I write, therefore I am: texts in the city

Fuhrer noted that graffiti are announcements of one’s identity, a kind of testimonial to one’s existence in a work of anonymity: ‘I write, therefore I am.’ However, graffiti is often understood to be at best an art form, at worst vandalism. This article is about graffiti, where ‘savage’ writing is inscribed onto the walls of our cities (Lefebvre) and argues that graffiti represents forms of text that directly challenge presumptions of private ownership and corporate power, that draw our attention to the materiality and spatiality of the city, and that act to create what Giddens, Beck et al. and Beck have called narratives of the self. The article suggests that graffiti has much to tell us about the ways in which broader global contexts impact on how we use textual practices to construct narratives about ourselves and our communities in everyday local sites.