Emilie Cameron

Indigenous spectrality and the politics of postcolonial ghost stories

Keywords: haunting, Nlaka'pamux, postcolonialism, spectrality, Stein Valley

there has also been an increase in passing, metaphorical references to 'haunting' in recent scholarship. It seems that everything, these days, is 'haunted', whether it be memories, places, ideologies, or ontologies. [START_REF] Mcewan | makes a similar observation in her recent piece on postcolonialism and the politics of enchantment (C. McEwan, 'A very modern ghost: postcolonialism and the politics of enchantment[END_REF] Haunting is a compelling metaphor for those engaged in studies of the emergent and immaterial, for those interested in identifying unnamed influences in contemporary thought, for studies into the textures of place and memory, and for general references to a present constituted by the non-linear enfolding of multiple, conflicting pasts. Scholars working within and across psychoanalytical, postcolonial, feminist, and posthumanist frameworks have all drawn upon haunting metaphors in recent years, and many geographers have begun to incorporate adjectives like 'spectral', 'haunting', and 'ghostly' into their writing. Haunting, it seems, has acquired a kind of tropic status in the discipline, particularly among geographers concerned with the colonial and postcolonial.

The very slipperiness and indeterminacy of haunting makes it amenable to a great variety of invocations and seems to capture something of the unfinished, contested nature of colonial and postcolonial geographies, but in this essay I ask what risks are involved in deploying a 'spectrogeographical' lens in studies of the colonial and postcolonial, and particularly in figuring Indigenous bodies, voices, and histories in ghostly terms. If, as Haraway notes, we inevitably read the world through tropes, we can still choose 'less-deadly version[s] for moral discourse', [START_REF] Haraway | A game of cat's cradle: science studies, feminist theory, cultural studies[END_REF] and at a time when spectral metaphors are proliferating, it seems crucial to interrogate the 'deadliness' of this particular line of thought. I would like to make a contribution along these lines by drawing attention to the longer history of haunting tropes in Canada and their re-emergence in the past decade or so in, among other places, a wilderness park in southwestern British Columbia. My intent is to draw points of connection between past and present hauntologies and interrogate the positionality of those who figure Indigenous peoples in ghostly terms. I will argue that allegorical representations of Indigenous peoples as ghosts haunting the Canadian state reinscribe colonial relations even as they are characterized as 'post' colonial expressions of recognition and redress, raising questions about the politics of postcolonial ghost stories.

In a recent review of the proliferation of haunting metaphors in Canadian cultural production, Goldman and Saul cite Canadian settler-author Catherine Parr Traill's declaration that 'ghosts or spirits… appear totally banished from Canada. This is too matter-of-fact a country for such supernaturals to visit'. [START_REF] Parr Traill In Goldman | Talking with ghosts[END_REF] Traill made this claim in 1833, but it was echoed by poet and critic Earle Birney in 1947 when he stated that 'it's only by our lack of ghosts we're haunted'. 13 Birney was referring to certain Canadians' preoccupation with their apparent 'lack' of history in comparison to their American neighbours, a matter of particular nationalist concern that has defined Canadian cultural production for decades. Such claims to 'ghostlessness', however, are more the exception than the rule. Northey [START_REF] Northey | The haunted wilderness: the gothic and grotesque in Canadian fiction[END_REF] argues that, in fact, ghosts have been at the center of nation-building projects in Canada for a long while, beginning in the nineteenth century. In particular, and of relevance to this essay, Bentley [START_REF] Bentley | Shadows in the soul: racial haunting in the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott[END_REF] argues that ghosts have been instrumental figures in efforts to connect Aboriginality with settler history, creating an aesthetic link between the 'Indian past' and the settler present. The Aboriginal ghost has been used to evoke a generalized sense of history in the Canadian landscape, but always with a sense of linearity and succession. It is assumed that Aboriginal ghosts are all that remains of the 'disappearing Indian', and that settler-Canadians have inherited this rich land from those who have now 'passed'.

The 'spectral native' was a particularly common figure among the Confederation poets, a group of writers working at the turn of the twentieth century who aimed to cultivate a uniquely Canadian literary voice and articulate the grounds for a budding Canadian nationalism. [START_REF] Bentley | The Confederation group of Canadian poets[END_REF] One of their more celebrated members, Duncan Campbell Scott, also spent his career in the federal Department of Indian Affairs, holding the post of Deputy Superintendent from 1923-1932, the era during which some of the most restrictive and assimilative policies relating to Aboriginal peoples were crafted and implemented. While traveling into Northern Ontario to arrange for the surrender of Cree and Ojibway lands in 1905, Scott wrote a poem entitled 'Indian Place Names' that begins:

The race has waned and left but tales of ghosts, That hover in the world like fading smoke About the lodges: gone are the dusty folk That once were cunning with the thong and snare And mighty with the paddle and the bow; They lured the silver salmon from his lair, They drove the buffalo in trampling hosts, And gambled in the teepees until dawn. But now their vaunted prowess is all gone, Gone like a moose-track in April snow. But all the land is murmurous with the call Of their wild names that haunt the lovely glens Where lonely water falls, or where the street Sounds all day with the tramp of myriad feet. [START_REF] Scott | New world lyrics and ballads[END_REF] Scott wrote a number of mournful Indian poems like this one, lamenting the loss of the very cultures he was instrumental in attacking. Although critics like Stan Dragland [START_REF] Dragland | Floating voice: Duncan Campbell Scott and the literature of Treaty[END_REF] have argued that Scott's poetry gave expression to his inner torment over the assimilation of Indigenous peoples into Canadian society, Groening [START_REF] Groening | Listening to old women speak: natives and alternatives in Canadian literature (Montreal and Kingston[END_REF] insists that Scott's poems supported and articulated his assimilationist agenda. Ghostly, fading Indians, regrettable or not, were an essential component of Scott's vision as Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs. Scott was unequivocal that Indians should 'progress into civilization and finally disappear as a separate and distinct people, not by race extinction but by gradual assimilation with their fellow citizens', [START_REF] Scott | The administration of Indian affairs in Canada[END_REF] and the motif of fading, spectral Indians in Scott's poetry worked to naturalize the policies he enacted as Deputy Superintendent. The portrayal of Indigenous peoples as fading ghosts extended far beyond Scott's poetry, but the political implications of Scott's use of this trope are particularly stark given the context within which 'Indian Place Names' was written. Scott was engaged in negotiations with real, live 'Indians' when he wrote this poem, and it is this mismatch between the poem's aestheticized 'ghosting' of Indigenous peoples and their embodied, material existence around the treaty table that is of note. This mismatch becomes all the more resonant from a contemporary vantage point: the Cree and Ojibway clearly did not 'wane', after all. They were real then and they are real today, in spite of Scott's efforts, both poetic and bureaucratic.

Scott is clearly a unique case; his occupation as both a poet and a high-ranking bureaucrat demand that the interdigitation of his governmental and literary texts be interrogated. But the prevalence of ghostly Indigenous figures in Canadian cultural production extends far 385 beyond Scott, and this prevalence in and of itself is worthy of note. Cariou argues that spectral Native figures are 'part of the iconic vocabulary of Euro-American Gothic romances', 21 citing the employment of such figures in prairie literatures from the 1930s to the present day. Margaret Atwood [START_REF] Atwood | Strange things: the malevolent north in Canadian literature[END_REF] has pointed to the importance of Aboriginal ghosts in constructions of the Canadian North as malevolent and mysterious, and Goldman and Saul identify an interest in haunting among contemporary writers such as Ann-Marie MacDonald, Jane Urquhart, Timothy Findley, and Michael Ondaatje, 23 some of whom have made explicit links between Canadian history, Indigenous ghosts, and the politics of land and inheritance. Gelder and Jacobs' important study of Indigenous ghosts as uncanny manifestations of settler unease, along with more recent work by Australian scholars, suggest that the ghost is a compelling figure in settler colonies more generally. [START_REF] Gelder | National hauntings: the architecture of Australian ghost stories[END_REF] Indeed, Bergland's comprehensive study of the 'Indian ghost' in American literature traces the figuration of Indigenous peoples as 'demons, apparitions, shapes, specters, phantoms, or ghosts' [START_REF] Bergland | The national uncanny: Indian ghosts and American subjects[END_REF] over the past three hundred years, noting the connection between Indigenous spectrality and colonial figurations of land and power. It seems that recent turns to the 'spectral' as a metaphor for coming to terms with colonialism are by no means original. The fact that settler colonies like Canada, Australia, and the United States are not 'post' colonial in the sense of being 'beyond' or 'after' colonialism may explain the ongoing importance of the Indigenous ghost in the settler imagination, but whatever continuities may exist between past and present settler hauntologies, it is important to note that recent invocations of the Indigenous ghost are frequently understood to be 'post' colonial and even decolonizing gestures. The final report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, for example, a commission meant to address some of the foundations of contemporary conflicts between Aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state, frames Canadian history as 'haunted' by colonial injustices:

Studying the past tells us who we are and where we came from. It often reveals a cache of secrets that some people are striving to keep hidden and others are striving to tell. In this case, it helps explain how the tensions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people came to be, and why they are so hard to resolve.… In our report, we examine that history in some detail, for its ghosts haunt us still. The ghosts take the form of dishonoured treaties, theft of Aboriginal lands, suppression of Aboriginal cultures, abduction of Aboriginal children, impoverishment and disempowerment of Aboriginal peoples. 26 The report goes on to outline the ways in which these ghosts might be laid to rest and an era of 'peace and harmony' might be initiated. According to a recent University of Toronto Quarterly special issue devoted to 'haunting' in Canadian cultural production, 27 spectral accounts of Indigenous-settler relations have proliferated in the decade since the Royal Commission. One of the places such stories have emerged is in a wilderness park in southwestern British Columbia. These stories raise important questions about the use of spectral tropes for making sense of contemporary settler colonies like Canada.

The Stein Valley Nlaka'pamux Heritage Park is a provincial park protecting the 'last unlogged, intact watershed' 28 in southwestern BC. The park stretches from the Coast mountain range inland to the deep cuts of the Fraser Canyon. It is rugged, mountainous country, largely unknown to most non-Aboriginal British Columbians until the mid 1980s when environmental activists realized that the valley was slated for logging. The valley has always been important to the Nlaka'pamux, whose traditional territory encompasses the watershed. It has been used as a source of food, a travel route between inland and coastal territories, contains numerous rock paintings, and is a site for vision quests and other activities. According to an activist who was central in the campaign to protect the Stein, however, such uses were downplayed by logging companies intent on extracting timber from the valley. [START_REF] Wickwire | Personal Communication[END_REF] In the rush to protect the Stein, a coalition of First Nations, environmental activists, and scholars therefore self-consciously worked to 'fill' the valley with signs of Aboriginality, emphasizing its spiritual significance and insisting on the integrity of the Valley as a whole, charged space. [START_REF]These efforts were facilitated by a longer history of imagining the Stein in spiritual terms. The spiritual significance of the valley was noted by anthropologists as early as 1900 (see J. Teit, 'The Thompson Indians of British Columbia[END_REF] T-shirts, posters, and flyers were emblazoned with rock art images and a coffee table book was assembled to showcase the Valley and raise funds for its protection. [START_REF] Wickwire | Voices for the Wilderness[END_REF] Wilderness concerts were staged to draw attention to the plight of the valley 32 and the 'Stein Rediscovery' Program was launched, a program aimed at reacquainting Lytton, Lillooet, and Mt. Currie Band youth with their traditional culture through extended journeys into the Stein.

Ultimately these multiple conservation efforts were successful. By 1995, a park co-managed by the provincial government and the Lytton First Nation was declared. The park was named 'Stein Valley Nlaka'pamux Heritage Park: A Living Museum of Cultural and Natural History', one of the first parks in Canada to highlight its Indigenous heritage. As Braun [START_REF] Braun | The intemperate rainforest: nature, culture, and power on Canada's west coast[END_REF] has argued with regards to Clayoquot Sound, however, a particular kind of Indigeneity was emphasized in the creation of the park. Notions of a pure, static, 'ancient' Indigeneity aligned with a pure and untamed nature predominated. This was a Stein of 'living, loving arms', with 'laughter on the breeze', [START_REF] Kruger | [END_REF] a charismatic space that was characterized by David Suzuki as palliative for a society 'desperately in need of environmental and spiritual restoration'. [START_REF] Suzuki | [END_REF] Descriptions of the Stein as a benevolent and healing spiritual place predominated in articles, flyers, reports, and images produced to protect the valley from logging. [START_REF] Dunstan | Stein Valley: an economic report for the people of Thompson Lillooet region[END_REF] Notably, the 'spirits' of the Stein were construed as universally welcoming and protective:

In truth, ancestors still sing in the Stein, using words which have remained unchanged throughout centuries. In truth, there is laughter on the breeze, and each tree, each stone, is alive. That the ancestors have always protected the Stein, and always will, is true; and the Stein, in turn, protects all. [START_REF] Kruger In M'gonigle | [END_REF] Efforts on the part of the Lytton, Mt. Currie, and Lillooet Bands to protect the Stein were embedded in a broader political movement to regain control over their traditional territories, a movement that began to gain some momentum in the mid-1990s. After over a century of demands on the part of the province's First Nations for official treaties and land claim settlements, the British Columbia treaty process finally resulted in a settlement in 1998, when the Nisga'a Nation successfully regained title over a portion of their traditional territory in northern British Columbia. [START_REF]as negotiator and are pursuing their claims through other channels[END_REF] 'Suddenly', or so it seemed to a number of non-Aboriginal British Columbians, the entire province was up for grabs, [START_REF] Rossiter | Fantastic topographies: neo-liberal responses to aboriginal land claims in British Columbia[END_REF] and a great deal of anxiety and uncertainty over land tenure began to emerge. [START_REF] Clayton | Absence, memory, and geography[END_REF] It was in this context that the spirits of the Stein began to figure in different terms than the coffee table books celebrated, and the notion of the Stein as 'haunted' by Aboriginal ghosts began to appear.

'Everyone knows that the Stein is haunted', [START_REF] Jordan-Knox | Personal Communication[END_REF] notes one former resident of Vancouver, but the valley's hauntings remain an unsubstantiated 'urban legend'. Interviews conducted with non-Aboriginal informants who have hiked in the Stein Valley since the late 1990s nevertheless reveal a number of haunting stories ranging from a vague sense of unease in the Valley 387 to accounts of ghostly apparitions. Importantly, all those I have interviewed 42 characterize these spectral experiences as frightening, unsettling, and scary, and describe an impression of being unwelcome trespassers in what is ostensibly a public park. One hiker notes that 'the site gave us a sense that we were trespassing somehow, and that there was still a presence there'. [START_REF] Roger | Personal Communication[END_REF] Another suggests: 'I think it was just feeling like we were intruding on somebody, and they were threatening in some way'. [START_REF] Tracey | Personal Communication[END_REF] Much like the postcolonial ghost stories Gelder and Jacobs' discuss in Uncanny Australia, these are stories about being unwelcome, illegitimate, and vulnerable to malevolent Indigenous ghosts. Although the Stein was set up as a 'living museum' to showcase the Valley's cultural history, Gelder and Jacobs argue that such museological containment has become increasingly untenable in decolonizing settler nations like Canada and Australia. Museologically-framed 'exhibits' like Asking Rock, described below, take on a whole new resonance for a settler society experiencing 'growing anxiety… regarding the legitimacy of their claims to belonging on what they call "their" land': 45 There are many rock paintings sites in the Stein Valley. A good example is the one known as 'Asking Rock' situated near Stryen Creek. At this site Nlaka'pamux people stop, recite a prayer, and ask permission to travel through the valley in safety. Some people leave offerings of burnt sage and tobacco to accompany their prayers. [START_REF] Parks | Government of British Columbia)[END_REF] Although this park brochure implies that only Nlaka'pamux need ask for permission to travel through the valley, non-Aboriginal British Columbians have become increasingly aware of their failure to ask for permission to traverse and settle the province's lands, and I would argue that sites like Asking Rock are no longer read as 'neutral', museological exhibits. Indeed, the presence and claims of Aboriginal peoples in the Stein Valley, presences that were purposely highlighted throughout the 1980s to ensure the Valley's conservation as a 'wilderness' space, seem to undercut the legitimacy of non-Aboriginal wilderness enthusiasts traversing the Stein in the more politicized climate of contemporary treaty-making.

Following Gelder and Jacobs, [START_REF] Gelder | Uncanny Australia. 48 Cariou[END_REF] one might interpret contemporary hauntings in the Stein as manifestations of a certain uncanny, unsettled sense of place for those non-Aboriginal British Columbians who are struggling to come to terms with their (il)legitimate presence in the province. Aboriginal ghosts represent the 'return of the repressed' 48 for settler-colonists, an uncanny reminder of the illegimitacy and injustice at the heart of land resettlement in the province. But whether or not one finds a psychoanalytic reading of the Stein Valley ghost stories compelling, it seems to me that one might more productively query the ways in which these stories manage to 'write out' the bodies and voices of living, politically active Indigenous peoples. In spite of the implicit recognition of Aboriginal 'presence' in these stories, postcolonial hauntings in the Stein do not seem to account for living Indigenous peoples any more than Scott's poems did a century ago. Not only do these ghost stories jar against Nlaka'pamux accounts of the spirits of the Stein as universally protective and welcoming, they also continue a longstanding practice of relegating Aboriginality to the immaterial and spectral past. Hikers do not recount stories of live, angry Nlaka'pamux asking them to leave, but rather tell stories of disembodied 'spirits' emerging from an evocative landscape. These ghosts do not speak or act; they haunt by virtue of their very existence. As the peoples of the Mt. Currie and Lytton Bands declared during the 'Save the Stein' campaign, they are far too accustomed to a spectral condition:

As we live through our daily lives as Indians, eventually we become accustomed to the fact that non-native people can see right through us. We don't mean that these people understand us fully or somehow sense the innermost workings of the Indian heart, because it seems to us that most non-native people don't take the time to come to this kind of knowledge. We mean simply that the majority of the non-natives view us as invisible peoples who really should not exist outside museums. [START_REF] Indian | Stein Perspective: the Lytton and Mt[END_REF] These comments highlight the specific, lived experience of ghostliness and not a generalized, metaphoric condition of Indigenous spectrality. Spivak has highlighted the importance of drawing a distinction between the singular and the general in accounts of the colonial and postcolonial. [START_REF] Spivak | A critique of postcolonial reason. 51 I. Baucom[END_REF] She emphasizes the importance of understanding the 'singular' not so much as an instance of the general, but rather as that which marks, in Baucom's words, a 'cryptic, secretive space…, discloses the presence of that withheld space, but "guards" its secret'. 51 In other words, as Baucom has argued in reference to the generalized sense of haunting evoked by stories of the drowning of 132 slaves on the Atlantic crossing of the Zong in 1781, postcolonial scholars must pay attention to the ways in which singular, specific historical experiences and events are translated into generalized allegories of a reprehensible colonial past. He insists that the specificity of these histories must be stripped away in order for them to circulate as evocative signs of 'that kind' of history, and that the 'value' of a specific history is only legible in this generalized state. There is a certain violence, then, in the evocation of a general sense of haunted (un)settlement in places like the Stein Valley. It is a haunting that speaks not to the particular ways in which Nlaka'pamux have experienced and objected to colonial policies and practices (experiences and concerns that they specifically articulated, for example, to Gilbert Malcolm Sproat, Joint Indian Reserve Commissioner, as Sproat traveled through their territory in the summer of 1878, tasked with allotting small reserve lands for the use of the Nlaka'pamux and thus clearing the way for non-Aboriginal settlement), [START_REF] Harris | Making native space: colonialism, resistance, and reserves in British Columbia[END_REF] but rather to a generalized sense of the contemporary resonance of 'that kind' of history. This generalized and allegorical understanding of the colonial past inevitably leads, Baucom argues, to an equally generalized 'fantasy' [START_REF] Baucom | Specters of the Atlantic[END_REF] of postcolonial justice, to the notion of reconciliation with ghosts rather than a reckoning with the specific and ongoing violences of colonialism. 'In poll after poll, Canadians have said that they want to see justice done for Aboriginal people, but they have not known how', 54 reports the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, in spite of the fact that Aboriginal peoples have consistently and forcefully articulated their specific demands for justice.

What does it mean, then, to be 'haunted' in a decolonizing settler colony like British Columbia? Who is haunted in these stories, and who or what is doing the haunting? What kind of future might these hauntings demand? Do they signal, as Derrida intended, a recognition of the always unfinished and unfinishable in our relation to the present and past and, by extension, a sense of generosity and hospitality towards ghosts? Or do they, as Sarah Ahmed [START_REF] Ahmed | The cultural politics of emotion[END_REF] has argued in relation to white guilt in postcolonial Australia, constitute yet another self-referential engagement with the colonial past, in which the experiences and desires of the settler occlude consideration of other desires and possibilities? This is the reason for my wariness in the face of haunting tropes, for I fear that postcolonial ghost stories risk perpetuating a kind of endless 'dancing around a wound' [START_REF]An anthology of Canadian native literature in English[END_REF] that Daniel David Moses identifies among liberal, left-leaning Canadians, anxiously replaying their complicity in an ugly colonial past while neglecting to mobilize effectively for change in the present. The ghosts of the Stein do not seem to me to represent the Nlaka'pamux with very much dignity or agency, and surely any postcolonial trope we might mobilize ought at the very least to figure Indigenous peoples with dignity. In Haraway's terms, it seems to me that 'haunting' has the potential to function as a particularly 'deadly' trope, one that requires the death and immateriality of Indigenous peoples to make an e/affective claim on non-Indigenous British Columbians. It is a trope within which today's living descendents of the generalized 'spirits' haunting the Stein, people like Chiefs Leonard Andrew and Ruby Dunstan, seem to have no place:

As the direct descendents of those aboriginal peoples who have inhabited, shared, sustained, and been sustained by the Stein Valley for tens of thousands of years down to the present, our authority in this watershed is inescapable… Under the cooperative authority of our two bands we will maintain the Stein Valley as a wilderness in perpetuity for the enjoyment and enlightenment of all peoples. [START_REF] Dunstan | Postcolonial ghost dancing: diagnosing European colonialism[END_REF] And so, at a time when (primarily non-Aboriginal) geographers, among others, seem to have taken an interest in ghostly matters, it seems critical to acknowledge that ghostliness is a politicized state of being. Many scholars have interpreted these politics as a function of visibility -that is, they suggest that the uncovering and exposure of the ghosts of the past is an emancipatory act. In many cases this may be true, but I would suggest that there is also a politics of vision involved in these hauntologies. Those who see and imagine ghosts are as deserving of interrogation as the ghosts themselves, and the ghosts of the Stein are profoundly self-referential. And so while the spectral does seem to offer a means of conceptualizing that which we cannot easily see, even of giving some voice to colonial traumas, confining the Indigenous to the ghostly also has the potential to re-inscribe the interests of the powerful upon the meanings and memories of place.

Further, while in this essay I have bracketed out the possibility that non-Aboriginal hikers truly are connecting with a complex spiritual world in the Stein, I think Métis scholar Warren Cariou's comments on postcolonial ghosts are worth considering. In contrast to the horror, anxiety, and sense of punishment or revenge conveyed by Indigenous ghosts in settler literatures, Cariou points out that for Native readers and writers, there is no reason that … Indigenous ghosts or spirits should be frightening. Native people already have plenty of evidence in their daily lives of how the legacies of colonialism have been passed down through the generations; they do not need to summon specters to fulfill that function. But Native writers do represent spirits in their work nonetheless; it is just that these spirits are not necessarily figures of uncanny terror. They may be malevolent beings such as the wihtiko or the skeleton-spirit Pahkakos, but they may also be figures of healing, ceremony, or political action. Or they may simply be ancestors. And while many such spirits do seem to address the transgressions of the colonial past, they usually do so as part of a call for some kind of redress or change in the present. 58 Haunting need not be about forgetting, avenging, and lurking; richer understandings of time, place, and materiality are available to us, and I would suggest that geographers might reconsider the political potential of haunting tropes in their accounts of the colonial and postcolonial.

have shared their stories of the Stein Valley with me, and particularly to Wendy Wickwire for sharing her extensive knowledge of the park's history.

Biographical note

Emilie Cameron is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada. She can be contacted at: Department of Geography, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6; email: 4esc@queensu.ca Notes

Acknowledgements

Thank you to David Lambert, Phil Crang, Laura Cameron, Audrey Kobayashi, and Bruce Braun for their comments and suggestions on various versions of this essay. Thank you also to the people who


In Virtual migration: the programming of globalization, A. Aneesh highlights how technological developments, such as high-speed satellites, cable links, and/or online services, have dramatically altered the way in which labor negotiates national borders. Using the familiar example of Indianstaffed (and located) call centers providing customer service for American consumers, Aneesh cites the growing 'invisible and disembodied processes of labor' (p. 3) that challenge our conventional understanding of labor migration. He further argues that these invisible and disembodied processes constitute an entirely unique, if not new, phenomenon which he calls 'virtual migration'. The term 'virtual migration' speaks to the migration of labor, skills, and data, but not bodies. Aneesh seeks to 'free the discussion of labor mobility from the confines of the body' (p. 3), in order to address the dynamic and complex relationships upon which globalization depends. To demonstrate how 'transnational virtual space' is both theoretically and practically an emerging space within which to tease out the complexities of globalization, Aneesh begins by situating the concept of virtual migration within wider debates concerning globalization. In doing so, he successfully employs a wide range of relevant literature, from Marx and Weber to Anderson and Harvey. However, Aneesh's discussion and treatment of the concept of 'territoriality' is quite weak and could have used the work of geographers, such as Agnew, Amin, Sack, Thrift, Tuan, or others, to strengthen his understanding and application of 'territoriality' as it relates to virtual migration and globalization. In order for readers to understand the ways in which virtual migration is a distinct phenomenon, Aneesh devotes the third chapter to discussion of the more familiar, and more researched, phenomenon of 'body-shopping'. Body-shopping refers to the practice in which programmers (and other highly-specialized laborers) migrate to the United States, typically on H-1B visas. In Aneesh's cases, the focus is on Indian programmers who have been 'body-shopped' to high-tech firms in New Jersey. Aneesh successfully demystifies the complexities of US immigration, particularly H-1B visas, in order to convey the benefits, costs, and implications of such migrations on the various actors involved. Through several well-situated interview excerpts, Chapter Three effectively sets the stage for understanding both why virtual migration became necessary and how virtual migration may contrast with bodyshopping in such a way that it can legitimately constitute a new space of inquiry into globalization. The remaining chapters of the book delve deeper into characterizing what virtual migration is, how it functions in a globalized system, and, perhaps more importantly, how it is programmed or governed. Aneesh provides an interesting and compelling argument for the emergence of what he terms 'algocracy' in which 'authority is increasingly embedded in the technology itself, or more

specifically the underlying code ' (p. 110). Aneesh's arguments are well-organized and effectively communicate the often jargon-ridden world of complex technologies for those who have yet to go virtual themselves. He makes important contributions that both demonstrate the successful application of diverse social theories to real world practicalities and challenge our conventional understandings of what it means to migrate. Virtual migration itself opens up a very real (as opposed to virtual) space for discussing new forms of migration, governance, and globalization in which geographic perspectives and voices still have much to contribute. Mediating nature opens with the statement that it 'offers a history of the present nature of mass mediation' (p. 1). The use of such an ambiguous declaration as a first gambit is a deliberate ploy to open up a space to discuss and disrupt commonplace conceptions of cultural concepts such as 'nature', 'mass mediation' and 'history of the present'. While the nature of 'nature' has been given considerable attention in the academic sphere in recent years it is by engaging with this literature alongside more critical understandings of mass mediation as a historical process that the book carves out its niche. Attention to mass mediation, which is defined more expansively as 'the historical process involving a panoply of pedagogies of massification' (p. 4), is usefully extended beyond what is commonly referred to as the mass media. In this sense the arena of interest for Mediating nature includes not only media coverage of nature through television programmes, the print media or films but also experiences of (and in) parks, zoos and museums. What is most refreshing about the text is its attempt to build bridges between non-representational and non-non-representational theories, a new conceptual divide within geography. The propaedeutic approach adopted (an approach that provides introductory instruction) is also a useful device in the light of the envisaged readership of the book. Students particularly will appreciate the reiteration of debates on the nature of nature and processes of observation and communication. A minor quibble is the relegation to an appendix of attention to the social semiotic problematization framework adopted in the text. This is a shame as the material could have usefully, with some modification, have been incorporated into the introductory section of the book. Another slight disappointment, and this may be only personal predilection, is the inclusion of an epilogue in place of a more consolidating chapter at the end of the book. The concern here is that rather than reflecting carefully on the vast, rich and fascinating material that is presented in the main body of the text the final chapter actually introduces new cases and issues. Hopefully, and in the best tradition of contemporary mass media, the opportunity for reflection and consolidation will come in the form of a sequel to the important early steps taken in Mediating nature.

University of Kansas

Department of Geography, School of Natural Sciences

ANGELA GRAY Mediating nature: environmentalism and modern culture. By

	Nils Lindahl Elliot.
	London: Routledge. 2006. 284 pp. $46.95 paperback. ISBN 0 415 39325 6.


Luke Dickens

Placing post-graffiti: the journey of the Peckham Rock

Keywords: art, Banksy, city, graffiti, post-graffiti, urban inscription

This article is about the intersections between contemporary forms of urban inscription, art and the city, as they come to be configured through an emergent 'post-graffiti' aesthetic practice. Exemplary of this movement is the self-proclaimed 'art terrorist', Banksy, who has earned a reputation recently for his audacious interventions into some of the most significant art institutions in the western world, as well as for his politically charged stencil and sculptural work in the everyday spaces of the city. Focusing on the artist's Peckham Rock, a fragment of concrete that he surreptitiously stuck to the walls of the British Museum in May 2005, this article uses the methodological device of 'the journey' in an attempt to place the connections and disconnections between a series of elite and institutional spaces, social relations and mediascapes through which 'the rock' passes as its 'life' as an artwork unfolds. Existing research, including that by geographers, has examined graffiti in terms of urban identity politics, territoriality and transgression. While such work has generated important insights into the nature of particular kinds of urbanism, it is often limited to a focus on graffiti 'writing', a subcultural model of urban inscription originating in New York and Philadelphia in the late 1960s. In contrast, this article explores a more recent style of inscribing the city, as set out in a series of art publications and conferences, and unpacks what such a model might indicate regarding contemporary urban processes and experiences.

Introduction

In May 2005, self-proclaimed 'art terrorist', Banksy, walked into the British Museum. He was wearing a fake beard and a long coat, and was carrying something in a plastic bag. Arriving at his chosen location, room 49 housing the 'Roman Britain' collection, and checking to see that no one else was looking, he took his Peckham Rock from the bag and attached it to the wall with strong adhesive tape. Underneath he fastened a caption, written in the style used by the museum, complete with a falsified index number and framed in a plastic case. He then slipped away, leaving 'the rock' to its fate. The caption read:

As I discuss throughout this article, Banksy's intervention into this exemplary centre of collection and display presents a significant opportunity to reconsider the place of urban inscription in the contemporary city. [START_REF]or with the physical spaces and surfaces of the city[END_REF] Inspirational here are the ways geographers and others have used graffiti -both in terms of performance and mode of representation -in order to investigate broader urban conditions and experiences. This body of work has approached graffiti in a number of ways: as an expression of the gendered and racial politics of difference and identity; 2 as the assertions of gang territoriality and communication; [START_REF] Adams | Gang graffiti as a discourse genre[END_REF] as an indication and outcome of urban decline and de-industrialization; [START_REF] Austin | Taking the train: how graffiti art became an urban crisis in New York City[END_REF] as a means of resisting the authoritarian city and producing differential forms of public space; [START_REF] Borden | Another pavement, another beach: skateboarding and the performative critique of architecture[END_REF] as an articulation of ideology, place and the geographies of transgression; [START_REF] Cresswell | The crucial "where" of graffiti: a geographical analysis of reactions to graffiti in New York[END_REF] and, more recently, as a conceptual tool for reading, writing and re-imagining the city. [START_REF] Amin | Cities: reimagining the urban[END_REF] Yet despite the valuable insights that such accounts provide, their focus tends towards a specific kind of urban inscription, a 'classic' model of graffiti 'writing' 8 -involving the subcultural practices 'tagging' and 'piecing' with spray paint -with its origins in Philadelphia and New York during the late 1960s. 9 Made famous internationally by Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant's photo-anthropological book, Subway art -documenting the lifestyles of the young people who painted graffiti on the 5 and 2 subway trains in the Bronx during the late 1970s -and films such as Charlie Ahearn's Wildstyle and Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver's Style wars, which situated graffiti writing alongside other elements of the early hip-hop scene, this neatly packaged model of graffiti has become deeply rooted in both popular and academic imaginations. [START_REF] Cooper | Subway art[END_REF] Yet, while such a model remains a principal, albeit increasingly hybridized, influence on the urban inscriptions found across much of the westernized world, I want to suggest here that the dominance of this model frequently obscures a diverse spectrum of alternative inscription cultures and styles.

Indeed, although Banksy has come to be known as 'Britain's most celebrated graffiti artist', [START_REF]Animals sprayed by graffiti artist[END_REF] his Peckham Rock was not created with spray paint, and did not appear on a street corner, rooftop or subway train in New York City. Instead, this curious object (marked, as it was, with the image of a Neanderthal figure pushing a shopping trolley) drew its inspiration not from the wild styles of the hip-hop scene, but a conflation of British activist art and cave painting (see Figure 1). Put on display in one of the oldest museums in the world, the rock was intended to poke fun at the consumption habits of modern Britain, promote the work and name of an artist, assert the artistic and historical value of work of this type, and berate the purveyors and enforcers of 'zero-tolerance' urban policy. As I will discuss below, the rudimentary components of this work seem to offer some useful clues for how we might go about expanding our understandings of urban inscription, and inscribers, today. This is not to say, however, that academic work to date has little to offer to an appreciation of interventions such as those by Banksy -many of the ideas developed through an analysis of graffiti writing are pertinent here -but to point out that, given the specificity of 'graffiti' to the research outlined above, my task here necessarily begins with the reassessment of terminology.

The term 'post-graffiti' seems perhaps the most useful and direct starting point for reconsidering current forms of urban inscription. Initially used to describe the displacement of graffiti writing from the streets and subways of New York City into the more acceptable confines of the art world, [START_REF]Post-graffiti' first appeared as the title of an exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery[END_REF] the phrase has reappeared recently in a series of popular art texts, exhibitions and conferences to suggest the emergence of a qualitatively different, contemporary style of inscribing the city. [START_REF] Blackshaw | Scrawl: dirty graphics and strange characters[END_REF] Tristan Manco, a Bristol based graphic designer and prominent commentator on the emergence of an international post-graffiti scene, explains '"post-graffiti" and "neo-graffiti" are more recent phrases used to describe street art and a graffiti scene in flux between established ideas and new directions'. [START_REF] Manco | Actually the term 'neo-graffiti' is far less prevalent than 'post-graffiti[END_REF] Importantly, by making it clear that this transition is less about a profound break in the history of urban inscription -announcing the death of 'real graffiti' 15 -so much as it is an attempt to comprehend new trends at a point when they are in becoming, Manco provides a timely account of the general aspects of an emergent post-graffiti aesthetic while acknowledging the difficulty of closing off any final definition. Indeed, the notion of post-graffiti is hotly contested, both by more traditional graffiti writers, and amongst those who might constitute this new movement. [START_REF] Tim | this naming and renaming of urban inscription practices and styles is a way of claiming the right to authenticity through the production of 'real graffiti', in Cresswell, In place/out of pace, p. 51; See Dreph and Sami, 'Underground resistance[END_REF] As a result, most contemporary practitioners would be more likely to describe themselves as 'street artists' and not 'post-graffiti artists'. [START_REF]not just 'post-graffiti' and 'street art', but also 'culture jamming', 'Brandalism', 'urban art', 'cult art', 'guerrilla art' and 'new underground art[END_REF] Nonetheless, given the critical mass of art and artists that appear in recent books, it is difficult to disagree with Manco's observation that '[t]oday's graffiti landscape is fast becoming unrecognizable from that of previous decades'. 18 Within this rather open definition, a number of more specific facets of a post-graffiti movement can be unpacked. At the most basic level, post-graffiti is said to look different to graffiti writing. For Manco, this is not just about the use of materials beyond the spray can, but reflects 'a revolt against generic styles', where a new generation of practitioners are 'breaking the unwritten graffiti rules to create new graphic forms and images outside 3-D and wildstyle 473 FIGURE 1 The Peckham Rock, 2005. (Author's photo.) lettering'. 19 His argument is that the 'tag', as the core component of graffiti writing, is increasingly being replaced by 'street logos'; a shift from typographic to iconographic forms of inscription. [START_REF] Stak | Time of the signs[END_REF] Crucially, he suggests this is because such logos are simultaneously inspired by, and critical of, the growing visual spectacle of signage and advertising in the modern metropolis, thus making explicit how this new look is profoundly connected with wider changes in the urban landscape. Early pioneers of this approach include American artists -such as Shepherd Fairey, the instigator behind the 'obey' campaign of cryptic pseudo-advertising, and the ex-graffiti writer, Barry McGee (aka 'Twist'). [START_REF] Poynor | Obey the giant: life in the image world[END_REF] Also influential to a distinct post-graffiti scene is an earlier generation of 'street artists', such as Blek le Rat and Nemo from Paris, and the doyens of New York's Lower East Side scene, Jean-Michel Basquiet, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf. 22 In Britain today, Banksy's work is perhaps the best illustration of this emergent postgraffiti scene. This is not least because of what some have described as the 'Banksy effect', 23 a comprehensive public dialogue that he has carefully nurtured alongside his work on the everyday spaces of the street. 24 Such engagements have significantly reframed popular understandings of the practice of 'graffiti' as something to be appreciated rather than despised, and have also had profound influence on the styles and practices adopted within the scene itself. Aesthetically, his distinctive stencil technique is exemplary of an iconographic style of inscription, especially his signature rat characters, who have become notorious 'actors' in the urban landscapes of British cities: sawing gas mains from walls, lighting sticks of dynamite, and climbing over signs warning of the use of anti-climb paint (see Figure 2). [START_REF] Manco | Bansky has developed this 'animals taking over the zoo' theme an[END_REF] Thus, post-graffiti differs from graffiti writing in its attempt to directly engage with urban audiences through 'readable' iconographic inscriptions -using critical, intriguing and often humorous graphics -in order to challenge their visual understandings and appreciations of the city. Reflecting on such shifts in the Guardian recently, Banksy draws attention to the political motives behind this aesthetic practice: modern street art is a product of a generation tired of growing up with a relentless barrage of logos and images being thrown at their head everyday, and much of it is an attempt to pick up these visual rocks and throw them back. 26 His commentary marks out an alternative political stance to that expressed by graffiti writing, one that challenges the 'antipathy towards corporate branding and creeping globalization' of the contemporary metropolis. 27 Encapsulated in his personal version of post-graffiti, 'Brandalism', his ideological position can be traced back through a much longer history of urban avant garde movements, such as the critical practices of the Situationists, and more recent forms of 'activist art' and 'culture jamming'. [START_REF] Marcus | Lipstick traces -a secret history of the twentieth century[END_REF] In Britain, the specifics of these influences predate or otherwise exist outside those of the graffiti writing subculture. For example, Henry Cooper and James Prigoff note that in London, '[p]olitical messages proliferated in the sixties, and in the midseventies punk bands like The Clash and the Sex Pistols tagged up around the clubs where they played'. [START_REF] Chalfant | [END_REF] A more recent manifestation of this kind of urban inscription is the British style of 'agitprop' art, which emerged during the 1990s. As Cynthia Rose explains, the 'countless electronic symbols, printed slogans and visual icons' in the city become the 'raw material' for Agitprop artists, whose 'mixology' of found objects and taste for intervention represented a 'reaction to surreal circumstance -but a reaction which seeks to assert morality'. [START_REF] Rose | Agitprop art: from the spraycan to the CD-ROM[END_REF] British agitprop outfits -such as KLF, AVI, FAT -sought to reach mass audiences by 'circumnavigating the established institutions of cultural discourse such as the gallery, buyer/client and curator', instead working directly on the street and through guerrilla media campaigns. 31 As a result, such groups came to be labelled by the British press as 'art terrorists'. [START_REF] Rose | Agitprop art, p. 208. and in frequently used artefacts[END_REF] These political roots are most apparent in Banksy's own 'art terrorism', a series of recent interventions in to the collections of several major international institutions of high arts and culture. In London, these include spraying the word 'boring' in red paint onto the side of the National Film Theatre, using a refilled fire extinguisher; stencilling 'mind the tat' on the steps of Tate Britain shortly before the announcement of the Turner Prize, and leaving a stuffed rat, equipped with a rucksack, spray cans and a pair of sunglasses in a display case on the walls of the Natural History Museum. He has also glued an 'acid-faced' Mona Lisa reproduction to the walls of the Louvre, Paris; and in a recent trip to New York City, targeted four major institutions in one day. These interventions included leaving an insect specimen in the 'Hall of Biodiversity' in the American Museum of Natural History, entitled 'withusoraganstus', complete with Airfix, bomb-mounted wings; and a screen-print of Tesco Value soup cans -a blatant Warhol parody -on the walls of the MoMA. 33 Such practices signal a key theme in Banksy's art, a critique of the undemocratic, elite nature of the art establishment, which he describes as 'a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak'. 34 Such interventions also demonstrate how site-specificity is central to Banksy's approach, whereby he takes up this cause by producing work that directly interferes with the politics of representation within these sanctified spaces of high-culture. 35 However, post-graffiti also seems to be defined by perhaps less antagonistic, if not more compliant, relationships with the art establishment than previous inscription cultures. Unlike earlier Agitprop artists, Banksy's self-styled status as an 'art terrorist' betrays a certain level of calculation in his approach. Indeed, there are a number of precedents demonstrating the value of shaking up the art world in order to garner public attention and, ultimately, become a more successful artist, from Marcel Duchamp's Fountain to the shock tactics employed by Young British Artists (YBAs). It is also important to acknowledge the main outlets for claims about 'new directions in graffiti art' have been made via the mainstream art press -particularly through publishers such as Thames and Hudson, whose portfolio of 'graffiti' related texts now extends to over 20 volumes -and at conferences and exhibitions hosted by international art institutions, including the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) and Tate Modern in central London. 36 This is in marked contrast to the somewhat exploitative encounters with Manhattan galleries and collectors that many graffiti writers experienced as they got caught up in the 1980s art 'boom'; 37 a situation that Joe Austin describes as resulting in 'an embittering clash between two very different prestige systems, one institutionalized in the commercial art galleries and the other in the train yards'. 38 Thus 'post-graffiti' is a salient term because it attends to a rather different 'art world' than that which produced graffiti writing, or indeed earlier forms of street art. 39 Unlike the black and minority ethnic youth from deprived environments who found themselves rapidly redefined as 'artists' by external interests, [START_REF] Cresswell | [END_REF] contemporary inscribers generally appear better able and more conscious in their efforts to organize and promote themselves within more formal art and commercial spheres. While unsubstantiated by scholarly research, provisional evidence suggests that the current vogue for producing 'street art' derives from educational experiences -both formal and informal -rather than directly 'street' and 'grass roots' influences. 41 Current practitioners also constitute something of a 'wired generation': [START_REF] Hanman | Growing up with the wired generation[END_REF] 'visually literate' and media savvy individuals, whose urban inscriptions operate across increasingly sophisticated social, professional and entrepreneurial networks. [START_REF] Dickens | Pictures on walls: post-graffiti, cultural industry and the city[END_REF] Nonetheless, in a recent Art of the state special issue, Beth MacAdam observes how this next generation 'move back and forth between culture and counter-culture, operating inside and outside the system'. [START_REF] Macadam | Outside in: sudden reversals in the street art constitution[END_REF] As such, it is important to view this new-found affiliation with the establishment as partial, negotiated and ambiguous, rather than a comprehensive 'selling out'.

With apparent changes in the nature of graffiti comes a clear need to develop new perspectives on the relationships between practices of urban inscription, art and the city. Contemporary London, for example, is distinctly different from the 'tense and strained' New York City of the late 1970s that produced, and in many ways was produced by, graffiti writing and the hip-hop subculture. [START_REF] Cresswell | In place/out of place[END_REF] As such, my discussion of Banksy's Peckham Rock is framed by a series of sites and spaces in London through which it passes as its 'life' as an artwork unfolds, using them as a means of exploring the apparent contrasts between graffiti and post-graffiti in a range of different contexts. I conclude by setting out how a post-graffiti model of urban inscription might develop a wider argument about the importance of urban art forms in visualizing the city as process.

The journey of the Peckham Rock: wall art from the Post-Catatonic era

Methodologically, this research takes as its starting point Arjun Appadurai's proposition that 'it is through things in motion that we may understand their material and social contexts'. [START_REF]The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective[END_REF] As such, 'the journey' is used here as a powerful discursive tool through which the 'life' of an art work in space and time can become central to its meaning. However, in narrating the journey of the Peckham Rock, there are also specific sites and spaces where meanings and understandings coalesce. So in another sense, Appadurai's sentiments can be inverted, making this task as much a consideration of things in context in order that we may understand their material and social motion. These ideas, I suggest, both confirm but also elaborate on the 'magic of displacement' that Tim Cresswell alludes to when considering the place of graffiti. 47 In this mode, the rock's journey serves to explore the shifting relationship between art and place across a range of richly significant contexts. While the trajectory of the rock does indeed have 'nodal' points -the British Museum, an imagined Peckham, a newspaper article -it is an emphasis on its mobility, its shifts in interpretation and context that are important to the task at hand.

The use of a journey to interpret the Peckham Rock is also intended to move beyond the spatial fixity and binary logic common to many accounts that have examined graffiti writing to date. This work addresses a need for a more sophisticated analysis of the crucial role of place in the ways such engagements come to be understood, pushing interpretation beyond simply situating it in the 'the street' or 'the gallery', or indeed 'the city'. [START_REF](Jo Brooks, Brighton); his dealer and photographer, Steve Lazarides; the manager at Pictures on Walls, Steph Warren; and other artists who know and work with him personally, such as EINE and D*Face. 50 Amin and Thrift[END_REF] Approaching urban inscription as a spatio-temporal practice, and not just as cultural text, also foregrounds the representational strategies of practitioners themselves, complicating the perennial debates among urban authorities, the press and urban scholars over the status of graffiti-as-art versus graffiti-as-crime. 49 More broadly, my analysis in this regard is a substantive attempt at working through Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift's treatise on contemporary urbanism, and particularly 'the difference it makes to visualize the city as a process, without the pretence of total sight or generalization'. 50 As Amin and Thrift elaborate: encounter, and the reaction to it, is a formative element in the urban world. So places, for example, are best thought of not so much as enduring sites but as moments of encounter, not so much as 'presents', fixed in space and time, but as variable events; twists and fluxes of interrelation. 51 In this sense, 'the journey' is both conceptual approach and a conceit, one that enables us to understand the highly interrelated and contextual practices of urban inscription, and moreover, rethink ways of reading, writing and knowing the city itself. [START_REF] Anastasio | My life in graffiti[END_REF] In their analysis of the ways cities are 'scripted', Amin and Thrift emphasize the import of various forms of encounter manifest through urban art forms: '[t]hese include not only the events in galleries and other closed spaces, but also open spaces used for artistic expression […] and the urban fabric itself used as canvass […] The city is the medium itself shouting its stories directly'. [START_REF] Amin | Reimagining the urban[END_REF] David Pinder has made a similar observation with regard to the early Situationist movement, and particularly Guy Debord's map, The Naked City produced in 1957, which he uses to illustrate how their quest for 'new routes' and 'alternative passage ways' in Paris sought to achieve a revolution in social and spatial relations. 54 As such, this article is intended to contribute to the recent work by cultural geographers in particular, whose efforts have been instrumental in understanding the important role that artistic practice can play in producing alternative knowledges of cities. [START_REF] Bain | Constructing contemporary artistic identities in Toronto neighbourhoods[END_REF]

Peckham 'rock': a fragment of modernity

In the spirit of Michael Keith's declaration, that '[i]n a metonymic flash the graffiti tag frames the contemporary city', 56 Banksy's Peckham Rock seems to encapsulate something of the urban margins. As a 6 by 9 inch piece of shattered concrete, supposedly from Peckham in the London Borough of Southwark, the rock makes reference to several different but related stories of derision. Its material composition seems to point to the prefabricated and cast concrete tower block estates constructed during the 1960s, and which have come under the wrecking ball recently, as yet another rethink on social housing leads to another round of urban regeneration. Concrete, it seems, has come to symbolize all that was bad with the old paradigm of social housing, and in many ways represents something of an endpoint in the history of modernism and the British city. [START_REF] Jacobs | Blowdown: the rise and fall of London's tower blocks[END_REF] As such, it is not just the subject of material demolition, but a more symbolic deconstruction and erasure by local planners, developers and architects, representing a 'blindness' to the social problems that have blighted such developments, and demonstrating a preference for erasing the past rather than coming to terms with it. [START_REF]What did architects ever do for us?[END_REF] Banksy's decision to use a fragment of concrete as the raw material for his rock, to pluck a lowly object and begin to transform it into a work of art and historical value, is a significant gesture in this light. It is an example of the more general use of 'found objects' and street detritus in post-graffiti art, and earlier art practices including those by the Lettrists and Situationists, who sought to transform trash into treasure as a critique of planned urbanism. [START_REF] Dickens | Finders keepers[END_REF] 'The rock' also takes up Adrian Forty's concern that architects and engineers seem to have a monopoly in the representation of concrete, which he argues is far too significant in the history of architecture to be left to them alone. [START_REF] Forty | Concrete and memory[END_REF] The conscious play on the rock's material qualities also connect back to various forms of site specific work and the role of place in installation art during the late 1960s, as James Lingwood explains: 'the objects and relics, processes and rituals of vernacular culture were the basic material for transformation through installation; the material was selected as much for the historical process and experience which it embodied as for its formal qualities'. 61 Thus, in the hands of an artist, apology and erasure are replaced with a fascination with the mundane, and the apparent mistakes of the past become a vital politics of present materiality.

The reference to 'Peckham' in the title is also a significant attribute to the work that evokes the margin and alludes to the origins of the concrete. In the popular 1980s British sitcom, Only fools and horses, Peckham was used as the setting for the ridiculous social pretensions of the white, working-class, wheeling-dealing characters of Rodney and Del Boy Trotter. In one particular episode, the pair famously attempted to sell water from a cracked water pipe as 'Peckham Spring' water. The title of Banksy's Peckham Rock seems to derive quite deliberately from this hoax, in that Peckham 'rock' is actually concrete passed-off as rock. 62 Furthermore, not only is the materiality of the rock ambiguous, but, just as in the Trotter's scam, so too are the rock's origins. To be clear, the Peckham Rock, did not actually come from Peckham in south east London at all, and is true to its original title, 'wall art, east London'.

More recently, Peckham has acquired a derisory and rather ominous reputation in the contemporary British imagination, as an area characterized by racial and gang violence. While such connotations rely on crude oversimplification by local and national media, notorious murders, such as that of the young Damilola Taylor in 2000, have made 'Peckham' shorthand for the social ills of contemporary urbanism. If anything though, these imaginative qualities of place in the city add to the importance of drawing attention to the urban margins and the salience of the hoax theme evoked in the work. As Miwon Kwon, in her discussions of site-specific art, makes clear 'the concept of the site has moved away from one of concrete physical location', and instead often refers to what she describes as a 'discursive virtualization'. [START_REF] Kwon | One place after another: site-specific art and locational identity[END_REF] The rock, then, renders visible a story of neglect, of failure, of the unseen but not for want of looking, which is important, precisely because it establishes the beginning of this particular journey, and gains weight as the rock appears in more public contexts.

'Wall art, East London'

Plucked from a nearby pile of rubble, Banksy took the little lump of concrete to his studio in the London Borough of Hackney, in the east of the city. In a move that strangely reflects the broader transition of the area from de-industrial decline to an important 'art district', [START_REF] Harris | Branding the city: the creation of art districts in London and Mumbai[END_REF] the rock here begins its transformation from urban waste to art proper. After being chipped into a suitable shape with a claw-hammer, an image was marked on its surface depicting a human form dropping an object into a shopping trolley, alongside a buffalo-like creature pinned with arrows. Through the depiction of 'early man venturing towards the out-of-town hunting grounds', the rock serves as an ironic comment on the modern disconnections between consumers and the products they consume, and the way this has come to be manifest in the urban landscape of large, planned, 'out-of-town' spaces dedicated to mass consumption. The rock also has connections with Banksy's previous works, such as 'cut out and collect' and 'keep it real', which both appear on large broken pieces of brick wall displayed on pedestals in gallery spaces. 65 The intention of these works is to critique the process of transferring graffiti from urban surfaces to more mobile formats, packaged in order to give this aesthetic an exchange value. Such commentary fits within a broader critique of consumption and commodification as recurring themes in much of Banksy's work.

The parody of cave art also makes explicit a frequent connection made by many graffiti writers and street artists when narrating the history of their own artistic practices. 66 Specifically, this is an argument that human kind has always been interested in inscribing the environment, from cave painting to the present day. According to Cresswell, the appellation 'primitive' is a key strategy employed by the art establishment for transforming and reframing graffiti as art, that is, to have artistic value. [START_REF] Cresswell | [END_REF] Yet, as John Berger points out, the term alludes to a particular kind of art -'naive', 'inexperienced' and 'non-professional' -and its contemporary use is often intended to 'put in its place the art of men and women from the working classes'. [START_REF] Berger | The primitive and the professional[END_REF] The reference to the primitive also reflects how an audience might read the object in the present, particularly in the context of the British Museum, as 'the trophies and 'curiosities' taken from the colonies […] when brought back to the imperial metropolis'. 69 In this sense, the rock plays with such themes through an illusion, since it appeals to an imagination of something both spatially and temporally 'other' to the modern city. To complete the illusion, the caption is written along with a spoof museum index number, typed and printed, then mounted in a plastic case. As the rock's journey progresses, these additional layers of caption and qualification contribute to the meaning and interpretation of it, both as a work of art and intervention.

Telling of a shift from graffiti to post-graffiti is a move towards more substantive attempts by practitioners inside the scene to align themselves within the sphere of art. Part of this transition is demonstrated by Banksy's use of a studio to produce his work, an increasingly common practice among street artists. [START_REF] Much | 's approach, the interviews that I have conducted with 'street artists' often take place in their studios, where such spaces have been the focus of discussion and photography[END_REF] Alison Bain, for example, has suggested that acquiring a dedicated studio space 'is not only a basic requirement of artistic practice but also a valuable reinforcement of an artistic identity', whereby 'to invest in a studio signifies a commitment to the fine art profession and a validation of the decision to be an artist'. [START_REF] Bain | Female artistic identity in place: the studio[END_REF] For 'street artists' in particular, working in the privacy of a studio or print-house adds another dimension to the common graffiti practice of inscribing outside walls and surfaces in situ. Instead, working in such spaces allows more time to be spent on the artwork in order to produce a more satisfactory and effective piece than would be possible in the 'time lean' conditions on the street. [START_REF]As discussed in detail by D*Face[END_REF] Yet, rather than replacing street based work, such an approach seems to complement it. Indeed, the significant increase in the use of stickers, stencils, posters and sculptural forms by graffiti artists in recent years, seems to have occurred in response to such 'time lean', and often 'zero tolerant' urban conditions, where they can be prepared off the street before being placed in the public spaces of the city. [START_REF]The discussion of 'time lean conditions' derives from D*face[END_REF] Hoxton, a neighbourhood in south Hackney, has become the key location for post-graffiti and 'street art' in London today. This emergent scene can be seen on the streets themselves, and in the growing number of print-houses and galleries specializing in 'street art' that have emerged in the area in the past few years. [START_REF] Dickens | Pictures on Walls[END_REF] To some extent, this situation is due to the rather acute social problems that have meant that the borough council has been largely unable to dedicate sufficient resources in the implementation of a national policy of zero-tolerance towards graffiti. But unlike Peckham, which shares many of these problems, Hoxton is also marked by established networks of contemporary art, fashion and design, [START_REF]For a detailed historical geographical account of the role that artist's studio blocks have played in the development of London's East End as an 'art district', see N. Green, 'Artists in the East End 1968-1980[END_REF] and a more general policy initiative to rebuild the area as a 'creative city'. [START_REF] Landry | The creative city (London, DEMOS & COMEDIA[END_REF] As Banksy himself points out, this has resulted in 'an area rich in street culture and frontier spirit'. 77 In her work on neighbourhood based artistic identities in Toronto, Alison Bain connects the 'frontier mentality' of artists, as they move into run-down, working-class neighbourhoods, to the language used by more explicit forms of gentrification. [START_REF] Bain | For work on the role of art in the regeneration process[END_REF] A particular effect of urban inscription is that these practitioners' identities don't just feed off an aesthetic appreciation of urban decay, but are more literally rendered present in the landscape. Unlike the inscriptions of graffiti writers in New York City, which were read by many as a visible sign of disorder, dirt, disease and madness, [START_REF] Cresswell | crucial where of graffiti' and In place/out of place. 80 Dickens, 'Finders keepers' and 'Pictures on walls'. Alison Bain also talks of a 'glamorized otherness' and the appreciation of 'urban grittiness' by artists in run-down neighbourhoods in A. Bain[END_REF] the visible traces of post-graffiti art in Hoxton actually appear implicated in the reproduction of a kind of 'grime chic'. 80 As comments posted on Banksy's website by one local resident make clear, '[y]our graffities [sic] are undoubtably [sic] part of what makes these wankers think our area is cool', [START_REF] Daniel | [END_REF] while other commentators have noted wryly that such inscriptions 'are probably watched with the same enthusiasm by property speculators as by art collectors'. [START_REF] Joel | Urbane guerrillas: street art, graffiti and other vandalism[END_REF] The explosion of contemporary forms of 'street art' in Hackney, then, suggests such practices are as instrumental in the drive to become a creative city as they are critical of it.

Strategies of (in)visibility at the British Museum

The strategies and tactics of Banksy's intervention at the British Museum reflect a sophisticated engagement with the spatial politics of visibility and appearance. Even before he could glue the carefully prepared rock to the museum wall, it was necessary for him to survey the museum and select an appropriate location for the rock, taking note of surveillance, including CCTV, wardens, and the habits of the visitors in different rooms. Undertaking the intervention itself, Banksy used a disguise -a fake beard, an overcoat, a thick scarf, glasses and a hat in a comic parody of a fictional 'spy' -which was necessary in order to go unrecognized at this tentative stage of the project. He was also supported by a lookout, who scoped the room prior to the addition being made, and took a photograph of the work immediately after it being left, a task that was essential for the success of the intervention. [START_REF] While | EINE, who commented recently that 'We would go out at night for[END_REF] The performance, in part, was a way of mocking the apparent blindness of British Museum security guards; authoritarian figures charged with ensuring acceptable encounters with art, and who are often made fun of in other of Banksy's works and exhibitions. 84 Commenting in the press at the time, Banksy explained that 'they've got their eye a lot more on things leaving than things going in, which works in my favour'. 85 Unlike more common forms of art crime, such as theft, damage or forgery, Banksy's 'art terrorism' in this instance was simply to exploit an unanticipated method of adding to the British Museum's collection.

In another sense, the Peckham Rock also pokes fun at the inability of visitors to the museum to spot a fake. While this cannot be verified -sadly, since it would be fascinating to know what those who did see it actually thought about what they saw -the museum did not receive any complaints or comments regarding its three-day stay with them. This critique has deep resonances with the politics of vision developed by the Situationist International, specifically their concern that '[s]ocial life had been so occupied by the commodity and administrative techniques, so saturated in an accumulation of spectacles, that vision had become associated with the pseudo-world of the illusion and people had become more like spectators than active agents, occupying roles assigned to them by others in a state of passive contemplation'. [START_REF] Pinder | Visions of the city[END_REF] Thus, Banksy's reference to a 'post-catatonic era' in his faked museum caption takes the stance that the appreciation of history and high-culture in such institutions is uncritical and somewhat detached. The iconography of concrete also challenges the hierarchies of material culture in the collections through ideas of fakeness and authenticity. Indeed, the texture and colour of the concrete used to produce the Peckham Rock was so well matched to that of the surrounding first century stonework on display in the Roman Britain collection that it did not appear to be 'out-of-place' in an immediately recognizable sense. [START_REF]As the British Museum's Senior Press Officer explained, 'it looked very in keeping [but] once you see it […] it[END_REF] Importantly, while geographers have demonstrated the crucial importance of place in shaping the meanings of graffiti writing, [START_REF] Cresswell | Crucial "where" of graffiti'; Keith, 'tagging the city[END_REF] this example makes clear that ways of becoming visible are also crucial in the production of meaning. As Rob Shields has suggested, understanding vision in this way 'demonstrate[s] the visual to be cultural, and […] show[s] the supposed solidarity of the visible to be constructed in such a manner that the eye is often being tricked -quite other things can be taking place within, for example, street cultures than those we think we are witnessing'. [START_REF] Shields | Visualicity: on urban visibility and invisibility[END_REF] This is particularly pertinent to emergent forms of post-graffiti, which, through an iconographic aesthetic, are well placed to camouflage their subversive intent amongst the mass visual spectacle of sanctioned urban signage. [START_REF] Manco | Street logos 91 For images of the Peckham Rock on the wall at the British Museum[END_REF] FIGURE 3 The location of Banksy's Peckham Rock in the British Museum, May 2005. (Author's Photo.) 91 Banksy's engagement with the politics of visibility also extends to the 'blindness' of historical representation, or what Allan Pred calls 'repress-entations', [START_REF] Pred | Recognizing European modernities: a montage of the present[END_REF] in an attempt to render visible what is absent from the museum's displays. [START_REF] Coombes | Blinded by science: ethnography at the British Museum[END_REF] As one of the oldest museums in the world, the British Museum is a hugely significant centre of high-culture, housing an acclaimed collection of material artefacts from exotic locations and cultures past, including other notable 'rocks' such as the Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta stone. Indeed, the materiality of the Peckham Rock not only made it able to nestle convincingly amongst the collections, but furthermore, toyed with the boundaries between high and low, authentic and inauthentic, as a cipher for insisting on the historical value and artistic merit of graffiti in the visual history of the city. More subtly perhaps, the rock also draws attention to the failures of urban planning and their intersection with colonial injustices, as they are encapsulated in the imaginative qualities of Peckham. These kinds of site specific art practice, which develop a critical relationship between context and content, follows an earlier tradition within installation art, where an 'emphasis on the dialectic of the site and non-site was a clear indication of the relationship between the inside (the museum) and the outside, indeed their complicity'. 94 In a move that has uncanny parallels with the subway train travelling from the yards in the Bronx and into central Manhattan, the Peckham Rock draws the urban margins to the centre, and in so doing, attests to the powerful ability of such interventionist art forms to tell alternative stories of the city. [START_REF]Feminist theory: from margin to center, 2nd Edition[END_REF]

Public art and art's publics

With the Peckham Rock in place in the British Museum, a treasure hunt was announced on Banksy's website. The page showed a close-up image of the rock and challenged hunters to find it in the museum, offering a one-off Banksy painting of a shopping trolley to the first person to return a photograph of themselves standing next to it. 96 Secretly played out within the spaces of the museum, the treasure hunt supports David Pinder's observations that 'artists and cultural practitioners have recently been using forms of urban exploration as a means of engaging with, and intervening in, cities'. 97 In Britain, for example, a similar project entitled 'the pleasure of treasure', created by Kathy Battista, Brandon LaBelle, Barbara Penner, Steve Pile and Jane Rendell, stressed the value of a treasure hunt in encouraging participants to view something 'with new eyes' in the Kings Cross area of London. [START_REF] Battista | Exploring "an area of unnatural beauty[END_REF] Such explorations draw on Henri Lefebvre's calls for a 'right to the city', a slogan which expressed 'a vision of the city as a realm not of exchange value but of use value, encounter, difference and play'. 99 This agenda was central to the creative interventions made by the Situationists during the 1960s, and has been adopted and adapted more recently by a growing body of contemporary 'psychogeographers'. 100 In this mode, the 'abstract space' of the museum, intended to facilitate a smooth passage of spectators through a succession of rooms depicting significant moments of material culture, became transformed as a 'differential space' where treasure hunters sought out rooms with matching coloured walls to those shown in Banksy's close up photograph of the rock.

Instrumental to the production of this differential space, and a defining feature of a shift towards post-graffiti aesthetic practice, was the use of the internet as an important additional 'field of action'. 101 In the hunt for the Peckham Rock, a playful engagement with the possibility of the city was achieved through an intersection of virtual and material spaces. Yet, because the rock remained invisible to a mass and somewhat 'catatonic' public, this stage of the intervention was solely intended for a relatively small group of Banksy fans, an informed 'counterpublic' able to engage in the production of the artwork rather differently. 102 In many ways this complicates the idea that post-graffiti appeals to a wider audience than the heavily coded practice of tagging, because both seem to protect their meanings from 'outsiders' by simultaneously 'revealing all yet revealing absolutely nothing'. 103 It was only after the rock had been discovered by a fan identifying himself as 'Mantis', that Banksy's PR agent contacted the press and circulated a press-release, leaving a newspaper journalist to inform the British Museum. In this sudden reveal, the Peckham Rock went to a further, mass public through its appearance in The Telegraph, The Independent, The BBC and a host of online fanzines and web logs, who all seemed rather impressed with it. 104 As it began to appear in the mainstream media, the rock was framed in the terms of the press-release text, and presented alongside an incidental history of the shopping trolley and the wider acclaim of Banksy's other works. At the height of this furore, Banksy was even rumoured to have been nominated for Turner Prize on the back of this intervention. 105 In this light, the rock seemed as much about adding currency to Banksy's brand identity as it was a critical intervention into the politics of representation. This was not incidental, but contrived through the use of a PR agent to put out the story on his behalf, preserving his valuable anonymity but still giving him a public voice. Seeking 'fame' and notoriety has always been a major motivating factor for graffiti writers, but in the case of Banksy and others practicing today, small but well targeted interventions are proving just as successful as a widely repeated tag. Commenting on such practices, Banksy suggests that 'the ability to photograph a street piece that may last for only a few days and bounce it round the world to an audience of millions has dramatically improved its currency'. 106 However, such cultivation of fandom and media spectacle somewhat temper the suggestion that Banksy's work has parallels with earlier avant-garde critiques of the society of the spectacle. 107 Instead, his interventionist tactics in this instance align with Donald Kuspit's discussion of '[t]he charismatic neo avant-garde artist benefiting from the charismatic mantle belatedly accorded the avantgarde artist by bourgeois society', an artist well versed in the understanding that 'publicity gives art charisma -the aura of success before actual success occurs'. 108 Yet, Banksy himself contends that 'fame is a by-product of making something that means something', suggesting that despite the pursuit of personal fame, which is clearly apparent in the way Banksy literally employed the media, the strong politics to the artwork are not entirely lost. 109 Whether either position is accurate matters less than the point that media compliance and interest are central to the production of Banksy's 'art terrorism', making effective use of what Amin and Thrift describe as the 'comprehensive ambient ecology' of media in the city. 110 Indeed, the museum's rather surprising response further confirms the positive value of the media attention that the intervention generated, as their senior press officer made clear:

We couldn't complain too much about it because at least its somebody interacting with our collections, they've done research, and we're very keen to encourage artists responses to the collections, to be inspired by the collections, and whatever that eventual message is, the fact is he's taken on board a great deal of what the museum does here in terms of actually channelling that into the piece so I think that's something that we would find quite gratifying. 111 The British Museum's attitude here, that 'we took it in the right light […] no harm done', suggests that they too had much to gain in critique of a fusty, old-fashioned art world. 112 Genuinely impressed with Banksy's research into and engagement with their collection, this response also indicates something of the liberal nature of these institutions in London today, and how much they have changed over time, especially when compared to the reaction by the New York museums targeted by Banksy. 113 In a final press release, Banksy announced that he did not intend to take his work back once it had been left. With the rock abandoned, on a journey with no known destination, the museum's rather astute response was to play along with the joke and publicly accept the rock as a donation to its collections. 114 'On loan from the British Museum'

The Peckham Rock's next appearance in public came shortly after it was removed from the wall at the British Museum. This time it featured as part of a collaborative show featuring the work of 32 contemporary UK street artists, hosted by the recently opened Outside Institute. Located in an old mews building just off the Edgware Road in the London Borough of Westminster, the institute was established by well-known street artist, D*face, in an ambitious attempt to provide a permanent 'safe house', studio and exhibition space for practicing street artists and graffiti writers. Keen to capitalize on the publicity surrounding the rock at the time of the exhibition opening, a special note was placed on the Outside Institute's website:

We are proud to announce that we now have on display 'The Peckham rock' kindly lent to us by the British Museum and artist Banksy. This will not be displayed anywhere else and will be returned to the British Museum for historical verification at the end of the show.

If you missed it in place at the British Museum we now offer you a chance to see it in a far grander environment. 115 Yet in an attempt to extend the joke, the display of the rock at the institute seemed only to revel in its life at the centre of a multi-media spectacle. Lacking the potency of its camouflage on the wall in the gallery, a second caption was added, reading 'on loan from the British museum', alongside a press clipping from The Telegraph and, below that, a Banksy tag/logo stencilled in matt black spray paint (see Figure 4). These various layers of label and qualification attested to a concern not so much with the actual content of the work and its political connotations, as with the named artist and what such a big name would do for the profile of the show, the Outside Institute and the wider 'urban art' scene. In a final twist of fate, marked by Banksy's previous commentary that 'if you've been hitting on people with all sorts of images in all sorts of ways [gallery shows can be] a real step backwards', the conventional presentation of the rock seemed to hand the last laugh back to the British Museum. 116 The use of the rock at this exhibition also demonstrated an important intra-urban geography at work in the production of post-graffiti as creative industry. In an effort to support the institute's aim to operate at the intersection between street and gallery, art and crime, inside and outside, Banksy had originally planned to construct the longest painting in the world for this exhibition, which traversed the city and eventually ended inside the gallery space. At one end of a long trail of white paint dripped onto the pavement outside the institute was to be a banker snorting at the line, and at the other end, inside the gallery, was to be a large pile of white powder (not cocaine). The Guinness Book of Records had even been contacted with the hope that they would verify this. Yet, due to an ongoing legal wrangling between the institute and the notoriously revanchist Westminster Council, who were determined to keep any 'street art' strictly inside the institute, Banksy was compelled to give up the idea at the last minute. 117 Thus, unlike the supportive context afforded by Hackney borough council's efforts to pursue a creative city policy, the operations of individual street artists and the institute itself were sorely curtailed by the 'zealous municipal officials' in Westminster. Indeed, the efforts of Westminster's anti-graffiti unit would eventually become instrumental in the closure of the institute, and its subsequent reopening in the heart of London's latest art district, just off Brick Lane in the east of the city.

As for the rock itself, the end of the exhibition prompted considerable uncertainty about the seriousness of Banksy's decision to return it to the museum, and the museum's offer to add it to their collections. With this ambiguity lingering, the rock was moved into a display cabinet in the Outside Institute's shop, placed alongside customised trainers and caps, graffiti books and other items for sale as a curiosity with an uncertain future. However, this situation was short-lived, and in ironic testimony to its artistic merit and historical value, the rock did indeed return to the British Museum. No longer positioned as a 'fake' in need of 'historical verification', the escalating value of an 'original Banksy', and the associated cache of owning such an item, was ultimately too much for the British Museum to resist. At the end of its journey, the rock had become transformed from illicit object with uncertain origins and into a prized addition to the public collections of a national museum.

Conclusions

Tracing the journey of the Peckham Rock provides a compelling means for exploring the variety of ways 'new directions in graffiti art' are placed in contemporary London. Methodologically, 'the journey' enables us to understand the highly interrelated spatio-temporal practices of urban inscription, addressing a need for a more sophisticated analysis of the crucial where of graffiti beyond a resort to spatial fixity and binary logic. Framed as a thing in motion, the Peckham Rock illustrates how such practices are placed not just in the cracks of the urban fabric or the train lines, not only on the streets or in galleries, but through a diverse and shifting range of material and social contexts. An 'anything goes' approach to the production of a post-graffiti aesthetic practice, reflected in Banksy's desire to 'make the right piece at the right time in the right place', 118 encourages a more sensitive understanding of the site-specifics these new forms of urban inscription seek to engage. In so doing, this article develops a wider argument about the importance of urban art forms in visualizing the city as process, comprised not from a series of discrete sites but through moments of encounter.

One way the metonymic lens of post-graffiti illuminates a distinct form of writing the city is through its highly developed use of the virtual sphere. The imagined qualities of place, encapsulated in Banksy's layered reference to Peckham, and his playful use of concrete, expand upon a representational practice that operates through 'discursive virtualization'. The strategies of visibility deployed on-line, through the press and at the British Museum also illustrate the ways post-graffiti draws on earlier avant garde and activist artistic practices in an attempt to engage urban publics as actors rather than passive spectators. These strategies demonstrate how this 'wired generation' is extremely adept at shaping conditions of visibility at the intersection between the virtual and material spaces of the city. Through such practice, the public is reconfigured beyond a simple insider/outsider distinction and instead is understood as multiple, whereby the activities of fans, collectors, documenters, publishers and institutions, as well as wider publics and the practitioners themselves, all collectively produce new representations of, and new modes of being in, the city.

Another defining feature of a post-graffiti model is the way practitioners cross back and forth between culture and counter-culture. As we follow the journey of the Peckham Rock through the city, it is clear that the critique Banksy seeks to make -of the art world, mass consumption, visual spectacle and the authoritarian city -is ambiguous at best. He is openly critical of consumption yet implicated in the production of new forms of cultural industry. He positions himself against the art establishment while also reaffirming the role of the maverick male artist. He is critical of passive spectacle but pursues fame through mediated channels. He is vociferously opposed to zealous municipal officials yet is often more conciliatory in practice. Unlike earlier graffiti writers, the abilities of post-graffiti practitioners to move freely and selectively between these positions at different times and in different contexts, attests to a certain kind of advantage, which questions the assumption that such practices necessarily constitute tactics of the weak in an attempt to counter strategies of the strong. In one sense, post-graffiti practices seem to offer the radical possibility of a differential urban space. Yet in another they appear central to the many ways the city is currently being rewritten by more overtly powerful interests: connected and mobile, entrepreneurial and creative, edgy and spectacular.

The central premise of this article is that graffiti, while worthy of attention in its own right, can also serve as a powerful means for reading, writing and knowing the city. Geographers and others have taken a significant lead in producing empirical accounts elaborating on this understanding, notably on the themes of urban identity politics, territoriality and transgression. Yet common to this body of work is a conception of graffiti as 'writing', which has tended to obscure a broader range of urban inscriptions, and the insights such practices are able to provide into the production of urban space. In addressing these limitations, this article has introduced an alternative, though no less specific, mode of urban inscription: a 'post-graffiti' model that employs an iconographic rather than typographic aesthetic. This is not to deny, when considering the evolution of graffiti in its broadest sense, the many synergies it has with earlier graffiti writing and street art. Instead, it is a call for further scholarly work to attend to the ways contemporary forms of urban inscriptions produce, and are produced by, their symbiotic connection with the city itself.

as part of my thesis. Likewise, I am grateful to the three anonymous referees for their insightful and supportive suggestions, and who have no-doubt helped improve the quality of what finally appears in print here. I would also like to thank all those involved in the lively discussions of this article as it was being developed: the 'art and belonging' session at the RGS-IBG annual conference (2005), the geography departments at Royal Holloway (2006) and University of Minnesota (2007), and the Department for Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College, CUNY (2007).

Biographical note

Luke Dickens is a doctoral student in cultural geography at the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. His developing research interests attend to the geographies of urban inscription, intervention and exploration; the theoretical intersections of culture and the city; and experimental qualitative methodologies. Working with case studies in London and New York City, his thesis investigates the contested terrain between art and economy, creativity and crime, as negotiated by those involved in the production, circulation and consumption of an emergent 'post-graffiti' aesthetic practice. He can be contacted at: Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX, UK; email: l.a.dickens@rhul.ac.uk

Notes

FIGURE 2

 2 FIGURE 2 Rat stencil by Banksy, Brick Lane, London Borough of Tower Hamlets, 2004. (Author's photo.)

FIGURE 4 The

 4 FIGURE 4 The Peckham Rock at the Outside Institute, June 2005. (Author's photo.)

Acknowledgements

This article derives from my doctoral research into the geographies of post-graffiti, generously funded by the ESRC (award number PTA-030-2004-00016). I am indebted to David Gilbert and Karen Till for their detailed and patient comments on earlier drafts of this, and other pieces of work, produced