To preserve and to protect vanishing signs: activism through art, ethnography, and linguistics in a gentrifying city

ABSTRACT

This article explores how a semiotics of the artistic aesthetics of New York City storefronts is deployed as activism against processes of gentrification and redevelopment. We examine how this creative endeavor by two local photographers compares to our own ethnographic and linguistic interventions uncovering and addressing storefront signage in gentrifying Brooklyn. We also compare this art activism to the ways in which developers and nations use art in various ways in the service of their placemaking goals. In doing so, we highlight both the innovative power of artistic framing to preserve and protect storefronts as salvage anthropology as well as the limits of this effort. We conclude with a discussion of how ethnography and activist art can yield different, yet critical mobilizations in the pursuit of maintaining multicultural communities and diversity in the neo-liberalizing city.

KEYWORDS:

• Signage
• art
• gentrification
• activism
• linguistics
• salvage anthropology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Smith defined the rent gap as the “disparity between the potential ground rent level and the actual ground rent capitalized under the present land use” (Smith 1979, 545).

2 The Murrays’ lay ethnography reveals quite a lot about the social and economic processes at work in disappearing storefronts. For example, they learn of how business owners get run out by landlords and developers who hold storefronts empty as tax write-offs or who pass increased property taxes onto the store owner because they cannot pass the increase on to their rent-controlled tenants.

3 The letters, CBGB stood for Country, Blue Grass and Blues. The smaller letters beneath – “OMFUG” stood for “Other Music for Urban Gormandizers” (or “gourmandizer” – meaning a voracious consumer of, in this case, music).

4 By distinction we mean, following Bourdieu (1990), both the contrast between similar things and an evaluation of those things as having qualities that mark variation in cultural capital.

5 See Liza Jackson (2017) who reconfigures the notion of colonization in gentrification studies as more than metaphorical reference (cf. Smith’s 1996 ‘frontier’ analogy).

6 How the law and landmarking drive gentrification is part of another project currently underway by the authors.

7 There are, for example, more than 1600 storefronts on Third and Fifth Avenues of Bay Ridge and Sunset Park.

8 Redman also notes that salvage anthropology has suffered an unfair negative reputation, where “[r]endered partly blind by their obsessive race to document and to preserve that which was thought to be old or ‘traditional,’ those active in the cultural salvage movement were often silent about the many cases of abuse inflicted upon Indigenous groups” (2021, 8). But Redman also argues that ‘salvage anthropology’ has continued to transform with contemporary debates about ethics and responsibility.

9 Ethnology is an older European term for cultural anthropology - or the comparative study of cultures, also born from nineteenth-century preservationist efforts in Central Europe to record, document, and promote definitive “national” cultures.

10 Boas headed the ethnology wing of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History and founded the first anthropology department in the U.S. at Columbia University. His students included Zora Neale Hurston, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead (King 2019).

11 These images are archived on the Murrays’ website at https://www.jamesandkarlamurray.com/JamesandKarlaMurrayStoreFrontRollingStoneFull.html

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Edward Snajdr

Edward Snajdr is Professor of Anthropology whose field research has engaged with urban redevelopment, gentrification, violence, ethnicity, gender, human trafficking, and environmentalism. He has conducted ethnographic research in North America, Slovakia, Kazakhstan, and Bosnia, among other sites, with funding from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of State, Fulbright IIIE, International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). His most recent book, (with Shonna Trinch) What the Signs Say: Language, Gentrification and Placemaking in Brooklyn (Vanderbilt University Press 2020), investigates the dynamics of place making and urban change in the framework of gentrification, redevelopment and its intersections with diversity, inclusion, racism, and white privilege. He is currently the chair of the Department of Anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Shonna Trinch

Shonna Trinch, Professor, is a sociolinguist who works at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Recently, Shonna has been studying gentrification in Brooklyn, NY, and her new book What the Signs Say: Language, Gentrification and Place-Making in Brooklyn (with Edward Snajdr) was published with Vanderbilt University Press in 2020. This book shows how systemic racism in the ‘liberal city' creates a place where social hierarchies are written on the land. At the same time, the book suggests that the signage that came before gentrification acted as a model of inclusion where there was a place for everyone. Shonna has also conducted fieldwork in the U.S. Southwest studying the ways in which Latina women and sociolegal authorities in different institutional settings collaborate and conflict in the creation of narratives of domestic abuse. Based on this legal ethnography, her first book, Latinas' narratives of domestic abuse: Discrepant versions of violence (John Benjamins, 2003) investigates how women’s stories of domestic abuse and rape change and are changed, as they are cast by legal professionals from one speech genre into another. Additionally, Shonna is the co-founder (with Barbara Cassidy) of Seeing Rape a public anthropology project of student-led theater that has sexual justice and the eradication of rape from college campuses as its mission. To date, Seeing Rape (seeingrape.com) has produced more than 100 plays written by John Jay College students and reaching an audience of over 25,000 of their peers.