ABSTRACT
In a metonymic flash the graffiti tag frames the contemporary city. It signals a particular moment of contemporary urbanism even as that moment is as much reviled in some quarters as it is celebrated in others. Particularly since the rise of the graffiti art of the 1970s and the gang wars of the late decades of twentiethcentury Los Angeles, the iconography of graffiti has drawn its inspiration principally from the USA but has been translated across the globe. Its roots in the ghetto appeal to, draw on and reconfigure forms of racialised sensibility generally and particular genres of African-American black expressive culture. Hence, as a technology of representation, the tag makes multiculture visible through a loosely conceived but transnationally generic language whose familial similarities at times transcends the linguistic specificity of the words that are commonly deployed. It both appropriates space and draws on conventions that are spatially globalised. It expresses a claim but appeals to an audience. And if the tag is hailing somebody, it might even assume that the audience will recognise itself.
