ABSTRACT
This chapter contends Austin's account of performative speech acts limits people's understanding of the struggles over what constitutes a legitimate performative action by naturalizing the authority of social convention as an unquestionable standard for judging the legitimacy of socio-political performances. The chapter suggests that place naming in general, and street naming in particular, can best be understood as a set of performative practices which political authorities seek to monopolize by devising official toponymical systems backed up by the force of the law. It also focuses on the case study of renaming Sixth Avenue as a way to problematize Austin's theory of performative speech acts. As a geopolitical utterance, the renaming of Sixth Avenue was to be seen as a concrete expression of the Good Neighbor Policy that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt promoted while in office. This street renaming project was part of an attempt by local businessmen to reinvent the image of Sixth Avenue as a place of commercial development.
