Material culture as a space of inscription for the protest letters: the political context

Abstract

The classical understanding of the political process as the interaction of political actors and the relations of power can be supplemented by the understanding of the political process as a creation of political texts. Thus, political actors may also compete with each other for the right to represent and legitimize specific political meanings. In non-democratic political regimes with restricted and limited space for real competition between political actors, the formal, institutionalized political process can be articulated through the production of informal meaning. In this case, political protest texts immediately acquires certain specific features — the ability to be updated in moments of political transformation, the attraction to the periphery, anonymous and allegory. In this study, the author focuses on the forms of protest letters which manifest themselves in the material culture of the city, and determines possible trends in the development of political protest letter as a genre.