ABSTRACT
On July 27, 2005, the day after Mohammed B., the convicted murderer of the controversial Dutch filmmaker and columnist Theo van Gogh, was sentenced to life imprisonment, the Boomerang company released a free postcard featuring graffiti by Van Gogh’s teenage son. 1 Inspired by urban American hip-hop culture (often defined as African-American), the graffiti uses American iconography – the text “Theo Forever” in English, Donald Duck, and the prominently pictured American flag with the name Theo spelled out in little stars – to provide a very personal expression of both remembrance and protest. On the one hand, the graffiti can be interpreted within a post-9/11 political discourse, in which Samuel Huntington’s polarizing thesis of the “Clash of Civilizations” has been accepted by many as self-evident. By connecting him explicitly to American symbolism, Theo van Gogh is placed on the side of the USA in its War on Terror, against the Muslim extremists who took his life. On the other hand, the graffiti can also be perceived as an example of American iconography as an international lingua franca, which is no longer connected to a specific American context but free to be appropriated and interpreted on local levels. 2 In that case, the American flag does not function as a symbol of the nation-state USA, but instead has become a sign of “America,” connoting, in this example, the freedom of expression.
