154 pages Edited by Alain Milon 21,2 x 13,7 cm Language: French Paperback Publisher: Presses Universitaires de France 1999
Reading the figure of the stranger through Georg Simmel — for whom even the native-born are strangers — Milon runs a route across the mural and musical forms of hip-hop, forms that remain foreign to most because they remain unreadable. The Stranger here is not the one who comes from elsewhere but the one in perpetual transit, who refuses to be fixed in place and brings change with him; mobility across the territory of the city becomes the defining criterion. Tag and graff, rap and tchatche, hype and break dance are read as the visible signs of a city changing its skin.
One of the earliest French academic works to take writing seriously as urban theory rather than as social pathology. The central chapter, "Le graff mural : peau ou cicatrice de la Ville ?", runs nearly thirty pages and asks whether the painted wall is the city's skin or its scar. Milon works with Deleuze and Guattari on deterritorialisation and the ritournelle, the Chicago School on urban ecology, and reaches for Artaud, Bartleby, Godard and glossolalia alongside MC Solaar and the Fabulous Trobadors. Published the same year as two other PUF titles by the author, at the moment French institutions were still deciding whether any of this counted as a subject.
