In Ralph Cintron’s article, he emphasizes that there is more to graffiti than we assume. He reflects on something seemingly simple, murals we often note as pure artwork or symbols of violence. However, he claims graffiti is composed of a complex code of writing–it is literacy as artwork.
Cintron states, “If my earlier descriptions of street-gang graffiti relied heavily on linguistic terms such as ‘syntax’ or ‘lexicon,’ it was to prepare the foundation for describing graffiti as a special kind of narrative genre whose deeper meanings were not explicit but which rested on a large substratum of related but private oral and written texts” (178).
Do you agree with Cintron’s assessment of this hidden “narrative genre”? Does he weigh the level of its literacy too heavily? Based on your own interpretation of Cintron’s described genre, what do you make of public actions against it? Can this be seen as a restriction of this culture’s expression of literacy?
32 Responses to Graffiti-Literate