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Draws on the concepts of striated and smooth space in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus to translate the politics of street art of the revolution as “a performance and product of aesthetic smoothing that resists the dominant striated narratives of the state.” As the author argues, street art becomes a way for Egyptians to reclaim and re-appropriate urban space. From the first tags that called for the downfall of the regime, to the rock formations made from crumbles of broken pavement in Tahrir, and the elaborate murals memorializing the martyrs, street artists have challenged the state's instruments of monopolizing public space and homogenizing Egyptian life and identity. Over the past months, Egypt's Military Council has mounted a “war on graffiti” targeting political artwork that is now widespread in Egyptian cities. Graffiti works inciting protest, or critiquing the military junta and the state security forces, or articulating the demands of the revolution, have systematically been painted over, dismantled, or “cleaned up” and several artists have been harassed and arrested by the Military Council for bringing art to the street in a clear show-down and contest over both public space and the space of visual consumption.

In their attempts to advance Scottish cultural revivalism, many writers and artists looked to mythical origins to help bind the national community and define its international connections. This chapter illustrates that it was not just Celtic mythical heroes that appealed to cultural revivalists but also Mediterranean paganisms, and that Celtic and Greek gods and mythologies often interacted in Scottish literature and art. The chapter uses John Duncan’s Ramsay Garden murals as a case study, before going on to assess William Sharp/Fiona Macleod’s concern with paganism. Fiona Macleod’s neo-pagan writings reveal the complicated gender dynamics of cultural revivalism in Scotland. The chapter then discusses the significant presence of Pan in fin-de-siècle Scottish culture, before exploring John Davidson’s resistance to both neo-paganism and Scottish cultural revivalism.

This chapter argues that several Scottish cultural revivalists, including Patrick Geddes, John Duncan and Jessie M. King, enthusiastically embraced Edwardian historical pageantry. What pageantry offered these writers and artists was an opportunity to further disseminate the Celtic myths and ‘lines of descent’ they had built in heir writings and artworks. By focussing on two key pageants: The Scottish National Pageant of Allegory History and Myth (1908) and Patrick Geddes’s The Masque of Learning (1912), I reveal the importance of Celtic mythology to Scottish pageantry, as well as the ways that these pageants interrogated stadialist notions of historical progress. A sub-chapter is dedicated to Arthurianism in Scotland, where I highlight the ways in which the Scottish claim to King Arthur helped advance Scottish cultural revivalism. The chapter also complicates wider critical understandings of Edwardian British pageantry, and reveals a distinct tradition in Scotland.

This chapter reviews the book Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals: Jewish Identity in the American Scene (2015), by Diana L. Linden. Ben Shahn’s New Deal Murals is about Ben Shahn, whom Linden considers an American Jew rather than a Jewish American. Linden studies a few of Shahn’s murals and a related easel painting, all conceived or completed between 1933 and 1943. She focuses on four large projects (one unrealized) from the vantage point of Shahn’s Jewish identity and leftist politics, contextualizing the art alongside the history of the American Jewish experience. Working first and foremost as an art historian, she explores Shahn’s iconography and the desires of his patrons. According to Linden, Shahn’s art is “neither solely American nor solely Jewish but rather an alchemic combination of the two.”

Chapter 5 begins at the moment of gentrification in Detroit and articulates ways that graffiti and street art are radically changing the former car-making capital of the world as it recovers from its declaration of bankruptcy in 2013. The chapter situates Detroit with other cities— Miami, São Paulo, Philadelphia—and how they all embrace street art to “improve” city infrastructure, which is part and parcel of racial capitalism’s rebranding of city space. It is not always a smooth transition; from downtown “Gilbertville” to Heidelberg Street and Grand River Avenue, racialized politics and subsequent “graffiti wars” resulted from street-art campaigns.

In the young adult novels Shadowshaper (2015) by Daniel José Older and Labyrinth Lost (2016) by Zoraida Córdova, Sierra Santiago and Alejandra Mortiz are the inheritors of great power in their respective cultural communities: shadowshaping, the ability to provide spirits with a physical form through drawing, murals, sculpture, or storytelling; and the Deathday, a ceremony to celebrate a bruja (or brujo) receiving her particular ability, including elemental control, healing, and/or defense, among others. Yet initially, through acts of refusal, the young women are outside of the material, ritual, and cultural practices of their communities.

The murals of the Upper Temple of the Jaguars present highly detailed and semi-mythologized representations of warfare through the vantage point of victorious forces. While previous interpretations have focused on the male combatants and the potential locations of the battles, this chapter focuses on the women who are targets of warfare. The authors propose that one goal of Itza conquest was the attainment of female labor and that, in pursuit of that aim, women were potential subjects of disturbing acts of violence.