a time- and space-bound field of political communication through which issues of inclusion, exclusion, legitimacy and memory were expressed and contested. It suggests that graffiti functions as a visual manifesto, rendering Bangladesh’s complex political trajectory legible in real time. However, the article also warns against viewing graffiti as a unified or enduring expression of collective will, noting that its meanings are often fluid and subject to erasure, selective preservation, ideological contestation and partial integration into sanitised official narratives. Despite these limitations, graffiti remains a vital record of this critical juncture, preserving sentiments, tensions and contradictions that continue to shape interpretations of the July uprising and influence political trajectories in post-Hasina Bangladesh.