Creative expression and political resistance among young urban Congolese

This article is about how young Congolese artists use performative ambiguity to navigate a political landscape of state surveillance and restrictions on civil liberties. It highlights how early-career painters, photographs and slam poets purposefully embed ambiguous meanings in their performance to protest political oppression. While such forms of performance operate from a covert and subtle repertoire of protest against the political restriction of civil liberties, the article interprets them within the broader theoretical framework of political resistance. The analysis makes a critical reappraisal of Georges Balandier’s concept of evasion, which he originally developed to understand how African societies reorganised themselves, through indirect and concealed tactics, to resist colonial rule and its prohibition. This study reinterprets evasion in a contemporary postcolonial context, and it argues that performative ambiguities are politically oriented to challenge the authoritarian status quo. They represent symbolic forms of political subversion through which the artists assert agency, reclaim public space and catalyse social change. Under conditions of political duress, Congolese artistic production is transformed into a critical space of negotiation between power, identity and freedom.