Figure 1 - uploaded by E. Dimitris Kitis
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'Praise money we have god, (with capital-A)'. Street slogan in the old town, Thessaloniki. Photograph by the author.
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graffiti, anti-language, semiotics, anarchists, social movements, Greece
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... Finally, slogan (4) instantiates a verbless hortative construction consisting of a nominal or adverb expression and a prepositional phrase (PP) that can at times include a proper name. It has the syntactic form N/adverb + PP, whereby the verb, usually a light one (with scant semantic content) pointing to the relevant process, remains unarticulated but is implied and widely understood as it is supplanted by the PP (see Kitis 2011, Kitis 2013. The prepositional phrase of the transitivity structure στα χέρια 'in hands' is coding in this case not so much the "location/place" as such but rather highlights the process of property transfer into the hands of the bankers. ...
This article examines the way that collective identity was discursively constructed during the anti-austerity protests of 28 and 29 June 2011 on the environs of the Greek Parliament. Drawing on the framework of critical discourse analysis, we study the interrelation between macro-level (dominant) values and views, and micro-level individual positions as expressed in graffiti slogans that appeared during the protests. The graffiti data comes from a personal archive which consists of 40 slogans, collected during June 2011. We conduct a systemic-functional analysis to scrutinize the transitivity structures of graffiti slogans, employing the notion of anti-language as central to the micro-level. We then draw on the notion of collective identity to frame the graffiti at the macro-level. Among our main findings is that the writers of graffiti slogans construct their collective identity on a two-fold oppositional axis: the first consists of the dominant institutions or “others,” which are negatively represented, while the second consists of a positively represented and inclusive in-group or “we.” The focus on graffiti has two manifest and interrelated goals: (a) to scrutinize the protesters’ semiotics in order to piece together their identity, thus avoiding subsequent hegemonic interpretations of the participants’ identity; and (b) to preserve the elaborate counter-reality constructed by these ephemeral messages against the official and “mainstream” discourses and their reality.
... Another researcher of this political subculture discourse is Kitis (2011), who in his article entitled "Street slogans: a specialized genre" analyzes wall slogans captured in the Thessaloniki area, as the most dominant characteristic of Greek urban landscape. ...
... Thereafter, the overview of the theoretical background will follow. Street Slogans 2.2 Kitis (2011) suggested that street slogans constitute a mode of communication based on a "visually riotous poetry" (ibid: 54) with an "individual dynamism" (ibid: 56). It is considered a type of graffiti, with mainly written language, with no attention paid to the form. ...
... In addition, Kitis (2011) proposed that the slogan-writers are concerned to show an anarchistic identity (ibid: 63, 66), transmitting collective visions directly to the passersby. According to their linguistic form, predominantly Standard Modern Greek is used in Athenian slogans and thus they can be understood by Greek standard speakers. ...
This paper discusses the urban writing on Athenian walls as an imaginative medium of intercommunication occurring during the socioeconomic and political crisis era in Greece, over the last seven years. The street art activity on the city’s walls as a linguistic and imagery phenomenon could be approached as the main symbolic mode of public expression generated by the crisis. To investigate it fieldwork research was conducted in central Athens from January to July 2015. Three research methods were applied: participant observation into two graffiti crews, consequent photo documentation of wall writings, and eight semi-structured interviews with street artists. The research findings disclose the metamorphosis of public walls into an interactive public notebook as an attestation of the processes in the Athenian multimodal urban landscape.
... Images, texts and video were instantly broadcast by local and global media networks but also online, where they were read, viewed and discussed by millions of anonymous users. An unexpected semiotic reaction to the shooting incident was a proliferation, across Greek cities, of graffiti and street slogans calling for revenge against the police and 'the state' but also against banks, big business and the mass media (Kitis 2011). All of a sudden, the socio-political circumstances enabled such "hidden transcripts" to become visible and accessible, with individual texts -whether verbal, visual or multimodal -entering into a "dialogue of genres" with other texts as well as contesting the meta-discursive projections of the mass media (Scott 1990;Blommaert 2005: 137). ...
In this article I examine the concept of 'gentrification' from its inception to its current varied uses and interpretations. Using the Oxford English Dictionary's third edition illustrative quotations database as a diachronic corpus of English, I employ a corpus-assisted and cognitive linguistics-inspired critical discourse analysis to trace the genealogy of the term within the broader field of related terms. By disentangling the emergence of this ideologically-laden term, the study enhances our understanding of how class-struggle discourse has evolved from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment and late-modernity. It is argued that a robust definition of 'gentrification'-which foregrounds the displacement of low-income residents-depends on historicizing the phenomenon, i.e. tracing its roots in concepts, practices and values.
LESoL) Τμήμα Κοινωνικής Ανθρωπολογίας και Ιστορίας Πανεπιστήμιο Αιγαίου c.canakis@sa.aegean.gr * lesol@sa.aegean.gr
Abstract
This paper investigates aspects of the Linguistic Landscape of central Belgrade between 2009 and 2017, theorizing its findings at the intersection of sociolinguistics, ethnography, and semiotics, which has gained ground as the platform of choice in “second wave” linguistic landscape (LL) research. It focuses on dynamic indexical
relations between space and language in the framework of superdiversity, as a way of making sense of language-in-society. To this end, it problematizes how ideologically laden identitarian concerns (such as digraphia/double literacy but also Christian Orthodoxy and heteronormativity as an index of srpstvo) find their
way onto Stari Grad walls. Such concerns have considerable – and often lasting – effects on the LL which can only be adequately investigated by systematic ethnographic studies of the semiotic means employed in inscribing it.
Key words: linguistic landscape, identity, indexicality, digraphia, homosexuality,
Belgrade
Athenian graffiti functions as a testament of creativity and artistry occurring during the hard times of socioeconomic and political crisis in Greece the last seven years. The impact of Greece's crisis is presented through urban art in downtown Athens. This extensive street art practice on Athenian walls as a linguistic and imagery line is approached in the present article via the semiotic and multimodal perspective, as the main symbolic and representative expression generated by the crisis, contributing to the production of visual urban culture. Fieldwork research was conducted in Athens from January to July 2015. The findings from the qualitative analysis highlight that politicized wall writings constitute a modern wall language, expressing social and political messages produced mainly via text and image, reconstructing the wall slogans and murals as the fundamental means of sociopolitical reaction.
Owing to its critical and creative potential, humour has often been used as one of the preferred means of resistance in social and political protests. In addition, the presence of humour is also increasing in the new social movements of recent history. The essential questions that this article aims to answer are how humour functions and what its purpose is amidst a time of numerous and notable social movements. During the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey, the protesters made significant use of humour that specifically targeted the control of the authorities over public life, thus providing a good case with which to study humour in social movements. One form which the protesters used to disseminate humorous messages was graffiti. In this article, the graffiti from the Gezi Park protests is examined using a critical discourse analysis model. In order to achieve the intended aims, Van Dijk’s (1995) understanding of ideological discourse analysis arguing that dominated groups may have ideologies that effectively organise the social representation needed for resistance and change, is taken as a point of departure. However, this work specifically relies on Fairclough’s (1992) three dimensional discourse analysis that covers the object (the text), the process (discursive practice) and the socio-historical conditions (social practice). Research on the language of Gezi graffiti shows that the humorous language of the protesters identified and differentiated the actors of the movement, and it did not only help them to cope with the domination and oppression to which they were subjected, but also increased support for development in the desired direction.
