Old School Rules

This article considers the unique features of what we call Old School storefront signs in Brooklyn, NY. These signs, which were often hand-painted and notably text-rich with large-size fonts, signaled an openness to all in a highly diverse, multi-cultural urban area. At the same time, very laconic, ambiguous and ironic gentrifying (or what we call New School) signage is replacing these Old School storefront signs at a rapid pace. Using sociolinguistic, semiotic and aesthetic analysis, we show how Old School shop signage acts as a “register of place.” The openness of this register allows it to adopt and incorporate elements preferred by Brooklyn’s gentrifying population. Also, we show how New School businesses begin to take on certain semiotic and textual features of Old School shops in order to survive in the face of corporate development. This appropriation of form/format, we argue, further demonstrates the effectiveness of Old School “rules,” which allow these signs to remain despite accelerating gentrification and the relentless march of corporate capitalism. Old School, as a marker of history and as an iconic form of place, is a living style that represents the past, has been transformed by the present, and perhaps has the power to change the future

Getting Lettered: The Complexity of “Basic” Skills

Guided by global scholarship in New Literacy Studies, we seek to redefine literacy as an identity. Our purpose is to devise new practices and perspectives that enable our college students to assume the identity of reader and writer. Our objectives for the session are to: describe the challenges of literacy acquisition at all educational levels; identify the particular challenges confronted by educators in higher-level institutions; share some literacy-consciousness-raising strategies developed from our respective disciplines; and target specific areas for development in other disciplines (as represented by audience participants)

Testimonio and telling women's narratives of genocide, torture and political imprisonment in post-Suharto Indonesia

To date, there has been no official investigation into or redress of the Indonesian killings of 1965/66 and the mass political detention of citizens under General Suharto’s New Order (1966/98). I argue that non-legal arenas must be explored for the documentation and circulation of testimonies by those who survived these events. As part of a larger project which aims to document, analyse and present the experiences of women during the killings and subsequent political detention, I outline two aspects of this documentation process. First, I adopt testimonio as both a political and analytical framework to argue that certain aspects of testimonio are essential to the continuing negotiations over who can speak, about what, and with what result in post-Suharto Indonesia. Second, I analyse a number of discursive strategies found within the narratives to highlight some of the issues which permit or proscribe the articulation of certain stories