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 reception—(writing
and reading typically are figured as private, contemplative activities)—graffiti
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.
Dwight Conquergood, Department
of Performance Studies, Northwestern University
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