Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes

Description

This volume offers comprehensive analyses of how we live continuously in a multiplicity and simultaneity of 'places'. It explores what it means to be in place, the variety of ways in which meanings of place are made and how relationships to others are mediated through the linguistic and material semiotics of place. Drawing on examples of linguistic landscapes (LL) over the world, such as gentrified landscapes in Johannesburg and Brunswick, Mozambican memorializations, volatile train graffiti in Stockholm, Brazilian protest marches, Guadeloupian Creole signs, microscapes of souvenirs in Guinea-Bissau and old landscapes of apartheid in South Africa in contemporary time, this book explores how we are what we are through how we are emplaced. Across these examples, world-leading contributors explore how LLs contribute to the (re)imagining of different selves in the living past (living the past in the present), alternative presents and imagined futures. It focuses particularly on how the LL in all of these mediations is read through emotionality and affect, creating senses of belonging, precarity and hope across a simultaneous multiplicity of worlds. The volume offers a reframing of linguistics landscape research in a geohumanities framework emphasizing negotiations of self in place in LL studies, building upon a rich body of LL research. With over 40 illustrations, it covers various methodological and epistemological issues, such as the need for extended temporal engagement with landscapes, a mobile approach to landscapes and how bodies engage with texts. Cover Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Part One Living the Past in the Present 1 Zombie Landscapes: Apartheid Traces in the Discourses of Young South Africans 2 Orders of (In)Visibility: Colonial and Postcolonial Chronotopes in Linguistic Landscapes of Memorization in Maputo 3 Chronoscape of Authenticity: Consumption and Aspiration in a Middle-Class Market in Johannesburg 4 Mobile Semiosis and Mutable Metro Spaces: Train Graffiti in Stockholm’s Public Transport System Part Two Alternative Places, Alternative People 5 Skinscapes and Friction: An Analysis of Zef Hip-Hop ‘Stoeka-Style’ Tattoos 6 The Linguistic Landscape Creating a New Sense of Community: Guadeloupean Creole, the General Strike of 2009 and an Emergent Identity 7 Negotiating Institutional Identity on a Corsican University Campus 8 The Semiotic Paradox of Street Art: Gentrification and the Commodification of Bushwick, Brooklyn Part Three Imagining Futures, Imagining Selves 9 Injurious Signs: The Geopolitics of Hate and Hope in the Linguistic Landscape of a Political Crisis 10 Of Monkeys, Shacks and Loos: Changing Times, Changing Places 11 Micro-Landscapes and the Double Semiotic Horizon of Mobility in the Global South 12 Afterword Index