Street Literacy and Performative Writing

Dwight Conquergood

IPR working papers from Institute for Policy Resarch at Northwestern University

Abstract: This paper presents an ethnography of "street literacy" and graffiti writing practiced by Chicago street gangs. Based on intensive field research in Chicago neighborhoods and drawing on new ethnographic approaches to alternative and underground literacies, gang graffiti is discussed as a counterliteracy, a performative writing that transforms mainstream and public spaces into contested zones of contact, site-specific theaters of defiance where excluded others re-present themselves (the street term for graffiti writing is 'reppin,' short for representing). Graffiti writing articulates cross-class antagonisms by bodily contact with, touching, public space and private property. In doing so, it upends the hierarchy of the senses: sight, the highest sense, is collapsed into touch, the lowest sense, a reversal of the fingerprinting process. Whereas official literacy is associated with detachment, distance, disclosure, and a scene of solo production and receptionÑ(writing and reading typically are figured as private, contemplative activities)Ñgraffiti writing is characterized by contact, coding, collaboration, and collusion. The paper describes and explains the signifying conventions, modes of representation, and scenes of enactment in light of mainstream campaigns to eradicate this criminalized practice.

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wop:nwuipr:96-6

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