Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes 9781350037984, 9781350037977, 9781350037991

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
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
2. Orders of (In)Visibility: Colonial and Postcolonial Chronotopes in Linguistic
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: Gentrifi cation 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

Citation preview

Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes

Advances in Sociolinguistics Series Series Editor: Tommaso M. Milani Since the emergence of sociolinguistics as a new field of enquiry in the late 1960s, research into the relationship between language and society has advanced almost beyond recognition. In particular, the past decade has witnessed the considerable influence of theories drawn from outside of sociolinguistics itself. Thus rather than see language as a mere reflection of society, recent work has been increasingly inspired by ideas drawn from social, cultural, and political theory that have emphasised the constitutive role played by language/discourse in all areas of social life. The Advances in Sociolinguistics series seeks to provide a snapshot of the current diversity of the field of sociolinguistics and the blurring of the boundaries between sociolinguistics and other domains of study concerned with the role of language in society. Discourses of Endangerment Ideology and Interest in the Defence of Languages Edited by Alexandre Duchêne and Monica Heller Globalization and Language in Contact Scale, Migration, and Communicative Practices Edited by James Collins Globalization of Language and Culture in Asia Edited by Viniti Vaish Language, Culture and Identity An Ethnolinguistic Perspective Philip Riley Language Ideologies and Media Discourse Texts, Practices, Politics Edited by Sally Johnson and Tommaso M. Milani Language Ideologies and the Globalization of ‘Standard’ Spanish Darren Paffey

Language in the Media Representations, Identities, Ideologies Edited by Sally Johnson and Astrid Ensslin Language and Power An Introduction to Institutional Discourse Andrea Mayr Language Testing, Migration and Citizenship Edited by Guus Extra, Massimiliano Spotti and Piet Van Avermaet Linguistic Minorities and Modernity, 2nd Edition A Sociolinguistic Ethnography Monica Heller Multilingual Encounters in Europe’s Institutional Spaces Edited by Johann Unger, Michał Krzyżanowski and Ruth Wodak Multilingualism A Critical Perspective Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese Remix Multilingualism Hip Hop, Ethnography and Performing Marginalized Voice Quentin Williams Semiotic Landscapes Language, Image, Space Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow The Languages of Global Hip-Hop Edited by Marina Terkourafi The Language of Newspapers Socio-Historical Perspectives Martin Conboy The Languages of Urban Africa Edited by Fiona Mc Laughlin The Sociolinguistics of Identity Edited by Tope Omoniyi Voices in the Media Performing Linguistic Otherness Gaëlle Planchenault

Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes Edited by Amiena Peck, Christopher Stroud and Quentin Williams

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition first published 2020 Copyright © Amiena Peck, Christopher Stroud and Quentin Williams, 2019 Amiena Peck, Christopher Stroud and Quentin Williams have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xvii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover illustration © Martin O’Neill All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Peck, Amiena, editor. | Stroud, Christopher, editor. | Williams, Quentin, editor. Title: Making sense of people and place in linguistic landscapes / edited by Amiena Peck, Christopher Stroud and Quentin Williams. Description: London: Bloomsbury Academic UK, 2019. | Series: Advances in sociolinguistics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018012773 (print) | LCCN 2018032513 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350037991 (ePub) | ISBN 9781350038004 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350037984 | ISBN 9781350037984 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350037991 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350038004 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Sociolinguistics. | Place (Philosophy) | Languages in contact. Classification: LCC P40.5.P53 (ebook) | LCC P40.5.P53 M35 2019 (print) | DDC 306.44—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012773 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3798-4 PB: 978-1-3501-5953-2 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3799-1 eBook: 978-1-3500-3800-4 Series: Advances in Sociolinguistics Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures List of Contributors Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Christopher Stroud, Amiena Peck and Quentin Williams Part One 1 2 3 4

5 6

7 8

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1

Living the Past in the Present

Zombie Landscapes: Apartheid Traces in the Discourses of Young South Africans Zannie Bock and Christopher Stroud Orders of (In)Visibility: Colonial and Postcolonial Chronotopes in Linguistic Landscapes of Memorization in Maputo Manuel Guissemo Chronoscape of Authenticity: Consumption and Aspiration in a Middle-Class Market in Johannesburg Gilles Baro Mobile Semiosis and Mutable Metro Spaces: Train Graffiti in Stockholm’s Public Transport System David Karlander

Part Two

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11 29 49 71

Alternative Places, Alternative People

Skinscapes and Friction: An Analysis of Zef Hip-Hop ‘Stoeka-Style’ Tattoos Amiena Peck and Quentin Williams The Linguistic Landscape Creating a New Sense of Community: Guadeloupean Creole, the General Strike of 2009 and an Emergent Identity Robert Blackwood Negotiating Institutional Identity on a Corsican University Campus H. William Amos The Semiotic Paradox of Street Art: Gentrification and the Commodification of Bushwick, Brooklyn Kellie Gonçalves

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107 123

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Contents

Part Three Imagining Futures, Imagining Selves 9

Injurious Signs: The Geopolitics of Hate and Hope in the Linguistic Landscape of a Political Crisis Rodrigo Borba 10 Of Monkeys, Shacks and Loos: Changing Times, Changing Places Sibonile Mpendukana and Christopher Stroud 11 Micro-Landscapes and the Double Semiotic Horizon of Mobility in the Global South Kasper Juffermans 12 Afterword David Malinowski Index

161 183 201 223 230

List of Figures 1.1 People visiting a Johannesburg toilet, c. 1980. Photograph: Eric Miller. 2.1 The Portuguese military attack on Macontene, Gaza, © M. Guissemo. 2.2 Rua Araújo 1960: Site of luxury in Lourenço Marques. Source: The Delagoa Bay Review, 2010. 2.3 The monument to the dead of the First World War, © M. Guissemo. 2.4 Example of new sign Rua de Chinyamapere that value Mozambican culture, © M. Guissemo. 2.5 Visibility of local African language in urban space, © M. Guissemo. 3.1 Digital flyer for a festival held at One Eloff in May 2016, relying on a discourse of authenticity to promote city life [found on the Facebook page of the event]. 3.2 Parking sign adjacent to The Sheds. 3.3 Parking sign at The Sheds. 3.4 Display in The Sheds reminiscent of egg baskets at a farmer’s market. 4.1 Writers painting background (left), filling in (mid) and sketching letters (right). 4.2 Writers finishing the WUFC piece. 4.3 WUFC NER whole car rolling through central Stockholm. 5.1 ‘Pretty Wise’ tattoo (left); hand gesture (right). 5.2 Ninja (left), Number gangster (right). 5.3 Ninja’s tattooed torso. 5.4 ‘Enter the Ninja’ background scene. 6.1 Graffito proclaiming identification with Domota. 6.2 Poster publicizing M’Bitako’s latest book. 6.3 Sign at the entrance to the Cascade aux Ecrevisses. 6.4 Entrance sign to the Bras-David site. 7.1 Names of departments and buildings. 7.2 Corsican nationalist slogans and a public demonstration poster. 7.3 Nationalist posters. 8.1 Bushwick is Beautiful. 8.2 The Hand of Protest. 8.3 Invent the future.

12 34 35 38 41 42

62 64 64 66 76 77 79 95 96 96 97 112 113 116 117 129 131 135 149 152 152

x 8.4 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 9.7 9.8 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 11.1 11.2 11.3 11.4 11.5

List of Figures Image of annual art festival in Bushwick. The impeachment wall. Dilma is a whore. ‘Feminicide yes! Hungercide no!: “#OUT WITH THE PT!!!”’ Car sticker. First injurious signs on the bookshop. The lotus flower. Recurrent injurious signs on the bookshop. Rainbow. #Shackville structure with occupants inside and a mattress they slept in. A handwritten sign in isiXhosa attached to the portaloo next to #Shackville. A handwritten sign attached at the back of #Shackville as a warning. A spray-painted graffiti-style sign on the back of the portaloo. Natcha’s mother’s display cabinet, Bairro Militar, Bissau. Photo courtesy Reinaldo A. Natcha, November 2016. Dragon-shaped kite from China in Natcha’s room, Bairro Militar, Bissau. Photo courtesy Reinaldo A. Natcha, November 2016. ‘Greetings from Ghana’ in Natcha’s room, Bairro Militar, Bissau. Photo courtesy Reinaldo A. Natcha, November 2016. Interior of El-Hadj Mamadou Bah’s hair and beauty salon, Bissorã, Guinea-Bissau. Photo by the author, March 2015. Interior of a hair salon in Gabú, Guinea-Bissau. Photo by the author, March 2015.

153 168 170 171 171 174 175 176 177 188 190 193 194 208 209 210 215 216

List of Contributors H. William Amos is Assistant Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick, UK. His research interests include regional and minority languages, language contact, mixing and change, and multilingualism in the city. He has published on bilingual French/Occitan street signs in southern France, ethnolinguistic vitality in the Chinatown of Liverpool, UK, and developing methodologies in linguistic landscape research. Robert Blackwood is Professor of French Sociolinguistics at the University of Liverpool, UK, and currently editor of the journal Linguistic Landscape with Elana Shohamy. He is the author of a number of articles and book chapters on language policy and regional language revitalization in France, including work on the linguistic landscape. He is the author of The State, the Activists, and the Islander: Language Policy on Corsica (Springer, 2008), and co-author with Stefania Tufi of The Linguistic Landscape of the Mediterranean: French and Italian Coastal Cities. Robert Blackwood also explores questions of French digital discourse. Gilles Baro is Lecturer and Researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is native of France, did undergraduate work in Paris and Sweden and received his PhD in sociolinguistics from the University of the Witwatersrand. One of his primary interests is understanding ways in which changing urban settings create, erase or reclaim meaning. He has studied and published on the recent redevelopment of the inner city of Johannesburg and has shared critical views on the strategies used by the private sector to shift the urban discourse away from the city’s apartheid past to one of global ‘gentrification’ consumption and of heritage. He is currently busy with a project aiming to bring in a postcolonial framework to linguistic landscape studies, particularly in relation to how languages are represented considering their colonial standardization and how diverse people make us of semiotic resources to reclaim apartheid-era spaces in Johannesburg. Zannie Bock is Associate Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape. Her current publications include work on narrative and discourse analysis, with a focus on racializing discourses among university students, emerging styles in youth instant messaging chats and the ways in which affect and stance are encoded in texts. Earlier publications include discourse analyses of testimonies given before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She also has a longstanding interest in adult education, curriculum and materials development and is the project co-ordinator and co-editor of the first southern African textbook in the field, Language, Society and Communication: An Introduction.

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Rodrigo Borba works at the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Applied Linguistics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His research interests include a wide range of areas such as queer linguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistic landscapes, language ideologies and discourse analysis with an activist and research focus on the relations between discourse, gender and sexuality in Brazil. Manuel Guissemo holds a master’s degree in linguistics from Eduardo Mondlane University, where he has been a lecturer since 2002. His work focuses on sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. He is currently completing his PhD in sociolinguistics at the Center for Research on Bilingualism at Stockholm University. Kellie Gonçalves has her PhD in English linguistics from the University of Bern, Switzerland. She was Visiting Research Fellow (Swiss National Science Foundation, SNSF) at the University of Washington, Bothell, USA (2012) and recipient of a MarieHeim Vögtlin grant from the SNSF (2015–2017). Kellie is currently Post-doctoral Fellow at MultiLing, the University of Oslo, Norway (2017–2020), working on a project entitled ‘Managing people and managing language: Polylingual practices in “bluecollar” workplaces’. Kellie’s research interests are at the interdisciplinary interface between sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, human geography and mobility studies, specifically within the fields of discourse, globalization, migration, multilingualism and tourism studies. She is author of Conversations of Intercultural Couples (2013) published by De Gruyter Mouton and Labor Policies, Language Use and the New Economy – The Case of Adventure Tourism (forthcoming) published by Palgrave Macmillan. She has published articles and edited special issues in international journals, including Multilingua: Journal of Cross-Culture and Interlanguage, Language Policy, International Journal of the Sociology of Language and International Journal of Multilingualism. In addition to her academic projects, Kellie is committed to fostering and disseminating knowledge about gender equality and real-life practical issues within academia. Kasper Juffermans has held doctoral and postdoctoral positions in sociolinguistics at the universities of Luxembourg, Hamburg, Tilburg and Hong Kong, and was a visiting professor at Ghent University, where he also received his first degree, in African studies. Kasper has conducted extensive fieldwork in West Africa researching literacy practices, linguistic landscapes and aspirations to migration. He is the author/co-editor of three books and two journal special issues on literacy, including the monograph Local Languaging, Literacy and Multilingualism in A West African Society (Multilingual Matters, 2015) and, most recently, The Tyranny of Writing: Ideologies of the Written Word for Bloomsbury’s Advances in Sociolinguistics Series (with Constanze Weth, 2018). In March 2017, Kasper hosted the Ninth Linguistic Landscape Workshop in Belval, Luxembourg, themed Movement and Immobilities. Unable to secure a solid job in European academia, Kasper temporarily or perhaps permanently retired from academia in September 2017 to move with his family to the Caribbean island of Curaçao, where they run a small holiday resort: Annidas Sambuyá. A reasonably mobile and multilingual person, Kasper is still interested in language and mobility in the broadest sense of both words and seeks to expand this interest in new directions, including underwater.

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David Karlander has a PhD in bilingualism (Stockholm, 2017). He is currently a fellow of the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. His research on the semiotization of space and spatialization of semiosis takes interest in questions of mobility, permanence and regimentation. David Malinowski is Language Technology and Research Specialist at the Yale University Center for Language Study. With a background in language and literacy education, multimodal communication and technology-enhanced learning, he conducts research and supports pedagogical innovation on such topics as internetmediated intercultural language learning, distance language teaching and linguistic landscape for language and literacy education. David holds an MA in English with a Concentration in TESOL from San Francisco State University and a PhD in education from UC Berkeley. Sibonile Mpendukana is a doctoral student with the University of the Western Cape, at the Department of Linguistics, and is currently employed as a lecturer in the Linguistics Section at the University of Cape Town. His research and publications focus on linguistic landscapes, visual semiotics and material ethnography. His specific research interests are in the nexus of place, semiotics/language and race in the post1994 era, and his central focus is on the ways in which place is a salient semiotic dynamic in different, evolving somatic and semiotic performances of race. He has also worked as an assistant strategic planner and researcher for an advertising agency. Amiena Peck is Lecturer in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape and Research Fellow at the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR). She has published papers on transnational migrants, identity and linguistic landscapes. She is an associate editor of Linguistic Landscape, an International Journal, published by John Benjamins, as well as Multilingual Margins: A Journal of Multilingualism from the Periphery, published by the CMDR. She is working on extending the linguistic landscape field through an engagement with gender, corporeality, affect and identity in the virtual space. Christopher Stroud is Senior Professor in Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research at the University of the Western Cape, and Professor of Transnational Multilingualism at Stockholm University. He has researched and taught in Sweden, Papua New Guinea, Mozambique, Singapore and South Africa, and has published in English, Swedish and Portuguese in journals such as Language Policy, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Sociolinguistic Studies, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development and Multilingual Margins. He is a fellow of the Academy of Science in South Africa (ASSAf), and coedits a series for Bloomsbury, together with Kathleen Heugh and Piet van Avermaet, entitled ‘Multilingualisms and Diversities in Education’. Quentin Williams is Senior Lecturer in the Linguistics Department at the University of the Western Cape and Research Fellow at the Centre for Multilingualism and

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Diversities Research (CMDR). He has published papers on hip-hop, marginality, linguistic citizenship and performance. He is co-editor of the journal Multilingual Margins: A Journal of Multilingualism from the Periphery, published by the CMDR. He recently finished Remix Multilingualism (published by Bloomsbury, 2018) and Kaapse Styles: Hip Hop Art and Activism (published by HSRC Press, 2017, and co-edited with Adam Haupt, H. Samy Alim and Emile YX?).

Preface It is always a remarkable moment when a body of papers emerges as a book after years of gestation in a drop box. It is equally astonishing to realize that the volume has a different (a)genda to what its caretakers had originally planned for. In the case of this collection, we, the editors, had conceived (of) it as a book on landscapes of hope and aspiration specifically, and affect and desire more generally. But as it grew and evolved, the volume took on another shape. Over time, the chapters organically coalesced around themes of people in place and place in people, suggesting a minute, barely perceptible, recalibration of emphasis in how the authors were approaching semiotic landscapes. Instead of the main focus being on the artefact or the scenery (Shohamy et al., 2010), all chapters could be seen as dealing with the people in place, the role of semiotic landscapes in scripting the relationships of individuals and groups to others, and authoring peoples’ sense of self and their fit to place. This focus, of course, has been a strand of linguistic landscape studies (LLS), at least since the pioneering work of Ben-Rafael and colleagues, and, more recently is quite strongly present in work on, for example, affective regimes, smellscapes (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015), visceral landscapes (Peck et al., in print, 2019) and the like. There has also been a trend in LLS to expand the scenery beyond the multimodal to incorporate mobilities, complexities and the multifarious, and in all of this, people in place have become more present. From attention to artefact in early research through the incorporation of other senses and other codes, the human has been brought increasingly into LLS. When thinking about the chapters in this volume in relation to what we have identified here as a sticky-ness and well-nigh inseparability of person in/and/of place, we were lucky to happen across some post-Kantian thinking on space and time. In the introduction to the book, we have attempted to frame the chapters in a so-called philosophical topology inspired by post-Kantian thinkers such as Heidigger, Malpas and Donald Davidsson. There is much more thinking to be done here, and we have only been able to complete a rough outline, a rudimentary set of coordinates of possible direction, as to what such a framing might be able to contribute. One contribution we sense following from such a framing is how what is often seen as chronologically, methodologically or ontologically different strands of LLS could in fact be seen to cohere around the three triangular points of a philosophical topology, namely place, person and intersubjectvity. More conventional studies of linguistic landscapes would then sit side by side with more ethnographically and corporeal work and contribute in equal measure to understanding being-in-place. We feel that the chapters in this volume are a step in this direction. Therefore, as editors, we have taken the liberty to arrange the chapters to highlight the bare bones of a philosophical topology of semiotic landscapes. UWC, Bellville The Editorial Triangle

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References Pennycook, A. and Otsuji, E. (2015), ‘Making Scents of the Landscape’, Linguistic Landscapes, 1 (3): pp. 191–212. Shohamy, E., Ben-Rafael, E. and Barni, M. (eds.) (2010), Linguistic Landscape in the City, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank all the contributors for their collegiality and punctuality of delivery. We are grateful to the many reviewers who have generously accepted to read chapters in various phases of gestation, and thankful to the publishers and the series editor for their patience and encouragement. And thanks to Jan Blommaert, who many years ago challenged us to firm up our thinking around bodies in landscapes. The volume would not have been possible without our funders. Money makes the world go round, and in this respect, we thank VLIR-UOS (RIP Project Number: ZEIN2016RIP2016), DHET Research Development Grant: Early Career Research Programme and the National Research Foundation (Project Numbers: 99241 and 107534) for providing funds to fly in colleagues to attend the workshop in Cape Town, and extra funding towards the authoring of this volume. UWC, Bellville The Editorial Triangle

Introduction Christopher Stroud, Amiena Peck and Quentin Williams

The philosopher Malpas (1999) tells us that place is neither like toothpaste nor like gravity – there was no such thing as place before the existence of humanity, and place is not something manufactured separately from the human. Place is where we engage with the world that makes us, as we simultaneously make the world, and where Selfand world-making is the outcome of ‘commonality’ of being-in-the-world with others. In other words, place is where we find ourselves together with others and where our very human selves are effectively constituted. Malpas’ particular perspective on place and humanity is in the grand tradition of philosophers such as Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger and Donaldson, each of whom offers rich insights into the importance of place and placedness in what it means to be human (Malpas, 1999). Malpas (1999), after Davidson (2001), calls this branch of thought ‘philosophical topology’, a mode of philosophical enquiry about understanding human beings ‘in terms of their particular topos, a place formed through the interrelations of individuals and groups, and between the things and environments that surrounds them’ (Malpas). If defining the human means understanding ‘existence in the world’, and if being in the world – in place – takes place in commonality with others, then philosophical topology is also an enquiry into the ethical nature of (being in) place, as well as its temporal dimensions. Place is intimately and irrevocably tied to time –‘timespace’ (Bakhtin, 1981; Heidegger, 1962, 1972; Malpas, 1999; Schatzki, 2010), in the sense that ‘there is no temporality which does not bring spatiality along with it, and no spatiality that does not bring temporality also’ (Malpas). The fundamental dimension of place, then, is simply that it emerges out of self-making jointly and in commonality with others. Much recent work in linguistic landscape studies (LLS) has come to converge on accounting for 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. LLS deals with the ‘apprehension’ of place, rather than place itself, and attends to the many ways in which placedness is managed and negotiated with others as individuals craft their belonging-in-place. Thinking LLS through philosophical topology suggests that a primary focus of study could well

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Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes

be on the person rather than on the place, and that the field could benefit from an even stronger emphasis on viewing place through person in commonality than as a dimension abstracted from the self (cf. e.g. Wee on affective regimes). Finding inspiration in Malpas’ philosophical topology, we see our volume as pursuing this emphasis. It is an exercise in what we could call semiotopology, the way in which semiotic landscapes are intimately tied to concerns of the human in place, and how linguistic landscapes provide the discourses and important reference points whereby people make sense of themselves and their relatedness to others in place. It thus takes as its point of departure in questions such as the following: How is a sense of place and its semiotics construed around the people that inhabit them? How are multiple voices layered into or erased out of, the semiotic landscape? And how do linguistic landscapes contribute to individuals’ manifest identities and sense of (dis) comfort in place? How are local landscapes actively deployed by groups and individuals to enhance their local engagement, sense of belonging or acts of resistance, or to create conditions for new emotional geographies of place? And how can we understand place as an amalgam of past happenings, present contingencies and the future aspirations of those that occupy or move through space? The organization we have chosen for the chapters in this volume reflects the topological triangle of the subjective (self), the intersubjective (commonality) and the objective (place/thing). Each of the sections has one of these themes as the main focus, although naturally all are at play in any one analysis. Cognizant of temporality as an important dimension of linguistic landscape research, we have also organized the chapters according to a cross-cutting temporal thematic, thereby dividing the volume into three broad sections: (i) living the past in the present, (ii) alternative places and alternative people and (iii) imagining futures and imagining selves. This way of organizing the contributions allows us to capture the temporal complexity of the self, to engage with the intersubjectivities of meaningful place-making and to probe ethics as a change dynamic in how places are moulded to person(s), and how things could be different. Part One explores ‘how the relations that produce a sense of self in “place” are materially brought into being and sustained in and across particular locations’ (Law, 2007: p. 11) and times. Three of the four chapters here use some notion of trace or chronotope to account for the presence of features of pasts in contemporary landscapes – ‘hetereochronicity’, to use a Bakhtinian term. The chapter by Bock and Stroud details how historical landscapes from South Africa’s apartheid past live on as ‘conceptual’ landscapes that constrain and inform how individuals perceive the spaces around them. The authors go on to show how conceptual landscapes function as a cognitive metaphor through which life in post-apartheid South Africa is navigated on a daily basis. Thus, traces of separateness and unease left behind by apartheid ideologies in the form of zombi landscapes frame how people speak about their fit (or not) to place and to other people. Baro (Chapter 3) and Guissemo (Chapter 4) detail how semiotic shards from apartheid and colonial time respectively continue to structure how selves are authored in contemporary place. Baro’s analysis of the emergence of markets in the middle-class urban enclaves of Johannesburg takes us through the efforts of private developers to transform the physical places of worn-out and inhabitable spaces and fill them out

Introduction

3

with desirable objects such as food, drinks, arts and artisanal goods that have a local feel yet are in demand globally. Authenticity of experience (affect) and ‘self investment’ are linked to these desirable artefacts of the past in a way that conjures up the privilege of historically exclusive white spaces. Baro’s notion of chronoscapes allows the reader to see just how slices of a particular heritage are reified for consumption. Manuel Guissemo investigates the perduring power of Portuguese in different timespaces in the linguistic landscape of contemporary Maputo, Mozambique. His data on linguistic landscapes of memorialization from colonial times to the present show how African languages have been variously invisibilized over time in favour of Portuguese. He uses the idea of chronotope to highlight these orders of (in)visibility (Kerfoot and Hyltenstam, 2017). Interestingly, he argues that although African languages are present more in the linguistic landscape today than ever before, Portuguese continues to exercise a presence in public signage, through the traces it leaves in the form of orthography and syntax of the African language. Thus, the ever-presence of past apartheid and colonial identities in landscapes are carried by a particular taste/ aesthetics: In Baro’s case, the aesthetic is resident in the authentic artefact of ‘whiteness’, whereas for Guissemo it is the hint or trace of Portuguese in African-language signage. The fourth chapter, by Karlander, illustrates how the ephemeral and short-lived material instantiation of signage/inscription is key to its reading with a sophisticated analysis of backjumps, a particular form of volatile train graffiti painted on trains at end-stations. Backjumps are produced in ‘fast time’, under time pressure to not be caught red-handed graffitizing subway trains, so as to be read in fast-time, as the train speeds away from, or into, the subway station. The fleeting availability of these representations for consumption is highly indexical of temporary, contingent and momentary encounters in public spaces in late modernity generally. In Part Two, the focus of the chapters shifts to the second angle of the topological triangle – the intersubjective – looking closer into the issues of living in commonality, as who and what we are is ‘determined by “complex situatedness” that is, by the others who shape our lives, as well as the wider world in which our lives play out’ (Malpas, 2007: pp. 20–21, cf. also Malpas, 2017). In today’s global modernity, ‘complex situatedness’ is characterized, among other things, by the circulation, appropriation and recycling of indexicals of place and person. It is thus against modernity conceived as a complex semiotic landscape that the intersubjective self is formed. In their chapter, Peck and Williams offer a virtual linguistic landscape analysis of the contentious Zef rock band, Die Antwoord. The tattoos and music video visuals together offer a smorgasbord of semiotics contextually indexing coloured, gangster realities in the cape. While the band itself has reaped monetary gains and international fame, Peck and Williams contend that these one-sided gains are nothing less than modern-day cultural appropriation, which the authors conceptually frame as friction (ref to author). The friction which Die Antwoord creates is made apparent through the juxtaposition of imagined hypermasculinity on the one hand and the very real silenced coloured realities on the other. In an interesting use of Povinelli’s notion of ‘carnality’, the authors not only lay bare the mechanics behind the infelicitous appropriation, but also show how it is an organizing principle of hegemony in skinscapes, in like manner to hierarchical ordering and presence/absence of languages in other forms of signage.

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Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes

Two chapters deal with the reverberations of singular events of protest and conflict. Blackwood reports on how Guadeloupian Creole, widely used across the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, is forging new ties that contribute to refiguring the social alliances of the island´s colonial past. The author draws clear links between the arrangement and naming practices of flora in Guadeloupe with that of the emergent identity of a community, noting how ‘the LL points to an emergent and alternative sense of identity that calls for further examination as the social upheavals of the general strike (that is protests) fade from public discourse’ (this volume). Amos’ chapter explores the dynamics of institutional identity on the Mariani campus with respect to French and Corsican linguistic markers, contributing to broader discussions about institutional identity from the perspective of the LL. Through an analysis of the contextual and spatial presentation of Corsican on campus, he addresses the complexities of identity presentation and maintenance, which are subject to the management strategies not only of the institution as a whole, but also of the individual LL actors who represent the institution in different settings. Finally, Kelly Goncalvez casts a critical eye on the process of gentrification in Bushwick, a borough of New York City. She details how Bushwick is transformed by street art which ultimately led to it changing from being the City’s most misfortunate neighbourhood (poverty and crime ridden), to the most desirable, with international artists formally applying to paint the street walls of Bushwick. Thus, what originated as a grass-roots-driven aesthetically pleasing experience, unintentionally morphed, as Goncalves demonstrates, into the gentrification of the Greater Brooklyn. The global flow of capital is used in this case to reorganize the sense-making practices of place, as an attempt is made to erase all material signs of poverty, crime and violence from the semiotic landscape and rebuild it as a space of luxury. In each of these chapters, we see that the way in which people appropriate and are themselves appropriated by the circulation of semiotic indexicals of place and person raises complex issues of ethics – of care for, or repair of, sustainable, respectful interpersonal relationships. Malpas (2007) notes that the greatest threats to human dignity are ‘those actions and circumstances that strip human lives of their relational character – that disable the sense of relatedness to self, of relatedness to others and of relatedness to the world’ (p. 24). Ethics comes even more powerfully to the fore in the third set of chapters, where emphasis is on how linguistic/semiotic landscapes are deployed in recapturing lost dignities, and repairing ethical injury. Each of the chapters highlights how linguistic landscapes figure centrally in how people (re)construct their relationships to others and imagine new (more ethical) futures. They describe attempts to interrupt the continuities of past and present through the creation of ‘scapes’ that can entertain new regimes of shared engagement. Borba offers an analysis of protest signs as an analytical tool with which to unearth how individuals semiotically disrupt oppressive social orders by reclaiming place, reimagining selves and others, reconfiguring the present and redesigning futures. By focusing on the geopolitics of hate and hope, the author opens onto the strategies and affective discourses that are written into the semiotic landscape. As protestors produce affect to express their discontent with the Brazilian political order, they are also pushing for the impeachment of the president. These actions by Brazilian citizens

Introduction

5

manifest an ‘affective conflict over meaning’. Borba demonstrates in his chapter that marking the landscape with a semiotic dynamics of hate and hope leads to injurious signs, for example, pointing out that place and space are reconfigured through erasure and affective regimes. Mpendukana and Stroud take their point of departure in the pain, suffering and humiliation of black students who experience a loss of relation through their exclusion from engagement around issues that concern them deeply. The authors explore how protesting students at a prestigious university in Cape Town reimagine and materially reconstruct the ‘space’ of the institution in ways in an attempt to erase, what they perceive to be, a racialized othering and open up to a more ethical regime of engagement. It details the emergence, unfolding and ultimate destruction of a construction in the form of a township of shack dwelling (named #Shackville) that the students built on the main university steps in protest against lack of accommodation for black students. The chapter analyses layers of place and temporality in the play of ‘racial’ politics, highlighting how the semiotic landscape of #Shackville can be seen as an act of linguistic citizenship that makes audible (‘visible’) the marginalized voice of students to ultimately bring about transformation at the institution. In Kasper Juffermans’ chapter, it is the microscapes crafted around artefacts and souvenirs of international travel that reinstate dignities and redefine identities and relationships. The artefacts brought from China, and the conference badges from Ghana, as well necklaces and other trinkets from travels are ‘important elements of interior landscapes’, which offer points of departure for ‘conversations about strange cultural habits or concrete travel experiences’. However, these travel regalia carry a social value far beyond their role of props for ways to remember. The social value of this microscape of souvenirs, irrespective of their origins of production, is in giving dignity to a teller who can spin his own cosmopolitan story on an equal footing to those working a world of mobility and haste. This is the case even though, as in this particular, the individual teller is one of the multitude of marginalized on the periphery of the global circuit whose movements are severely curtailed– an African waiting to migrate. We believe these chapters make an important contribution to LLS in many respects. First, the overwhelming majority of chapters in this volume have addressed significant social, political and ethical concerns that people grapple with as they attempt to come to grips with living in a world of diverse others. The theoretical framing of the studies in a philosophical topology in ways that we have suggested here, emerging out of the concerns addressed in the chapters, both individually and collectively, could provide guidance for future work. A semio-topological perspective on LLS offers foundational thought on the human as a lens with which to approach urgent questions of coexistence in place in an increasingly turbulent and diasporic world. Secondly, a semio-topological approach fits well with the groundswell of recent work that sees LLS as part of an (interdisciplinary) endeavour to chart the ways in which the mobility of different forms of semiosis (sound, touch, language and smell) dynamically and interdiscursively, affectively and aesthetically, link bodies, selves and memories across times and places (cf. Blommaert, 2013; Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010; Peck and Stroud, 2015; Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015; Stroud and Jegels, 2014;

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Stroud and Mpendukana, 2009, 2012). In this interpretation, LLS is nothing less that an enquiry into how the emergence of person in commonality is given significance and meaning in place. We would also hope that semio-topological frame might also invigorate the broader constituency of sociolinguistics. The core parameters of sociolinguistics have long been identity and community, and increasingly, embodiment/corporeality (e.g. Bucholtz and Hall, 2016; Peck and Stroud 2015) and materiality (e.g. Sharku, 2015). As noted earlier, the interarticulation of these parameters are also those out of which the ‘ontology’ of the human is washed. Identity and subjectivity emerge out of intersubjectivity and commonality, and thereby also engage questions of ethics. At the same time, identity, community and the material are the triangulated pillars of place. The corporeal is secondary to place, as is the phenomenology of the body, as bodies are crafted and construed only relative to places (cf. Peck and Stroud, 2015). Surely, this would find favour with a post-Kantian sociolinguistics briefed to explore how people inhabit, appropriate and perform their embodied, emplaced and mobile selves in a diverse world.

References Bakhtin, M. (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin: University of Texas Press. Blommaert, J. (2013), Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes. Chronicles of Complexity, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2016), ‘Embodied Sociolinguistics’, in N. Coupland (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 174–200. Davidson, D. (2001), ‘Three Varieties of Knowledge’ in D. Davidson (ed.), Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heidegger, M. (1962), Being and Time, translated by John Macquarie and Eduward Robinson, New York: Harper & Row. Heidegger, M. (1972), On Time and Being, translated by Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper and Row. Jaworski, A. and Thurlow, C. (eds.) (2010), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London and New York: Continuum Press. Kerfoot, C. and Hyltenstam, K. (2017), ‘Introduction: Entanglement and Orders of Visibility’, in C. Kerfoot and K. Hyltenstam (eds.), Entangled Discourses: South-North Orders of Visibility, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–13. Law, J. (2007), Actor Network and Material Semiotics. http://www.herogeneties.net/ publications/Law-ANTandmaterialsemiotics (accessed18 May 2007). Malpas, J. (1999), Place and Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malpas, J. (2007), ‘Human Dignity and Human Being’, in J. Malpas and N. Lickis (eds.), Perspectives on Human Dignity: A Conversation, Springer, pp. 19–25. Malpas, J. (2017), ‘In the Vicinity of the Human’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 25 (3): pp. 423–436. Peck, A. and Stroud, C. (2015), ‘Skinscapes: Bodies as Linguistic Landscapes’, Linguistic Landscape, 1 (1): pp. 133–151.

Introduction

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Pennycook, A and Otsuji, E. (2015), Metrolingualism: Language in the City, London: Routledge. Schatzki, T. (2010), The Timespace of Human Activity: Performance, Society, and History as Indeterminate Teleological Events, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Stroud, C. and Jegels, D. (2014), ‘Semiotic Landscapes and Mobile Narrations of Place: Performing the Local’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, published in Tilburg papers in Culture Studies, Paper 50, 2013. Stroud, C. and Mpendukana, S. (2009), ‘Towards a Material Ethnography of Linguistic Landscape: Multilingualism, Mobility and Space in a South African Township’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13 (3): pp. 363–386. Stroud, C. and Mpendukana, S. (2012), ‘Material Ethnographies of Multilingualism: Linguistic Landscapes in the Township of Khayelitsha’, in S. Gardner and M. MartinJones (eds.), Multilingualism, Discourse and Ethnography, London: Routledge, pp. 149–162.

Part One

Living the Past in the Present

1

Zombie Landscapes: Apartheid Traces in the Discourses of Young South Africans Zannie Bock and Christopher Stroud

Introduction In April 2016, an incident made headlines when a young white waitress in a trendy café in the neighbourhood of Observatory, near the University of Cape Town, was reduced to tears when two black patrons, both activists aligned with the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) movement,1 handed back their bill with the following handwritten note: ‘We will give tip when you return the land.’ The incident attracted widespread public attention when one of the activists, Ntokozo Qwabe, an Oxford scholar and recipient of the prestigious Rhodes Mandela scholarship, wrote about it on his Facebook page, promising more acts of this nature. His posting generated a flood of responses, many sympathetic to the white waitress. Several web-based funding sites were established to raise ‘tips’ for her, and within a few days she had received a phenomenal sum of over R120,000 (approx USD 9500). This reaction in turn generated heated race debates, with some commentators pointing to the power of ‘white tears’ in garnering support and sympathy. Qwabe in turn defended his actions by arguing that the act was not directed at the waitress per se, but was rather about ‘disrupting whiteness in a particular space’ (Phala, 2016). When his Facebook account was blocked, he defiantly responded: ‘We remain resolute in our struggle against white domination! We will continue to be black in spaces where being black is deemed unacceptable’ (Ntokozo Qwabe, Facebook post, 11 May 2016). What this incident (and many like them) draws attention to are the ways in which space is still highly contested and racialized. The action of RMF activists is based on an analysis of South Africa as a place speckled by mosaics of whiteness. Their strategy is therefore to disrupt these structures and force both institutions and ordinary people to confront what they argue is the unacceptable reproduction of colonial and apartheid norms of ownership, access, authority and voice in places of the everyday. The event again brought to the fore the continued preoccupation of space and place as tropes of subjectivity in the psyches of post-apartheid South Africans. Apartheid was a system of legalized racism, a product of the regime’s policy of separate development,

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Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes

designed to entrench the privileges and power of whiteness, and to erode the rights and positions of those classified ‘black’, ‘coloured’ and ‘Indian’.2 It was underpinned by a raft of discriminatory laws affecting every aspect of life. Notwithstanding the extent to which apartheid encroached upon the dignity and everyday lives of millions of South Africans, it is most typically remembered for how it legislated the right to reside, socialize in and move through different spaces. For example, the Group Areas Act (1950) determined where differently raced people could live and own property, and the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act (1953) legislated the racial segregation of public facilities. This demarcation was realized in a linguistic landscape (LL) of public signage signalling whether an amenity was for ‘non-whites’ or ‘whites only’ (see Figure 1.1 for an example). Geographic segregation was further entrenched by the Bantu Self-Government Act (1959) and the Bantu Homelands Citizens Act (1970), which stripped all black South Africans of their citizenship and made them citizens of ethnically based ‘homelands’ or ‘Bantustans’, even if they did not live in their designated homeland. Significantly, the ‘independence’ of these homelands was not recognized by any other nation except the apartheid regime. The aim of this act was to completely remove the rights of black South Africans to the land, and to ensure that they were restricted to a few marginal areas of the country. It is unsurprising that one of the acts of resistance practised during the anti-apartheid defiance campaigns of the 1980s was the deliberate occupation of white beaches, bars and amenities by people classified ‘black’, ‘coloured’ or ‘Indian’. With the transition to democracy in 1994, apartheid laws were removed from the statute books. However, as the RMF example illustrates, they still remain powerful shaping forces in the lives and perceptions of contemporary South Africans. The focus in this chapter is on using the tools of semiotic landscaping to interrogate how

Figure 1.1 People visiting a Johannesburg toilet, c. 1980. Photograph: Eric Miller.

Zombie Landscapes: Apartheid Traces

13

it can be that apartheid remains a structuring motif in the way young South Africans perceive and talk about themselves, their possibilities of mobility and their sense of ‘comfort’ in place (c.f. Mpendukana and Stroud, this volume). Our data are drawn from six focus groups and one interview conducted between 2009 and 2014 at the University of the Western Cape (UWC).3 All interviewers were students who selected their own interviewees, generally third-year or post-graduate students (twenty-seven participants in total). Within each group, the interviewees were generally known to each other. While three of the groups were ‘mono-racial’ (black or coloured) in composition, the other half were ‘multi-racial’ – with the racial composition affecting the nature and extent of racializing discourses in each interview (see Bock and Hunt, 2015). Data were elicited using a number of open-ended questions, asking the students what they knew about apartheid, how they felt about it and how it had affected them.4 Asking students about apartheid proved to be very generative and stimulated rich discussion about the students’ own experiences of racism (Bock, 2017). A predominant feature of their narratives was how they spoke of apartheid as a spatially and temporally bounded space of racialized social identities and injustices. In order to more systematically capture how participants spoke about apartheid as place, in particular to get at the meanings associated with apartheid ‘places’, we analysed in context the use of terms such as apartheid, place(s), town(s), cit(ies), rural, areas, school, university, varsity as well as all place names. Our analysis seeks to account for the mechanisms whereby apartheid landscapes come to be internalized and embodied in the narratives and lives of young South Africans. We refer to such constellations of place and subjectivities as a ‘zombie landscape’ in the sense that the ‘undead’ and highly racialized ways of speaking about space and place that we find in our participant narratives continue to ‘haunt’ the present despite having no legal standing after two decades of democracy. In so doing, we echo Beck’s (1992, 2009) use of the term when he refers to notions such as ‘nationstate’ as zombie concepts, belonging to times past (a particular form of modernity) but returning to structure and constrain the way we perceive and talk about late or postmodernity. It is in this sense – as a zombie landscape – that apartheid retains its force as a dynamic in the everyday subjectivities of South Africans. Entertaining a notion of zombie landscape requires answers to three questions. First, in what way does it make sense to speak of a spatially and temporally delimited notion of apartheid as a semiotic landscape? In particular, how can we grasp the idea of a ‘semiotic’ landscape as a space of the imagination, experienced primarily as a ‘haunting’, as one constructed in narrative and interaction, and lacking explicit, visible semiotic inscription or the materialities of memorabilia? Secondly, how do we conceptualize a sense of place as contributing to the dynamic formation of participant subjectivities? And thirdly, a related question: Through what psycho-social processes do (apartheid) semiotic landscapes come to be layered into the longue durée or intergenerational transmission of racialized mentalities and bodies? We explore these three sets of questions through a mesh of concepts that link the imagining of place to the formation of intergenerational subjectivity. First, we use a notion of trace in order to conceptualize how place is imagined out of the circulation of memories of apartheid and fragments of experience. Trace is a notion used in many different ways5

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Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes

but here we use it in the sense of Napolitano (2015) to refer to a Freudian condensation of stories. The meaning of place as traces of memory is the discursive articulation of the materiality of actions, actors, events and states that characterize apartheid spaces. Secondly, in order to further interrogate how place engages the formation of subjectivity, we turn to a post-humanist expansion of Du Bois’ model of stancesubjectivity. Stance-subjectivity requires ‘a dialogical, relational and inter-subjective conception of subjectivity’ (Thompson, 2016: p. 31), which in turn offers an understanding of place as a ‘lively’ and agentive stance-taker in its dealings with human subjects. In viewing place as a post-humanist subject and stance-taker, we broaden the more traditional understanding of a post-humanist subject as material (e.g. objects and architecture). We are motivated to do so because ‘place’, as with objects and architecture, is discursively constructed (diagrams and drawings) through human intention, at the same time as these ontological objects come to constrain the agencies and subjectivities of their human users/interactants. And thirdly, we attempt to account for the longue durée of the trope of apartheid as place by discussing how a Foucauldian ‘subjectification’ can be reconciled with a posthumanist Freudian notion of ‘condensation’ (cf. Thompson, 2016). We suggest that asking these questions of landscapes of the imagination has the potential to inform new perspectives on LL research more generally in the direction of conceptual landscapes (e.g. Lyons, 2016). In particular, we propose a post-humanist framework for semiotic landscapes and draw out a couple of methodological and epistemological implications that might follow from such a proposal.

Trace in the reconstruction of apartheid as place out of time As noted in our data, apartheid is frequently used to refer to delimited spaces, where people to one extent or another experienced racism and oppression. Most commonly, it is used to refer to a time period (1948–1994) which is now ‘over’ (e.g. ‘apartheid era’ and ‘apartheid past’), or to a locale where participants imagine people did (or did not) experience racism and oppression: Andile: Apartheid is still there in certain places ah … I could say ah … semi-rural places, the places that are not well developed yet but in cities it’s not likely there is apartheid

This ‘spatial boundedness’ is also reflected in the narratives of participants who – when giving a reason for why their parents did not speak much about apartheid at home – explained that their parents seemed ‘not to be affected’ by apartheid because of where they were raised. Here Tsepho says that because his father grew up in the Eastern Cape, he may not have experienced apartheid so strongly: Tsepho: perhaps he felt a bit of it or he didn’t feel it at all I think at that time he was still in the Eastern Cape and I don’t know the Eastern Cape is an area which experienced much of apartheid

Zombie Landscapes: Apartheid Traces

15

The Eastern Cape, in actual fact, has a history of fierce resistance to apartheid, and is the birth place of many famous political leaders (e.g. Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko). But, for this participant, the Eastern Cape – or at least his father’s home – is perceived differently. Furthermore, place functions as indexical of or proxy for widely recognized narratives of apartheid heroism, suffering and resistance. For example, when talking about the liberation heroes of the past, such as Robert Sobukwe, two of the interviewees make reference to Robben Island. This refers to the island off Cape Town’s shore where political leaders were incarcerated for many years, and has come to hold a particular meaning in the national imaginary as emblematic of the apartheid regime’s repression: Tsepho: Everyone was in prison in Robben Island and everyone went to exile Ras T: Sobukwe … was staying on Robben Island the house was surrounded by fourteen DOGS in chains so that he cannot escape.

A vast body of research has explored the variety of semioses through which semiotic landscapes are constituted (cf. Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010). Perceptions of place are not just filtered through ocular engagement with landscapes, but constructed through the embodied (and multisensorial) interaction of people with place and its semiotics: for example, smellscapes (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015), metroscapes (Karlander, 2018), chronoscapes (Baro, this volume), mobilescapes (Stroud and Jegels, 2014) and skinscapes (Peck and Stroud, 2015). These interactions are entextualized in narrative, becoming explicitly part of the cluster of the material and lived reality of a place that impacts or imprints itself upon bodies, structuring the emotional experience of a place and the type of emplacement or mobility possible there (e.g. Stroud and Jegels, 2014). What we are here calling ‘zombie landscapes’ are landscapes crafted from the publicly offered meanings of interactively negotiated narrative text (e.g. Johnstone, 1990, 2010). They gain their significance and meaning in the retellings of the remnants of histories and fragments of hearsays. Zombie landscapes are reconstructed and imagined landscapes, pieced together through traces of memory and the visceralities of affect these memories call forth. In talking about apartheid in terms of ‘place’, the participants are building historical meaning and significance into contemporary geographies. Train (2016) notes how landscapes are invested with ‘layered regimes of historicity that invest the present landscape with meaningful relationships between the past and future’ (240). He proposes the notion of memorization to refer to how multiple, layered, embodied and tension-laden discursive, political … practices, policies and ideologies intersect over time and place to make the past present for the future. (2016)

The immaterial, propositional traces in the narratives serve the same function as material traces in the form of commemorative statues and plaques in the broader

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study of diachronicities (Pavlenko and Mullen, 2015) and the historicities of semiotic landscapes (Shohamy, 2010; Train, 2016). Both trace and memorization call forth stories of the past in the present minds of readers/viewers (also impacting on how future stories will be told). The multifactorial, layered and temporal complexity of processes of memorization are reflected in Napolitano’s (2015) notion of trace as arising out of the Freudian condensation of stories and histories, that is a process of compromise and convergence of multiple stories into a knot. That knot has a form and is in space – so that a trace is both a form in space as well as the process through which histories and reminders of different worlds imprint and condense on a given space. (2015: p. 57)

A trace, according to Napolitano, ‘animates a socially built space between the flesh and the environment through condensations and negations of histories’. (Here, the author is referencing Povinelli’s (2006: p. 1) notion of carnality.) By so doing, ‘a trace makes a particular form, object or place mattering’ (Napolitano, 2015: p. 60, italics in original) in particular ways. In the present analysis, the notion of trace (Napolitano, 2015) refers to the narrative reconstruction – fashioned from the circulation of collective and personal memory – of apartheid as a spatio-temporality populated by sociopolitically and economically stratified populations. Apartheid as place is thus a semiotic landscape that give[s] meaning to constructs of collective memory and forgetting that inform and are informed by public spaces and their attendant discourses, ideologies, practices, and policies. (Train, 2016: p. 226)

Lively places: Apartheid in stance-subjectivity Apartheid as place also figures prominently in structuring the identifications the interviewees entertain and the subjectivities they articulate. In the following example, Neels, one of the only two white participants in the data, gives a snapshot of the overt racism he observed whilst growing up in an area which, prior to 1994, was staunchly white, Afrikaans and conservative: Neels: the majority of the white people that I grew up with treated coloured and black people … it was … it was wrong you know going out with people to clubs and throwing bottles at … people going like ‘Hey! Hey! Hey!’ screaming things

Neels expresses a clear negative stance on the actions of racist whites. In taking the stance he does on the acts of violence they committed, he gives a good sense of where he stands with respect to racism and, by inference, how he sees himself as a non-racial and anti-discriminatory Self. Du Bois’ (2007) notion of stance-subjectivity or stanceownership offers an appealing perspective on what we are hearing in Neels’ recount. According to Du Bois, stance-taking involves

Zombie Landscapes: Apartheid Traces

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a public act by a social actor, achieved dialogically through overt communicative means, of simultaneously evaluating objects, positioning subjects (self and others), and aligning with other subjects, with respect to any salient dimension of the sociocultural field. (2007: p. 163)

The evaluation of an object is the placement (hierarchization or sifting) of an object on a market of value. Du Bois discusses positioning as ‘the act of situating a social actor with respect to responsibility for stance and for invoking sociocultural value’. Alignment is ‘the act of calibrating the relationship between two stances and by implication between two stance-takers’, thus aligning one or more subjects vis-à-vis the evaluation/categorization of ‘objects’. By evaluating an object and by aligning to another subject vis-à-vis this object, Du Bois intends to offer ‘a dialogical, relational and inter-subjective conception of subjectivity’ (Thompson, 2016: p. 31).6 Returning to Neels’ comment, it would appear at first glance that the stance-subject he is positioning as responsible for the negative evaluation of, and violence against, blacks are the ‘majority of the white people [he] grew up with’. These would then also be the stance-subjects with whom, in this case, he disaligns with. However, taking our cue from research on semiotic landscapes that sees place as generative of affect and significance, and formative of body shape, posture, decoration and gait (cf. Milani, 2015; Peck and Stroud, 2015; Stroud, 2016), we might also see ‘place’ itself as a stancesubject in Neels’ commentary. In such a case, it is the ‘clubs’ that ultimately provide the affordance or impetus for the sorting and evaluating of clients into sociocultural silos of black and white. This in turn implies embracing an idea of place as agentive, ‘lively’ and, in an important sense, a responsible agent. More generally within post-humanist thought, the very notion of ‘subject’ is redefined as no longer refer[ing] to a human being but rather a pragmatic competence (our italics). This competence consists in originating courses of action, defining contexts as contexts of some kind, creating meanings, and delimiting available ways of life. (Caronia and Mortari, 2015: p. 403)

This characterization resonates with the idea of place as ‘lively’ and ‘animated’ (Amin, 2014, 2015; Thrift, 2014), and captures well what the ‘clubs’ that Neels refers to are about. According to Sloterdijk (2011: p. 90): The spaces that humans allow to contain them have their own history – albeit a history that has never been told and whose heroes are eo ipso not humans themselves.

In relation to stance and subjectivity, Thompson (2016) provides an innovative addendum to Du Bois’ theory of stance by developing the idea of ‘objects’ – what we could call ‘new posthumanist subjects’ – as stance-takers. He provides the example of a ‘test’, noting that what tests do is precisely perform agentive roles of evaluation (good/ bad results on some criteria); position a subject (good pupil or a pupil improving

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Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes

according to sociocultural criteria); and create an alignment with other subjects. Each of these dimensions is a key criterion for stance-takers in Du Bois’ sense. Objects such as tests can evaluate, position and align because they are the product of a chain of social interaction meaningful engagement – a resemiotization of deliberated human intentionality into particular discursive frameworks. However, once created, the test as object literally ‘takes on a life of its own’, constraining the possible actions open to those (human) subjects that interact with it. Caronia and Mortari (2015: pp. 404–405) put it thus: Most of things that inhabit our social world and shape our conduct in it are created, installed, interpreted and used by humans … laypersons acting and interacting in a socio-material context do not cope with humans that conceived the artefacts … but rather with the meanings, ideas, constraints, possibilities and consequences embodied in and enacted by these artefacts.

Similar reasoning can be applied to ‘animated and lively place’ as a stance-subject. Just as with a ‘test’, a place gains significance and meaning through a socially and interactionally grounded process of baptism (Karlander, 2018, this volume; Wee, 2016). Behind the delimitation and naming of places are extended processes of deliberation and contestation, law-making, policy formulation and policing (cf. Karlander, 2018) that comprise the scaffolding that allows the creation of place from space. People insert and entwine themselves with the filaments and fabric of places, spinning a narrative of self in place and thereby giving place a particular ‘voice’. At the same time, place also inserts itself in our bodies, postures and trajectories and the speeds with which we move through space (Peck and Stroud, 2015). From this perspective, semiotic landscapes are at base fundamentally inscriptions of human intentionality, just as we as humans are authored by the places we inhabit. Given this, there is no reason – other than a bias towards prioritizing the ‘human’ as agent – to prefer an interpretation that focuses attention in Neels’ commentary on the human actors rather than on the post-human actor, namely place. The stance-taker that Neels is dialogically and intersubjectively engaging with here is the ‘club’. It is the club that orients to an object of stance and characterizes it as having some specific quality or value. In this case, the ‘objects’ evaluated are skin colour and other bodily features, as black or white, and their (in)appropriate fit to place (cf. Peck and Stroud, 2015). Neels’ words can further be seen as recognizing how the club ‘positions’ itself as responsible for this (through regulatory frameworks that historically prohibited certain places to blacks, e.g. ‘whites only clubs’). When Neels, for example, mentions how ‘it is wrong for whites in clubs to throw bottles and stones at blacks’, he is not only evaluating that behaviour negatively, but also actively disaligning himself from the ‘club’ as stance-taker. Many of the interviewees remark on how different places select, sift and evaluate objects (people) according to the sociocultural values of race. In fact, it could be said of apartheid that it is a racialized stance-taker. For example, rural areas (and townships) are represented as ‘selecting’ blackness and poverty, and by contrast, cities and wealthy suburbs ‘select’ whiteness and wealth. Ras T notes how

Zombie Landscapes: Apartheid Traces

19

Transkei was like a province of black people it’s where blacks were dumped you see it was the homelands for blacks where blacks were supposed to rule themselves.

When Ras T notes how people were ‘dumped’ in apartheid homelands, he is articulating disalignment with a stance-taker (place) that evaluates and categorizes blacks and whites racially. In all of these situations, place (the club, the neighbourhood, or homeland) in effect acts as a social actor, a ‘lively’ place that facilitates the invocation of sociocultural value of an object, in this case black versus white bodies.

Subjectification In the discourse of our participants, the idea of apartheid is associated with a web of notions such as ‘blackness’, ‘poverty’, ‘violence’, ‘xenophobia’, ‘threat’, as well as ‘modernity’, ‘urbanization’ and ‘change’. Invariably, the interviewees talk about these notions by means of reference to ‘place’; apartheid as a spatio-temporally bounded dystopia has become an organizing trope for talk about a variety of present-day racialized narratives. For example, stories of ‘otherising softly’ (Bonilla-Silva, 2003, in Walker, 2005, 134) organized around ‘place’, is evident in Palesa’s recount of how she feels racialized in her home town when her entry into a (presumably white-owned) shop, positions her, in her perception, as a black person, as poor and a potential thief: Palesa: Yes in the shops when you want to buy something they always undermine black people like as if for example ko (at) Sport Scene they always think that we can’t afford R600 pair of jeans or whatever so they always go to coloureds which at the end of the day they don’t buy and I buy the black person so ja they normally look at the coloureds first or whites, and blacks later ‘cause they have this mentality that blacks don’t have money and ja and another thing when you go inside the clothes or shoe shop they always follow black people they don’t follow coloureds or whites and they steal those coloureds then whites [laughter] and us ja so they always follow more especially at home wooo ba re keng shop ela [What do they say that shop?] Shoe something next to Crazy Store, yo that shop ha ah

For Palesa, the shop ‘engages’ and positions her in a highly racialized way. She invokes the apartheid hierarchy (which ranked races in order of privilege from whites at the apex to blacks at the bottom, with coloureds and Indians somewhere in between) to explain the shop owners’ apparent prejudices. It is also telling that it is the perceived association of blackness with poverty and crime that she rejects, underlining once again the very sedimented associations these meanings have in the imaginary and discourses of South Africans. Other places that are seen as ‘selecting’ or that ‘belong to certain races’ are institutions, such as schools and universities. These institutions also ‘have colour’. Schools and universities are described as ‘white’ or ‘coloured’, despite the fact that all institutions have been desegregated since 1994, and these appellations are associated with ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’ standards.

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Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes Dan: like your parents … they always like attach labels to … labels to things … like they would say that ‘that’s a white school we can easily see that’s a coloured school’ Ayesha: But the majority there by UCT … maybe [laughs] I don’t see a lot of coloureds there I see a lot of Indians I see a lot of blacks and I see a lot of blacks! … And their level of education is much higher than ours! … Here by us [at UWC] we have the majority … what? Coloureds

Although Dan’s commentary does not state the association explicitly, it can be inferred from the surrounding discussion, as well as Ayesha’s contribution, that formerly ‘white’ schools and institutions have better facilities and are associated with higher-quality education, whereas those, such as the historically ‘coloured’ UWC, are more inferior. It is not in the least surprising that the participants make these connections: in many cases, inherited patterns of racialized wealth are still firmly in place. However, it is also well recognized that the biggest demographic shift post-apartheid has been the growth of the black middle class (Seekings, 2008) and the deracialization of capital (Bundy, 2014; Haffajee, 2015).7 Yet, as seen in these data, these shifts have not impacted on the ways in which participants talk about space, race and class, even though a number of them are part of this emerging middle class, have attended the more expensive, former white schools which were desegregated after 1994, and are currently acquiring degrees in a tertiary institution. ‘Place’ is also a predominant organizing trope when talking about the South African curse of xenophobia. Palesa explains why white migrants did not experience the 2008 xenophobic attacks that so cruelly targeted a diverse group of black migrants. These were predominantly carried out by black township residents and directed at African migrants living in townships and rural areas. According to Palesa, white immigrants can afford to go to ‘expensive areas’ where ‘no black person’ may confront them. By inference, the black economic migrants do not have money and so land up in poorer areas inhabited by black people. Palesa: The thing is with white people they are not moving to those rural places and stuff like that when they move from other countries they already have money so when they come to South Africa they go to expensive places and those places […] where no black person would just go there and say hey you’re foreigner and stuff like that so I think that’s the reason why [they were not targeted].

Clearly, the norms that Palesa is drawing attention to (who can speak freely in which spaces) are ones based on the relative power of the people concerned, and here the correlation between whiteness and power is sharply drawn. This power, Palesa argues, derives from the greater economic power of white migrants over those of black ones, which allows them to avoid selection by ‘black’ places where violent acts are committed. While the data clearly show how the segregating principle of apartheid is still a motif which structures participants’ experience and perception of space and place,

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place is also referenced as ‘selecting’ non-racialism. The following narrative by Ben is one of the stories which speak to the breaking down of racial boundaries: Ben: When you see near Cape Town Gugulethu, do you know Mzoli’s Place? You see there … all different races are there it’s township but all different, white, coloured all there and that proves ah … all people don’t believe in apartheid they let it go away, it was ah … something of the past so they have to let it go … ja.

Here, progress in terms of social integration and the dismantling of racial boundaries is very much read as something you can see, that is, inscribed visually in how people are placed in space. In the following extracts, progress is measured in terms of freedom of movement through formerly coloured or white spaces. Joshua, the only other white participant, recounts his experience of visiting the homes of coloured friends from UWC, and Leo speaks of his pleasure at being able to walk freely in Camps Bay, another exclusive (formerly) white Cape Town suburb: Joshua: But do you know what’s nice is that there is no barrier like there was in apartheid … the door is open to come in and say, well hey come in and see what we do. Leo: I can go to Camps Bay I have that freedom I can move around freely without being worried or being accused and being prosecuted and things like that

The point we wish to make with these examples is that there are many ways in which participants could speak about apartheid, and that it is telling that ‘placial’ tropes emerge as a predominant mode of narrative organization. Place, as we have seen here, carries multiple meanings in the discourse of the students, organizing accounts how black bodies are monitored and surveilled, how blackness is subjected to violence and crime, and how transformation is perceived as freedom of movement and the spatial dilution of white bodies. These tropes and clusters of racial indexes make sense against the zombification of a semiotic landscape of apartheid as place and its workings – a psychic space rich in racialized meanings. The notions of trace (as a Freudian condensation of multiple narratives and actors) and stance (as the interactional and dialogical engagement in practices of subjectivity) in relation to semiotic landscape provide us with the tools for accounting for how apartheid as place has become a trope or lens with which to view the world. Again, Thompson’s (2016) innovative take on Du Bois’ ‘stance’ provides a useful point of departure. He poses the question of how the everyday production of stancesubjectivity evolving over the micro-timescales of interactional turns relates to the process of Foucauldian subjectification at macro-timescales: ‘a process by which subjectivity emerges across timescales of decades to centuries’ (p. 40). The notion of zombie landscape offers some inroad to this question. The economic, cultural and symbolic traces of white power in place in the form of buildings, objects, differential access to spaces, trajectories of movement and the layerings of racial evaluations into

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texts, objects, places and narratives that persevere over time are nothing less than sedimented tools of Foucauldian discourses of power: the ‘texts, artefacts, images, technologies and semiotically arranged spaces enter the micro-order of everyday life’ (Caronia and Mortari, 2015: p. 405). The longue durée of place and its artefacts, and the texts (e.g. regulations) that circumscribe and give it significance make up enduring sites of Foucauldian power. As noted by the post-humanists, ‘humans are designed, interpreted and authored by things – things make us do things, thanks to us, but also despite us’ (Caronia and Mortari, 2015: p. 406). As we noted in the stories from Palesa, Ras T and many of the interviewees, this claim is equally applicable to place as it is to other ontological objects.

Post-humanist perspectives on semiotic landscapes In this chapter, we have explored how the spatial aspects of apartheid still structure the way young people at a South African university conceptualize and talk about place. We showed how they ‘remember’ apartheid not as a system of legalized oppression, but as a mental landscape bounded by time (e.g. ‘it ended in 1994’) and space (e.g. ‘apartheid is still there in some places’). Perhaps even more importantly, the landscapes of the past reappear in the present time as (metaphorical) building blocks in contemporary ‘racialized subjectivities’, becoming a shorthand or cipher for clusters of ‘meaning’ pertaining to migration, modernity, reconciliation, poverty, xenophobia and violence. Apartheid is an enduring lens for the racial classification of people and events, standing for a ‘condition’ or ‘state’ which people experienced and endured (‘suffered under apartheid’) or which has had a lasting impact on their lives (‘affected by apartheid’). Thus, ultimately, these imaginary semiotic landscapes comprise the building blocks, out of which multiple speaker subjectifications are constructed. In making this argument, we have drawn on various dimensions of semiotic landscape research. First, in seeking to understand how imaginary landscapes provide contemporary tropes of subjectification, we engaged with work that interrogates how features of past semiotizations of place in the form of monuments and memorabilia are incorporated into retrospective, reconstructed, landscapes lived in the present (cf. Train, 2016). However, rather than material artefacts of past LLs, we elaborated on an immaterial notion of trace (of histories and hearsay as retold in interviewee narratives) as the scaffolding for the meanings and significances of apartheid as place. The important role of narrative in the production of semiotic landscape work also speaks to studies that explore how narrative works to reconfigure, recycle and embed emplaced semiotic artefacts (traces) into personal stories of place and mobility, saturated with emotions such as belonging or displacement (Stroud and Jegels, 2014; Mpendukana and Stroud, this volume). Secondly, the interviewees’ stories showed them to be engaging in subjective stancetaking – exercising ‘stance-ownership’. Our analytical focus on stance-subjectivity led to a notion of enlivened place as a stance-taker in its own right, with place providing the interactional engagement necessary for the interviewees’ representation of subjectivity and sense of self in interviewee narratives. There is an intimate connect

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in how speakers represent themselves and their stance to apartheid as place in that the ‘telling of selves’, and the stances taken towards apartheid is one of the foremost means whereby the meanings of apartheid as place are crafted. At the same time, these very places constrain the possibilities available for self-authorship. This ‘post-humanist’ take on landscapes of the ‘undead’ builds on, and extends, other work in semiotic landscapes that has explored how mobile bodies in place create, as well as are created by, the landscapes through which they move (Karlander, 2018; Peck and Stroud, 2015 and Stroud, 2016). Finally, we were able to account for the longue durée of the trope of apartheid as place by way of reference to the post-humanist Freudian notion of ‘condensation’ and Foucauldian ‘subjectification’, showing how places scripted by discourses of power exercise psychoanalytic constraint. This move opens up accounts of how Foucauldian discursive structurings of place are inserted into our interviewees’ longer-term psyches through Freudian condensation. Such a move references work in semiotic landscapes that interrogates how (hidden) discourses of power structure and maintain semiotic landscapes (e.g. Ben-Rafael et al., 2006; Shohamy, 2010). It also engages with doing more recent research in the role of place and its semiosis in constructs of affect (Wee, 2016), sexuality (Milani, 2015) and body-ness (Shohamy and Correa, personal communication), thereby also providing a conceptual bridge between place as power and place as sexuality, body and affect. We believe that zombie landscapes as discussed here have the potential to pose some interesting epistemological and methodological questions for research on semiotic landscapes more generally. We will mention only two that we feel are most significant. First, recent LL research with its increasing centring of the ‘human’ has gone hand in hand with studies of a broader spectrum of the semioses behind their authoring and reading (cf. the introduction to this volume and pioneering work by Shohamy, 2010; Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010). However, until now, this wider brief has continued to largely exclude the variety of objects, artefacts and other post-human elements that are written into the landscape. These post-human actors contribute to how texts are read as well as to how persons (also as readers) are ‘authored’ (and ‘read’) in place. Earlier research by Stroud and Mpendukana (2009) introduced the notion of material ethnography to deal with the intersecting worlds of place, object and semiosis, but focused primarily on the material circumstances and consequences for modalities and forms of inscription and language choice. The notion dealt less with how the ‘human’ interacted with and is co-authored by the materiality of and placement of signage and artefacts in general. Among other implications, this has led to a narrow focus in LL research on accounting for the meaning and the (local) origin of LL (similar to the Conversation Analysis methodology of focusing on the interaction out of context) rather than asking, for example, how we as persons are authored by a variety of ontologies in place – including emplaced inscriptions at great spatio-temporal distance from where we stand. A post-humanist perspective on LL would start on the premise that the understandable, accountable, justifiable character of human praxis depends upon a chain of agencies embodied in and enacted by a plethora of different

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Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes entities with different ontologies: objects, cultures, norms, ideologies, discourses, signs, texts, images take part in making meanings and shaping human praxis, each one as an ‘actant in its own right’. (Caronia and Mortari, 2015: p. 405)

An epistemological stance inclusive of the post-human in LL also has methodological consequences. For example, one of the prima facie modes of approaching semiotic landscapes is to ask about the local meaning of the scape in its local context. Much discussion and contention have been generated in the field as to how to reliably elicit the ‘local’ meaning and the intention of the (human) author or sign-maker. Malinowski (2009) in a perceptive paper has already ‘warned’ that signs in place, just as signs anywhere, take on a Butlerian excitability, and that the reading of a sign may offer as many readings as there are iterated ‘replications’ and readings. However, if LLs are multilayered, recursive and spatio-temporally distributed ‘events’, comprising a variety of authoring agents, how do we as immediate participants deal with the orchestration and multisensorality of what we experience in the LL. What degree of ‘awareness’ do we have as immediate participants in semiotic place – not only as readers with particular positionalities, but as authors and authored? Knowing and accounting for the meaning of a semiotic landscape becomes a problem of hearing, disentangling and re-entangling the many ‘voices’ that may have gone into creating the landscape. This is a problem of the indeterminacy of meaning more generally, including, importantly, the unplanned, unintended meanings that surface over time as constellations of objects and perspectives shift (cf. Malinowski, 2010). Thus, rather than searching for a singular intention behind how we are reading a sign, should we not rather be generating a force field of possible meanings and readings? Some of the readings – as with the ‘traces’ condensed into post-apartheid narratives of place – would be saturated with semiotic instability as we inhabit the same place but do so from very different positions of ‘condensation’ (e.g. ‘black pain’ vs. ‘white tears’). And would this not merit putting a greater degree of trust in the accounts provided by the analyst? After all, analysts have the advantage of viewing moments of engagement across longer time spans and from coordinating perspectives of different participants into a more holistic and theoretically informed retrospective. Caronia and Mortari (2015) have posed this very concern as a general problem for research from a post-humanist perspective. They note how ‘analytical approaches programmatically rooted in members’ local interactions do not deal with all the possible ways in which things have or may have agency’ (407, italics in original). They speak of the ‘agency of unmarked objects’ in reference to the agency of things that do not appear as explicitly mentioned or directly visible in impacting on non-discursive practices. They conclude that using both a human interactive point of view and a point of view from objects (i.e. post-humanist subjects) means accepting the ‘analyst’s point of view which may not necessarily coincide with the members/interactants’ point of view or priority’. And, citing Nicolini (2009: p. 1407), they speak of ‘textures of practice’ distributed among artefacts and human beings (p. 417). Ultimately, this means that people may not really know (or be able to know) what they are reading and why they are reading it that way (i.e. what has authored them as reader). Would therefore psychoanalysis as a mode of enquiry8 not be a promising methodology for post-

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humanist LL research? Psychoanalysis as methodology, according to Highmore (2007), can be seen as a practice, a form of listening, of allowing voices to speak, of establishing a scene of communication that allows the unconscious to signify. In the specific case of apartheid or zombie landscapes, but more generally in landscape analysis, Highmore’s point on how psychoanalysis recognizes the past in the present and encourages an approach to landscape as layered and entangled semiotic spaces. In the end, we think our analysis of ‘zombie landscape’ is contributing to a post-humanist perspective on LL that offers a perspective on the human through the lens of objects and the undead.

Notes 1 Rhodes Must Fall is a radical, decolonial student movement founded when activist Chumani Maxwele threw human faeces at the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, an arch imperialist and colonialist, at University of Cape Town. (http://www.iol.co.za/news/ south-africa/western-cape/protesters-throw-poo-on-rhodes-statue-1829526). 2 The Population Registration Act (1950) classified all South Africans into the following racial categories: ‘white’, ‘coloured’ and ‘native’ (later ‘African’ or ‘black’). ‘Asian/Indian’ was later added as a fourth category. Although these terms no longer have any legal standing, they are still used for self-identification and are required on many official forms for equity and redress purposes. 3 The university was established in 1960 for coloured students, but the current student population is predominantly a mix of black and coloured students, with a handful of white students (5 per cent) and a growing number of students from elsewhere in Africa. 4 The dominant language of the interviews was English, although some code-switching (in and out of Afrikaans, isiXhosa and Sesotho) did occur. 5 We thank one reviewer for noting this. 6 Thompson argues that Du Bois’ emphasis on stance-ownership actually downplays dialogicality and intersubjectivity in stance-subjectivity, as well as interobjectivity (2016: p. 34). 7 It is also well acknowledged that these gains have not sufficiently ‘trickled down’ and made significant dents on the country’s high poverty levels, which remain largely, though not exclusively, black. 8 With due consideration for its Fanonian and decolonial development.

References Amin, A. (2014), ‘Lively Infrastructure’, Theory, Culture and Society, 31 (7/8): pp. 137–161. Amin, A. (2015), ‘Animate Space’, Public Culture, 27 (2): pp. 239–258. Beck, U. (1992), Risk Society. Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage. Beck, U. (2009), ‘The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies’, Theory, Culture and Society, 19 (1/2): pp. 17–44. Ben-Rafael, E., Shohamy, E., Hasan, M and Trumper-Hecht, N. (2006), ‘Linguistic Landscape as Symbolic Construction of the Public Space: The Case of Israel’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 3 (1): pp. 7–28.

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Bock, Z. (2017), ‘“Why Can’t Race Just be a Normal Thing?” Entangled Discourses in the Narratives of Young South Africans’, in C. Kerfoot and K. Hyltenstam (eds.), Entangled Discourses: South-North Orders of Visibility, London: Routledge, pp. 59–76. Bock, Z. and Hunt, S. (2015), ‘“It’s Just Taking Our Souls Back”: Apartheid and Race in the Discourses of Young South Africans’, SALALS, 33 (2): pp. 141–158. Bonilla-Silva, E. (2003), Racism without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Bundy, C. (2014), Short-changed? South Africa since Apartheid, Auckland Park: Jacana Media. Caronia, L. and Mortari, L. (2015), ‘The Agency of Things: How Spaces and Artefacts Organize the Moral Order of an Intensive Care Unit’, Social Semiotics, 25 (4): pp. 401–422. Du Bois, J. W. (2007), ‘The Stance Triangle’, in R. Engelbretson (ed.), Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation and Interaction, Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, pp. 139–182. Haffajee, F. (2015), What If There Were No Whites in South Africa? Johannesburg: Picador Africa. Highmore, B. (2007), ‘Michel de Certeau and the Possibilities of Pyschoanalytic Cultural Studeies’, in C. Bainbridge (ed.), Culture and the Unconcious, Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 88–92. Jaworski, A. and Thurlow, C. (eds.) (2010), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London: Continuum. Johnstone, B. (1990), Stories, Community, and Place: Narratives from Middle America, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Johnstone, B. (2010), ‘Language and Place’, in W. Wolfram and R. Mesthrie (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Sociolinguistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karlander, D. (2018), ‘Backjumps: Writing, Watching, Erasing Train Graffiti’, Social Semiotics, 28 (1): pp. 41–59. Lyons, K. (2016), #mysanfrancisco: Social Media and the Conceptual Linguistic Landscape. https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/rqktw Malinowski, D. (2009), ‘Authorship in the Linguistic Landscape: A MultimodalPerformative View’, in E. Shohamy and D. Gorter (eds.), Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 107–125. Malinowski, D. (2010), ‘Showing Seeing in the Korean Linguistic Cityscape’, in Monica Barni, Elezier Ben-Rafael and Elana Shohamy (eds.), Linguistic Landscape in the City, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 199–215. Milani, T. M. (2015), ‘Sexual Citizenship: Discourses, Spaces and Bodies at Joburg Pride 2012’, Journal of Language and Politics, 14 (3): pp. 431–454. Napolitano, V. (2015), ‘An Thropology and Traces’, Anthropological Theory, 15 (1): pp. 47–67. Nicolini, D. (2009), ‘Zooming In and Out: Studying Practices by Switching Theoretical Lenses and Trailing Connection’, Organization Studies, 30 (12): pp. 1391–1418. Pavlenko, A. and Mullen, A. (2015), ‘Why Diachronicity Matters in the Study of Linguistic Landscapes’, Linguistic Landscapes, 1 (1/2): pp. 114–132. Peck, A. and Stroud, C. (2015), ‘Skinscapes’, Linguistic Landscapes, 1 (1/2): pp. 133–151. Pennycook, A. and Otsuji, E. (2015), ‘Making Scents of the Landscape’, Linguistic Landscapes, 1 (3): pp. 191–212.

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Phala, Mbali. (2016), ‘Ntokozo Qwabe on Disrupting Whiteness and Black People’s Attachment to Whiteness’, Independent Online News, 12 May 2016. https://www.iol. co.za/news/opinion/ntokozo-qwabe-on-disrupting-whiteness-2020699 (accessed 3 November 2017). Povinelli, E. A. (2006), The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy and Carnality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Seekings, J. (2008), ‘The Continuing Salience of Race: Discrimination and Diversity in South Africa’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 26 (1): pp. 1–25. Shohamy, E. (2010), ‘Building the Nation, Writing the Past’, in A. Jaworski and C. Thurlow (eds.), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London: Continuum, pp. 241–255. Sloterdijk, P. (2011), Bubbles. Spheres: Microspherelogy, London: MIT Press. Stroud, C. (2016), ‘Turbulent Linguistic Landscapes and the Semiotics of Citizenship’, in R. Blackwood, E. Lanza, and H. Woldemariam (eds.), Negotiating and Contesting Identities in Linguistic Landscapes, London and New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 1–14. Stroud, C. and Jegels, D. (2014), ‘Semiotic Landscapes and Mobile Narrations of Place: Performing the Local’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 228: pp. 179–199. Stroud, C. and Mpendukana, S. (2009), ‘Towards a Material Ethnography of Linguistic Landscape: Multilingualism, Mobility and Space in a South African Township’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13 (3): pp. 363–386. Thompson, G. A. (2016), ‘Temporality, Stance Ownership and the Constitution of Subjectivity’, Language and Communication, 46: pp. 30–41. Thrift, N. (2014), ‘The “Sentient” City and What It May Portend’, Big Data and Society, 1 (1): pp. 1–21. Train, R. (2016), ‘Connecting Visual Presents to Archival Pasts in Multilingual California. Towards Historical Depth in Linguistic Landscape’, Linguistic Landscapes, 2 (3): pp. 223–246. Walker, M. (2005), ‘Rainbow Nation or New Racism? Theorizing Race and Identity Formation in South African Higher Education’, Race Ethnicity and Education, 8 (2): pp. 129–146. Wee, L. (2016), ‘Situating Affect in Linguistic Landscapes’, Linguistic Landscape, 2 (2): pp. 105–126.

2

Orders of (In)Visibility: Colonial and Postcolonial Chronotopes in Linguistic Landscapes of Memorization in Maputo Manuel Guissemo

Introduction Maputo city is the capital of Mozambique, a global south country located on the African continent and a former Portuguese colony that gained its independence on 25 June 1975. It is estimated that more than twenty languages are spoken in the country (cf. Chimbutane, 2012), but ever since colonial times Portuguese colonial policy recognized only Portuguese as the official language. This ideology of Portuguese pre-eminence prevailed into postcolonial independence. When the new revolutionary Mozambican government was proclaimed, it opted for the ‘production of Mozambican nationhood through the Portuguese language’ (Owen, 2007: p. 22; Stroud, 1999, 2007). Political changes starting in the 1990s began to ‘give citizenship’ to local African languages, with the result that these languages are now gradually being used in more state media (radios and televisions), in public institutions and in primary education through models of bilingual teaching. Some public universities have also introduced courses teaching these languages, as well as initiated teacher-training programmes to meet the demands for experimental bilingual programmes (cf. Chimbutane and Stroud, 2012).1 One interesting reflection of contemporary development is that African languages are increasingly being used on (official) signage and plaques. This is a marked departure from a historical situation in which these languages were considered highly unacceptable and even at times prohibited in urban public spaces. However,

I would like to thank especially Christopher Stroud for guidance and engagement beyond the call of duty throughout the writing of this chapter. My thanks to Caroline Kerfoot for a careful reading and the two anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback. Stockholm University/Eduardo Mondlane University.

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the African-language names are written according to Portuguese orthography, despite the existence of official standards for their spelling. This Portuguese-ification of public space inspired Honwana (2015) to conclude that ‘there seems to be no hurry or need to correct in our toponymy the errors and distortions that comes from the colonial time’ (Honwana, 2015: p. 20). In this chapter, I suggest that far from being an idiosyncratic and occasional phenomenon, due to either ignorance of African orthographic norms or an articulation of grass-roots literacies (e.g. Blommaert, 2010) (or both), the ways in which Portuguese figures in public space – in particular the appearance of Portuguese on the spelling and phraseology of African-language signage – are systematic, and trace complex roots back to coloniality, and its varied but continued replication in contemporary time. In order to argue this, I take my cue from linguistic landscape studies (LLS) and offer an account of what languages and linguistic forms occur in public spaces in Maputo in terms of a broader semiotic framing of types of inscription and artefact made visible or erased over time. I am particularly interested in public places of memorization, that is, linguistic landscapes comprising material artefacts, such as monuments or placards, that carry historical and ideological significance and that are designed to reflect social ideologies (Train, 2016) and articulate grand narratives of nation-building. In what follows I introduce a conceptual framework to help account for how grand narratives are made flesh and the role of linguistic forms in the process.

Theoretical framework – Memorization, orders of visibility and the chronotope LL is a field of studies interested ‘in forms of writing, languaging, texts and images that give shape to the public space’ (Ben-Rafael and Ben-Rafael, 2016: p. 293) made through deliberate human intervention and meaning making (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010: p. 2). The field has evolved from an overwhelming focus on written language (e.g. Landry and Bourhis, 1997) to an interest in a wider semiotics (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010; Shohamy, 2012). More recently, physical artefacts and their (geosemiotic) placement (Ben-Rafael and Ben-Rafael, 2016) as well as bodies/skinscapes (Peck and Stroud, 2015) and emplaced affect have also garnered interest within an LLS framework. Of particular interest in this chapter are artefacts and inscriptions of memorization, the multilayered historicities and intertextualities layered into the materiality of artefacts ‘that commit to public memory linguistic, political, and educational discourses – with their constitutive ideologies, practices, and policies – designed to “make the past present for the future” in public space’ (Train, 2016: p. 223; cf. also Woldemariam, 2016; Shohamy and Waksman, 2010 for LLS approaches to monuments as canonizing the memory and ideology of a nation). Memorization is usefully understood in terms of the notion of ‘orders of (in) visibility’ introduced by Kerfoot and Hyltenstam (2017) to refer to ‘the hierarchies of objects, social relations, ways of knowing, being, and saying concealed or embedded beneath the apparently common sense and taken for granted in policies and practices’

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(Kerfoot and Hyltenstam, 2017: p. 5). ‘Orders of visibility’ have resonances with Foucault’s ‘order of discourse’ ([1970] 1981), ‘a kind of gradation among discourses’ (55) where some are ephemeral and disappear almost immediately and some over time become sedimented into religious, juridical, literary and scientific text (cf. Kerfoot and Hyltenstam, 2017). Orders of visibility oblige us to explore what is, or is not, manifest in artefacts and inscriptions of memorization, and to pay attention to the discourses of presence, absence, erasure and memory – ‘the shifting regimes of historicity’ (Hartog, 2015) that organize our understanding of ‘the past’, ‘the present’ and ‘the future’. A particularly useful tool for charting how regimes of historicity are mapped onto orders of visibility that subsequently become memorized in linguistic landscapes is Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope. Chronotope from Greek ‘chronos’ (time and ‘topos’) space was a notion introduced by Bakhtin to denote ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’ (Horquist, 1981: p. 84), where ‘time, as it were thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible’ and where ‘space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ (Bakhtin, 1984: p. 84). Chronotopes provide the narrative mould for how events are embedded in time and space and constrain what forms of personhood or social actors are possible (Hanks, 1990; Wirtz, 2016). Chronotopes also map different time–space configurations and galleries of social actors with particular languages, linguistic forms and concomitant indexical values (Blommaert and De Fina, 2016: p. 5). Because of the intimate and intrinsic connections between categories of space and time, the notion of chronotope is an excellent tool with which to explore linguistic landscapes of memorization – themselves instantiations of events in time in place. Bakhtin himself wrote on how ‘a locality is the trace of event, a trace of what has shaped it, a way of making sense out of space’ (Bakhtin, 1986: p. 189). The thrust of this study, then, is to explore the chronotopical structure of different orders of visibility and their memorization associated with the grand narratives of Mozambican nationhood, and how this might account for the languages made visible, the forms in which they occur and their indexical values. The procedure is essentially diachronic (Pavlenko and Mullen, 2015: p. 117) in that I explore what particular narrative/events of nation-building are visibilized and retold, or erased and replaced in signage and other forms of memorization, and the particular languages and other semiotic indexicals used to tell the story. In other words, I explore the artefact as an index of its history – ‘when it was designed and put into the landscape, under what ideological conditions and for what specific purposes’ (Pietikäinen, 2013: p. 5), teasing out the multiplicity of space–time–personhood dimensions layered into the artefact (cf. Pietikäinen, 2013: p. 4). For the purposes of this study, I have chosen to first look at identical places across history as to what artefacts they host, and, secondly, to look in detail at one type of artefact across time and place, namely street and neighbourhood signs (toponyms). The data comprise both archivally sourced information and the compilation of an empirical set of (photographic representations) of these artefacts collected during one year of fieldwork, from July 2014 to July 2015. During this period, I walked almost daily through the different places in Maputo city observing monuments and toponymy visible in public space and, at the same time, documenting these observations

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through photos. I was able to collect a total of 203 digital photographs that I hope are representative of Maputo city linguistic landscape. In the next section, I look into the chronotopic structure of Mozambique’s grand narraties of nation-building and progress across three historical periods of Mozambican history. I pay special attention to forms of visibility or erasure of language in relation to the galleries of social actors.

Chronotopes of change and stasis It is useful to distinguish between three historical conjunctures within which to situate chronotopes and their orders of visibility in memorizations. These are: first, a broad-brush stroke of the colonial period (with an emphasis on Portugal’s response to a post-Berlin colonial Mozambique); secondly, an immediate post-independent period (roughly 1976–1992); and thirdly, a period of gradual (neo-)liberalization and cosmopolitanism (roughly covering the period from 1992 to the present).

Colonial Mozambique The Portuguese first arrived in Mozambique in 1498 on an expedition led by the navigator Vasco da Gama, although the colonial occupation of the area first began with the building of a prison in 1782 by military coming from Ilha de Moçambique (cf. Guimarães s/d and Melo, 2013). However, it was only after the Berlin conference (1884–1885) when the European colonizers divided the continent between them that Portugal felt obliged to treat Mozambique in a colonially ‘befitting’ manner. From this point onwards, Mozambique became a settler colony (Meneses and Gomes, 2013). A Portuguese trader called Lourenço Marques, who was the first to explore that area in 1544, had the capital city named after him in honour of his exploits. Over time, the colonial government created a ‘symbolic and mental landscape’ (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010: p. 7) in Lourenço Marques that mimicked everyday life in Portugal as an ‘overseas provinces’. All colonial ventures have been built on ideologies and practices of racism, and Portuguese colonialism was definitely no exception (Chimbutane, 2011: p. 33; Cumbe, 2016: p. 197; Jones, 2006: p. 70). At that time, in Lourenço Marques, even with the status of assimilado,2 the general principle was that black skin, whatever the legal status of the individual, prevented access to most of the places of socializing and leisure frequented by ‘the civilized’, the white people (cf. Cabaço, 2007: p. 44). Cabaço remarks on how until the early 1960s, there was in fact a compulsory curfew for blacks in the cities. After 9 p.m. any African who circulated on the streets was stopped by the police and had to prove his status of assimilado or justify his presence in the prohibited space (cf. Cabaço, 2007: p. 56; cf. Penvenne, 1995). The constraints on the times and places in which the domestic labouring Mozambican indigene could ‘appear’ are reflected in language labels such as Português do quintal (backyard or kitchen Portuguese, cf. Penvenne, 1995), a variety perceived to be inferior to the Portuguese spoken by assimilados, who had had a basic schooling.

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There was a hierarchy in the classification of languages or repertoires linked to race, where ‘good Portuguese’ was associated with white people and distinguished from the Portuguese spoken by black Africans. Furthermore, it was not only the so-called indigenes who were largely ‘prohibited’ in urban public space – the languages they spoke were also outlawed. African languages and Portuguese were framed differently (…) and organized into different orders of visibility (Kerfoot and Hyltenstam, 2017; Stroud and Guissemo, 2015: p. 9). Portuguese was tied to public and official domains and functions, and to ideas of modernity and the metropole, whereas African languages were restricted to the informal, home domains and to ideas of tradition and the local (Stroud, 2007: p. 30, see also Firmino, 2002). There was then a particular ordering of time and space in terms of the visibility or complete erasure of who could racially inhabit or move through urban spaces and when. Movement through time for indigenous Mozambicans was punctuated, calculated and restricted, whereas the white settler moved through time with uninhibited leisure. Whereas the white colonialist roamed across space without hindrance, black Mozambicans found themselves confined to the peripheries and backyards of cities. These features of life can be found represented chronotopically in – what I am here calling – the imperial–colonial Lusophone chronotope.

The imperial–colonial–Lusophone chronotope The division of colonial time into ‘black time/space (places and chores of the day) and white time/space (leisure time of open beaches)’ is chronotopically reflected in different formal techniques of representation across modalities such as architecture (houses with large stands and imposing facades); urban design (wide boulevards and avenues, and many streets leading to parade squares) and photographic representations (the wide expanse of beaches populated by the leisurely pursuits of the white and privileged). In urban Maputo, plaques and statues in proud memory of the bravery of grand colonial conquest instantiate the individuated presence of the colonialists, filling space and determining the meaning and value of moments of time (e.g. the victory at the battle of Coolela, 1895). On the other hand, black Mozambicans are invisibilized and erased from public representations. Whereas whites are visible everywhere, and often individuated, blacks are more often than not depicted as an anonymous mass. Memorials and works of art that honour and perpetuate the memories of the regime’s ideological, political and military leaders provide telling examples of this (Guilat and Espinosa-Ramírez, 2016: p. 248). The monument of Mouzinho de Albuquerque, which was erected in a square named after him, is a case in point. Mouzinho de Alburquerque, a prominent Portuguese soldier in the Mozambican military campaign in 1895, and later general governor and commissar of Mozambique from 1896 to 1898 (cf. Wheeler, 1980: p. 295), was a key figure in the battle of Coolela, 7 November 1895. There were thousands of African warrior casualties. Figure 2.1 shows part of the statue of Mouzinho de Albuquerque, a monument that was integral to ‘the symbolic construction of the public space’ (Ben-Rafael et al., 2006). The monument consisted of two parts: a large stone pedestal with two bronze reliefs, one representing the Portuguese military attack on Macontene and the other

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Figure 2.1 The Portuguese military attack on Macontene, Gaza, © M. Guissemo.

representing the capture of Gungunhana by Mouzinho de Alburquerque, and, on top, the bronze statue of Mouzinho riding a horse (cf. Verheij, 2012). On this pedestal, CHAIMITE, the name of the village in which Mouzinho de Albuquerque arrested Gungunhane was written in capital letters. This grand celebratory statue of Marshall Mouzinho is an example of white individuation; all the important soldiers are visible and named – Ernesto Maria Vieira da Rocha, Mouzinho de Albuquerque, Aires de Ornelas and Vasconcelos, Manuel Ferrão de Castelo Branco, Conde da Ponte and Ensign (Alferes) Reis – and their heroic deeds held forth for all to see (cf. Verheij, 2012). The black indigenous resistance, on the other hand, is represented as an amorphous pile of bodies under the hooves of the soldiers’ horses. The invisibility and erasure of black Mozambicans in representations extends further to local African languages at the time. A short street called Rua Araújo leads off MacMahon square ending at Praça 7 de Março (now Praça 25 de Junho). Araújo, who gave the name to the street, was the first governor of the Prison of Lourenço Marques nominated in 1781 (The Delagoa Bay Review, 2010: p. 2). This street was famous during the colonial regime as the icon of nightlife, with establishments lit up with huge neon signs, creating the impression at night that ‘it looked like it was Las Vegas close to Indico’ (The Delagoa Bay Review, 2010: p. 4). Figure 2.2 also shows that Portuguese and English were the languages most visible on the signs ‘Bar’, ‘Texas’, ‘Cafe Palace’, ‘Dancing’, ‘Central’, ‘Submarimo’ and ‘Pinguim’

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Figure 2.2 Rua Araújo 1960: Site of luxury in Lourenço Marques. Source: The Delagoa Bay Review, 2010.

in this global playground. Some of these names are international brands that index the cosmopolitan reach of the street and its nightlife. The range of languages found in the street of Rua Araújo combine to a mosaic familiar to cities such as Havanna, where the rythm of life was determined by the pleasures of the night and the late mornings. José Craveirinha (1922–2003), in his famous tale Hamina ‘faz haraquiri’ nos templos da Rua Araújo, makes a reference to the cosmopolitan environment of Rua Araújo in his depiction of sailors calling out to the popular lady of the night, Hamina, in their many different foreign languages (English – come here; Portuguese – anda cá; local African language (Xirhonga) – buia aleno3 and French – venez ici): Hamina, come here – Hamina, anda cá – Hamina, buia aleno – Hamina, venez ici -. (Craveirinha, 1996)

As with the statue and plaque, the invisibility of the African indigene goes hand in glove with the invisibility of the local African language. The imperial–colonial chronotope does not provide a persona for the African at this time and place, other than as victim of erasure. Portuguese, on the other hand, gains its cosmopolitan indexicalities of power, play and enjoyment from the agency of the Portuguese colonialist. In 1962, when the nationalists led by Eduardo Mondlane formed the liberation party Frelimo, time and place were radically reconceived and the grand narrative of liberation repopulated with new actors and new forms of (in)visibility. However, the

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consequences of independence for the visibility of local African languages remained relatively unchanged.

Revolutionary Mozambique On 25 June 1975, Samora Machel proclaimed Mozambican independence, became the first independent president of Mozambique. Frelimo officially declared itself a Marxist-Leninist party (Jones, 2006: p. 138). During the transitional government and for the first years after independence, the party carried out a broad process of decolonization of the social and political landscape of Mozambique (Meneses, 2016: p. 58). The revolutionary government set about reconstructing the nation through the reconstruction of colonial time and space. As part of the new temporal order, Frelimo forbade traditional cultural manifestations – many of which had been ‘constructed’ by the colonial regime. Traditional culture in the prevailing ideology of Frelimo was associated with defeat and humiliation; it was the cause of the weakness that allowed the subjugation of Mozambique by the Portuguese (Sumich, 2008: p. 329) in the first place. In this sense, some traditional practices such as the exercise of traditional authority, the lobolo,4 polygamy and witchcraft were officially outlawed. This was essentially a modernist project that sought to reposition the black Mozambican in new forms of the ‘present’. In some cases, Frelimo had to use coercive methods to combat popular resistance to its modernization plans (cf. Sumich, 2008; Stroud, 1999). Likewise, spaces that Frelimo perceived as having erased the humanity of the black Mozambican were reconfigured. Among its decolonizing activities, the Frelimo government ordered the closing of all leisure establishments located along the Rua Araújo, thereby prohibiting what they considered to be an immoral, decadent, capitalist exploitation of the bodies and political and economic vulnerabilities of Mozambican women. Changes in time and space coalesced in the deportation of prostitutes and other undesirables to labour camps in the far North of the country – Operation Production. This was a massive engineering of invisibility in the pursuit of the revolutionary ideology of Frelimo after independence, personified in the New Man. Nielsen (2010) points: In an attempt to leap into a socialist future, the ruling Frelimo party created the Homem Novo (New Man) immediately after independence in 1975 as a figure devoted to the eternal revolution. As immoral antithesis, a peculiar cartoon figure, Xiconhoca, was created to represent those moral aberrations which impeded the full realization of the socialist utopia. (Nielsen, 2010: p. 1 cited by Langa, 2014: p. 163)

The New Man who would build postcolonial Mozambique was a modern man who was not tribalist, traditionalist, obscurantist or an enemy of the revolution (cf. Stroud, 2007 for more detail). This personification excluded the speaking of local African languages in that ‘any attempts to use local languages for official businesses were considered as evidence of the inimigo interno, the “internal enemy”’ (Stroud, 2002:

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p. 262) as encouraging local African languages was seen as divisive and potentially causing tribal or ethnic problems (see Lopes, 2004; Stroud, 2002).

The New Man chronotope With the independence of Mozambique, one of the major priorities of Frelimo’s government was to replace all visual elements of the colonial political ideology within the city with celebratory items of the revolution. Rather than make ‘the past present for the future’ (Train, 2016: pp. 223), Frelimo sought to remake the past for a future in the present. This took various forms, such as the removal of ancien régime monuments and erecting new monuments in the symbolic refiguration of space, as well as the choice of new toponyms, often with revolutionary connotations, in order to usher in a sense of a new dawning, a break with the past. One of Frelimo’s first re-symbolizations of public space was to remove Mouzinho de Albuquerque’s monument from the square. This signalled a crisp rupture with colonial ideology, and by glorifying the heroes of independence, it also served to implant the new ideology in the public space. Some of the most significant parts of this monument are now in Fortaleza de Maputo (Maputo Fortress), where they serve the museological purpose of material ‘for the study of the history of colonial occupation’ (Verheij, 2014: p. 39). Praça Mouzinho de Albuquerque was renamed Praça da Independência (Independence Square), where frequent public ceremonies were held that served as an opportunity for ‘mental decolonization’, something that Samora Machel saw as a ‘great challenge after independence’ (Samora Machel in Notícias, 1982). Post-independent Maputo city has replaced other monuments with the aim of immortalizing the history of the liberators of the country. For example, next to Independence Square, in the main entrance of Jardim Tunduru, a bronze statue of Samora Machel was inaugurated in 1990, in the same place where the colonial government had erected a monument commemorating the visit of the Portuguese president Carmona in 1939 (cf. Verheij, 2014). As was done in colonial times, in all monuments ‘the reinforcement of collective national ideology is related to the personal stories appropriated in the represented texts and images’ (Shohamy and Waksman, 2010: p. 249). An interesting re-visibilization of public space was the way in which the colonial monument to the dead of the First World War, Monumento Padrão da Guerra (see Figure 2.3), located at Worker’s Square (Praça dos Trabalhadores), former MacMahon Square, was allowed to remain, but where it was given a completely new significance in popular narrative. Instead of celebrating the Portuguese colonial power’s contribution to the European (World) War, the monument today is read as honouring a Mozambican woman who managed to kill a huge snake that at the time killed the people that circulated in those areas (cf. Verheij, 2014). This is the only monument erected in Mozambique by the colonial regime that portrays Mozambicans favourably, and the fact that it opens for readings that do not relate at all to the colonial regime (cf. Verheij, 2012) serves to revisibilize social actors previously erased.

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Figure 2.3 The monument to the dead of the First World War, © M. Guissemo.

New toponyms that signalled new times also served to refigure the symbolic significance of space. One form that this took was new toponyms created in postindependence that exalted the liberators of the country, as well as granted recognition to those countries that helped Frelimo during the colonial war. For example, the city of Lourenço Marques was renamed Maputo city, and Rua Araújo was renamed Rua do Bagamoyo (cf. The Delagoa Bay Review, 2010). Bagamoyo, translated variously as ‘Be quiet, my heart’, ‘Lay down the burden of your heart’, ‘Rest your soul (here)’, ‘Free the heart’ and ‘Rest the mind, throw off melancholy, be cheered’ (Brown, 2016: p. 38), was seen as a fitting name for ushering in the ‘new’. Bagamoyo was the first military training camp of Frelimo in Tanzania (cf. Maina et al., 2004), so the name

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change also served to symbolize the sacred places of the glorious guerrilla far away in Tanzania (cf. The Delagoa Bay Review, 2010). It also referred to a school for the formation of the New Mozambican Man, escola para a formação do Homem Novo Moçambicano. The change of names affected other streets that had been named in celebration of the military victories of colonialism in Mozambique. Street names such as ‘Avenida 5 de Outubro’, a tribute to the date of the proclamation of the Republic in Portugal, was changed to ‘Avenida Josina Machel’, a Mozambican heroine. In other cases, the new names were given in tribute to countries that had helped Frelimo in the anticolonial struggle, for example ‘Avenida Massano de Amorim’. In colonial times, Amorim was the governor of Gaza, and in 1897 he was military commander of Tete; this street was rechristened as ‘Avenida Mao Tsé Tung’, in honour of China’s head of state and chairperson of the Chinese Communist Party (see Cabral, 1975: p. 24), as this country had lent support to the Frelimo guerrillas in the fight against the Portuguese administration (Lusa/Fim, 2016). Another technique of naming was to replace names referring to districts and regions of Portugal with new names for districts, provinces, cities and rivers in Mozambique. For example, names such as Rua de Tsangano and Rua de Chimoio replaced names of the colonial regime, such as Rua de Vila Real, Rua de Bragança and so on. Renaming in this manner served to sever Mozambique from its ties to Portugal as a colonial overseas province and to reconstruct it as an independent state with national borders, and its own rivers and districts (see Cumbe, 2016 and Moçambique para todos, 2009 for more details). I note that local and traditional names were re-visibilized, although not in local African languages but Portuguese. The legitimacy of Portuguese as the sole public language par excellence was reinforced. In all public forums (media, street signs and public services), local African languages were represented as undesirable and reactionary. If during colonial time local African languages were invisibilized and hidden away because they were spoken by a subject who was often erased from the colonial narrative, in independent Mozambique, local African languages were written out of public space or represented as degraded and code mixed because they were indexical of potential fifth columnists, and antisocialist ethnic traditionalists. Portuguese, on the other hand, was reindexicalized as the language of the revolutionary New Man – of new times and new spaces. The effect was to reinforce the visibility and value of Portuguese as a language of modernity and progress, and to perpetuate the invisibilization of local languages as being of another time and another space.

Mozambique retraditionalized The death of President Samora Machel in October 1986 and the abandonment of Marxism and the option for liberalism in 1989 heralded the start of a new sociopolitical era in Mozambique. The long period of civil war ended with negotiations between Frelimo and the resistance movement Renamo, leading to a peace accord in 1992, the implementation of political reform and the first democratic elections in 1994 (cf. Jones, 2006: p. 147). The rise of a post-Marxist neo-liberal democratic state in the early 1990s

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(cf. Owen, 2007) created a new social political conjuncture in Mozambique, ushering in new public discourses that seemingly sought to revalue some of the traditional social values of Mozambicaness (compare Abousnnouga and Machin, 2010: p. 223). A new Constitution of the Republic was adopted in 1990, and for the first time ever the development and increased use of national languages in public life was promoted, including in education (cf. RM, 1990, Article 5 cited by Chimbutane, 2011: p. 45). The revised constitution of 2004 (cf. Artigo 9) reaffirmed the value and promotion of the use of national languages, but went one step further by stating that ‘the State promotes the development of national culture and personality and guarantees the free expression of the traditions and values of Mozambican society’ (Constituição da República, 2004, Artigo 115). According to Chimbutane (2011), this attitudinal change shows that the policies adopted by the government have moved from the onelanguage-one-state approach to one in which there were attempts to accommodate linguistic and cultural diversity. In this sense, local African language won new orders of audibility and visibility with their emergence into the public sphere in Maputo city, although this is predominantly confined to Xichangana and Xirhonga, the two most spoken local African languages. Xichangana is also the language of the political elite in Mozambique since the first three leaders of Frelimo Mondlane, Machel and Chissano were native speakers of this language. The other local African languages appear only in oral speeches. At the same time, Mozambique has reoriented its policies to global (neo-)liberalism and cosmopolitanism. The discovery of vast coal and gas reserves has attracted foreign investors from many corners of the globe, with the largest stake in the country without doubt being that of the Chinese. In Maputo, the Chinese have invested massively in infrastructure since about 2009, building a new airport, supplying a number of high-rise buildings and constructing a four-lane motorway where there was once a meandering and pot-holed beach road leading to nowhere in particular.

Chronotopes of retraditionalization Today, fewer people know the significance of the venerated socialist heroes of independent Mozambique found in the revolutionary toponymy of avenues with names like Kim Il Sung, Vladimir Lenin, Ho Chi Min and Salvador Allende. However, this urban amnesia is being offset by new forms of memorialization. As late as 2011, on the occasion of the commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of President Samora Machel, the largest statue built in Mozambique in his memory was inaugurated in the same place where the monument of Marshal Mouzinho had been erected. The plaque of the monument presents the following information written in Portuguese and in capital letters: ‘Monument in homage to the founder of the Mozambican State and first president of the People’s Republic of Mozambique Samora Moisés Machel. Inaugurated by his Excellency Armando Emílio Guebuza, President of the Republic of Mozambique. Maputo City, October 19, 2011’. Retraditionalization is the chronotopical expression of the new Mozambican cosmopolitanism and neo-liberalism. Portuguese has once more become reindexicalized to now stand proxy for a globetrotter with a taste for the latest in

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mobile phones and European lifestyle. As during colonialism, Portuguese now jostles with other global languages (English, Italian and Chinese) in public spaces, taking on connotations of the mobility of its speakers, both socially upwardly and geographically, and complementing the new aesthetics in the steel and glass of highrises. Local African languages, on the other hand, remain tightly glued to the local and the modern-day precariat, spoken by those who live primarily in the outlying bairros of Maputo. In ways similar to how the traditional indigene and his/her language was erased totally in colonial time, and the visibility of traditional speakers and their languages monitored and controlled during independence, so is the dosage of local African language visibility carefully measured in the public spaces of memorization in present-day Mozambique. Local African languages appear in public in company with Portuguese. This is the case, for example, with some of the toponyms in local African languages that are now replacing the older signs. Local African names are now used by the Municipality of Maputo city to substitute the previous administrative division of this city. The new names are Distrito Municipal KaMpfumu, Distrito Municipal de Nhlamankulu, Distrito Municipal KaMaxakeni, Distrito Municipal KaMubukwana, Distrito Municipal KaTembe and Distrito Municipal KaNyaka.5 Malhangalene ‘B’ was one of Maputo city neighbourhoods which saw most renamings. For example, in bairro Central ‘C’, Rua Marquês de Pombal, which had strong connotation with Portuguese history, was substituted by Rua Ngungunhana, who was the last Emperor of Gaza and a symbol of the Mozambican resistance against the colonial domination. In some cases, we see in the examples how these new toponyms are accompanied by an explanation in Portuguese of the meaning of the name attributed to the street. In Figure 2.4, ‘Rua de Chinyamapere’ hosts underneath the explanatory text in

Figure 2.4 Example of new sign Rua de Chinyamapere that value Mozambican culture, © M. Guissemo.

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Portuguese as ‘Pinturas rupestre em Manica’; it is a tribute to rock paintings in Manica province which are testimony of the existence of settlements in that place before our existence. This is an innovation that did not exist in previous toponyms and, although didactically useful, also emphasizes the marked or ‘symbolic’ nature of the African names as opposed to names in Portuguese. Figure 2.5 is one example of how the orthography and phonology of the Portuguese language permeate the local African language name. In Figure 2.5, the writing ‘STAE – CIDADE DE MAPUTO, DISTRITO MUNICIPAL LHAMANCULO’ belongs to a government institution. What is noticeable is that the local African name ‘Lhamanculo’ is written according to the Portuguese spelling of African languages. Before the approval of the new toponymy in Maputo city, this name was written ‘Chamanculo’, obeying the Portuguese orthography. The intention on the sign was to write ‘Nhlamankulu’ [nɫamaŋkulu], in accordance with the municipality resolution (cf. following text). However, the influence of the orthographic system and even phonological system of Portuguese language motivated the writing of ‘Lhamanculo’, given the fact that in the phonological system of Portuguese the sound/ hl/[ɫ]6 does not exist, and is therefore incorrectly represented here by the Portuguese sound/lh/[ʎ].7 Furthermore, there is little use of grapheme ‘k’ in the orthographic system of the Portuguese; therefore, ‘k’ was represented by ‘c’.8 The last vowel should be ‘u’ and not ‘o’, again testifying to the influence of Portuguese orthography that has few words ending in ‘u’. Just as Portuguese remains the language of the modern state – however culturally diverse that state may be constitutionally – so does public space retain traces of the layered modernities of the colonial and postcolonial state.

Figure 2.5 Visibility of local African language in urban space, © M. Guissemo.

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Discussion/conclusion Carlos Serra stated that ‘things in life do not flow linearly, as phenomena following one after the other without memory of the past’ (1986: p. 58). Pietikäinen (2013) reminds us that space is something that ‘is carved out and performed in a complex and changing system of semiotic practices and circulating discourses’ (2013: p. 3). I have tried to capture the workings of such circulating discourses in the deeply layered and complex history as they pertain to the forms of visibility and erasure of Portuguese and Mozambican languages. I have done so by juxtaposing the notions of memorization, orders of visibility and the concept of chronotope, in an account of why the urban landscape appears to contain ‘obsolete elements that no longer “fit” into the social order’ we imagine (Blommaert and De Fina, 2016: p. 19), in particular the traces of Portuguese appearing in local African language forms. The semiotic landscapes of contemporary public space in Maputo city comprise a layering of imperial–colonial chronotopes, revolutionary chronotopes and the chronotopes of a more diverse and constitutionally open retraditionalization. Although different regimes of historicity have produced different orders of visibility and artefacts of memorization associated with the political ideologies of the time, traces of each remain ever present. Bakhtin writes that chronotopes ‘may be interwoven with, replace or contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex interrelationships’ (Bakhtin, 1981: p. 252). And Folch-Serra has remarked on how ‘[chronotopical] forms continue to live in the objective forms that culture assumes’ (Folch-Serra, 1990: p. 263). Lemon’s notion of heterochronicity captures how Mozambican public spaces are structured, that is, ‘the co-existence of multiple chronotopes in an interactional event’ (Lemon, 2009 quoted by Wirtz, 2016: p. 348). This is evident in the overlaps and synergies but also contradictions and distinctions in the chronotopes of colonialism, independence and retraditionalization. But common to all chronotopical variants of both the colonial and independence times is the modernist aesthetic of Portuguese. Blommaert and De Fina (2016) note how forms of speech indexically anchored in the past can be re-entextualized in contemporary time, and this is what I find with respect to the significance accorded to Portuguese and African languages throughout history. Portuguese retains its high visibility in Mozambique and its value of a modern – and global – language. It can even be argued that its visibility has increased in this moment of retraditionalization as it is now even visible in the writing of local African languages.

Notes 1 Despite this, ‘Portuguese continues to be the sole official language and, technically, the sole language of education, whereas African languages remain relegated to informal domains and primarily used orally’ (Chimbutane, 2017: p. 4). 2 Assimilado was a status that was attributed to ‘Africans who had broken with their traditional bonds and adapted themselves to the Portuguese language and culture’

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3

4 5 6 7 8

Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes (Ferreira, 1974: p. 37; for more details, see also Davidson, 1974: p. 18; Stroud, 2007: p. 34). The sentence buia aleno was written based on the orthography of the Portuguese language. Its writing according to the standard orthography of the local African languages is buya haleno. A compensation that a bridegroom’s family makes to the bride’s family before the marriage. See Resolução nr 10/AM/2009 de 25 de Novembro – Resolução nr 20/AM/2010 de 17 de Março da Assembleia Municipal. Unvoiced alveolar lateral fricative. Palatal lateral approximant. See Joka’s explanation of this crossover of orthographies involving ‘k’ and ‘c’ in Sitoe (2014: p. 63).

References Abousnnouga, G and Machin, D. (2010), ‘War Monuments and the Changing Discourses of Nation and Soldiery’, in A. Jaworski and C. Thurlow (eds.), Advances in Sociolinguistic: Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London: Continuum, pp. 219–240. Bakhtin, M. (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1984), Rabelais and his World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986), The Dialogical Imagination, Austin: University of Texas Press. Ben-Rafael, E. and Ben-Rafael, M. (2016), ‘Schöneberg. Memorializing the Persecution of Jews’, Linguistic Landscape, 2 (2): pp. 291–310. Ben-Rafael, E., Shohamy, E., Amara, M and Trumper-Hecht, N. (2006), ‘Linguistic Landscape as Symbolic Construction of the Public Space: The Case of Israel’, in D. Gorter (ed.), Linguistic Landscape: A New Approach to Multilingualism, Clevedon, Buffalo and Toronto: Multilingual Matters, pp. 7–30. Blommaert, J. (2010), The Sociolinguistics of Globalization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. and De Fina, A. (2016), ‘Chronotopic Identities: On the Timespace Organization of Who We Are’, Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, 153: pp. 1–26. Brown, W. (2016), ‘Bagamoyo: Inquiry into an East African Place Name’, in L. Bigon (ed.), Place Names in Africa. Colonial Urban Legacies, Entangled Histories, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 37–44. Cabaço, J. (2007), Moçambique, Identidades, Colonialismo e Libertação (Tese de doutoramento não publicada), São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo; Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas; Departamento de Antropologia. Cabral, A. (1975), Dicionário de Nomes Geográficos de Moçambique – Sua Origem, Lourenço Marques: Empresa Moderna. Chimbutane, F. (2011), Rethinking Bilingual Education in Postcolonial Contexts, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Chimbutane, F. (2012), Panorama Linguístico de Moçambique – Análise dos Dados do III Recenseamento Geral da População e Habitação de 2007, Maputo: INE. Chimbutane, F. (2017), ‘Language Policies and the Role of Development Agencies in Postcolonial Mozambique’, Current Issues in Language Planning, 18 (4): pp. 356–370.

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Chimbutane, F. and Stroud, C. (eds.) (2012), Educação bilingue em Moçambique: Reflectindo criticamente sobre políticas e práticas, Maputo: Texto Editores. Constituição da República. (2004), Constituição da República (actualizada), Maputo: Imprensa Nacional de Moçambique. Craveirinha, J. (1996), Hamina e outros contos, Maputo: Ndjira. Cumbe, C. (2016), ‘Formal and Informal Toponymic Inscriptions in Maputo: Towards Socio-Linguistics and Anthropology of Street Naming’, in L. Bigon (ed.), Place Names in Africa-Colonial Urban Legacies, Entangled Histories, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 195–205. Davidson, B. (1974), ‘Portuguese Colonial Values: An Introduction’, in E. Ferreira (ed.), Portuguese Colonialism in Africa: The End of an Era. The Effects of Portuguese Colonialism on Education, Science, Culture and Information, Paris: The Unesco Press, pp. 11–27. Ferreira, E. (1974), Portuguese Colonialism in Africa: The End of an Era. The Effects of Portuguese Colonialism on Education, Science, Culture and Information, Paris: The Unesco Press. Firmino, G. (2002), A ‘Questão Linguística’ na África Pós-Colonial: O caso Do Português e das Línguas Autóctones em Moçambique, Maputo: Promédia. Folch-Serra, M. (1990), ‘Place, Voice, Space: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dialogical Landscape’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 8: pp. 255–274. Foucault, M. ([1970] 1981), ‘The Order of Discourse’, in R. Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader, Boston, London and Heuley : Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 51–81. Guilat, Y and Espinosa-Ramírez, A. (2016), ‘The Historical Memory Law and its Role in Redesigning Semiotic Cityscapes in Spain’, Linguistic Landscape, 2/3: pp. 247–274. Guimarães, S. (s/d), ‘O choque cultural do “retorno”: a vida em Moçambique e a vida em Portugal, uma narrativa na 1a pessoa’, E-REI: Revista de Estudos Interculturais do CEI, pp. 1–23. Hanks, W. (1990), Referential Practice: Language and Lived Space among the Maya, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hartog, F. (2015), Regimes of Historicity Presentism and Experiences of Time, New York: Columbia University Press. Honwana, L. (2015), ‘A Rica Nossa Cultura’, in P. Gonçalves and F. Chimbutane (eds.), Multilinguismo e Multiculturalismo em Moçambique: em Direcção a uma Coerência entre Discurso e Prática, Maputo: Alcance Editores, pp. 7–22. Horquist, M. (ed.) (1981), The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, Austin: University of Texas Press. Jaworski, A. and Thurlow, C. (2010), ‘Introducing Semiotic Landscapes’, in A. Jaworski and C. Thurlow (eds.), Advances in Sociolinguistic: Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London: Continuum, pp. 1–40. Jones, B. (2006), Explaining Global Poverty. A Critical Realist Approach, London and New York: Routledge. Kerfoot, C. and Hyltenstam, K. (2017), ‘Introduction: Entanglement and Orders of Visibility’, in C. Kerfoot and K. Hyltenstam (eds.), Entangled Discourses: South-North Orders of Visibility, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–13. Landry, R and Bourhis, R. (1997), ‘Linguistic Landscape and Ethnolinguistic Vitality – An Empirical Study’, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16 (1): pp. 23–49. Langa, P. (2014), ‘On the Possibilities of Leisure Studies in Mozambique: Historical and Sociological Considerations’, Sociology Study, 4/2: pp. 157–169.

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Lemon, A. (2009), ‘Sympathy for the Weary State? Cold War Chronotypes and Moscow Others’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 51 (4): pp. 832–864. Lopes, A. (2004), The Battle of the Languages – Perspectives on Applied Linguistics in Mozambique, Maputo: Imprensa Universitária. Lusa/Fim. (2016), ‘China eleva parceria com Moçambique para estatuto único fora da Ásia’. http://24.sapo.pt/article/lusa-sapo-pt_2016_05_19_1715246632_china-elevaparceria-com-mocambique-para-estatuto-unico-fora-da-asia (accessed 13 October 2016, 5 pm). Maina, E., Obaka, W. and Makong’o, J. (2004), History and Government 3, Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam: East African Educational Publishers. Melo, V. (2013), ‘Urbanismo português na cidade de Maputo: passado, presente e futuro’, Urbe. Revista Brasileira de Gestão Urbana, 5 (1): pp. 71–88. Meneses, M. (2016), ‘Só revendo o passado conheceremos o presente? Alguns dilemas das descolonizações internas em Moçambique’, in M. Meneses and B. Martins (eds.), Cescontexto, Direitos e Dignidade, Trajetórias e experiências de luta, IX Edição do Congresso Ibérico de Estudos Africanos (Volume I), Coimbra: Centro de Estudos Sociais, pp. 56–66. Meneses, M. and Gomes, C. (2013), ‘Regressos? Os retornados na (des)colonização portuguesa’, in M. Meneses and B. Martins (eds.), As Guerras de Libertação e os Sonhos Coloniais: Alianças secretas, mapas imaginados, Coimbra: Almedina, pp. 59–107. Moçambique para todos. (2009), ‘Ruas da cidade de Maputo: Designações nacionais substituem as coloniais’. http://macua.blogs.com/moambique_para_todos/2009/04/ ruas-da-cidade-de-maputo-designa%C3%A7%C3%B5es-nacionais-substituem-ascoloniais.html (accessed 4 October 2016, 1 pm). Nielsen, M. (2010), Antithesis without Thesis. Virtuality and Its Negation in Maputo, Mozambique. Paper to be delivered at the EASA Conference, August 24–27, 2010. (Online). http://pure.au.dk/portal/files/34321825/Morten_Nielsen_Antithesis_ without_Thesis.pdf (retrieved August 27, 2011). Notícias. (1982), ‘Descolonização Mental é o Nosso Problema Actual’, Jornal Notícias, Maputo 11 de Maio de 1982. Owen, H. (2007), Mother Africa, Father Marx: Women’s Writing of Mozambique, 1948– 2002, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Pavlenko, A. and Mullen, A. (2015), ‘Why Diachronicity Matters in the Study of Linguistic Landscapes’, Linguistic Landscape, 1 (1/2): pp. 114–132. Peck, A and Stroud, C. (2015), ‘Skinscapes’, Linguistic Landscape, 1 (1–2): pp. 133–151. Penvenne, J. (1995), African Workers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican Strategies for Survival in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique 1877–1962, Portsmouth: Heinemann. Pietikäinen, S. (2013), ‘Spatial Interaction in Sámiland: Regulative and Transitory Chronotopes in the Dynamic Multilingual Landscape of an Indigenous Sámi Village’, International Journal of Bilingualism, 18 (5): pp. 478–490. República de Moçambique (RM) (1990), Constituição da República. Boletim da República, I Série, No. 44. Maputo: Imprensa Nacional de Moçambique. Resolução nr. 20/AM/2010 de 17 de Março. Assembleia Municipal. Resolução nr. 10/AM/2009 de 25 de Novembro. Assembleia Municipal. Serra, C. (1986), Como a Penetração Estrangeira Transformou o Modo de Produção dos Camponeses Moçambicanos – o exemplo da Zambézia (± 1200–1964); Volume 1: os Moçambicanos antes da penetração estrangeira, Maputo: Universidade Eduardo Mondlane/Imprensa Nacional de Moçambique.

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Shohamy, E. (2012), ‘Linguistic Landscape and Multilingualism’, in M. Martin-Jones, A. Blackledge and A. Creese (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 538–551. Shohamy, E. and Waksman, S. (2010), ‘Building the Nation, Writing the Past: History and Textuality at the Ha’apala Memorial in Tel Aviv-Jaffa’, in A. Jaworski and C. Thurlow (eds.), Advances in Sociolinguistic: Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London: Continuum, pp. 241–255. Sitoe, B. (2014), ‘Línguas moçambicanas, como estamos?’ in C. Severo, B. Sitoe e J. Pedro (eds.), Estão as línguas nacionais em perigo? Lisboa: Escolar Editora, pp. 37–73. Stroud, C. (1999), ‘Portuguese as Ideology and Politics in Mozambique: Semiotic (Re) Constructions of a Postcolony’, in J. Blommaert (ed.), Language Ideological Debates, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 343–380. Stroud, C. (2002), ‘Framing Bourdieu Socioculturally: Alternative Forms of Linguistic Legitimacy in Postcolonial Mozambique’, Multilingua, 21 (2–3): pp. 247–273. Stroud, C. (2007), ‘Bilingualism: Colonialism and Postcolonialism’, in M. Heller (ed.), Bilingualism: A Social Approach, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 25–49. Stroud, C. and Guissemo, M. (2015), ‘Linguistic Messianism’, Multilingual Margins, 2 (2): pp. 6–19. Sumich, J. (2008), ‘Construir uma nação: ideologias de modernidade da elite Moçambicana’, Análise Social, XLIII (2.º): pp. 319–345. The Delagoa Bay Review. (2010), ‘Deus, o negócio e o pecado na Rua Araújo em Lourenço Marques’. The Delagoa Bay Review-08/10/2010. https://delagoabayword.wordpress. com/category/arquitectura-mocambique/historia-de-maputo/ (accessed 2 December 2015, 2.25pm). Train, R. (2016), ‘Connecting Visual Presents to Archival Pasts in Multilingual California. Towards Historical Depth in Linguistic Landscape’, Linguistic Landscape, 2 (3): pp. 223–246. Verheij, G. (2012), ‘Monumentalidade e Espaço Público em Lourenço Marques nas Décadas de 1930 e 1940, On the waterfront, 20: pp. 11–54. Verheij, G. (2014), ‘Monumentos coloniais em tempos pós-coloniais. A estatuária de Lourenço Marques’, in Apha (ed.), Actas do IV Congresso de História da Arte Portuguesa em Homenagem a José-Augusto França. Sessões Simultâneas (2.a edição revista e aumentada), pp. 36–45. Wheeler, D. (1980), ‘Joaquim Mouzinho de Albuquerque (1855–1902) e a política do colonialismo’, Análise Social, XVI (61–62): pp. 295–318. Wirtz, K. (2016), ‘The Living, the Dead, and the Immanent. Dialogue Across Chronotopes’, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6 (1): pp. 343–369. Woldemariam, H. (2016), ‘Linguistic Landscape as Standing Historical Testimony of the Struggle Against Colonization in Ethiopia’, Linguistic Landscape 2 (3): pp. 275–290.

3

Chronoscape of Authenticity: Consumption and Aspiration in a Middle-Class Market in Johannesburg Gilles Baro

Introduction Since the late 2000s, multiple ‘markets’ have been opening around the middle-class urban enclaves of Johannesburg as well as in South Africa (see Stroud, 2017, for an example in Cape Town). Mainly through private developers’ efforts, these spaces cater for the middle class to upper class offering food, drinks, art and artisanal goods to a curious public. These markets have been popping up in privatized neighbourhoods located on the edge of Johannesburg’s inner city, with the aim to attract capital and consumers back to the area as it has been deemed a no-go zone since the late 1980s because of its high crime rate and urban decay caused by the collapse of the apartheid local government (Beavon, 2004; Iqani and Baro, 2017). In order to attract consumer, those markets tend to offer goods not available in shopping malls, the usual spaces of consumptions for middle-class Joburgers since the 1970s, meaning goods not mass-produced and food experiences not following the mainstream fast-food model, such as street food craft burgers, bubble teas, locally grown and produced vegetables, cheeses or coffee beans as well as home-made goods representing the Johannesburg aesthetic such as framed photographs, pillowcases and jewellery. Those goods are put on display in a way that makes them look unique, as opposed to being mass-produced and in a way the whole markets are designed so that they look like authentic marketplaces where goods are sold directly from the producers as opposed to supermarkets, which connote modernity and mass consumption. People tend to come for the authentic consumer experience, a made-up stage reserved for the middle class because of the high cost of everything compared to the actual stalls of street traders in the inner city close by. In this chapter, I argue that the authentic aspect of one particular marketplace in Johannesburg, The Sheds, is made up and follows a worldwide trend for authentic

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consumption, which, according to Boltanski and Chiapello (2007), is a reaction by late capitalism to the counterculture movements of the 1960s and 1970s which were against mass production. I thus see the trend as an aspiration for a ‘gentrified’ aesthetic of authentic urban experience coming from the West and being wanted by post-apartheid middle class in Johannesburg. I also look at it from a socio-historical perspective under a lens of what I call a chronoscape, which implies that the semiotic landscape (henceforth SL) of the market needs to be investigated from the perspective of time, in order to understand how the meaning of the space came to be. After introducing the literature on authenticity in relation to urban spaces, I refer to the sociolinguistics debate on the topic which calls for an enquiry on the construction of what is seen as authentic while forgetting to look at the multimodal aspect of authenticity, particularly visual, something which I do look at in this chapter. I then introduce the concept of the chronoscape and, finally, analyse the space of The Sheds in Johannesburg and how its design carefully suggests that products are authentic and that consumers are having the experience of a global authentic urban space.

Authenticity and urban development: A historical overview The rise of authenticity in contemporary consumption in the West, Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) argue, is simply a trendy part of the motor of capitalism which consists in transforming non-capital into capital. Indeed, authenticity was used by capitalist entrepreneurs as a way ‘to combat market saturation, intensifying consumers’ desire by furnishing “quality” products that were healthier and offered greater “authenticity”’ (2007: p. 442). Such market saturation took the form of a crisis of mass consumption in the 1970s when a more critical portion of the Western population were rejecting ‘mass consumer products, which were not only insipid but also bad for the health’ (2007: p. 442). Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) define the commodification of the authentic as finding new sources of profit by capitalists such as ‘human beings, scenery, cafes where people feel comfortable, tastes, rhythms, ways of being and doing, and so on, which have not yet been introduced into the sphere of commodity circulation’ (2007: p. 444). Zukin (2009) suggests that the pursuit of ‘authenticity’ is crucially important in relation to contemporary urban development because of the obsession of planners and consumers with ‘old-looking things’. This trend isn’t about conserving any trace of the past in modern cities, but rather about selecting what is worth remembering, usually for development purposes. As Zukin puts it: ‘Today, all big cities are erasing their gritty bricks-and-mortar history, to build a shiny vision of the future’ (2009: p. 1). The trend tracks the city dweller’s desire for authentic origins (Zukin, 2009: p. 2), to (re)discover their roots through the urban experience and to see how their predecessors used to live and how traditional urban living looked like before different waves of residents lived there one after the other, changing communities over time. The pursuit of ‘authenticity’ is a response to what Zukin calls ‘manhattanization’ (as in downtown New York City), which entails ever-growing high-rise modern buildings, dense crowds, the kind of anonymity where one doesn’t know or speak to the person even living in the apartment

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next to theirs, and intense competition to fit in with the latest style. This lifestyle, which is seen as ‘modern’, goes against what is understood as ‘authentic’ or ‘traditional’. One might expect this dichotomy between manhattanization and authenticity to be clearly noticeable in the SL of many cities, as there are countless examples around the world of city developments and trends that look to the origins of a city, a neighbourhood or its inhabitants to reclaim an aesthetic. For example, Lindsay Brown, in a piece for Briarpatch magazine, analyses the authenticity aesthetic of linguistic and visual signs deployed to regenerate Vancouver’s historic neighbourhood of Chinatown. The title of the piece, ‘When Hipsters Dream of the 1890s’, is a reference to the American television series Portlandia, which portrays Portland, Oregon, as an embodiment of the ‘dream of the 1990s’ as exemplified by the iconic theme song of its first episode, wherein the ‘dream’ of that era – mainly radical culture and liberal politics – is still alive. For the case of the Canadian city, it’s the dream of the colonial enterprise from the nineteenth century that is showed to be still alive, through the re-aestheticization of the neighbourhood and its new target market: young, white, middle-class urbanites who have grown up in the suburbs, and want to live a true urban experience. A communication strategy put in place by the contracted development companies used signs of authenticity and heritage to lure these wannabe urbanites into the city centre of Vancouver. The centre includes the historic Chinatown, a neighbourhood traditionally made up of low-income immigrants, many of whom have now been forced out of the area due to rent increase and foreclosures. Such signs include brochures in magazines portraying nineteenth-century white men labelled ‘snappy dressers,’ to highlight that people used to dress in a way that resembles the fashion aesthetic of the modern ‘hipsters’ in these parts of town: usually trendy young men. Quite unsurprisingly, all the men in the black-and-white picture are white, and associated with the colonization of the area, as opposed to the first-nation people who used to inhabit the area first long before the European settler-colonialism project, or even the Asian migrants and Chinese Canadians who have inhabited Chinatown for decades. Another sign analysed by Brown perfectly sums up this relationship with ‘the old’ and ‘the new’ of development: an advertisement for a boutique condominium in Vancouver which is titled ‘Reassuringly Old, Refreshingly New’. The ad includes a picture of a room with nineteenth-century-style light bulbs and cases on shelves made of wood, reminiscent of the traditional simplistic boxes used in markets to sell and carry products, free of brands and plastic. The slogan gives an overview of the eras the boutique wants to be associated with: the past and the future. And not the immediate past, but rather the past that is understood as being more ‘authentic’, as if the communities having lived in the areas for decades aren’t themselves authentic. This past and the future are tied up as linear in a timeline of fashion accessories, such as taxidermy and explorer-type outfits, sported in trendy restaurants and cafés. This selected past, which is presented as ‘authentic’, is used to advertise an area targeted for development, and aims at echoing a certain commodified style, rather than achieving any historical accuracy, as explained by Zukin: ‘Lately, though, authenticity has taken a different meaning that has little to do with origins and a lot to do with style. The concept has migrated from a quality of people to a quality of things, and

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most recently to a quality of experiences’ (2009: pp. 2–3). This last qualitative aspect of authenticity is the most important, because it is also the most contemporary. Property developers want to give the experience of origins to targeted urban dwellers to make a place seem authentic. In other words, it is a regulated authenticity. Just as heritage is what is selected from the past for particular purposes in the present (Graham et al., 2000: p. 17), modern authenticity is a sort of floating signifier (Hall, 1997) where what is considered authentic is actually artificial, supposedly coming directly from the past, without having been shaped and modified over time. This phenomenon is obtained, according to Zukin, by ‘preserving historic buildings and districts, encouraging the development of small-scale boutiques and cafes, and branding neighbourhoods in terms of distinctive cultural identities’ (2009: p. 3). This phenomenon does not claim to represent authenticity from everybody’s perspective, but only according to the tastes of those with the power to construct their own ideal authenticity, turning it into a tool of power. Investing in particular narratives, and specific heritage sites, can potentially ‘disinherit and exclude those who do not subscribe to [them]’ (Graham and Howard, 2008: p. 120). In other words, there is nothing natural about what is presented as authentic: it is socially constructed by people in power, who seek to dictate what a reading of history should be and add layers of meaning to a commodified aesthetic of the past. Such representations give those in power legitimation and control. In the case of Vancouver’s Chinatown, the history of low-income migrant residents is erased from the promotional signs, so that middle-to-upper class people will move into the neighbourhood. The urban, community feel of the neighbourhood, however, which is the result of years of migrant workers living there, is being used to give it an authentic feel. As Zukin puts it, ‘[in] the gentrified and hipster neighbourhoods that have become models of urban experience since then, authenticity is a consciously chosen lifestyle and a performance, and a means of displacement as well’ (2009: p. 4). In large metropolises around the globe, corporate urban developers have tried to lure new, hip, middle-class residents into the inner cities using the arguments mentioned earlier; at the same time, there is a desire from these sectors of the population to have an authentic, urban experience as a reaction to the urban crisis in the second half of the twentieth century. These ‘crises’ occurred in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, and in the 1980s and 1990s in South Africa (Beavon, 2004). During these periods, inner cities were seen as too congested, and middle-class populations moved to larger suburban spaces, leaving behind urban neighbourhoods struggling to find capital to keep themselves afloat. But in these suburbs, the next generation of people complained about the lack of authentic human interactions where neighbours know each other and one can walk to a store to buy groceries. Public city officials in need of capital for their city centres looked to business executives to use these issues to fix the image crisis of cities and make people want to go into city centres again. Suburban sprawl meets every need with shopping malls and lawns, instead of public parks and momand-pop shops. In a city like New York in the United States in the 1980s, the business executives changed the local economies to present a ‘clean’ image of diversity for mass consumption through the integration of artists’ lofts, cultural districts and ethnic tourists’ zones (Zukin, 2009: p. 5). The city had to appear safe, interesting and worth

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visiting. It wasn’t until later that developers started considering the notion of origins to achieve these goals, to give urban dwellers the experience of the authentic inner city and to create a collective imaginary of what a city centre once looked like, or rather what people thought it ought to look like. In the case of urban heritage, the notion of origin is relative: the people with the power to affect the landscape of the city will have the power to decide which roots of a neighbourhood are worthier of notice than others. When city dwellers complain about a lack of authenticity, they really mean a loss of (their) origins; there is a need to see oneself in the origins on display, portrayed as authentic. Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) have questioned this complex interaction between past and present, showing a desire for contemporary (Western) societies to sometimes literally invent bridges with the past, constructing them as tradition, often to legitimize power. For example, the (white) gentrifiers of Chinatown in Vancouver mentioned earlier portrayed themselves visually as being part of the authenticity. Their attitude seems to be that they are discovering urban centres, much as their colonial ancestors discovered valleys and built borders and countries, in both cases removing in-place populations and their heritage, creating a bridge between the colonial past and the (neo-colonial) urban present (Atkinson and Bridge, 2004; Lees et al., 2010). Neighbourhoods like Chinatown in Vancouver seem attractive to modern urban dwellers because of an aggressive politics of policing and displacement to lower the crime rate, businesses that cater to their middle-class needs, such as coffee shops or upscale restaurants, and also because they cultivate the image of an authentic workingclass neighbourhood, which contrasts immediately with suburban vastness, or highrise Central Business Districts (CBDs) where buildings and houses look the same from one city to the next. ‘Authentic’ neighbourhoods represent change and difference, as well as continuity with the past, as opposed to the modernist aesthetic which required that the past be given up. This is the same reason why Henry James critiqued New York skyscrapers as lacking ‘the authority of things of permanence or even of things of long duration’ (James, 2012: p. 77). Authentic neighbourhoods have this sense that things have remained the same for years, and will stay the same in the future. Having a past thus creates capital for buildings, parks or even entire streets. This past is celebrated as being authentic by developers, and not necessarily by the original residents, who might have to move on; developers aim to promote the image of the neighbourhood, and not the neighbourhood itself. This example of Vancouver mentioned earlier very much resonates with today’s hip, authentic neighbourhoods where the local communities have almost no control over how the neighbourhood should be represented, and are used as a source of ‘authenticity’ capital, which then gets used to attract wealthier people, who will eventually push out the communities claiming an origin in that space. This phenomenon is what is today known as gentrification. In the 1960s, people such as famous journalist and activist Jane Jacobs, or urban planning researcher Herbert Gans, spoke out in favour of ‘authentic’ urban spaces as an argument against urban renewal. Gans (1962) coined the term ‘urban village’ to describe the type of neighbourhood on New York City’s West Side, which was being destroyed by local elites, through a process of ‘urban renewal’ that in fact amounted

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to slum clearance. Gans depicted an ethnic community of Italian migrants, where entire families lived together, and everyone in the neighbourhood knew each other. Jacobs (1961) argued against modern urban planning, whose aim she described as being to destroy the old to make space for the new. Her activism resembled the work of a preservationist. Jacobs argued for the authenticity of human contact in these neighbourhoods, made possible by the unplanned messiness of old patterns of urban development. According to Zukin (2009), gentrifiers started moving into areas of New York City such as the Lower East Side, then considered a poor neighbourhood, in order to buy and restore late-nineteenth-century houses with ‘great symbolic value’ (2009: p. 11). These gentrifiers were obviously welcomed and supported by historic preservationists, who deplored the destruction of old buildings that embodied urban memory. This combination of historic and community preservationists, and activists, ultimately won the battle against the form of urban renewal that required bulldozing historic buildings to make space for high-rise buildings and skyscrapers for upperclass residents and corporations in a city built on a peninsula which was doomed to be rapidly desperate for and limited in space. Numerous public policy changes were made following Jane Jacob’s pleas, protecting urban villages of poor communities, very often the ones least likely to be able to afford to move somewhere else. Historic preservation laws were passed first in New York City, and then in many other cities around the world, in order to oversee and sometimes to prevent the tearing down of old buildings. But for Zukin (2009), these changes ‘nonetheless left a gap between celebrating the authenticity of historic houses and acknowledging the authenticity of the lower-class families who lived in them’ (2009: p. 12). Indeed, the historical preservationists fighting for historic buildings not to be taken down did not really care about the low-income families living in them, and these families did not worry about the historical value of their building, being concerned instead with the inflation of prices in the neighbourhood that made it harder for them to afford living there. On the other end of the spectrum were business executives cheering on urban renewal, such as urban planner Robert Moses, who aimed at ‘destroying New York’s uneven origins in his pursuit of sanitized, efficient new beginnings’ (Zukin, 2009: p. 13). Moses headed the most important city redevelopment agency from the 1930s to the 1960s, and his vision of urban development was a very corporate one with many highways, high-rise buildings and few parks and residential houses. This dichotomy between Moses’ and Jacobs’ visions ultimately merged into one ideology for contemporary urban developers: support urban renewal projects but with a preservationist twist. This twist was that heritage and ‘authenticity’ will ultimately attract young and rich urban dwellers. The result would be somewhat similar in that neighbourhoods would be upgraded and made more secure, catering to a sector of the population that pays more taxes, but buildings would be preserved and the authenticity traditionally embodied by the low-income families would be commodified in order to give the urban dwellers the experience of authenticity. In other words, the new regeneration projects in cities around the world which are marketing themselves using heritage and authenticity (Hewison, 1987) are textbook application of Jane Jacob’s manifesto, except that the people originally living in these places, members of working-class communities, are long gone.

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However, as time went on, the concern of the consumers shifted from experiencing an authentic place to ‘lifestyle goals of liberation and personal authenticity’ (Zukin, 2009: p. 15). The authentic feel of a neighbourhood may feel like an outdoor museum, but personal authenticity was yet to be achieved. This embodiment of authenticity was linked with the looser, more liberal ‘hippy’ lifestyle, which made older neighbourhoods the symbol of a more interesting way to live. The goal of the modern liberal consumer became to access a certain symbolic capital of authenticity through deciding to live away from alienating suburbs or big glass-box buildings and instead in an ‘old red brick building and cobblestone street which has been gaining cultural distinction’ (Zukin, 2009: p. 14). And the goal was also to live the authentic urban village lifestyle by not buying from corporate supermarkets, but from artisanal shops and fair-trade outlets, where ethical business models and the latest fashion trends were on display. Dressing simply with locally made clothes, these new settlers modelled themselves on the original colonialists seen on billboards in the gentrified neighbourhoods of Vancouver. As Zukin puts it: ‘In a curious and unexpected way, the counterculture’s pursuit of origins – by loosening the authentic self and bonding with the poor and underprivileged – opened a new beginning for urban redevelopment in the 1970s’ (2009: p. 16). Media texts played a significant role in shifting the image of city living in the collective memory of modernizers and suburbanites, glamorizing old neighbourhoods, showing them as great places for consuming authenticity. The pursuit of authenticity and heritage as cultural capital is what property developers are hoping will fuel the rise of real estate values by attracting consumers interested in a different kind of consumption in spaces forgotten by capital for many years, offering them the opportunity to embody their subjective identity through a performance of urban authenticity: be different, unique, live differently, somewhere different. The emphasis is on the word ‘different’ which contrasts with the suburban sameness known to these urban dwellers. For Zukin (2009), these capitalist strategies of retail store owners aren’t attached to the old as ‘their needs represent the interests of a cultural community that contrasts with that of longtime residents’ (2009: p. 19). They represent new beginnings, erasing certain traces in favour of new ones shaped in the image of the old ones. Before diving into the analysis of the relationship between past and present in the construction of authenticity in a middle-class market place in Johannesburg, I will now elaborate on the conversation on authenticity within sociolinguistics studies, how it points towards a study of the discursive construction of authenticity rather than a study of authenticity itself and how I aim to contribute to it by arguing that the construction is not only visual but also discursive.

The authenticity debate in sociolinguistics Authenticity has been studied by sociolinguists since the early 2000s (Bucholtz, 2003; Coupland, 2003; Eckert, 2003; Jaworski, 2007). Eckert defined it as ‘an ideological construct that is central to the practice of both speakers and analysts of language’ (2003: p. 392). In LL research, it has not been investigated, with the recent exception

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of Moriarty (2014), who looked at the use of the Irish language to index the town of Dingle, where Irish is a minority language, as an authentic tourist space. Eckert (2003), Bucholtz (2003) and Coupland (2003) published related articles in reaction to a panel entitled ‘Elephants in the Room’ at the New Ways of Analysis Variations conference at Stanford University in 2002. For them, authenticity has been an elephant in the room of sociolinguistics studies, as it remained under-investigated while being central to many works within sociolinguistics. Indeed, the notion of ‘authentic speaker’ has been heavily used, justified by the notion that it gives a ‘direct access to language untainted by the interference of reflection or social agency’ (Eckert, 2003: p. 392). Such a belief implies that there are inauthentic speakers, ones whose language attitudes have been contaminated by a social environment, or other speakers. The authentic speaker is expected to speak the variety of a language assigned to his or her identity. If they do not, their way of speaking is deemed ‘less natural’ (Eckert, 2003: p. 393). For Coupland, the notion of the authentic speaker ‘was a liberal, idealised socio-political construct designed by sociolinguists to supplant a hegemonic idealised alternative’ (Coupland, 2003: p. 425). For Eckert, the major problem with authenticity in sociolinguistics studies is its heritage of structuralism, as language varieties are seen as fixed, uniform and static, adjectives that often accord well with definitions of ‘authenticity’. Bucholtz remarks that the idea of authenticity ‘gains its force from essentialism’ (2003: p. 400), which posits that attributes and characteristics of people are inherent in their social group, thus opening up the possibility of grouping someone based on their behaviour and attributes (such as language attitudes). On the contrary, identities, language varieties and social locations are not static; their meanings and characteristics vary constantly depending on a variety of factors including context. One way of speaking will be judged as authentic in one social setting by certain people, and may be seen as tainted in a different location by a different group of people. Bucholtz (2003) makes similar comments regarding the problematic views of authenticity with regard to language attitudes and identities in sociolinguistics. However, she mentions that the concept itself remains under-studied. The quest for authenticity isn’t new, but the questioning of authenticity as a concept is brushed aside (2003: p. 399). She summarizes the theorization of authenticity in sociolinguistics and its problematic use as well as the methodological steps made by sociolinguists to access authentic language speakers and attitudes, such as participant observation ethnography when the researcher becomes ‘part’ of the community (2003: p. 406). She concludes by condemning the collection and analysis of authentic speech as doomed to failure because it would involve ‘extremely unethical research practices’ (2003: p. 406). For Coupland (2003), authenticity is something we seek out, but are also sceptical of (2003: p. 417). In other words, people aim to seem authentic, to have authentic experiences and to speak authentically, but they also know that they cannot really be authentic, as the notion itself is flawed. Full authenticity doesn’t exist. Instead, people co-construct through discourse what counts as authentic or not. Inauthenticity is something regularly critiqued, as lacking something. Coupland argues that authenticity can be achieved or discredited through language, thus ‘sociolinguistics has a role to play in the analysis of how we engage with authenticity’ (2003: p. 417). Just like other

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social characteristics of identity and everyday experience such as gender or nationality, authenticity is socially constructed. What we define as an authentic speaker, place or experienced is achieved through ‘patterns of discursive representation’ and ‘specific ways of speaking’ (Coupland, 2003: p. 417). Similarly to the notion of tradition (see Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983), authenticity implies that something, from a distant or recent past, has remained, as if what is qualified as authentic is directly connected to its origin, untainted. If it is authentic, it means it is being compared successfully to something ancient being used as a norm; everything deviating from that norm will be deemed inauthentic. Bucholtz (2003) adds that authenticity has been used more recently as a way to access the past: ‘[T]his desire for origins […] led to a concerted effort to valorise via scholarship an earlier epoch imagined as directly tied to – yet irrevocably sundered from – the present day. Access to the past was provided through the study of those in whom it was thought to be most authentically retained’ (2003: p. 399). Coupland also remarks that every community relies on experts to establish whether something is authentic or not. In order to be authentic, something or someone has to be accepted and authorized as such. This is why artefacts sometimes simply cannot appear authentic: in order to be accepted as such, developers have added signboards and given interviews about the process of authenticating the artefacts, identifying which era they come from, and who they collected them from (someone with the authority and proof to deem something authentic, like museums or collectors). For, Bucholtz (2003), authenticity tends to be achieved rather than given, and she proposes the notion of authentication as something sociolinguists should investigate. As she puts it: ‘sociolinguists should speak not of authenticity but more accurately of authenticity effects, achieved through the authenticating practices of those who use and evaluate language’ (2003: p. 408). Finally, Coupland gives a possible explanation for the resurgence of authenticity as a concept investigated in the social and human sciences, recently exemplified by significant mainstream literature on the subject. For Coupland, authenticity is experiencing a resurgence, and needs to be investigated, because it is in crisis. It has reached this point because of globalization, a process which is responsible for ‘detraditionalising social life, breaking the continuities and certainties that characterised the phase of the “modern” period, which is where our traditional understandings of social structure were conceived’ (2003: p. 425). Following the concept of authenticity as a discursively constructed and authorized concept, and in parallel with Coupland’s reasoning behind the concept, its crisis and its possible application, I would argue for authenticity itself to be investigated in sociolinguistics, and not be applied solely to linguistics-specific concepts. As Bucholtz argues: ‘Rather than attempt to track down authentic speakers, sociolinguists might instead devote more time to figuring out how such individuals and groups have come to be viewed as authentic in the first place, and by whom’, in other words ‘undoing authenticity’ (2003: p. 407). The resurgence and recent obsession of people with authenticity as a key organizer of social life discourse suggest that scholars should take it on as a topic of study to question how certain spaces, people or cultural items are authorized and authenticated through discourse, often for consumption purposes.

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The chronoscape In their geosemiotic framework, Scollon and Scollon (2003) stipulate that the meaning of signs is derived from their location in a particular place, at a particular time. Pavlenko and Mullen (2015) have highlighted that although the Scollons’ approach requires consideration of all signs in a given environment to understand the meaning of any sign, they fail to account for diachronicity; their model could thus be understood as an ‘all signs on one street on one day approach’ (2015: p. 117, emphasis in original). In light of this, Pavlenko and Mullen propose that ‘the interpretation of signs is intrinsically linked to the preceding signs in the same environment and to related signs elsewhere and is thus diachronic in nature’ (2015: pp. 114–115). Their point implies some temporal elements for LL research, which should take into account all signs present in one place over time, but also the length of the experience of signs in the environment, as it is clear that the viewers’ interpretation of one sign can be affected by what they have seen before (see also Peck and Banda, 2014, for an investigation of linguistic landscape items over time). Their intervention also aims to highlight notions of normativity, and the familiarity of signs as viewers experience them, which implies that corpora including signs from different times may be collected in order to be compared. Building on Pavlenko and Mullen’s argument, it is clear that a focus on the past lives of signs also implies that we must keep in mind what made a particular sign meaningful, in the past, and to whom these signs were salient. I therefore propose that we analyse these signs as a chronoscape. Especially in contexts of sociopolitical change such as post-apartheid Johannesburg, where rapid change has affected place semiotics, in the context of a built environment that has changed less rapidly, I would argue that the chronoscape opens important avenues for investigation. The affordances of the notion of chronoscape are the possibility to capture the past layers of meaning which are aggregated in the built environment. Indeed, buildings, streets or parks did not come out of the ground naturally. Past social actions and social actors contributed to the present landscape. As Kropotkin (1995 [first published in 1943]) argues: Whole generations, […] have handed an immense inheritance to our century. For thousands of years millions of men have laboured to clear the forests, to drain the marshes, and to open up highways by land and water. Every rood of soil we cultivate in Europe has been watered by the sweat of several races of men. Every acre has its story of enforced labour, of intolerable toil, of the people’s sufferings. Every mile of railway, every yard of tunnel, has received its share of human blood. The shafts of the mine still bear on their rocky walls the marks made by the pick of the workman who toiled to excavate them. (1995: p. 14)

Kropotkin reminds us that we cannot take for granted that humans created the built environment. The chronoscape helps us to trace which history of the built environment is being celebrated and which one is being sidelined. This in turn allows us to draw conclusions about the negotiations of power relationships in urban spaces. More specifically, through the chronoscape it is possible to map out how elements

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of the built environment have changed over time, and for what purpose. Gelderman and Aiello (2010), in a study about changes in building façades in post-eastern bloc cities undergoing urban regeneration, do not refer to the chronoscape, but their way of looking at the SL is similar to how I will use the term. They argue that urban change requires new uses for pre-Soviet and communist-era façades. Indeed, preSoviet façades are highlighted as historic, thus worthy of renovation because of their global, tourist appeal, heightened by the performance of an authentic but staged local identity. Buildings are thus celebrated for their pre-Soviet aesthetic in order to attract global attention and hide their use during the Soviet era. Communist-era façades, on the other hand, are either hidden away through urban decay and lack of care, or they are ‘refashioned’ (2010: p. 270) through the use of billboards and other types of advertisement for global consumption. Gelderman and Aiello conclude by saying that ‘façades do not necessarily offer accurate renditions of any given local reality; they can instead be seen as (visual) texts realizing imaginative meanings that are to be attached to the city’ (2010: p. 270). A similar trend is taking place in inner-city Johannesburg, though enacted differently. Buildings from the early stages of Johannesburg in the 1880s to the modernist 1960s are being preserved and renovated because their appeal in terms of authenticity and historicity make them worthy and attractive for the tourism market. More recent buildings are not given as much attention, and tend to be renovated internally, adding more office space to the inner city. The social actions taking place in and around all these buildings during apartheid are thereby erased in favour of a more ‘authentic’ and appealing time, which simultaneously glorifies white colonial capital. Another example of literature which investigate signs of heritage in urban centres is Aiello (2011), who looks at how the industrial neighbourhood of Manifattura delle Arti in Bologna, Italy. She argues that urban renewal has had an effect of exclusion in the neighbourhood as development brought new consumerism. Indeed, she regrets that this renewal is catering for a new, wealthier market and not historically working-class residents. This phenomenon is understood as the result of advanced capitalism. Aiello concludes by stating that ‘in late modern times it is not only media based in representation and communication technology that are mobilized to carry professionally crafted meanings across cultural and national borders’ (2011: p. 360), which equates to Appadurai’s notion of the mediascape (1996). On the contrary, we should pay attention to how meaning is communicated through the material environment in addition to discourse and images, as part of what Thurlow and Aiello (2007) call the semioscape of contemporary communication. Thurlow and Aiello coined the term semioscape in response to Appadurai’s stratification of the complex global economy into five dimensions of global cultural flows, such as the mediascape as mentioned earlier, but also ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes (1996: p. 33). Appadurai’s goal is to analyse the disjuncture between economy, culture and politics, which intensify systemic complexity. Appadurai justifies the use of the suffix -scape as [it] allows us to point to the fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes, shapes that characterize international capital as deeply as they do international clothing

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I argue that the chronoscape intersects with Appadurai’s other five elements: its situatedness is similar as it is fluid and constructed by various processes such as the ones mentioned earlier. My aim is for the chronoscape to also intersect with the SL of Johannesburg to reveal flows of communication related to time such as the use of the old to give a sense of progress, or to focus on how the construction of a future landscape hides uncomfortable events from the past. Having given the theoretical background to the chronoscape, and before diving into the analysis, I would like to give some example of ‘signs of the past’ in Johannesburg. As previously mentioned, a discourse of time is highly visible in the SL of inner-city Johannesburg. Examples forming this discourse include signboards scattered along Main Street, which talk about the history of the area; relics of the past, usually related to mining; and the mining corporations’ headquarters, most of which are in the inner city. Parts of the neighbourhood are privately controlled and maintained under the name of South-Western Improvement District, improvement signifying a progression from the past to the present. The guards, streets and shops appear better maintained and more recently renovated than the rest of the city, and the web pages for certain activities offered to tourists talk about the district as a growing and future major destination in Africa. Other signs of temporality can be observed from the district, such as the abandoned mine dumps to the south, the wasted remains of the ore from which the city’s wealth was extracted and ruins of once-prestigious buildings such as the Library Hotel on Commissioner Street. In the suburbs of Johannesburg, one can find other examples of signs of the past which are repurposed for economic reasons, obscuring their original meanings. Falkof (2015) points out that almost all middle-class houses in former whites-only suburbs have a ‘garden cottage’ in the backyard which the owners rent out to students or other middle-class people today. These structures were actually ‘servants’ quarters’ that used to be filled with cheap materials and furniture. Today, the renters list descriptions such as ‘separate entrance’ as marketable features when putting up online ads for the cottage; in the past, these separate entrances were to avoid having the (black) workers interact with the (white) residents outside of the house (Falkof, 2015). Today, the meanings of these garden cottages relate to extra income for home owners, and not to relics of the apartheid era. Under apartheid, black people were only allowed to live in these suburbs if they were housed in these cottages, using a separate entrance to the property. Most of them are rather small, poorly lit and almost always built at the back of a property. This example gives an idea of the reasons why it is relevant to examine an SL considering the factor of time in order to understand the juxtaposed layers of meaning that have sedimented over time, creating what we see today. The meaning of these signs has changed, and the construction of their meaning isn’t linear. In other words, if we take such signs as the ones presented earlier as signs of heritage, we have to take into account that they have been highlighted in the landscape for a particular purpose and

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we have to critically investigate these purposes, that is, which narratives from history are foregrounded and which are backgrounded. In order to unveil such historical intertextualities, it is also important to consider the ‘real historical actors’ (Blommaert, 2013) responsible for the construction of the built environment. It is for the reasons explained earlier that I would like to look at the middle-class markets of the inner city of Johannesburg as a chronoscape, considering the semiotics of the built environment from a temporal perspective. A chronoscape would then be a landscape with multiple historicities layered on top of each other, where neither meaning nor built structures are fixed, each one requiring dissection in order to be understood in all its past and present political and social complexity. The chronoscape is tightly connected to the notion of memory because signs in the landscape directly or indirectly act as remembering tools, or forces viewers to forget. Planners and architects design a place in order to not only highlight certain moments, but also hide others. Having introduced the concept of the chronoscape, I shall now analyse multiple signs of authenticity in the SL of those marketplaces which index feelings of authenticity and nostalgia: people interacting with these signs may be reminded of a Johannesburg they used to know or of the urban experience they saw or imagined abroad.

‘The Sheds’ and the authentic urban lifestyle As I explained in the introduction of the chapter, the inner city of Johannesburg has suffered from an image problem since the 1980s. This was a time of capital flight and abandonment by the municipality. However, as things started to turn around during the 2000s, with pockets of privately funded development in certain areas of the inner city, investors started to prepare for a shift in the real estate market, or in some cases realized they could profit off the working-class population of the inner city. In order to secure their investments, private interests partnered with the City of Johannesburg to change the image of the city, and present it as more desirable. In service of this aim, promotional campaigns convinced media publications to write about the small islands of excellence, and ‘beautiful’ heritage buildings and artefacts. Publications such as City Buzz began writing about the changing urban lifestyle in central Johannesburg, which was reminiscent of a ‘world class’ metropolis overseas. The city is being celebrated through media for its ‘raw authenticity’ as, for example, in a TedX talk by architect Brian Kent McKechnie. What type of hip foods are now available, or what type of fashionable shops are open, is also covered by the media. In what follows, I analyse examples from two related ‘markets’. These two venues hosting the markets are The Sheds and One Eloff, located on opposite sides of the limits of the private wealthy neighbourhood of Marshalltown, and offering food, arts and crafts to a middle-class clientele wanting to explore and experience the inner city. Figure 3.1 advertises a festival where ‘authentic street cuisine’ can be enjoyed. The written text refers to a discourse of authenticity, though the terms ‘street’ and ‘cuisine’ may seem to be opposed because ‘street’ is usually associated with ‘street food’, whereas ‘cuisine’ usually refers to a more refined, higher-quality and certainly more expensive way of consuming food. It is possible that the terms were chosen purposefully to signal

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Figure 3.1 Digital flyer for a festival held at One Eloff in May 2016, relying on a discourse of authenticity to promote city life [found on the Facebook page of the event].

that the type of food being offered at the festival is similar to the food sold on the streets of the inner city, but with much higher-quality ingredients, and more attention given to preparation and presentation. This argument is strengthened when looking at the multimodality of the image. In the background, a photograph shows tasty-looking food laid out on a place setting on a wooden table. The food presented is carefully placed on the plate, as would be expected in the ‘cuisine’ discourse. As for the ‘street’ part of the food pictured, it uses semiotic resources to discursively produce authenticity. First, the aged, non-polished wooden structure where the plate is laid out gives the meaning of a humble, cheap and informal business. Secondly, the crinkled tinfoil paper on the top-left corner of the photograph also gives the meaning of informality, as it would not be offered on a place in a formal restaurant. The fact that the festival is described as taking place in the ‘heart of the city’ also references authenticity: the idea that the most authentic, original street food culture

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is found in the very centre of the city, away from supposedly ‘inauthentic’ suburbs. In the context of Johannesburg’s inner city, locals know that the heart of the inner city is attached to a discourse of danger and violence, but also that it is largely populated by pan-African migrants and black South Africans. Again, in relation to Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, which tells the story of a white explorer voyaging into the heart of the Congo to find the most authentic, uncivilized and raw culture, untamed by (Western) civilization, the trope of the white explorer is invoked. In Figure 3.1, the authenticity of the culture found in the heart of the city is symbolized by the informal typefaces in the text. Indeed, different typefaces are used, most with nonstraight lines, giving the impression that the characters were hand-drawn or painted. There is also a character from the ge’ez alphabet used to write in Amharic, one of the two main languages of Ethiopia, in the top-right corner. However, in this case, the character is resemiotized to represent the letter ‘n’ from the Roman alphabet. This multimodal assemblage points to the multiculturalism of the inner city and profits off of its supposed authentic informal food culture. Opened in late 2014, the market called The Sheds situated in a historic warehouse in Ferreirasdorp on the western edge of the Johannesburg CBD is a set of renovated warehouses used for a food and art market, live music events, artists’ studios and offices. Owned by the Anglo-American Corporation before being sold to the Johannesburg Land Company, it was remodelled in 2014 in partnership with Gerald Gardner, author of the Joburg: Space and Place guidebook series, and tour guide in the inner city. In terms of branding, the venue references the mining heritage theme also present in Marshalltown, as Ferreirasdorp was the location of the first mining camp in what was to become Johannesburg, which was originally designed as a miner’s camp after the discovery of gold in the area. The Sheds’ website even claims that it is rumoured that the warehouses now stand where the first miner’s bar of the gold rush era was located. However, the mining theme stops at The Sheds’ historic location. The interior of the space, especially its market, is however filled with signs indexing old things, ‘authentic’ origins, and reminiscences of bygone, supposedly simpler lifestyles. The Sheds are surrounded by informal parking lots for the Magistrates Court. The venue itself has demarcated a more formal parking lot for its customers directly across from its entrance. The two types of parking lots offer two different semiotic arrangements, which can be described as sites of necessity and luxury (Stroud and Mpendukana, 2009). Indeed, the parking lots around the court are indexed by handmade signs and managed by informal guards. These signs can be removed each day as their placement as well as the parking spaces are not legally the property of the guards (see Figure 3.2) managing them. The Sheds’ parking lot on the contrary is indexed with formal, digitally designed signs in bright orange, which contrast with the decaying environment, indicating the address (1 Fox Street) and location of the site of luxury (see Figure 3.3). The parking space itself is managed by guards in uniforms hired by the venue, who let vehicles in and out from their booth, opening and closing a boom gate. The Sheds’ sign is placed on a new fence, and the parking spaces have been covered with gravel. The sign for the informal parking area, on the other hand, is painted on a decaying brick wall and surrounded by material used by the guards to sit on, or store their belongings under, such as leftover bricks, cardboard boxes and wood.

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Figure 3.2 Parking sign adjacent to The Sheds.

Figure 3.3 Parking sign at The Sheds.

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Interestingly, similar brick walls can be seen inside The Sheds, though they are not covered in graffiti. These walls have been renovated to look like old brick walls, not painted over, and showing traces of wear. I would argue that the use of the brick wall as aesthetic is used to legitimize the authenticity and heritage aspect of The Sheds, indexing and symbolizing a time when structures were not covered, so that the bricks in the wall are visible as opposed to hidden underneath layers of paint. For Scollon and Scollon (2003), the construction of an authentic scene means that there should be the ‘absolute minimum divergence from the “natural” scene’ (2003: p. 108). Here, the exposed bricks represent the bare minimum of construction, as in modernist architecture they would either be replaced by concrete or hidden by paint or wallpaper. Such discourses of origin and simpler architectural style are also salient in the structure used for the various booths in the market that sell arts and craft, food or drinks. In this setting, wooden pallets are used as separators and stands which, similarly to the brick walls, allow visitors to not only experience the heritage and old impression of the market, but also sense it through touch. For Boltanski and Chiapello (2007), the making for the authentic into capital implies selecting ‘the distinctive features to be preserved’ (2007: p. 444) and discarding the ones too costly to reproduce or not necessary in the commodification of authenticity. The bricks mentioned earlier are typically such feature of a building; they play a role in the commodification of the building – and thus the space of the market itself – as an authentic space. Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) argue that this commodification process is ‘equally necessary for assessing the financial cost of the commodification of the authentic product and for serving as a device for marketing operations designed to enhance its prestige’ (2007: p. 444). De la Pradelle (2006), in a study of French markets in Provence, shows that the authenticity of those markets is performed by farmers to meet the demand of the visitors, who expect certain qualities from the fruits, vegetables and other products that are more constructed in their imagination than available from actual produce. Highlighting that the renewed interest in farmer-style markets has experienced global growth recently, de la Pradelle argues that even though a simpler time and economy is symbolized in these markets – with free samples, ‘real’ food as opposed to the kind offered in supermarkets, and small talk with the producers – it still relies on freemarket economics. This means that both buyers and sellers rely on the construction of an atmosphere of an old farmer’s market in order to make the whole experience more authentic itself and thus legitimize the high prices and a profit-driven economic model. I would argue that The Sheds rely on similar strategies to attract their clientele into this authentic, urban, market experience. A lot of the produces offered for sale at The Sheds market are marketed in opposition to mass-produced ones found in supermarkets. The origins of the produce, which could be a farm or even the backyard of The Sheds itself where organic vegetables are being grown, are mentioned or pictured. The venue is located in a low density of population area, which means it relies on a target market that must drive to get there: hence its dedicated parking lot and close proximity to a highway exit. It is interesting to note that nearby in the centre of the CBD, the pedestrianized Kerk Street fruit and vegetable market offers high-quality produce to inner-city residents for much lower prices than The Sheds, which caters to a wealthier market.

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In order to attract a market which has to drive to get to the venue, The Sheds must give the impression of being a worthy attraction, offering produce and experiences not available elsewhere. It also has to compete with similar markets elsewhere that have been operating since 2010 in the neighbouring areas of Braamfontein and Maboneng, responding to the growing demand. The Sheds has the advantage of being much more spacious, and thus offering a wider variety than its competitors. As opposed to restaurants where one has to book, sit and be waited on, The Sheds offers street food options where customers eat with recyclable cutlery while sitting on wooden furniture. Other strategies used to convey the meaning of authenticity at The Sheds is placing the food in a position where it looks as if it is coming straight from the producer. For example, glass bottles of drinks with brands that cannot be found in the supermarkets of the CBD are displayed in a woven basket on a bed of strawlike material (Figure 3.4). This composition is reminiscent of fresh eggs collected by the farmer and sold directly at the market, placed in straw to prevent them from breaking. This strategy cannot index the freshness of these drinks, as they are clearly industrialized and massproduced, although the brands are specialist, and hard to come by. Its presentation symbolizes a different kind of consumption, one that is more direct, where available products are carefully selected and stores are curated as opposed to mass consumption, a facet of modernity.

Figure 3.4 Display in The Sheds reminiscent of egg baskets at a farmer’s market.

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Conclusion I would argue that although the place semiotics (Scollon and Scollon, 2003: p. 9) of The Sheds is presented as authentic, the place itself is not. In other words, the built environment where actions such as eating, walking and consuming take place, the place semiotics is presented as authentic because the original warehouse and its brick walls have been conserved. However, the other two semiotic systems that would make The Sheds an authentic market, namely visual semiotics (as analysed earlier) and the interactive order (Scollon and Scollon, 2003: p. 12), give the space a different meaning. Indeed, the interaction order between the consumers, the venue and its produce is performed as authentic because it gives a sense of going back to an ancient way of consuming – straight from the producer – in an environment containing multiple signs of the past, which help to curate the experience. People with the means to consume the products sold at The Sheds go there hoping to have a ready-made ‘authentic’ experience, as they buy from small businesses, see their food being made in front of them and presented with handmade displays, as in imagined pre-modern times. The Sheds is not meant to be experienced as a museum, as items are not put on displayed to be enjoyed, but rather to be consumed, and the oldness of the warehouse is merely used to convey a sense of an authentic old environment. In this chapter, I have analysed the global trend towards authenticity in redeveloped consumer urban spaces, and how it relies on a specific construction of what needs to be seen as authentic. Authenticity is also tied to time, as it symbolizes pre-modernity, and must perform ‘authenticity’ in order to be recognized and valuable for urban development. Looking at the SL of those markets through the lens of the chronoscape has helped unearth meaning from the spaces themselves, not only on the surface level but also how they are experienced within the historical context of post-apartheid inner-city Johannesburg through a recounting of heritage (e.g. mining theme). The chronoscape also helped argue that the authentic urban experience as constructed in the markets is a sign of globalized discourses reaching South Africa after decades of cultural boycotts during apartheid as well as the erasure of other parts of the heritage of apartheid such as a limiting of access to urban spaces to non-white people.

References Aiello, G. (2011), ‘From Wound to Enclave: The Visual-Material Performance of Urban Renewal in Bologna’s Manifattura delle Arti’, Western Journal of Communication, 75 (4): pp. 341–366. Appadurai, A. (1996), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Atkinson, R. and Bridge, G. (2004), Gentrification in a Global Context, London: Routledge. Beavon, K. S. O. (2004), Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of the City, Pretoria: University of South Africa Press.

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Blommaert, J. (2013), Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007), The New Spirit of Capitalism, London: Verso. Bucholtz, M. (2003), ‘Sociolinguistic Nostalgia and the Authentication of Identity’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7 (3): pp. 398–416. Coupland, N. (2003), ‘Sociolinguistic Authenticities’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7 (3): pp. 417–431. Eckert, P. (2003), ‘Elephants in the Room’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7 (3): pp. 392–397. Falkof, N. (2015), ‘Out the Back: Race and Reinvention in Johannesburg’s Garden Cottages’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 19 (6): pp. 627–642. Gans, H. J. (1962), The Urban Villagers; Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans, New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Gelderman, I. and Aiello, G. (2010), ‘Faces of Places: Facades as Global Communication in Post-Eastern Bloc Urban Renewal’, in A. Jaworski and C. Thurlow (eds.), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Graham, B. J., Ashworth, G. and Tunbridge, J. (2000), A Geography of Heritage: Power, Culture and Economy, London: Arnold. Graham, B. J. and Howard, P. (2008), The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, Aldershot: Ashgate. Hall, Stuart. (1997), Race – The Floating Signifier. Film directed by Sut Jally. Media Education Foundation. Hewison, R. (1987), The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline, London: Methuen London. Hobsbawm, E. J. and Ranger, T. O. (1983), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Iqani, M. and Baro, G. (2017), ‘The Branded Skyline? A Socio-Semiotic Critique of Johannesburg’s Architectural Adverts’, African Studies, 76 (1): pp. 1–19. Jacobs, J. (1961), The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House. James, H. (2012), The American Scene, Memphis: General Books LLC. Jaworski, A. (2007), ‘Language in the Media: Authenticity and Othering’, in S. Johnson and A. Ensslin (eds.), Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies, London: Continuum. Kropotkin, P. (1995), Kropotkin: ‘The Conquest of Bread’ and Other Writings, New York: Cambridge University Press. La Pradelle, M. de. (2006), Market Day in Provence, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lees, L., Slater, T. and Wyly, E. K. (2010), The Gentrification Reader, London: Routledge. Moriarty, M. (2014), ‘Contesting Language Ideologies in the Linguistic Landscape of an Irish Tourist Town’, International Journal of Bilingualism, 18 (5): pp. 464–477. Pavlenko, A. and Mullen, A. (2015), ‘Why Diachronicity Matters in the Study of Linguistic Landscapes’, Linguistic Landscape, 1 (1–2): pp. 114–132. Peck, A. and Banda, F. (2014), ‘Observatory’s Linguistic Landscape: Semiotic Appropriation and the Reinvention of Space’, Social Semiotics, 24 (3): pp. 302–323. Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. W. (2003), Discourses in Place, London: Routledge. Stroud, C. (2017), ‘A Postscript on the Postracial’, in C. Kerfoot and K. Hyltenstam (eds.), Entangled Discourses: South-North Orders of Visibility, New York: Routledge. Stroud, C. and Mpendukana, S. (2009), ‘Towards a Material Ethnography of Linguistic Landscape: Multilingualism, Mobility and Space in a South African Township’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13 (3): pp. 363–386.

Chronoscape of Authenticity Thurlow, C. and Aiello, G. (2007), ‘National Pride, Global Capital: A Social Semiotic Analysis of Transnational Visual Branding in the Airline Industry’, Visual Communication, 6 (3): pp. 305–344. Zukin, S. (2009), Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Mobile Semiosis and Mutable Metro Spaces: Train Graffiti in Stockholm’s Public Transport System David Karlander

Introduction Mobility ought to be a central concern in any engagement with the semiotization of space and spatialization of semiosis. The present study brings this vision to bear on an analysis of the interplay between various attempts to exercise semiotic control over urban space. By discussing train graffiti – an inherently mobile form of semiosis – as well as the practices that encapsulate it, the study attempts to cast light on some forms of mobility that saturate what often is construed as a landscape of signs. Rather than focusing on the semiotics of place as something fixed, it engages with the forms of mobility that shape the presence and apparent permanence of a sign in a given place. From this vantage point, the study focuses on the spatial and semiotic struggles that unfold over train graffiti. Indeed, mobility brings several antagonistic phenomena into relation with each other. It accommodates ‘surprising combinations of presences and absences’ (Sheller and Urry, 2006: p. 222; see also Jaworski, 2014; Stroud, 2014), which are just as much contingent upon permanence as on immanence and as much upon stillness as on actual movement (Cresswell, 2012). Cresswell (2006: p. 6), among others (e.g. Hannam et al., 2006; Adey, 2010; Sheller and Urry, 2006), stresses that mobility is ‘rarely just about movement’. Mobility cannot be reduced to a pattern of mere physical motion. Rather, it encompasses a distinctively semiotic dimension. In this view, mobility can be conceived of as movement bound up with meaning (Adey, 2010; Cresswell, 2006, 2011). This vision unties the moorings of semiosis. It accentuates that signs and meanings, too, are mobile, potentially shifting and multiplying as they reverberate across social space (see Jaworski, 2014, 2015; Stroud and Peck, 2015). These insights are apt for grasping the semiotization of space and the spatialization of semiosis, that is, semiotically effective spatial practices and the social, spatial existence of semiotic objects. In what follows, this, as it were, dialectical vision of mobility is brought to bear on a profoundly mobile form of semiosis: train graffiti. The present study takes interest

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in backjumps, a genre of train graffiti consisting of graffiti pieces completed on trains en route during extended stops, such as at a terminal station (Kimvall, 2014: p. 194; Karlander, 2018). More specifically, it discusses the workings of mobility as a semiotic device with reference to the production and circulation of backjumps in the Stockholm metro. This rapid transit system is a space where graffiti has been strictly policed over an extended period of time (Kimvall, 2013a, 2014). While the Stockholm metro ‘breathes and exhales’ semiosis, as Pennycook and Otsuji (2015: p. 56) suggestively put it, it simultaneously vaporizes some of the signs that it engenders. As in many similar spaces, graffiti is persecuted and meticulously erased – ‘buffed’ in the graffiti writer register – from much of the metro system. To analytically capture graffiti means, accordingly, to capture the ways in which graffiti appears and disappears. It also means accounting for the forms of mobility that underwrite these appearances and disappearances, and for the practices in which these patterns of mobility are upheld. Thus, as I shall show here, an analysis of some of the many forms of mobility that converge in a backjump may offer general insights into the persistence of mobility in and in relation to semiosis. To be sure, an understanding of semiosis as mobile requires a sensitization to an array of complementarities and antagonisms, that is to say, to the continuities and discontinuities, presences and absences, and moorings and forms of movement that come together in any given sign (Jaworski, 2014: p. 524; see also Cresswell and Martin, 2012). As Stroud maintains (2014: p. 214), semiosis is made to move through ‘discordant and competing processes.’ Signs and semiotic practices might cohabitate peacefully or grapple violently with one another (Jaworski, 2014: p. 524). They might likewise precipitate spatially as temporary outcomes in an ongoing struggle between various opposing social and semiotic forces. Neither a sign – in a genuinely semiotic understanding of the term – nor the space in which it appears are sedentary. Over time, any sign might be remodelled, replaced or removed. Such changes have semiotic repercussions, as they might fuse with other recontextualizations of the provisionally emplaced sign. In this regard, the semiotic composition of a place encompasses both coherence and dispersion, as its ‘elements are drawn together at a particular conjuncture only to disperse or realign’ (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011: p. 125). Most semiotic constellations can always be rejigged, either semiotically or spatially. The forms of semiotic stability that exist in a particular space are but temporary, an ‘coextensive with their potential collapse’ (Cresswell and Martin, 2012: p. 517). The present study pries into this dynamic. By discussing the production of backjumps, it attends to the relationship between semiotic practice, mobility and the semiotics of place. While the study explores the interplay of various forms of mobility and immobility that coalesce in a backjump, as well as the absences and presences that issue out of such patterns of movement, the study is not solely concerned with backjumps nor with graffiti in a more general sense. Rather, it uses backjumps to bring home a point about the multifariousness of mobility and about the formative influence that it exercises on semiotization of space and spatialization of semiosis. Through this lens, the study discusses mobility as a semiotic device, as well as on some conceptual concerns that this point of view may usher in.

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A strict semiotic regime Whereas the public life of graffiti often is regimented, the means and ends of such semiotic regimes vary (see Blommaert, 2016; Caldeira, 2012; Ehrenfeucht, 2014; Kramer, 2010; Kimvall, 2013a, 2014; Pennycook, 2010). Relative to some institutionalized semiotic order, graffiti may be permitted in some spaces and persecuted in others. In the Stockholm metro, graffiti is strictly policed. As a consequence of an assiduously pursued graffiti-removal regime, it mostly lingers as a semiotic absence in the metro space. As Edensor (2013: p. 450) notes, such absences ‘loom large for long periods in some places, generating and sustaining imaginaries.’ The Stockholm metro is certainly a case in point. In this space, the absence of graffiti is bound up with an imaginary of the semiotically predictable and visually ordered city. A quick glance on Stockholm’s policy statement (Klotterpolicy, 2015) on what city authorities officially have designated ‘graffiti and similar forms of vandalism’ substantiates this view (see also Kimvall, 2013a, 2014: p. 105–149). Here, articulations of the social and aesthetical inappropriateness of graffiti are refracted through a representation of the purported security, purity and splendour of the graffiti-free city. The document declares that ‘Stockholm shall be secure, safe, clean and beautiful’, and that ‘graffiti and similar forms of vandalism shall not be accepted […] on any building, on the ground, on any facility, vehicle and so on’. Such denunciations of graffiti as a threatening, vile, dirty and generally undesired form of semiosis have at times been reinforced by a commitment to rapidly erase unsanctioned graffiti wherever it occurs. The text dictates that graffiti ‘shall be sanitized – that is, removed – within 24 hours after it has been discovered, documented and reported’. In the same vein, it also demands that all vehicles, machinery and equipment used by the city or by its subcontractors must be ‘sanitized’ from any graffiti before being used in public space. These reactive semiotic tactics blend with more durable preventive strategies. For instance, the policy demands that ‘any construction or reconstruction project, or a similar type of change in the urban milieu should opt for designs that prevent and obstruct graffiti and similar types of vandalism, whenever this is possible’ (Klotterpolicy, 2015). Crucially, the policy text does not simply make reference to the legal treatment of unsanctioned writing graffiti. In fact, its main accomplishment is that it does not merely regard illegal graffiti as a property crime. In the document, illegal acts of graffiti writing are not just construed as mere transgressions of law, but at once as transgressions of taste, of dominating beliefs about space and semiosis and of similar rationalizations of the symbolic facets of social order. As such, it positions graffiti as inherently out of place (see Cresswell, 1996: p. 37–60; Dickinson, 2008; Kimvall, 2014: p. 46ff.; Pennycook, 2010: p. 140). The policy text is above all concerned with the demarcation of semiotic ordinariness from semiotic digression. Its antagonistic images of cleanliness and defilement define semiotic normality as a negation, that is, as the permanent absence of graffiti. Now, textually realized utopias do not necessarily affect the objects that they bespeak. In one way or another, there tend to exist gaps between policy text and actual policing. In the Stockholm metro, however, the ‘sanitation’ of graffiti constitutes a markedly efficient semiotic regime. Graffiti is usually removed quickly from the

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spaces of the metro system. In metro stations, graffiti typically remains for a stretch of maximally a few days. As for graffiti on trains, the permanence is even shorter. Whenever graffiti is written on a metro train in a train yard, the train will be purged from graffiti before it is allowed to enter into traffic. In 2013, to take one example, there were 16,469 recorded occurrences of illegal graffiti in the Stockholm County public transport system.1 To someone travelling in the Stockholm metro at that time, most of this graffiti would have remained invisible. This invisibility was maintained through a robust semiotic regime, manifested in the swift and consequential erasure of graffiti from the metro. This semiotic regime relied upon myriad semiotic interventions, minor acts of visual maintenance and reversion, which were largely effective to this ends. During that year, most of the reported instances of illegal graffiti were removed from the public transport system with relatively short notice. Few, if any, remain as of today. As of 2017, this regime is still upheld. Although graffiti keeps appearing in the Stockholm metro, its presence is still provisional and, always, quickly terminated. While graffiti might linger for some time in spaces-in-between of the metro system, such as in unlit tunnels or on bridges, trackside walls and other structures in the peripheral parts of the metro, it is quickly erased in spaces that are open to travellers (Kimvall, 2013a, 2014). As a consequence, graffiti exists somewhere other than in metro stations and on metro trains. In these spaces, it is close to an ever-present absence. Importantly, manifold acts of erasure underlie the recognition of graffiti as intrusive and disruptive. Such acts do not only enact a visual reversion, but are rather coproductive of the symbolic order that graffiti writing is held to transgress. They do not simply restore some unmarked semiotic status quo, but continuously define and produce it, invoking a polar opposition between appropriate and inappropriate forms of semiosis. Patterns of erasure create a semiotic order that simultaneously manifests its inversion in the contrastive positioning of graffiti as out of place. No act of erasure simply restores an unmarked visual state, but defines it, asking slyly: ‘If this graffiti was supposed to be here, why would it have to be removed?’ In this vein, the systematic removal of graffiti both materially reiterates and symbolically points to authorized systems of ideas about the acceptable visual composition of places, as well as to ideas about how this composition is to be legitimately altered (Cresswell, 1996: p. 57–59; Pennycook, 2010: p. 138–143). Under such a regime, the sudden presence of graffiti provokes questions about how semiosis is regimented, that is, about how space is semiotically controlled and about the ways in which this control is upheld. Various forms of mobility may contribute significantly to such comparatively rare events of semiotic rupture. We shall now consider one such event.

Mobility as an intrinsic property of semiosis The existence of the graffiti in the Stockholm metro is tangibly constrained. In several ways the semiotic regime upheld in the metro curtails both the longevity and the visibility of graffiti. As a consequence of the conditions outlined earlier, the existence of graffiti is always evanescent. These constraints are intensified in the policing of train

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graffiti in Stockholm, with metro trains being meticulously erased whenever graffiti is discovered on them. Painted trains are temporarily withdrawn from traffic or barred from leaving train yards until they have been buffed. Backjumps, as we shall see, are able to overcome some of these constraints. By completing a piece on a train that has already entered into traffic, graffiti writers are able to circumvent the anti-graffiti measures upheld in train yards, as well as to momentarily subvert the semiotic order of the metro system. Such forms of semiotic transgression are interwoven with various forms of mobility: of trains, of writers, of actual graffiti pieces. It is obvious that a moving backjump is necessarily preceded by a successful act of writing. However, as any such semiotic intervention must overcome a number of obstacles, its outcome is not given beforehand. Notably, any attempt to complete a backjump is temporally constrained. During the short time a train remains static in a terminal station, graffiti writers must complete their backjump, preferably without being observed, interrupted or arrested. The felicity of the writing is dependent on the writers’ practical mastery of several intertwined forms of mobility. The train moves and the writers move. Other people, such as security guards, metro workers or travellers, may move in ways that could affect the writing. If everything goes according to plan, the backjumps will eventually move. In short, mobility is a constitutive feature in the production and subsequent existence of backjump. Should backjumps be grasped, mobility must be grasped. In the following text, I expand on this outlook in relation to three stills extracted from a YouTube video2 (Figures 4.1 to 4.3), which capture the production and circulation of a backjump. Figures 4.1 and 4.2 exemplify one possible modus operandi of backjump painting in the Stockholm metro (cf. Karlander, 2018). Although generic, the graffiti that the writing produces is far from ordinary. The completed backjump (Figure 4.3) is a so-called whole car and measures roughly 14 metres in length. It covers the entire side of the first section of a metro carriage. The clip, from which Figures 4.1, 4.2 and 4.3 have been extracted, comprises several similar records of graffiti writing in the Stockholm public transport system. In a two-minute clip, it condenses to roughly ten to fifteen minutes during which the WUFC NER backjump was created, hence editing out most of the writing. Also, a soundtrack has also been added, with the WUFC NER clip playing over an interminably repeating five-second rap loop. In the video, four masked men are seen running up towards the trackside at the Fruängen terminal station of metro line 14, located in the southern peripheries of the Stockholm metro system. The men are graffiti writers bent on painting a backjump. They make their way to a metro train parked at the platform, climb onto the footbridge that runs along the train and begin to paint. The division of labour appears to have been made up beforehand. As partially shown in Figure 4.1, one writer sketches the crew names WUFC NER in black spray paint. Two other writers follow him, filling in the outlined letters with chrome-coloured paint. One writer stands upright, spraying the windows and upper parts of the carriage while the second one crouches and engages with the surface below the window. The latter task is slightly impeded by the railing mounted on the footbridge and progresses slower. A fourth writer begins by painting an orange background to the left of the W. Having finished quickly, he produces a can of chrome paint and starts to fill in the letters (Figure 4.1).

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Figure 4.1 Writers painting background (left), filling in (mid) and sketching letters (right).

The scene buzzes with movement. The writers operate at different speeds, regularly shifting their pace. Unlike the initial scramble towards the train, the actual writing appears calm. The movements of the writers remain poised, yet differentiated. The lines are added with a casual elegance. The fields of chrome, black and orange are completed at a much faster tempo, hands moving frantically over the surface. At the same time, the writers’ footwork is slow, their bodies slouching sideways along the carriage. The crouching writer moves even slower than his partners. Whenever a writer turns away from the piece, his pace shifts again. Writers can be seen dashing from one spot to another, either in order to fetch more paint or to work on a different part of the piece. They slow down as they squeeze past each other on the footbridge and speed up whenever they are able to move about more freely. Every now and then, a writer leaps off the footbridge or climbs back onto it. These movements are usually cautious, as the moving writers carefully avoid the high-voltage third rail running beneath the footbridge. At one point, one writer seems to accidently fall down on the tracks. Occasionally, writers move on the ground in front of the footbridge as they paint, improving the chrome fill-in with additional paint. A backjump is not usually as large as the WUFC NER piece shown here (cf. Karlander, 2018). As a composite whole, the completion of the piece appears choreographed. The movements of hands, arms, feet and bodies are highly synchronized, with each writer adapting to his partners’ pace and progress as the work unfolds. Every writer is occupied with his own set of tasks, but these tasks form part of a cooperative creative

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practice. The writers collectively shape the letters on the side of the train. The division of labour is necessary for completing the work on time. Thus, the completed backjump eventually emerges from the collective mobility practised by the writers (Figure 4.2). As the letters have been filled in, one writer accentuates the chrome-dusted contour lines with more black paint. Several writers add black three-dimensional effects to the completed letters. Another writer adds a second, yellow, contour outside the black lines and white highlights to the letters. As the train pulls away from the station, he rushes to finish the last details of the final R. On par with the ensuing movement of the train, the writers run away from the station, passing through a hole in the metal fence before dispersing among the nearby buildings. Clearly, a number of transgressions occur whenever a backjump is painted. The Stockholm metro, just like any infrastructure of mass mobility (see Edensor, 2011; Löfgren, 2008; Symes, 2013; Urry, 2007: p. 90–111), is a highly regimented space. Metro travellers are not supposed to engage in begging or unauthorized busking, nor infringe on their co-travellers with excessive talk, or sounds, or smells or bodily proximity. They are expected to move in certain spaces, while staying out of others. Not least, they are supposed to not write graffiti in the metro. This semiotic, spatial regime is inscribed in the architecture of metro system. Not only are flows of time, matter and people fastidiously controlled, but the metro abounds with material measures to keep people in certain places, and to keep them out of others. Some spaces are locked; others are sealed off with barbed wire, motion detectors or alarms. Other spaces are fitted with surveillance equipment, designed to deter, monitor or record undesired ways of being and behaving. This spatial regime precipitates in a range of material, temporal and semiotic limitations to graffiti writing. Yet, these constraints have become partially integrated into a range of graffiti-writing practices. The backjump is an epitome example of such integration of space, mobility and practice.

Figure 4.2 Writers finishing the WUFC piece.

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‘Limitations are what make graff ’, Swedish graffiti writer Leon argues,3 reflecting on the conditions of the production of train graffiti. At a less general scale, this is also an apposite characterization of the backjump practice. In several respects, the constraints that writers manage to navigate in backjump painting are different than those upheld in other production sites of train graffiti, such as in train yards and depots. On the one hand, a terminal station in the Stockholm metro has relatively few security measures. Stations, in contrast to depots and other sealed-off spaces, are among the most accessible parts of any mass-transit system. This accessibility applies not only to passengers, but also to graffiti writers. Compared to a train yard, an outdoor station in the Stockholm metro has a reduced standard of security and surveillance. The fences are usually lower, equipped with less-aggressive barbed wire, and typically lacks alarms. There are no motion detectors or floodlights. The flow of people is negligible outside rush hours. As a consequence, a terminal station in the Stockholm metro affords graffiti writing on trains, not least in the guise of backjumps. Furthermore, any train graffiti produced there will not immediately be subject to the cleaning regime enforced in train yards, where trains will be meticulously cleaned off graffiti before they are permitted to enter into traffic. On the other hand, the backjump practice is not totally unconstrained, but subjected to different set of tangible limitations. As the WUFC NER example illustrates, the production of a backjump unfolds in a hazardous space. The writers are highly visible and their practice is, thus, more exposed to detection. Likewise, their writing is fraught with temporal limitations. Yet, the transgressions involved in the production of a backjump are unmistakeable. Writers engage in an illicit practice undertaken in a space where people are not supposed to move around. Moreover, the transgressiveness of a backjump extends beyond the actual moment of its production. It is coextensive with the ensuing movement of the train. As visible in Figure 4.3, the WUFC NER backjump entered into traffic, producing yet another sequence of semiotic transgressions. Prior to the moment depicted in Figure 4.3, the WUFC NER backjump had moved at least once between the two terminal stations of metro line 14. On the northbound journey of the train, the backjump trajected a total of nineteen metro stations. In Figure 4.3, the train is southwardly mobile, passing over a bridge in central Stockholm. In these trajectories, the composite mobility of the graffiti and the train semiotically reconfigured a series of interconnected spaces. It introduced a new, unmoored element to the semiotic assemblage of each station, producing a breach in the semiotic regimentation of the metro system. By semiotically appropriating the movement of a train, the writers succeeded to transgress the semiotic and spatial control exercised in the sections of the metro where this object eventually circulated. Their writing did not simply alter the surface of the train, but effectively transformed the spaces through which the surface ultimately moved. As Figure 4.3 also suggests, this transgression was momentary, coeval with the movement of the WUFC NER backjump through the metro. During its journey, the backjump remained in each station of the line for no longer than one minute. As quickly as the backjump had shown up, it moved on again, out of sight. While its temporary presence certainly upset the semiotic order of the metro, it nevertheless left the fixed imageries of each station untouched, reset as the piece moved on. Recalling

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Figure 4.3 WUFC NER whole car rolling through central Stockholm.

Leon’s point of view, these forms of mobility contain an immanent potential for their own toppling. A moving backjump transgresses the semiotic order of the metro, the transgression being parasitic on the mobility of a moving metro train. In this vein, the patterned mobility of the metro system partakes in the subversion of its own poised imageries. Yet, the same mobility was responsible for quickly restoring semiotic order in each station. As a semiotic device, mobility seems to produce dual effects, being capable of both unsettling and resettling various forms of spatialized semiosis. This dialectic between presence and absence, and between writing and erasure, indicates that the semiotic control of the metro spaces is not total. Just as with any assemblages of signs (see DeLanda, 2006: Chapter 2), the physical and semiotic limitations imposed in the metro can be subverted at certain temporal conjunctures. As the WUFC NER backjump emphasizes, mobility is vital to this end. The WUFC NER backjump emerged from an inventive use of the patterned, predictable mobility of the metro train. The train moved and the writers took advantage of this movement. Their semiotic intervention created a new instance of semiotic mobility. The mobility of the metro train repeatedly redeployed the backjump, engendering a series of patterned transgressions of the semiotic order of the metro system. Stillness and immobility were crucial components in the functioning of this mobility (see Cresswell, 2012: p. 645), as each stop of the train accentuated the semiotic effect of transgression. The moments of immobility of the metro train were ‘thoroughly incorporated in

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practices of moving’ (Cresswell, 2012: p. 648; see also Hannam et al., 2006: p. 3; Cresswell, 2010) that converged in the backjump. As the mobility of the train was temporarily halted, the writers’ vigilant waiting was transformed into rapid action. Their joint corporeal movements ensued during a moment of relative immobility nested in a trajectory of mobility. The train remained immobile while the writers moved vividly, their actions being framed by trains’ patterned mobility. Tellingly, the backjump became synchronized with the timetabled mobility of the train. The patterned mobility of the semiotically modified train was woven into other forms of mobility, and with other trajectories that crossed through the places that the train passed. Moving with the train, the WUFC NER backjump animated and reordered an array of interconnected spaces. Throughout this trajectory, the initial moment of transgression persevered, resonating in the subsequent moments of semiotic transgression. This rhythm of stops and movement, of visual changes and relapses, was replayed until the train eventually was taken out of service and the backjump was removed. Thus, the example of the WUFC NER backjump underscores the ways in which interspersed forms of mobility partake in the production and dissemination of semiosis. Since the example encompasses visual material flowing through YouTube, a well-developed ‘online infrastructure of graffiti’ (Blommaert, 2016; see also Light et al., 2012), it is, furthermore, implicit that this mobility extends into a circulation that supervenes the physical moment of the backjump through the Stockholm metro. This is yet another semiotically relevant form of mobility (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2014). While any backjump painted on a Stockholm metro train is bound to succumb to erasure, it can be remobilized through digital media (see Kimvall, 2013b: p. 81). Through forms of medial remobilization, the mobility of the WUFC NER backjump has been extended and further recontextualized. In a non-trivial way, the online circulation of the WUFC NER backjump is paired with its dire absence in the space where it originated. When the initial mobility of the backjump was recast and remediated online, this relative consolidation points back to the brief existence and current non-existence of the piece in the metro. As this dual circulation again emphasizes, the social life of a backjump conjoins several forms of mobility. A backjump is conspicuously, but not exclusively, interlinked with the patterned movement of metro trains. It semiotically unsettles the spaces through which the train moves, clashing with more sedentary forms of semiosis and with the semiotic regime that underwrites them. Its movement, and the semiotic effects that this mobility creates, is filtered through the flickering gazes of the moving audiences that it interpellates. Less flagrantly, a backjump is bound up with stealthy forms of mobility practised by graffiti writers. It is, in short, inseparable from the many mobilities coexisting in the metro system. Without a resourceful use of the mobilities of the metro system, there could be no backjumps. Without the intervention of graffiti writing in these controlled forms of movement, there would be no semiotic transformations of places. Without the continuous eradication of graffiti in the Stockholm metro, these semiotic interventions would entail other semiotic effects. By the same token, these forms of mobility extend beyond the original trajectories of an individual backjump. To the extent that a backjump is documented, its mobility may align with other media and modalities, thus feeding into new semiotic practices. The

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fact that the video is uploaded onto YouTube further stresses this point, as do the layers of discursive mobility added by the present study.

Implications A moving backjump underscores that mobility is a pertinent and highly formative force in the semiotization of space and in the spatialization of semiosis. This pertinence ought to have conceptual implications for our thinking about the interface between space and semiosis. A sensitization to the primordiality of mobility in spatial and semiotic processes entail questions about the ways in which mobility brings to bear on a vast number of sign relations. Such questions must go beyond an empiricist interest in movement. To simply say that a material instance of semiosis is mobile is not to provide a complete account of all semiotically relevant forms of mobility in which a mobile sign is embedded. As the backjump example illustrates, a mobile image both feeds into and off other forms of mobility. Physical movement, such as that of a train, is only a sort of ‘raw material’ (Cresswell, 2010: p. 19), which can be resourced in a range of interdependent semiotic activities. While such movement undoubtedly partakes in the production of meaning, movement cannot be rationalized as the source of meaning, nor as meaning proper (Adey, 2010: pp. 34–39; Cresswell, 2006). Rather than simplifying this relative complexity, it seems fitting to approach mobile semiosis as tied into various constellations of mobility (Cresswell, 2010), conceiving signs as bound up with ‘patterns of movement, representations of movement, and ways of practising movement that make sense together’ (Cresswell, 2010: p. 18). Any semiotically relevant form of mobility is clearly mobile with several other forms of mobility (Jensen, 2010; Thurlow and Jaworski, 2014: pp. 464–465). Indeed, the production, circulation and eradication of a backjump constitute a prime example of a semiotically dense linking of multiple forms of mobility. ‘To speak of the metro first of all is to speak of reading’, Augé (2002: p. 9) writes in his reflection on travelling in the Paris métro. Although this suggestive remark resonates with a foundational thought in the contemporary strand of spatially invested sociolinguistics, the forms of mobility that ensnare graffiti in the Stockholm metro beget questions about the practical basis of such reading. They ask: What does it mean to look for something that for most of the time remains unseen? How can we make sense of an instance of semiosis that has already been erased? What happens to reading when our objects move about at several interconnected scales? How do our analyses handle the occasions when our objects encounter us, and not vice versa? And, recalling Cresswell (2006), what meanings does this mobility create? These are rather programmatic questions, which nonetheless can sensitize our gaze to the interplay of absence and presence, breaks and continuities that are co-present in any form of mobility. Importantly, mobility pushes us to consider the relationality of the sign and to construe its presence and absence as relative of each other. By stressing that places are ‘continually reproduced through the mobile flows that course through them’ (Edensor, 2011: p. 190; see also Stroud and Jegels, 2013; Jaworski, 2015; Stroud and Peck, 2015), such shift of perspective foregrounds the ways in which the

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mobility of people, objects and meanings partake in the semiotization of space and in the spatialization of semiosis. It also directs attention to the temporal organization of these flows. Rather than querying the most apparent visual manifestations of spatial semiotic regime, it takes interest in the techniques and practices that uphold such regime, as well as in the moments when the regime is overturned. An analysis of the interplay between order and disorder is apt for unravelling the ways in which several coalescing forms of mobility feed into spatial and semiotic practice (cf. DeLanda, 2006; Anderson and McFarlane, 2011; Cresswell and Martin, 2012; Stroud, 2014). By turning our focus to the moments when semiotic order appears to break down, we can, as hinted by Cresswell and Martin (2012: p. 526), begin to refine our grasp of the ways in which this order is produced, maintained and altered. As for the type of graffiti writing considered in this study, a sensitization to mobility is a prerequisite for understanding what backjumps transgress, as well as of how, when and why they transgress. Semantically, the word transgression, which stems from the Latin gressus (perfect participle of gradior – to walk, to step), implies mobility. In a backjump, this formal semblance gains practical force. Through the resourceful use and production of several mobilities, graffiti writers manage to transgress the unwavering regime of graffiti removal upheld in the Stockholm metro, as well as the fetishism of semiotic stasis upon which this regime is founded (see Cresswell, 1996, 2012). Through a backjump, semiosis assumes a rhythmic structure, embodying both a temporal and a spatial periodicity. During limited period of time, it moves at a certain pace, appearing in a series of places at a relatively predictable interval, thereby provoking a sequence of less predictable semiotic effects. Yet, although mobility has an immanent capacity of semiotically defying and surpassing the regimentation of places, the semiotic effects it creates are not necessarily permanent. As highlighted by the case at hand, mobility is manifest not only in the genesis of semiosis, but also in its demise. A moving backjump engenders presences that soon turn into absences, in a way that make semiotic change and reversal exist sequentially across a number of temporal conjunctures. However, in the case considered here, the dialectic between appearances and disappearances was eventually superseded by an absence, as the mobility of the backjump is reiterated definitively in its erasure. To be sure, the WUFC NER backjump did not last long. Its immediate semiotic imprint on the metro was limited. Like all train graffiti in the Stockholm metro, it was eventually removed, or erased. Thus, just as graffiti writing often ‘challenges assumptions about who has access to public literacy, who controls space and who can sanction public images and lettering’ (Pennycook, 2010: p. 140), its social existence may just as well confirm rather gloomy expectations about who ultimately controls the semiotics of public spaces. It is rarely writers who determine the longevity of an instance of graffiti. In sum, the present case highlights the intimate relationship between mobility and the semiotics of place, adding conceptual substance to the enquiry of ‘the when and where of the physical location of language in the world’ (Scollon and Scollon, 2003: p. xii). As of late, spatially invested sociolinguistics has sought to elaborate on the language sciences’ long-standing concern with signs in space (see Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010a; Johnstone, 2010). In a spatially invested sociolinguistics, questions pertaining to the emplacement and location of semiosis are becoming increasingly

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important. Under the banner of landscape, such questions often seem to align with a panoptic view on the relationship between space and semiosis. As Jaworski and Thurlow (2010a: p. 3) note, the concept of landscape is closely linked to notions of a fixed vision, which endows ‘the observer a sense of dominion and control over space’. When this is the case, the ‘where’ and the ‘when’ are often reduced to the ahistorical ‘here’ and ‘now’ of a snapshot representation. This vision seems to yield cartographic engagements, in which spatialized semiosis tends to appear alluringly fixed, and issues pertaining to semiotic practice tend to be ignored (see Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010a; Blommaert, 2013: p. 24–27; Moriarty, 2014: p. 458; see also Massey, 2005: p. 36–38; Cresswell, 2006, 2011). In a similar critique, Cresswell (2015: pp. 17–18; see also Cresswell, 2003) argues that this analytical perspective derives from an ‘intensely visual idea’ of space. In his critique, the very notion of landscape is inextricably linked to a gaze ‘from a slight distance’, producing a detachment, which is prone to overlook less static facets of space, including practice, interaction and, not the least, mobility (Cresswell in Merriman et al., 2008: p. 194). The accuracy of this view is not uncontested (see contributions in Merriman et al., 2008). Indeed, a notion such as landscape, and the place of practice and mobility therein, has been a matter of much debate in human geography (e.g. Cresswell, 2003, 2006; Merriman et al., 2008; Wylie, 2007). It is not unlikely that the same issues will arise in the maturational process of spatially interested sociolinguistics. Reflecting upon such struggles, Massey (2005: p. 107) offers a balanced comment, noting that ‘not all views from above are problematical – they are just another way of looking at the world […]. The problem only comes if you fall into thinking that vertical distance lends you truth’. Her remark should serve as a timely reminder for sociolinguists preoccupied with similar issues. However, since mobility calls for a focus on practice, change and relationality, it seems to preclude, or at least complicate, a fixed view from above (Adey, 2010; Cresswell, 2006, 2010; Hannam et al., 2006; Sheller and Urry, 2006). Mobility, accordingly, serves as a good inroad to the many interconnected ‘whens’ and ‘wheres’ of semiotic production, and thereby to a deepened understanding of the semiotization of space and the spatialization of semiosis. It provides additional insights not only about how and why semiosis appears and disappears, but also about how such appearances and disappearances add to the semiotics of place, and not least of all why such processes arise and gain semiotic efficacy. Acknowledging the co-presence of these forms of mobility can serve to create a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between space and semiosis, and to develop accordingly an account of mobility as a cluster of semiotically productive forces. This way of thinking entails a shift in gaze and engagement. If semiosis is approached through the mobilities by which it is assembled and dissembled, it will be difficult to reduce space to merely a physical context for signs, writing and other modes of signification. Pushing this metalinguistic trope further, it seems as if the dynamic relationship between space and semiosis bears resemblance to the linguistic anthropological idea of contextualization (e.g. Bauman and Briggs, 1990). In line with this view, semiosis cannot be conceived as simply ‘existing’ in some invariant spatial configuration, but rather as partaking in a multifarious human enterprise that

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continuously define and redefine the spatial embedding of semiosis. By rethinking space and semiosis in processual and relational, the ‘where’ of meaning and the ‘what’ of space are recast as an emergent reality, continuously shaped in the interactions between manifold agents, practices and processes, none of which can exert complete control the semiotic assemblage in which they partake. Such an outlook construes places as ‘ever-shifting constellations of trajectories’ (Massey, 2005, 151), which cannot be reduced to any of its parts (DeLanda, 2006; Harman, 2008). It consequently compels us to engage with the myriad intersecting processes that precipitate in the semiotization of space and the spatialization of semiosis. Not least, it provides a suitable analytical texture for grasping ‘fleeting encounters’ (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010b), such as those unfolding around a backjump. Exploring such encounters, it is imperative to eschew ‘a point of view that takes certain kinds of fixity and boundedness for granted and instead start with the fact of mobility’ (Cresswell, 2011: p. 551; see also Jaworski, 2014, 2015; Stroud, 2014). As argued here, this vantage point is apt for prying into the semiotization of space and spatialization of semiosis. Not least, it is a necessary measure for beginning to grasp the social life of a backjump.

Concluding remarks As the present study illustrates, mobility is difficult to tease apart from the spatial existence of semiosis. As its discussion about backjumps indicates, the social existence of semiosis may be entwined with various forms of mobility. In the case of backjumps, this mobility includes the patterned movement of trains and the disruptive movements of writers. It likewise includes the mobility of the actual backjumps through the metro system, as well as their eventual removal from this space. Not least, it comprises the mobile gazes of metro travellers as well as the online circulation of edited audiovisual recordings of the original backjump. Mobility, thus, is not simply the movement of the backjumps of the train, but rather a range of tightly connecting ways of moving and making use of movement. The production and subsequent existence of backjumps can by no means be teased apart from these interlinked forms of mobility. In this regard, the example at hand gestures at a larger point. As a semiotic device, mobility appears in many guises, partaking in numerous processes and serving numerous ends. It is not reducible to the movement and impermanency of certain images, nor to slow visual changes developing across time. Mobile semiosis, as I have sought to elucidate, presumes upon a number of such forms of mobility. As the case of backjumps illustrates, mobility becomes semiotically relevant in the circulation of semiosis, and in the visual transformations and potential transgressions that this circulation might produce. Contrastively, but inescapably, mobility is manifest in the patterns of erasure that cancel this circulation. Mobility is once again actualized in the afterlife of an erased image, subsequently extending and mobilizing semiosis across time and space. Accordingly, mobility persists as a connectivity between the coextensive, and sometimes antagonistic, phenomena that are caught up in semiotization of space and spatialization of semiosis. In this vein, mobility can both

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reveal and hide key aspects of the emergence, durability and reordering of semiosis. A sensitization to ways in which mobility operates as a semiotic device may offer a deepened understanding of the relationship between spatial and semiotic practices and, thus, between space and semiosis.

Notes 1 Data extracted from the crime reports database (Statistik över anmälda brott) of the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (Brottsförebyggande rådet, Brå). Report for Stockholm County (Stockholms län) for the post Klotter i kollektivtrafiken (Swe. Illegal graffiti in public transportation) for the year 2013. Accessible at http:// statistik.bra.se/solwebb/action/index; as of November 2014. 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS2dJQ5lOQI ; accessed in December 2016. 3 Interview (2012). Underground Productions 45: 58–62. Quote, p. 62.

References Adey, Peter. (2010), Mobility, Abingdon: Routledge. Anderson, Ben, and McFarlane, Colin. (2011), ‘Assemblage and Geography’, Area, 43 (2): pp. 124–127. Augé, Marc. (2002), In the Metro, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bauman, Richard, and Briggs, Charles L. (1990), ‘Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 19: pp. 59–88. Blommaert, Jan. (2013), Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes. Chronicles of Complexity, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Blommaert, Jan. (2016), ‘“Meeting of Styles” and the Online Infrastructures of Graffiti’, Applied Linguistics Review, 7 (2): pp. 99–115. Caldeira, Teresa. (2012), ‘Imprinting and Moving Around: New Visibilities and Configurations of Public Space in São Paolo’, Public Culture, 24 (2): pp. 385–419. Cresswell, Tim. (1996), In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cresswell, Tim. (2003), ‘Landscape and the Obliteration of Practice’, in Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds.), The Handbook of Human Geography, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 269–282. Cresswell, Tim. (2006), On the Move, Abingdon: Routledge. Cresswell, Tim. (2010), ‘Towards a Politics of Mobility’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28 (1): pp. 17–31. Cresswell, Tim. (2011), ‘Mobilities I: Catching Up’, Progress in Human Geography, 35 (4): pp. 550–558. Cresswell, Tim. (2012), ‘Mobilities II: Still’, Progress in Human Geography, 36 (5): pp. 645–653. Cresswell, Tim. (2015), Place: An Introduction, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Cresswell, Tim, and Martin, Craig. (2012), ‘On Turbulence: Entanglements of Order and Disorder on a Devon Beach’, Tijdschrift vor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 103 (5): pp. 516–529.

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DeLanda, Manuel. (2006), A New Philosophy of Society, New York: Continuum. Dickinson, Maggie. (2008), ‘The Making of Space, Race and Place: New York City’s War on Graffiti, 1970 – the Present’, Critique of Anthropology, 28 (1): pp. 27–45. Edensor, Tim. (2011), ‘Communter: Mobility, Rhythm and Commuting’, in Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman (eds.), Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 189–204. Edensor, Tim. (2013), ‘Vital Urban Materiality and its Multiple Absences: The Building Stone of Central Manchester’, Cultural Geographies, 20 (4): pp. 447–465. Ehrenfeucht, Renia. (2014), ‘Art, Public Spaces, and Private Property Along the Streets of New Orleans’, Urban Geography, 35 (7): pp. 965–979. Hannam, Kevin, Sheller, Mimi, and Urry, John. (2006), ‘Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings’, Mobilities, 1 (1): pp. 1–22. Harman, Graham. (2008), ‘The Assemblage Theory of Society’, in Graham Harman (ed.), Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures, Ropley : Zero Books, pp. 170–198. Jaworski, Adam. (2014), ‘Mobile Language in Mobile Places’, International Journal of Bilingualism, 18 (5): pp. 524–533. Jaworski, Adam. (2015), ‘Word Cities and Language Objects: “Love” Sculptures and Signs as Shifters’, Linguistic Landscape, 1 (1–2): 75–94. Jaworski, Adam, and Thurlow, Crispin. (2010a), ‘Introducing Semiotic Landscapes’, in Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow (eds.), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London: Continuum, pp. 1–40. Jaworski, Adam, and Thurlow, Crispin. (2010b), ‘Language and the Globalizing Habitus of Tourism: Toward a Sociolinguistics of Fleeting Relationships’, in Nikolas Coupland (ed.), The Handbook of Language and Globalization, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 255–286. Jensen, Ole. (2010), ‘Erving Goffman and Everyday Life Mobility’, in Michael Hvid Jacobsen (ed.), The Contemporary Goffman, Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 333–351. Johnstone, Barbara. (2010), ‘Language and Geographical Space’, in Peter Auer, and Jürgen Schmidt (eds.), Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 1–18. Karlander, David. (2018), ‘Backjumps: Writing, Watching, Erasing Train Graffiti’, Social Semiotics, 28 (1): pp. 41–59. Kimvall, Jacob. (2013a), ‘Scandinavian Zero Tolerance on Graffiti’, in Eliza Bertuzzo, Eszter Gantner, Heike Oevermann, and Jörg Niewöhner (eds.), Kontrolle Öffentlicher Räume, Berlin: Lit, pp. 102–117. Kimvall, Jacob. (2013b), ‘Towards a Conceptual and Multipositional Understanding of the Object in Street and Graffiti Art’, in Luca Boriello and Luca Ruggerio (eds.), Inopinatum. The Unexpected Impertinence of Urban Creativity, Rome: Arti Grafiche Boccia, pp. 79–89. Kimvall, Jacob. (2014), The G-Word: Virtuosity and Violation, Negotiating and Transforming Graffiti, Stockholm: Dokument. Klotterpolicy (Policy mot klotter och liknande skadegörelse i Stockholm [Policy against graffiti and similar kinds of vandalism]). (2015), City of Stockholm. Kramer, Ronald. (2010), ‘Painting with Permission: Legal Graffiti in New York City’, Ethnography, 11 (2): pp. 235–253. Light, Ben, Griffiths, Marie, and Lincoln, Siân. (2012), ‘“Connect and Create”: Young People, YouTube and Graffiti Communities’, Continuum, 26 (3): pp. 343–355. Löfgren, Orvar. (2008), ‘Motion and Emotion: Learning to Be a Railway Traveller’, Mobilities, 3 (3): pp. 331–351.

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Massey, Doreen. (2005), For Space, London: Sage. Merriman, Peter, Revill, George, Cresswell, Tim, Lorimer, Hayden, Matless, David, Rose, Gillian, and Wylie, John. (2008), ‘Landscape, Mobility, Practice’, Social and Cultural Geography, 9 (2): pp. 191–212. Moriarty, Máiréad. (2014), ‘Languages in Motion: Multilingualism and Mobility in the Linguistic Landscape’, International Journal of Bilingualism, 18 (5): pp. 457–463. Pennycook, Alastair. (2010), ‘Spatial Narrations: Graffscapes and City Souls’, in Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow (eds.), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London: Continuum, pp. 137–150. Pennycook, Alastair, and Otsuji, Emi. (2015), Metrolingualism: Language and the City, Abingdon: Routledge. Sebba, Mark. (2010), ‘Discourses in Transit’, in Adam Jaworski, and Crispin Thurlow (eds.), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London: Continuum, pp. 59–76. Scollon, Ron, and Wong Scollon, Suzie. (2003), Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World, London: Routledge. Sheller, Mimi, and Urry, John. (2006), ‘The New Mobilities Paradigm’, Environment and planning A, 38 (2): pp. 207–226. Stroud, Christopher. (2014), ‘Afterword: Turbulent Deflections’, in Christopher Stroud and Mastin Prinsloo (eds.), Language, Literacy and Diversity: Moving Words, London: Routledge, pp. 206–216. Stroud, Christopher, and Dimitri Jegels. (2013), ‘Semiotic Landscapes and Mobile Narrations of Place: Performing the Local’, Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 50. Stroud, Christopher, and Peck, Amiena. (2015), ‘Skinscapes’, Linguistic Landscape, 1 (1–2): pp. 133–151. Symes, Colin. (2013), ‘Entr’acte: Mobile Choreography and Sydney Rail Commuters’, Mobilities, 8 (4): pp. 542–559. Thurlow, Crispin, and Jaworski, Adam. (2014), ‘“Two Hundred Ninety Four”: Remediation and Multimodal Performance in Tourist Placemaking’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18 (4): pp. 459–494. Urry, John. (2007), Mobilities, Cambridge: Polity. Wylie, John. (2007), Landscape, Abingdon: Routledge.

Part Two

Alternative Places, Alternative People

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Skinscapes and Friction: An Analysis of Zef Hip-Hop ‘Stoeka-Style’ Tattoos Amiena Peck and Quentin Williams

Tattoos that move bodies Images and words on the body produce a corporeal linguistic landscape (LL) that travels in the larger LL of both public and private spaces (Hiramoto, 2015; Peck and Stroud, 2015). Different semiotic resources are taken up differently and given meaning depending on the body and oftentimes the body semiotics, particularly as seen with tattoos, which are interpreted differently in context and in practice (Pennycook, 2012). Bodies are perceived to move in and out of contexts and spaces, and places, differently in to the world today because, following Appadurai, ‘we are functioning in a world fundamentally characterized by objects in motion … a world of flows … a world of structures, organizations and other stable social forms’ (2000: p. 5). In this world of flows, we argue that sometimes body semiotics are inscribed through processes of hybridity and cultural appropriation (see Appadurai, 1996), and in such processes friction (a la Tsing, 2005) may arise when expected norms for how signs are produced in linguistic and semiotic landscapes are violated. According to Tsing, friction is about ‘the grip of worldly encounter’ (2005: p. 1) that arises out of ‘global connections’ (2005: p. 3) and that involve ‘the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnections across difference’ (2005: p. 4). In this chapter, we explore a particular form of friction, namely that which emerges ostensibly out of the cultural appropriation of tattoos and body ornamentation on inappropriate or unexpected bodies. More specifically, we discuss the case of the white South African Zef culture music group, Die Antwoord,1 and build on the notion of ‘skinscapes’ (cf. Peck and Stroud, 2015) and Povinelli’s (2006) notion of ‘carnality’ to provide an account of how white and coloured2 corporeal regimes differ. The process of cultural appropriation is defined as the borrowing of unauthorized cultural practices that reinforces historically disparate relationships between parties. To be sure, Hart defines cultural appropriation as a process whereby ‘a member of another culture takes a cultural practice or theory of a member of another culture as if it were his own or as if the right of possession should not be questioned or contested’ (1997: p.

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138 cited in Haupt, 2012: p. 418). The tattoos found on the bodies of Die Antwoord are known as Stoeka-style tattoos. These are large tattoos usually exclusively found on the coloured male body, and widely read as indicating that the bearer has served time in a Cape Town prison as a member of the Number gang. These semiotics have a specific time, design, purpose and legacy attached to it, and it is to this legacy that we now turn.

Cape gangs and Stoeka-style tattoos The Number gangs are prisoners formed historically through myth and rituals initially produced outside the prison during the early days of South African Union, and alongside the discovery of gold and diamonds (Steinberg, 2004). Based on the old Boer War commando structure, the Number gangs comprise of the 26s, 27s and 28s, all notorious for their violence, racketeering and money laundering. Showing allegiance to one of the Number gangs is important for the survival of inmates, particularly after they have been ritually apprenticed. One way a gang member is marked is through Stoeka-style tattoos, painstakingly inscribed using non-mainstream tattoo materials (matches, blood, shards of glass, etc.). The area on the body where the tattoo is found also holds important meaning; it tells a story of rank and duty. Once these prison tattoos (locally known as ‘tjappies’) are inscribed, the inmates are forever labelled as part of the notorious underbelly of Cape Town’s gang culture, with death (in most cases) as the only escape (De Clermont, 2008). For those affiliated to the Number gangs, Stoeka-style tattoos serve to incarcerate them long after they leave prison as they are unable to secure employment because of fear and distrust, and because their physical appearance evokes more than discomfort in civil society. Ultimately, the chapter analyses the journey of these tattoos as they move from the social realities of the coloured body, to the mind of Ninja and then onto his body. One may question how such a transmodal journey may be analysed through the use of LLs. We contend that skinscapes allow us to disambiguate the corporeal landscape to reveal how the body is disciplined by discourses of power which persist in the LL.

Zef culture and Die Antwoord Almost twenty years after the first democratic South African government branded the unifying idea of multiracialism in the metaphor of the ‘rainbow nation’ (Alexander, 2013), a new form of performance culture, Zef culture, and music (pioneered mainly by White Afrikaans3 hip-hop artists) has emerged. In particular, Zef culture has become a form of release for White Afrikaner youth amidst an assumed crisis of power, masculinity and sexuality (Kreuger, 2012). According to Marx and Milton (2011), Zef culture is reconfiguring Afrikaans whiteness, mediated through ‘Zef ’ cultural artefacts and performances, in a deliberate attempt to speak ‘to the perceived sense of marginal and liminal experience of White Afrikaans youth in post-apartheid South Africa’ (cf. Marx and Milton, 2011: p. 723). Die Antwoord is Zef culture’s most famous breakout group, comprising of a rapper Ninja and bandmate and fellow rapper Yolandi Visser. Their debut album entitled $O$ was released in 2009 with a breakout music video ‘Enter the Ninja that has attracted

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both local and international attention. Such is their fame that they have been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Rolling Stones. To date, they have produced four albums and have appeared in (international) movies such as Chappie, a future science fiction movie that involves a self-aware police robot as the protagonist that had been decommissioned as scrap but reprogrammed to ‘think and feel’, to have empathy, and transform the role of artificial intelligence. Die Antwoord’s music videos are characterized by violent acts and profanity and are liberally peppered with sexual acts both desired by Ninja and (occasionally) unsought, by Yolandi. Their music videos usually showcase Yolandi and Ninja in graphic sexual acts, leading many a critique to charge them with racism and misogyny, since they reinforce the stereotypes of Afrikaner patriarchy and the politics of ordentlikheid (van der Westhuizen, 2017). Ninja’s rap persona portrays white working classness shot through with coloured gangster proclivities (cf. Haupt, 2012). Yolandi Visser’s persona is that of a transgressive white teenager with an outlandish (and often ghoulish) appearance, frequently dressed in provocative attire and infamous for her antics.

Skinscapes, corporeality and corporeal regimes The chapter attempts to address the appropriation of Stoeka-style tattoos by Die Antwoord to ostensibly promote a hyper-masculine persona in their videos. We make the argument that the represented maleness of coloured gang semiotics (Stoeka-style tattoos) contributes to the injurious power structures and racialized stereotypes that perpetuate the negative semiotization of the coloured male. Put another way, we argue that Die Antwoord reproduces the stigmatization of the coloured body in postapartheid South Africa. In order to analyse this phenomenon, we require an approach to semiosis, mobility and place that can capture the situated representation and reproduction of power which occurred when Ninja inscribed his body with gang tattoos. We ask, how do we best capture this form of semiosis, power relations and reproduction in an analysis of Ninja’s tattoos? Fundamentally, answering this question requires an understanding of how racialized bodies are authored and reproduced. The notion of corporeal regime (cf Povinelli, 2006) is a useful tool to capture how the body is structured differently in society. A corporeal regime is the social and political structure of power and discourses which frames the body, or skinscape. For this reason, we argue that a corporeal regime foregrounds social and political differences assigned to racialized bodies by coconstructing the body via symbolic and material discourses of power. We can therefore say that the body is read as a text, but moreover, there is a larger narrative that the body is indexing through the manner that it is discoursed in society. During apartheid, the corporeal regimes of white and black4 bodies were heirachized in accordance with the inequitable structures of power during that time. Notably, although white people were in the minority, they nevertheless had superior corporeal regimes to all other racial groups.

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For Die Antwoord, seeking a corporeal regime of masculinity, the transposing of appropriate (gang) tattoos is read as a form of semiotic mobility. A useful notion with which to chart the mobility of semiotic features across differentiated corporeal regimes can be examined through the theory of skinscapes. Skinscape is originally a notion developed within LL research. The field of LL has grown rapidly since its description of language on public signage (cf Landry and Bourhis, 1997). While initial research may well have been on language on (static) signage, some more recent work is taking a mobile and corporeal turn, with analysis of signage on the body offering new insights into the body as a ‘corporeal linguistic landscape’, or skinscape (cf. Peck and Stroud, 2015). This theoretical move allows the body, the figured worlds5 that signs on the body index and the greater LL to be considered simultaneously. Skinscapes, therefore, offer a tapestry where bodies, tattoos and their real (or imagined) figured worlds can be read together, informing how actors take on signs in crafting affective, corporeal regimes as they chart old and or new subjective sense of selves (Peck and Stroud, 2015: p. 146). As Peck and Stroud puts it, the idea of ‘skinscapes’ ‘allows us to critically engage with a wider complex sociopolitical “consciousness” climate, wherein inscriptions of the body is seen as imbedded in a network of “intertextual aesthetics” (i.e. popular culture, narratives of aspiration, social class and cultural erasure)’ (2015: p. 149). By drawing on Ahmed’s phenomenological view of bodies as expanding and retracting in space, Peck and Stroud (2015) discussed skinscapes in terms of corporeal place-making, with tattoos as signage on the body which can be read by others. This is helpful in this study, as we analyse precisely how gang semiotics find place (or fail to do so) on Ninja’s white body. We argue that there is no easy fit and that, in fact, the attempts at constructing a masculine corporeality are undermined in very principled ways. This is taken up further in the analysis of the video and production of Ninja’s gang-like semiotics. In the next two sections we (1) apply a multimodal analysis to a small visual corpus of Ninja’s Stoeka-style tattoo signs as they appear in his debut music video $O$ and moreover (2) we analyse the production process of Ninja’s tattoos as we chart the design of the corporeal regime.

Enter the Ninja music video: An analysis of ‘Stoeka-style’ tattoos It was the 2009 debut release of ‘Enter the Ninja’ which propelled Die Antwoord into mega-stardom. The song was listed at number thirty-seven on the UK Music Chart in 2010, with the band easily considered as one of the most successful South African musical exports. The music video is featured in the $O$ album and is considered a true reflection of Zef culture with Ninja’s rough rock persona leading him to be described as ‘someone not to be messed with’ (https://theculturetrip.com/africa/south-africa/ articles/introduction-to-die-antwoord/). The opening few seconds of Enter the Ninja begins with snapshot of Ninja’s face, neck and torso. Almost immediately visible, in the next shot are the words ‘Pretty Wise’ written across his neck (see Figure 5.1, left). These two words are written in

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Figure 5.1 ‘Pretty Wise’ tattoo (left); hand gesture (right).

black and appear to be handwritten, etched into his skin, giving no hint that the tattoo was produced professionally. This handwritten style, known as ‘handpoked’, gives the impression that the tattoo is authentically styled as a Stoeka-style tattoo, that is, crooked and hastily inscribed. This particular style is discussed in more detail in the next section. The term ‘pretty wise’ is a popular cultural reference that Ninja has plausibly translated from Afrikaans ‘raak wys’ (meaning to be aware/wise). That sign signifies a ‘keeping it real’ attitude among prisoners and particularly the Number gangs in the local, the English equivalent allows it to find favour in the global stage without being too close to the real thing. The Afrikaans term ‘raak wys’ would often be used to threaten someone with physical violence, particularly when the interaction is with a gangster, and it would also be used in conjunction with the pointed index finger and raised thumb (creating an image of a gun), also used to threaten. As the video progresses and the shot widens, and pans, Ninja begins his rap verse in braggadocio style and performs overt masculine gestures representative of many hip-hop artists (see Figure 5.1, right). The viewer is treated to a background of graffiti that co-articulates with the Stoeka-style tattoos on the rapper’s body. Ninja’s lyrical performance is energetic and aggressive. He performs what would be perceived as threatening gestures (as if shooting someone), gestures typical in freestyle rap performances (see Alim et al., 2011) and, as such, indexes a hyper-masculinity that mimics the somatics of the Number gangs. If we put Ninja’s body frame alongside that of an actual Numbers gangster, we see the striking similarity in Stoeka-style tattoos. In Figure 5.2, to the left we first see a picture of Ninja with one hand behind his back and the other resting on his stomach, below his torso. His face is stressed to express anger and that reinforces his performance of a hyper-masculine stance. To the right, the real-life gangster smiles (although his face is blacked out for security reasons). His hyper-masculinity is apparent because his Stoeka-style tattoos not only reveal its authenticity but tell a story of the violent transformation of his body as he undertook to ritually perform his apprenticing into a Number gang (see Steinberg, 2004 for a detailed description for how a Number

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Figure 5.2 Ninja (left), Number gangster (right).

gangster is apprenticed), something that is clear from the three stars on his shoulders – an indication that he is a high-ranking member in a Number gang. Ninja’s attempt fails to index any rank as he clearly has no similar tattoos on his shoulders. A closer look at Ninja´s tattoos, on his chest and arms for example (see Figure 5.3), provides better insight as to what his Stoeka-style tattoos attempt to narrate and allow

Figure 5.3 Ninja’s tattooed torso.

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him to pass as, and what he mimics of the Number gang’s tattoos. On the right side of his chest is a tattoo of a hand holding a knife. To the left is a Richie Rich cartoon character holding a bag of dollars in his left hand and a stack of money, perhaps also dollars, in his right hand. Both tattoos, on the left and right, symbolize how Number gangs settle disputes (by the knife) and define their social and economic life specifically through the pursuit of money (cf. Steinberg, 2004). On the far left in Figure 5.3 is a tattoo of an Evil Boy cartoon, a cupid, holding a huge phallus in his hand: here, an expression of Ninja’s sexual virility devoid of the Number gang’s hyper-masculine practice of rape as part of the ritual rites of passage into a gang. Furthermore, tattooed on Ninja´s sternum is the lyrical phrase, ‘How can an angel break my heart?’, the title of an R&B song by Toni Braxton. Moreover, on his arm is tattooed the lyrical phrase, ‘Ugly on the Skin, Lovely from Within’, taken from Die Antwoord’s song Ugly Boy. This phrase brings to the fore the complex relationship between the ‘ugliness’ of tattooed bodies from the outside – here Ninja suggests that his white body is ugly from the outside – as it co-articulates with the blissful but precarious lifestyle of a gangster from within. The background imagery of the music video itself works well to position Ninja’s skinscape into wider figured worlds or narratives regarding the coloured gangster experience. The statements ‘When days are dark friends are few’ and ‘When I do good no-one remembers, when I do bad no-one forgets’ in Figure 5.4 speak to the loneliness and abandonment which gangsters feel in times of trouble. The former text is a quote commonly found emblazoned on minibus taxis’6 rear-view windows, and graffitied in parks and residential flats on the Cape Flats.7 The latter saying lends credence to the continuous struggles which gangsters face as they are always blamed for what they

Figure 5.4 ‘Enter the Ninja’ background scene.

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did and never rewarded for their achievements. This saying reveals the futility of their lives and indexes their carnal trappings – experiences beyond the semiotics which entrap the wearer within a lifetime of despair. Rapping from what appears to be a dirty old mattress is also reminiscent of the prison environment, evoking a sense of an ignominious existence. Ninja provides us with a performance of a desperate, violent and futile existence; however, as we discuss later in the chapter, this does not permeate his body. Importantly, we see that the video attempts to layer Ninja’s corporeal regime with one of hyper-masculinity wherein Ninja’s persona indexes a particular regime of masculinity and toughness associated readily with the coloured, male gangster. Ninja’s deliberate representation of self through his rock attire, overt violent gesticulation and gang tattoos together produces a particularly intriguing, albeit unconvincing, corporeal regime. While Die Antwoord has been accused of culturally appropriating coloured gang tattoos (cf. Haupt, 2012), we broaden this discussion by delving deeper into the materiality of the bodies themselves. Specifically, we ask, how does the legacy of these racialized bodies in South Africa affect how signs are read in the greater linguistic landscape? If we look at how the coloured body has suffered historically and how their bodies have been ‘packaged’ (as inferior, of low value), with many bodies locked up in Pollsmoor prison,8 we contend that there is a clear difference between gang tattoos and gang-like tattoos. We argue that this is cultural appropriation which has failed spectacularly, and it is this failure which is underpinned and explained by differences in carnality.

The production of Stoeka-style prison tattoos on Ninja’s body An interview with Ninja’s tattoo artist Tyler B Murphy (TBM), who own Sins of Style in Cape Town’s CBD, indexes the pursuit and ultimate failure to adopt gang tattoos despite creative interventions and philosophical ponderings on Ninja’s behalf. The interview was featured in Tattoo Artist Magazine (TAM), an online publication which began in 2003 and is described as a ‘self-published professional tattoo artist trade journal’. TAM features accomplished tattoo artists with regular interviews and galleries of their work on their website. The following TAM interview was published online on 10 August 2011 and discusses TBM’s experience tattooing Ninja (for analytical purposes, emphasis has been added in bold): 1. Interviewer: Speaking of permanence, Die Antwoord’s visual aesthetic – in which you have played a significant role in developing through your signature hand-poked tattoo style – is well known. How did you meet Ninja and begin working with him? 2. TBM: I used to be in a graffiti crew with SIBOT, Ninja’s DJ from an early band, and I got to know Ninja through hanging with SIBOT at shows. Over the years, he spoke about getting tattooed by me but I only ended up tattooing him after he had tattooed himself a few times at my shop. After that, he was keen on me doing a few South African prison-inspired tattoos. To date, every tattoo except for two I’ve done on Ninja is hand-poked. At first when I started tattooing Ninja, I was

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interested in making the tattoos rough like they look in prison. Later, I started pushing the style to make it neat and I started experimenting with both color and shading. This change of process became what I term ‘Stoeka Style.’ The definition of ‘stoeka’ is steez or big tattoo. Interviewer: Having referenced South African prison imagery, do you think Ninja’s tattoos have any cultural significance? TBM: Ninja has managed to encompass so much of the hidden aesthetics that make up the real essence of South African males. His tattoos address things that most of us are either oblivious to or not proud of. Culturally, we were close to being drowned by ‘Americanisms’ but Die Antwoord helped reveal the Zef that has always existed. Ultimately, they gave us something we can all relate to. It is these ideas that are made physical through Ninja’s tattoos. Interviewer: Finally, what has drawn both you and Ninja to these South African prison-style tattoos? Why do they spark so much interest? TBM: As a modern man, there are very few rights (sic) of passage rituals that we can indulge in. As a result, we are forced to create new ones. Artists in a city environment often choose to write their names on trains to prove their worth, just as I did. This act in turn makes you aware of its consequences; essentially, the possibility of being incarcerated. At an early age, I researched as much as I could about life behind bars. This ultimate and realistic outcome to criminal behavior had to be understood in order to be survived. Most poignantly, the poor criminal classes have organized the South African prisons in ways as secret and intricate as Free Masonry. The tattoos that these men wear are so ugly and yet so fascinating. These are the men whose bodies Ninja examined and pondered over while working out his answer to being South African.

Highsnobiety.com(http://www.highsnobiety.com/2014/02/17/tyler-murphy-dieantwoord-interview/) What is clear from the video analysis and the aforementioned interview is that one of the most visible (and marked) aspects of Ninja’s tattoos are its crude stylization. Etched as if done by hand, Ninja’s Stoeka-style tattoos are different from the many typeface options provided in tattoo parlours (see, for example, Peck and Stroud, 2015). In order to appear as authentic prison tattoos, Ninja opts for a ‘handpoked’ style which closely resembles handwritten, jagged prison tattoo styles. This choice of typeface is a way for Ninja to obtain the desired ‘look’ without enduring the social realities that produce it, or the social realities that they produce. This journey of producing ‘authentic’ prison signs on Ninja’s body is the start of friction, a pre-emptive stage separating corporeal regimes, specifically Ninja’s white body and that of the largely coloured, anonymous prison bodies. The rough-hewn and handcrafted production of the tattoo carries exactly the ingredients of ‘authenticity’ – like a cheese at Biscuit Mill (cf Stroud, 2017), obviously handmade and roughly packaged to bring out authenticity, specifically attempting to package the body as the local – the real thing. This desire for authenticity can be seen in other linguistic landscape studies (LLS) on distinction in the marketplace, specifically the pursuit of authenticity (cf. Baro, this volume).

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Contrastingly, prisoners and gang initiates have no option when it comes to the style of their tattoos. Because of the materialities used in prison tattoos (matches, blood, glass etc.), roughness is the only outcome. And while Ninja may have had the discipline to lay dutifully on a tattoo bed to get his tattoo, gang initiates may well have been forcefully held down during inscription. The horrific realities endured by inmates are typical of what Povinelli describes as carnality. By carnality, Povinelli (2006) points out the history and memory which influences the making and reading of a sign.9 TBM asserts that Ninja has managed to distil the ‘real essence of South African men’ by allowing the prison tattoos to be seen (and in fact celebrated!) at a global level. We argue that it is the white skin which features as the most salient feature on the corporeal LL. In fact, the ‘hidden aesthetics’ (prison tattoos) of South African (coloured) males which he speaks of, while no longer hidden, are nonetheless sanitized and arranged neatly for others to admire. The statement that these hidden aesthetics are what makes up the ‘real essence of South African men’ is problematic. While the ‘essence’ of anything is relative and not helpful to any contemporary view of gender identity, the attribution of these hidden aesthetics to seemingly homogenous ‘South African men’ has a double minimizing effect. First, Ninja’s artistic persona does not (by any stretch of the imagination) index a collective (multiracial/class) group of men, but rather a very specific subgroup within the Coloured community. Importantly, the desire for coloured semiotics to bring across the idea that the essence of South African men is constituted by aggression/ violence, reproduces the racialization of aggression to the coloured body. Secondly, as we will illustrate shortly, TBM’s claim that Zef saved South Africa from being drowned by ‘Americanisms’ (as seen by their adverse reaction to Lady Gaga10) is understandable, as globalized forms of hip-hop do pervade many local genres. However, his assertion that Ninja (through Zef music) gave artists ‘something they can all relate to’ falls flat as Ninja has no real first-hand knowledge of the carnal realities of coloured life. Ninja may show the world one element of gang subculture through his tattoos, but he has not lived the coloured experience, and he cannot be said to relate to those that own these signs (and its memories). Thus, by equating a select and specific set of tattoos with coloured male experience and by claiming the right to curate the semiotics on his body, Ninja and Die Antwoord are revealing social inequities which see his white body as operating within a more favourable corporeal regime. Another marker of friction between the two corporeal regimes becomes apparent in Ninja’s cognitive indulgences of just what these tattoos say about a particular masculinity and its apprehension in the world. TBM describes Ninja’s deliberations over his tattoos as stemming from the fact that ‘the poor criminal classes [that] have organized the South African prisons in ways as secret and intricate as Free Masonry. The tattoos that these men wear are so ugly and yet so fascinating. These are the men whose bodies Ninja examined and pondered over while working out his answer to being South African’. While it is true that the blueprint for Stoeka-style tattoos was originally conceived in Cape Town prisons, it is also inextricably tied to highly ritualized processes which have immediate social consequences. It is those rituals of etching on the body that Ninja sought to reproduce, sans the social effects that this production evokes.

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What then can we say about skinscapes within the broader LL or social setting illustrated here? What are the consequences for LLS, more broadly? We argue that skinscapes, viewed through this notion of carnality, make visible how signs or semiosis are heirachized on the medium of skin. We see that the carnality, that is, the memory, legacy and making of Ninja’s white body reorders the semiotics, allowing his white body to be seen as the most salient semiotic of his skinscape.

Discussion We take our point of departure in the fact that the life quality of white and black bodies is different and unequal. South Africa is a country where the very foundations of culture, community and person were heavily racialized and regulated under apartheid law. Today, even more insidious, albeit subtle, racializations have emerged to replace state-regulated discrimination. Roth-Gordon (2017) makes the point that the body and its ‘semiotic display’ to the world tells us about a particular ‘sensory regime’. By this she means that there is ‘a basic “common sense” about the body, and one’s sensory experience of the surrounding world … /this/includes the semiotic display that one projects to the world as well as one’s semiotic perception of the world – how one “reads” racial signifiers, for example, and how one attempts to shape the racial readings of others’ (Roth-Gordon, 2017: p. 39). The layering of coloured Stoeka tattoos on Ninja’s white body indexes a particular bodily order or corporeal regime. It also shows how white bodies have more affordances, allowing for more transgressive semiotics with less or no repercussions at all. This notion is confluent with Ahmed’s (2006) work on bodies that ‘count’ or matter which engages fully with the post-apartheid politics of the body. Ahmed’s point that white bodies expand into space i.e. they exert power over others by literally having bigger grounds or better amenities can be equated with Ninja’s financial gains and overall greater agency with the same or similar semiotics which would stop a coloured person from obtaining a job (compare Coole, 2007: p. 416). It is exactly the different effects with which Ninja’s white body mediates socially ignominious semiotics that this study has investigated. We see his skinscape as aesthetically interesting artistic impressions of gang-like tattoos. We see the white skin as the salient feature on the body, and this is where his skinscape wins out. His corporeal regime ‘civilizes’ the tattoos and as onlookers; we are not scared of him – we are curious, intrigued, even infuriated by what appears to be blithe cultural appropriation (cf. Haupt, 2012). The carnal regime, that is, the often-traumatic real-life experiences which preceded the creation of the tattoos and continue to produce their effects on coloured bodies, is the reason why cultural appropriation simply cannot be what is going on here. Coloured bodies do not only carry the distasteful stigma of gang tattoos, but the skinscapes of coloureds – their brown skin – are also read as racial signifiers (cf. RothGordon, 2017) which further marginalize them. Their skinscapes and tattoos appear fused, indistinguishable from one another, with each mutually constitutive of the other. Saliently, prior to their incarceration, many inmates are from an early age exposed to gang culture as it is seen emblazoned as graffiti walls in their townships (cf. Stroud and Jegels, 2014).

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We argue that Ninja’s body, and his carnal regime, is quite different. Ninja selected his tattoos and had the luxury of mapping and musing about their appearance and placement. His tattoos are then layered with clothes and music. Arguably, his tattoos would have been well cared for after inking so as to ensure that they heal well. Coloured bodies’ carnal realities would be very different. Tattoos would have no post-care to speak of. Their tattoos would be framed with scratches, cuts and abrasions borne out of violent interactions and neglect. We argue that the carnal regimes differ greatly. Returning to the notion of cultural appropriation, we find that Ninjas has failed in his attempt at appropriating these cultural semiotics. It is the differences in carnal regimes which anchor gang semiotics firmly to coloured bodies. Ninja attempts, but is unable to replicate the signs or its values. A case in point is his choice of a ‘handpoked’ style to service his need to have authentic-looking gang signs. Our approach to the analysis uses skinscapes in conjunction with notions of corporeality and carnality to analyse the difference in somatic materiality between coloured and white skins, not in an essentialist way, but in a manner which demonstrate how cuts, abrasions, etchings are interpreted as part of a local carnal regime. Our analysis demonstrates that Ninja’s skinscape – in an attempt at mimicking culturally specific Stoeka-style tattoos – runs the risk of being ‘out of sync with the apparatus of cultural recognition’ (Povinelli, 2006: p. 79) that the original sign creators produced. Our analysis also demonstrated how the tattoos etched into Ninja’s white body opens enduring ‘comfortable racial contradictions’ (Roth-Gordon, 2017: pp. 3–7) indexed largely by differences in carnal regimes. Additionally, the metaphor of friction helps us to understand the ontology of corporeal regimes as embedded in the carnal realities of racially inequitable social life in South Africa. Thus, we aim to read the body as part of a corporeal regime, with skinscaping framing an analysis of tattoos as the seam that literally stitches carnality (Povinelli, 2006) and corporeality onto the fabric of the skin. We apply the notion of carnality to bring into sharper focus ‘modalities of materiality’ (pigment and tattoos in our case) that allow us to ask additional questions about the quality of material objects that are discursively produced, and how such objects continue to produce unequal relations in the organization of social interactions in the flow and uptake of skinscapes. Regarding novel ontological perspectives on the mobility of the post-apartheid body, we see that materiality (skin) still matters: with Ninja’s white skin seemingly absorbing the notoriety and aggressiveness he desired without any of the social implications. Simply put, Ninja’s body counts. Here we are talking about white privilege as it metaphorically cleanses/rinses/ disinfects the semiotics as it touches the surface. The stigma, burden and consequences are expunged, and Ninja is left with carefully crafted aesthetically interesting ganglike tattoos. The salient feature of Ninja’s skinscape is the colour white; this mode permeates the landscape, thereby minimizing or even erasing the effects of the tattoos. In his videos, Ninja’s skinscape is also layered with deliberate stylization, performance and music. All these layers add to and, we argue, change how the skinscape is read – and heard – by Die Antwoord fans. The corporeal regime for gang-inked coloured men is vastly different. Even before they obtained the tattoos, their bodies were ‘marked’. Their pigmented skin was already

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laden with negative social values promulgated during apartheid. There is indeed an ‘uneven distribution of flesh’ (Povinelli, 2006: p. 8), and to realize the differences in the corporeal regimes we have to pay attention to the carnal regimes which precede them. And bearing in mind that Ninja’s tattoos were originally produced in prison cells in Cape Town, we investigate what, if any, friction emerges when endemic gang tattoos are inscribed on Ninja’s white body. Simply put, how do we define place-making on the body of Ninja? To answer this question, we return to LLS more broadly. Skinscapes resonate with important defining characteristics of LLS broadly, specifically how languages are heirarchized with a particular code preference which places languages of power first or at the top of a sign. This usually results in other languages relegated to the bottom of a sign or invisilibized altogether. These are some of the ways that hegemony is identified in signage that is to say linguistically mediated hegemony in public space habitually occurs through either heirachization or invisiblization. One may ask how it occurs in skinscapes? Or rather, what is the principle of hegemony in skinscapes? To answer these questions, we return to the notion of carnality, particularly the relationship between coloured male body and gang tattoos. We argue that it is the way that the coloured body has been socially ‘packaged’ over time, that is, through incarceration, violent gang initiation and social expunction that gang tattoos get their meaning. We say that it is the carnal regime of the gang signs which jars with Ninja’s corporeal regime. So while the tattoos can be selected, purchased and made expertly to look like the real thing, Ninja’s corporeal regime cannot house the carnal realities within which these semiotics are anchored. Thus, different modalities exercise different principles of hegemony, and with skinscapes particularly, we see how the colour of the skin is tied to different histories of power and subjugation and subsequently endows different meanings to the semiotics depending on the materiality of the body. This shows how carnality de facto works as a principle of hegemony.

Conclusion In summary, the notion of skinscapes allows us to engage with a wider complex genre of popular culture of which prison tattoos, although inscribed on Ninja’s body, still remain the preserve of those which are socially burdened by them. We introduced the idea of carnality to explain the ‘friction’ immanent between bodies. We found the metaphor of friction to be a useful way of talking about how bodies, when moving up against, or coming into contact with one another, reveal continuous social inequalities as they are experienced in popular culture today. We argue that skinscapes has undergone a metaphorical redressing, and we see a need to layer carnality so as to give voice to the pre-discursive bodies-in-space, to lend credence to the inheritance of the body so as to move past sweeping notions such as cultural appropriation. We show that it is the failed attempt at cultural appropriation which is perhaps a more useful approach to bodies that appear out of sync. Ninja is not ‘channeling’ the unnamed, seemingly homogenous coloured gangsters which he

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speaks of, to claim that would be to attribute too much power to him. However, we can say that by gaining infamy from the semiotics, he is wielding an alternative materiality of white privilege. Moreover, we argue that Ninja’s body is read differently, and not unlike traditional LL research his corporeal LL has salient features which foreground how semiotics are read and which order they are arranged. In this study, we see Ninja’s white skin as foregrounded as a salient feature of his skinscape, and it is this feature which frames his corporeal regime. We see the process of transposing gang semiotics onto Ninja’s body as akin to an authorized space for graffiti within an austere Singaporean public space. While it may appear to house transgressive semiotics, the frame itself (not unlike Ninja’s white skin) causes the graffiti to lose any transgressive values it would otherwise have yielded. He simply cannot access the carnal regime within which these tattoos operate. Following Povinelli, we have found it useful to investigate different corporeal regimes through an investigation of ‘power and the discursive matrixes that underpin it’ (2006: p. 10). By investigating the corporeal regimes which discipline Ninja and coloured bodies differently, we are moving past the notion of cultural appropriation per se, and moving towards a fleshing out of skinscapes in relation to carnal regimes. Particularly, we argue that carnality is thus the principle that orders semiosis to reproduce hegemony. We would not have been able to ascertain the privileging of one semiosis over the other if it were not for analysing skinscape within the larger context of an LL which both indexes past histories and speaks to current socio-cultural realities at play. Put another way, it is the ever-expanding reach of LLS which begins to explain why the same (or similar) semiotics can appear as anchors to some and masts to others.

Notes 1 2

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Afrikaans for ‘The Answer’. Coloured is an ethnonym created during colonialism and redefined in apartheid to mean citizen and people of mix race. We acknowledge the problematic nature of this term, but find it important to use it as it indexes exactly the subgroup we are addressing in this study. When we refer here to Afrikaans, we are referencing the ‘language’ invented by the free white Boers, Afrikaners, Dutch descendants who settled at the Cape around 1652 (led by Jan van Riebeeck), and as a consequence of sea travel, slavery, colonialism and mercantile expeditions to India by the Dutch East Indian Company (VOC), (Kriel, 2017). For South African readers, we use ‘black’ here in an inclusive sense to also include what in conventional (post)apartheid nomenclature is called ‘coloured’ or ‘Indian’. According to Gee, ‘Figured worlds are an important tool of inquiry because they mediate between the “micro” (small) level of interaction and the “macro” (large) level of institutions’ (2011: p. 76). Sixteen-seater vans used to transport working class around the city. They are much cheaper than metered taxis and are often slightly cheaper and faster than the bus. The majority of taxi commuters are working-class black and coloured people use them as their mode of transport daily.

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During apartheid, coloured people were forcefully removed from idyllic and beautiful residences closer to the CBD and placed in the dry outlands which is known as the Cape Flats. This prison is located in Tokai, Cape Town, and is reputed to house the most hardened criminals. Povinelli describes how a sore on her body is discoursed through a Western medical lens, while her aboriginal counterparts, due to their station in Australian life, are not allowed the same benefit which has led to many of them having a much shorter lifespan. Die Antwoord famously declined to open for Lady Gaga, a famous American pop artist.

References Alexander, N. (2013), Thoughts on the New South Africa, Johannesburg: Jacana. Alim, H. S., Lee, J. and Carris, L. M. (2011), ‘Moving the Crowd, “Crowding” the Emcee: The Coproduction and Contestation of Black Normativity in Freestyle Rap Battles’, Discourse & Society, 22 (4): pp. 422–439. Ahmed, S. (2006), Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham: Duke University Press. Appadurai, A. (1996), Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Appadurai, A. (2000), ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’, Journal of Public Culture, 12 (1): pp. 1–19. Coole, D. (2007), ‘Experiencing Discourse: Corporeal Communicators and the Embodiment of Power’, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 9 (3): pp. 413–433. De Clermont, A. (2008), ‘Life after Gallery’. http://aramintadeclermont.com/work. php?seriesId=1157 (accessed March 2015). Gee, J. P. (2011), How to Do Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit [Kindle edition]. Retrieved from Amazon.com. Hart, J. (1997), ‘Translating and Resisting Empire: Cultural Appropriation and Postcolonial Studies’, in B. Ziff and P. V. Roa (eds.), Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 137–169. Haupt, A. (2012), ‘Part IV: Is Die Antwoord Blackface?’ Safundi, 13 (3–4): pp. 417–423. Hiramoto, M. (2015), ‘Inked Nostalgia: Displaying Identity Through Tattoos as Hawaii Local Practice’, Journal of Multilingualism and Multicultural Development, 36 (2): pp. 107–123. http://tattooartistmagazineblog.com/2011/08/10/tyler-murphy-dieantwoord-hand-poked-tattoos-ninja-yolandie-tattoo-artist-magazine-blog/ (accessed 4 April 2017). https://www.bustle.com/articles/83522-7-things-to-know-beforegetting-a-stick-and-poke-tattoo-aka-your-budget-friendly-ink-alternative (accessed 4 April 2017). http://www.highsnobiety.com/2014/02/17/tyler-murphy-die-antwoordinterview/ (accessed 4 April 2017). Krueger, A. (2012), ‘Part II: Zef/poor White Kitsch Chique: Die Antwoord’s Comedy of Degradation’, Safundi, 13 (3–4): pp. 399–408. Kriel, M. (2017), ‘Chronicle of a Creole: The Ironic History of Afrikaans’, in J. Knorr and W. T. Filho (eds.), Creolization and Pidginization in Contexts of Postcoloniality: Language, Culture, Identity, Boston, MA: Brill, pp. 132–157.

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Landry, R. and Bourhis, R. (1997), ‘Linguistic Landscape and Ethnolinguistic Vitality: An Empirical Study’, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16 (1): pp. 23–49. Marx, H. and Milton, V. C. (2011), ‘Bastardised Whiteness: “Zef ”-culture, Die Antwoord and the Reconfiguration of Contemporary Afrikaans Identities’, Social Identities, 17 (6): pp. 723–745. Peck, A. and Stroud, C. (2015), ‘Skinscapes’, Linguistic Landscape Journal, 1 (1–2): pp. 133–151. Pennycook, A. (2012), Language and Mobility: Unexpected Places, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Povinelli, E. A. (2006), The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Geneology and Carnality, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Roth-Gordon, J. (2017), Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro, Oakland: University of California Press. Steinberg, J. (2004), Nongoloza's Children: Western Cape Prison Gangs during and after Apartheid, Braamfontein: Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. Stroud, C. (2017), ‘A Postscript on the Postracial1’, Entangled Discourses: South-North Orders of Visibility, 12: pp. 230. Stroud, C. and Jegels, D. (2014), ‘Semiotic Landscapes and Mobile Narrations of Place: Performing the Local’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2014 (228): pp. 179–199. Tsing, A. (2005), Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Van der Westhuizen, C. (2017), Sitting Pretty: White Afrikaans Women in Postapartheid South Africa, South Africa: UKZN Press.

6

The Linguistic Landscape Creating a New Sense of Community: Guadeloupean Creole, the General Strike of 2009 and an Emergent Identity Robert Blackwood

Introduction Long considered a spoken variety, Guadeloupian Creole is widely used across the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, which lies between Montserrat and Dominica. In this former colonial territory that is now a French overseas département and region (DROM), whilst questions of ethnicity play a significant part in most domains of life (including language), Creole is not solely used by Guadeloupe’s non-white communities. At the same time, French is the undisputed lingua franca on the island, transcending divisions of social class and ethnicity. The extent to which Creole forges a sense of people and place as part of the linguistic landscape (LL) is a relatively new and complex question, arising only recently, and is one we seek to address in this chapter. The use of Creole, whose sociolinguistic position we discuss more fully in the following text, has been limited to speech, but its appearance in the island’s LL demands consideration, especially in the light of social upheavals during this period of late modernity. As a part of France, the island is subject to the laws passed in Paris, which include the language laws that privilege the French language above all others. Spolsky (2004: p. 63) refers to France as ‘the paradigmatic case for strong ideology and management’, and much has been written about the country’s language policies, ideologies and practices (see, for example, Adamson, 2007; Ager, 1999). Despite these restrictive language management strategies, Guadeloupean Creole has been in widespread daily use across the island as a spoken language; in this chapter, we explore the extent to which senses of individual/ collective identities and of place are created in or via written forms in the public space. The fieldwork for this discussion was undertaken twelve months after the general strike of early 2009, described by Bonilla (2010: p. 126) as ‘the largest wave of social The research discussed in this chapter was generously funded by the British Academy, grant SG090537, for which I am particularly grateful.

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protest’ in the island’s history. The unrest on the island, which extended beyond industrial relations, prompted violence and even the death of a one protestor. The public debate, in Creole, was framed around the cleavage between ‘ordinary’ islanders and those who have profited from Guadeloupe’s fragile economic situation. This division of society turned on the relationship between a theoretical nou (in Creole), standing for ‘us’, and yo (‘them’), which are as much the profiteers (both black and white) as they are the French from France (Bonilla, 2012: p. 219). In a community where public writing in Creole is the marked choice, we discuss here the potential for the LL to contribute to our understanding of the ecology of Guadeloupean Creole during this period of intense social change. Events in Guadeloupe exemplify what Williams (2012: p. 176) refers to as the severe stress that test ‘pristine conceptions of the ideal nationstate’ such as the notional unity of France. With speakers of Guadeloupean Creole constituting a territorially defined language community set at odds with a national ideology that rejects the recognition of any group other than the French, the LL of the island points to the value of Creole as a resource distributed amongst most islanders but marginalized and stigmatized within narratives articulated by the French State from its centre in Paris. Questions of (linguistic) identity and a sense of belonging in the twenty-first century are bound up with the value attributed to languages within a community’s repertoire, especially multilingual groups such as Guadeloupeans. Stroud (2008: p. 71) argues that ‘the extent to which a community of speakers maintains a language as a primary language, adopts it as a lingua franca, appropriates it as a second language or gradually abandons it in favor of alternative modes of communication reflects the perceived value of that language on capital markets of modernity’. Pride is another factor at play, which Bokamba (2008: p. 117) highlighted on the basis of his work in the Democratic Republic Congo, whereby language endangerment is countered by the valuing of indigenous languages and cultures, and this identification with contested, often peripheral languages – such as Guadeloupean Creole – can be a defining characteristic of resistance, group legitimization and alternative or compound identities. As argued elsewhere (Blackwood, 2018a), the LL is a domain of necessity (Edwards, 2007: p. 244) for the maintenance of a language and, by extension, for the sustained development of a specific identity, especially those consistently denigrated such as regional identities in France and its wider territories. Ultimately, we consider the extent to which written Creole has transcended its traditional cloistering as a spoken variety to assume a role in the (semi-)permanent and visible entextualization of a specific group set at variance with a national rhetoric which erases such as a sense of belonging.

Contexts Guadeloupe The Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, in the Leeward Islands within the Lesser Antilles, is one of a number of French territories whose sociolinguistic relationship with France merits close scrutiny. Cristoforo Colombo is acknowledged as the first European

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to land on the island at the end of the fifteenth century (Viala, 2014: pp. 1–2), but it was France, led by Charles Liénart de l’Olive and Jean de Plessis, that began the colonization of the island from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards. As with all colonized spaces, the island was not deserted when the European settlers arrived. Arawaks, often referred to as Indians (Aldrich and Connell, 1992: p. 17), are viewed as the first indigenous inhabitants of the island, and the first colonizers were the Caribs from South America around 500 AD. The French, seeking to establish sugar plantations on the island, first sought to subjugate the Caribs, and when they resisted began what Saint-Ruf (1977: p. 12) describes as genocide of the resident population. Sugar production (including its refining) was labour intensive, and this heralded the enthusiastic transportation of slaves from Africa to work on the plantations. White plantation owners, known as békés, were initially drawn from France but ownership of the estates passed to the békés’ descendants, who were normally born on Guadeloupe. Guadeloupean society continues to be stratified according to ethnicity, which plays a part in the sociolinguistic context of the island. The immediate post-war period saw Guadeloupe’s status change from colony to département d’outre-mer (overseas department), but this did not protect the island from the challenges of twentieth-century modernization, leading to notable social and economic hardships. In particular, the high cost of living, estimated at 40 per cent above the metropolitan French average (Hazaël-Massieux, 2013: p. 648), resulted in high unemployment and its related consequences.

Creole Whilst the notion of the French language as a discrete, bounded language enjoys widespread currency (despite the considerable variation that France’s national language ideology seeks to mask), discussing creoles is less straightforward from the perspective of nomenclature. Contemporary scholarship, such as the work of Hazaël-Massieux (2002, 2013) and Schnepel (2004), refers to Creole, rather than creole or Creoles, and we follow this approach here, acknowledging at the same time that this position is contested, and recognizing that there is variation in the internal structure of Creole. It is not the focus of this chapter to discuss this internal variation, but rather than explore the cases where actors in Guadeloupe’s public space write in ‘their’ Creole. This use of Creole as shorthand, therefore, facilitates the analysis of the data from Guadeloupe but it does, we concede, conform to a specific ideology of language that does not reflect the breadth of variation in use on the island. From a sociolinguistic standpoint, Hazaël-Massieux (2013: p. 647) notes that almost the entire population of the island now speaks French, and that only a few elderly residents speak only Creole. At the same time, she also argues that the majority of islanders also speak Creole, although important exceptions include those with considerable economic capital, such as some former plantation owners, highly educated professionals (including senior civil servants and business leaders) and those temporarily on Guadeloupe for work. This perspective is of particular importance; whilst French as a resource is distributed across the entire island, regardless of social class, gender, ethnicity or (with a handful of exceptions) age, Creole is part of

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the repertoire of many but not all islanders. Significantly, Creole transcends ethnic boundaries but not all economic ones, meaning that whilst many békés and other established white islanders speak Creole, its use is uneven amongst the wealthiest and most socially powerful on Guadeloupe. In terms of this chapter, therefore, the sense of a community, place and belonging does not divide along ethnic lines; we focus instead on the use of Creole to distinguish a particular group that is drawn from amongst ethnicities which might be described as ‘white’, ‘non-white’, ‘black’ or ‘mixed race’, recognizing that these terms are problematic and contested. Whilst speaking Creole is generally agreed to be widespread, writing in the variety is another matter. Schnepel (2004: p. 224) notes ‘writing it can be difficult for native and non-native speakers alike, particularly in light of the language’s phonological variation and the number of scripts currently in use or available on the linguistic market’. This potential for linguistic insecurity is a context for any examination of Creole in Guadeloupe’s LL. Since the middle of the 1970s, scholarly attention has been paid to the written form(s) of Creole. The totemic Groupe d’Etudes de Recherches de la Créolophonie (GEREC, or Creole Studies Research Group) sought, since its inception in 1975 by Martinican linguist Jean Bernabé, to formulate a writing system for Creole that sought both to distinguish it from French (in particular from an etymological perspective) and to address the issue of Creole phonological patterns. This deliberate differentiation from French further underscores the potential for the written use of Guadeloupean Creole to contribute to the reidentification of individuals and groups with an identity that is not exclusively French but which instead emphasizes the localized and Caribbean distinctiveness of Creolophone Guadeloupeans. The value attributed to Creole is, as is often the case, relative and potentially contradictory; on the one hand, many islanders value Creole highly as part of their identity, as a link to their roots and as a language of intimacy and familiarity (HazaëlMassieux, 2013: p. 649). On the other hand, Creole is also credited with the ongoing marginalization of its speakers, in particular those from lower social classes, and was excluded from the provisions of various education laws permitting the teaching and study of Creole in schools, largely on the basis that mastery of French is hindered by the usage of Creole.

Methodology The data discussed in this chapter are part of a wide and longitudinal project examining the position and status of regional languages within the LL of what could be referred to in shorthand as France, but which extends beyond metropolitan European France to include the Mediterranean island of Corsica, Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean Sea, and New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean. To facilitate the comparison of data across these diverse geographic settings, the methodology has been retained as far as is practical from the first surveys in 2007; inevitably, this has meant that the project’s methodological starting point has not evolved at the same pace as LL studies. In particular, this fieldwork was undertaken before what might be described as the multimodal turn in LL research, meaning that the quantitative data collected in the field are privileged. The methodological approaches adopted1 therefore replicate those

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undertaken on Corsica (Blackwood, 2014), Brittany (Blackwood, 2010, 2011, 2015), Northern Catalonia (Blackwood, 2010, 2015, 2018a; Blackwood and Tufi, 2015) and Mediterranean coastal cities (Blackwood and Tufi, 2015), whereby we exhaustively surveyed twenty sites of both sides of 50 m stretches of roads in town and city centres in Guadeloupe. Each sign was recorded and identified according to the language(s) included within the definable frame (Backhaus, 2007). From a quantitative perspective, we record that Creole appears on 22 signs out of a corpus of 5,408, which constitutes 0.4 per cent of the total. This trace of Creole highlights the extent to which the widely spoken oral variety does not transcend its traditional function to appear in a written form on the walls of the island. Elsewhere (Blackwood and Tufi, 2015: p. 158–161), we have addressed this paucity of signs in the regional language within the survey areas by examining critically signage found elsewhere within a given city. In this chapter, we discuss the signs that do appear in the survey areas, but acknowledge from the outset that, proportionally, there is very little evidence of written Creole. We investigate the issue of agency in the written production of Creole in the forms in circulation in the public space, seeking to discern the extent to which these signs point to a sense of a specific identity set in contrast to the dominant, and legally protected, French identity.

Guadeloupean Creole in domains of activity In recording examples of Guadeloupean Creole within the survey areas of the island, specific domains of activity emerge as spatial practices indexing a sense of community and, by extension, belonging. Regardless of the very low numbers of signs within this corpus, it is possible to categorize the areas of island life which are indexed by Creole.

Creole for social action The first of these areas is the one that is associated directly and explicitly with the 2009 strike and its repercussions. Most of these examples are graffiti, although we recorded a printed poster, planning for a forthcoming demonstration, where a strapline in the middle of the text is in French, but the rest, including all the details about practical information, are in Creole. Graffiti ranges from the acronym of the island’s independence movement (FKNG! Fòs pou konstwi nasyon Gwadloup; ‘The Guadeloupe Nation-Building Force’) to short political commentaries and statements. One such example is the one-line text ‘Domota sé nou’ (‘We’re all Domota’), which appeared in several locations around the city of Pointe-à-Pitre as a graffiti (Figure 6.1). Elié Domota was the spokesperson for the Liyannaj kont pwofitasyon (LKP; ‘The Alliance Against Profiteering’), who had been a civil servant working for France’s national employment agency on Guadeloupe, and was at the time leader of the Union general des travailleurs de la Guadeloupe (UGTG; The General Union of Guadeloupean Workers). Domota emerged as what Bonilla (2015: p. 162) describes as ‘the people’s prosecutor’ during the televised negotiations between the LKP and the island’s elected representatives. Further signs recorded within the survey areas also expressed disdain for other key participants in the general strike, such as those whose profiteering actions were perceived to have

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Figure 6.1 Graffito proclaiming identification with Domota.

led to the economic convulsions on the island. Across several sites in Pointe-à-Pitre, a well-known agricultural manager was accused of various nefarious activities which amount to defrauding the island’s taxpayers. In these examples, Creoles was used to stake out a clearly defined identity, namely that of the ‘nou’ in distinct opposition to a ‘yo’, referring to the French (both in France and on Guadeloupe) and the island’s profiteers, including the white béké and a local black élite. Here, we see how the graffiti written in Creole and linked to the general strike chimes with what Cresswell (1992: p. 332) refers to as ‘the discourse of disorder’, whereby graffiti is perceived from one standpoint as threat to public order, and therefore, in this case, the use of Creole becomes in some sense transgressive. The potential transgression is from the longestablished language ideology, decanted to the French Caribbean from France, that writing (in particular) should be undertaken in French.

Creole for pride and profit Much work has been undertaken with regard to the economic capital with which languages can be imbued, and this has been explored in various contexts including marketing, commercial activity and cultural activities, including sport (see, for example, Duchêne and Heller, 2012; Kelly-Holmes and Mautner, 2010). On Guadeloupe, one of these domains is food, which is explored in depth elsewhere (Blackwood, 2018b), but merits brief discussion here. In these cases, we recorded local commerce co-opting

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Creole in their signage as part of ‘the discourse of national pride’ (Heller and Duchêne, 2012: p. 5), largely to entextualize the narrative that healthy eating is a local practice, and that Creole cuisine is nutritious, inexpensive and authentic. Several local shops, in stark contrast to national (by which we mean European French) supermarkets, use Creole in their signage to underscore the Caribbean nature of the premises, implicitly identifying the goods on sale with the nou rather than the yo. For these corner shops, as with some restaurants and snack bars (see Blackwood, 2018b), Creole is co-opted into commerce in order to sell products because it conveys a specific ideology. This written use of Creole is one which can be linked to the mass strike of 2009 and points to a newly acquired domain for the language. The discourses articulated on the fronts of these grocery shops subtly create a distinction between a group identity premised on shared and localized patterns of consumption and an unmentioned other, the yo, with non-Caribbean diets and cuisines. Profit is not invariably linked to the notion of pride, and a role is being established for Creole in cultural activities that are not explicitly driven by economic gain. Creole has long been used in the performing arts, including dance, music and theatre. It has not been excluded from high culture, such as literature, and data gathered as part of this surveying of Guadeloupe’s LL point to continued use of Creole in this area. During the surveying of the island, posters were recorded, entirely in Creole, advertising the launch of the latest book by Guadeloupean author, poet and actor Ogis M’Bitako (Figure 6.2). Not only is the poster solely in Creole, underlining

Figure 6.2 Poster publicizing M’Bitako’s latest book.

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the functional use of the language in conveying information and advertising a new book, but the book to which it refers is also in Creole, thereby constituting a double index from the perspective of the establishment of Creole as a written medium of communication. This poster contributes to the creation of a specific group at odds with France’s national narrative of French-speaking men and women; here a Guadeloupean public consumes cultural matter in Creole, setting itself at variance with the wider francophone public. There are examples, nevertheless, of what might be perceived as an unexpected absence of Creole in cultural domains. The Guadeloupean sculptor Omer Poulier, known by his professional name Jacky Poulier, created the Monument des 100 chaînes (The Monument of 100 Chains) in 2003, which stands in la place de la Victoire in central Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe’s capital city. The monument, made of stone and iron, is dedicated simultaneously to the hundred or so individuals executed in May 1802 for their opposition to slavery, and to the victims of the confrontations following three days of rioting in May 1967. The monument was proposed and commissioned by Akiyo, a politically active musical and culture group on Guadeloupe. The signage on the monument is all entirely in French, except for the acknowledgement of Akiyo’s participation in the sculpture, where the group is given its full title in Creole, but the rest of the information is provided in French. The Creole-ness of the movement is recognized by the act of naming the group in Creole, but French is used for all the other details. Memorialization of Guadeloupe’s troubled past is expressed not through the language of those commemorated but in French, the colonial language of dominant social group.

The civic authorities continuum In much LL work, there is an etic division of authorship between forces described as top-down and bottom-up, but we agree with Leeman and Modan (2009: p. 334), who reject this binary division on the grounds that ‘the distinction between topdown and bottom-up signage practices is untenable in an era in which public-private partnerships are the main vehicle of urban revitalization initiatives’. In addition to these public–private partnerships, the top-down/bottom-up dichotomy not only overlooks the complicated position assumed by international business in the public space, but also fails to nuance the different levels of civic authorities operating in towns, cities and regions. It is more helpful to distinguish between layers of top-down agency in order to discern better localized ideologies and to identify more accurately trends in language management.2 Language in the public space in France is directed by different levels of civic authorities, and here we explore the strategies adopted by national and by islandbased bodies, since their emplacement of Creole differs. This approach responds to the call from Pennycook (2010: p. 54) to focus on local activity: We need to understand how language planning often builds on small local actions, on decisions made in communities, on local publications. Such a focus on local action is a useful corrective to the bland work on language planning that has held sway for too long, doing little more than describing national policies. At the same

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time, however, we need to be cautious lest a focus on the local remain only on the ‘bottom-up’, the micro, the contextual, and is thereby bereft of more powerful interpretations.

At one level, France’s national ideology, which privileges French and marginalizes other languages (often to the point of erasure), is attested in spaces managed by the French state. Of particular interest here is the tension between national authorities whose reach extends to Guadeloupe and more localized power structures. One example of this is Parc national de la Guadeloupe (Guadeloupe’s National Park). Here, the visiting public is introduced to the island’s biodiversity within the boundaries of a tropical forest and a range of mountains. The park is managed by a publicly owned state corporation, with the triple mission of protecting the site, opening it up to the public, and educating islanders and visitors about the natural environment. The park is administered by a local supervisory board that comprises elected officials, scientists and researchers. The tropical forest, the mountain massif and the mangroves are, inevitably, framed by signboards with details on the history, flora and fauna of the site, as well as instructions and regulations regarding accepted behaviour. As a state agency, funded largely by the public purse, the park is presented to its visitors first and foremost in French; other languages are visible, but French dominates the visual hierarchies on the sign boards across the national park. To illustrate the arrangement of languages, the maintenance of hierarchies and the tension between different levels of political agency, we examine two sites on the Route de la Traversée, the road which crosses the park, passing through the mountain range, and which is punctuated by sites where visitors can stop and follow trails. The first of the two sites we consider is the trail to the Cascade aux Ecrevisses (the Crayfish Waterfall), where a constant flow of water fills a small pool which has been used for bathing since its discovery. The waterfall and pool are found at the end of a short but well-maintained path, which can accommodate wheelchairs and whose signage in braille suggests that it welcomes visually impaired visitors. The first sign on this path (Figure 6.3) presents the history of the park in French, and positions Guadeloupe’s site in relation to the nine other national parks within France (which, given the national ideology, includes three overseas territories, in both the Caribbean Sea and the Indian Ocean). In addition to identifying the park’s place amongst other national parks, the sign also invites visitors to respect the environment whilst making the most of their visit. This information is presented solely in French, although there is a braille version on a neighbouring panel. Despite the fact that the park encloses the Guadeloupean natural space, and therefore embodies Caribbean flora and fauna, visitors are addressed in French alone, positioning the park and its attractions as part of francophone natural heritage. There is no space accorded to the Caribbean distinctiveness of the site, and the tropical forest is incorporated into a French (and simultaneously francophone) entity. Visitors who make it along the path to the Cascade aux Ecrevisses are greeted by an advisory notice which first names the site (in French) and then warns, in both French and then English, that diving into the pool is dangerous. For communicative purposes,

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Figure 6.3 Sign at the entrance to the Cascade aux Ecrevisses.

this use of French and English addresses the main functional requirements of the sign, on the basis that most visitors to the site are expected to be francophones, whilst the English-language text conveys the warning message through what is perceived to be the most widespread language of wider communication. Absent from this sign, however, is any information in Creole. Although it is fair to expect that those who read Creole also read French, the omission of Creole from a sign at an important topographical site within an area of notable natural beauty and significance reinforces a persistent language ideology that denigrates Creole, despite its relevance to the local populations. Visitors to the park are encouraged to stop, rest and enjoy the site at specific locations, rather than pulling up and having a picnic wherever they see fit. One of the sites on the Route de la Traversée is Bras-David, where there are not only basic facilities for picnics, but also easy access to the river where swimming is popular (Figure 6.4). Here the signage includes some Creole, and even emplaces the Creole text in a prestige position, on the left, although the use of italics and a red title, rather than the black font reserved for French, counters the privileged emplacement. The Creole text is a translation of the central panel – in French – and is echoed in English (also in italics, with the red title) on the right-hand side of the sign. As such, the impression is given that the ‘main’ text is in the middle of the sign, and the versions in Creole and English are visibly peripheralized. Moreover, as the visitor moves away from the entrance to the Bras-David site, Creole drops from view, and signs giving details on the level of

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Figure 6.4 Entrance sign to the Bras-David site.

difficulty of the walk to the river, for example, appear in French and English alone, with no place for Creole. When national schemes, such as France’s national parks or les Maisons des Illustres (the Homes of the Great and the Good, discussed in Blackwood and Tufi, 2015: p. 138), are extended to France’s periphery, the data suggest that the sociolinguistic specificity of the regions are not reflected in the LL. The majority of signage at the Parc national de la Guadeloupe appears in French, with some translations in English. There are some splashes of Creole, but these are not in what could be described as the main texts. Certainly, when standardized signage (such as the main introductory panel which situates this park within the national scheme) is erected on the island, its appearance conforms to what one might take as a national template. The localized variance from the national norm is not entextualized in this kind of signage, and where there is an inclusion of Creole, reflecting spoken language practices, the signs are of secondary significance, and Creole is marginalized. In contrast, at the highly localized end of the civic authorities continuum, there are occasional and unremarkable echoes of this emplacement of Creole. In sites and spaces normally associated, certainly within a French context, with the French language, Creole can be found, but usually in a minorized position. Place names on street signs on the island often include a Creole toponym (now a fairly widespread practice across France wherever regional languages are spoken) and so drivers entering Guadeloupe’s

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main city, Pointe-à-Pitre, encounter the Creole name, Lapwent, albeit in a smaller, italicized script, and below the French version. The main sign outside the university on the island also includes the name of the district of Pointe-à-Pitre where the campus stands and the naming of the site as a university first in French and then again in Creole, in the same-size font but again below and in italics. It would be incorrect, however, to assert that more localized levels of government consistently use written Creole with the domains for which they are responsible. The town motto for Le Moule, in north-east Guadeloupe, is in Latin, ‘Mens agitat molem’ (‘the mind moves matter’), from Virgil’s Aeneid. This choice, married with the depiction of a clipper with three masts on the town’s coat of arms, reflects a European rather than Caribbean identity, with no space accorded to Creole. All that Creole connotes is omitted from this coat of arms (that appears in Le Moule’s public space, from its town hall to its wheelie bins) in favour of a prestigious but dead European language.

Conclusions In this chapter, we have presented data recorded from a number of sites on Guadeloupe with a view to contributing to the discussion of the potential for the LL to create a sense of place, people and/or belonging. The dimension that governs this investigation is Guadeloupe’s relationship with France (as in the French State), the French language and the ideologies of language. Despite recognition of the peculiarity of territories such as Guadeloupe in the founding text of France’s Fifth Republic in 1958,3 since the French Revolution, sovereignty has resided exclusively in the nation. Fenet (2004: p. 21) reasons that the nation represents ‘the political unity confirmed a priori by the population despite its multiple diversity’ and constitutes ‘a means to assemble an empowered people without relying on divine references or a particular ethnic or linguistic identity’. Matched by a vigorous set of language management strategies that buttress French as the national standard and marginalize regional languages, this world view deliberately erases Guadeloupeans as a group and renders them ‘French’. The LL of the island, especially in the aftermath of the general strike of 2009, is a place where this narrative can be countered, albeit unevenly. From a purist perspective, any inclusion of Guadeloupean Creole in the public space is part of Cresswell’s ‘discourse of disorder’ (1992: p. 332); a more nuanced reading of the island’s LL, especially given the striking paucity of signs in Creole, suggests a nascent expression of identity but not necessarily a sense of place. With the graffiti recorded as part of this survey of post-strike Guadeloupe, the production of a sense of belonging and of a specific Guadeloupean identity is brought to the fore. Pennycook (2009: p. 306) notes that ‘[it] is the process of writing/drawing illicitly, as well as the subsequent traces of that writing, that matters’, and these two dimensions are significant in the context discussed here. The first is the transgressive nature, where the unknown authors of the graffiti challenge the established conventions of political and democratic representation within France – such as the well-established national political parties – to inscribe publicly their collective identification with the informal alliance of action groups and trade unions. In the graffito ‘Domota sé nou’,

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the use of ‘nou’ (‘us’) is set up not so much in opposition to ‘yo’ (‘them’) where ‘they’ are the French state, but rather against those – French or Guadeloupean – who seek to profit from the island’s difficult economic and social situation. Rather than the conventional conflict where – in a localized perspective on colonized versus (neo-) colonizer – islanders are pitted against France and ‘the French’, such public acts of writing entextualize an alternative community. This alternative group is not necessarily divided along ethnic lines, given the use of Creole by white islanders, and the nou becomes all those who endure economic hardship as a consequence of the high cost of living and the social disadvantages of living on Guadeloupe. We see this echoed in the use of Creole and of the deictic marker ‘nou’ in signage associated with local grocery shops. The second dimension that Pennycook notes – ‘the subsequent traces of writing’ – is the endurance of this text, which, in the case of this graffito, stood unchanged a year after the general strike, and whose (relative) longevity sustains in the LL this alternative sense of belonging. Its durability is limited – graffiti fade – but its tenor and symbolism are reinscribed in successor texts such as the poster for the 2010 May Day demonstration. From the perspective of this chapter, this writing on the walls of a city during a period of social upheaval is very much a spatial practice which emphasizes locality (Pennycook, 2010: p. 54), and which simultaneously identifies a distinct community that speaks, reads and (significantly) writes in Guadeloupean Creole, and reconfigures more conventional understanding of a group. This group is in a position to consume culture in Creole, which further reorganizes Guadeloupeans not as a collective of islanders, and certainly not as – blandly – French citizens, but more precisely as those who have acquired the skills to read Creole. Again, this grouping transcends ethnic lines that conventionally have been used informally to categorize communities on the island and reinforces a set of spatial practices that underscore a specific sense of identity. The signage analysed in this chapter points not to the identification of ‘Guadeloupeans’ as a group, but more accurately as Creole-ophone (by which we mean specifically individuals able to speak, read and, in some cases, write in Creole) islanders, regardless of ethnicity. From this perspective, the virtue of being born on the island, or living there does not grant automatically grant access to this group; the group is legitimized by its shared value and use of Guadeloupean Creole. In this chapter, we have acknowledged that Creole has established a very modest presence in the LL, and from a quantitative perspective, the visibility of the language is minimal. We argue that the social contexts on the island, however, have provided the impetus for individual agency in writing in Creole, with many of the signs recorded linking back to the mass strike of 2009 and its nascent ideologies. As such, we argue that the LL points to an emergent and alternative sense of identity that calls for further examination as the social upheavals of the general strike fade from public discourse.

Notes 1 The methodology is outlined in full in Blackwood (2011) and discussed critically in Blackwood (2015).

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2 This is an approach we first tested in Ajaccio, Corsica; see Blackwood (2014). 3 Articles 72 and 76 of the 1958 Constitution include these territories as part of the French Republic but do not oblige assimilation despite actions which suggest the contrary (see Fenet, 2004: p. 21).

References Adamson, R. (2007), The Defence of French: A Language in Crisis?’ Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ager, D. E. (1999), Identity, Insecurity and Image: France and Language, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Aldrich, R. and Connell, J. (1992), France’s Overseas’ Frontier: départements et territoires d’outre-mer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Backhaus, P. (2007), Linguistic Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in Tokyo, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Blackwood, R. (2010), ‘Marking France’s Public Space: Empirical Surveys on Regional Heritage Languages in Two Provincial Cities’, in E. Shohamy, E. Ben-Rafael and M. Barni (eds.), Linguistic Landscape in the City, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 292–307. Blackwood, R. (2011), ‘The Linguistic Landscape of Brittany and Corsica: A Comparative Study of the Presence of France’s Regional Languages in the Public Space’, Journal of French Language Studies, 21: pp. 111–130. Blackwood, R. (2014), ‘The Top-Down Revitalization of Corsican: Considering the Reversal of a Language Shift in the Linguistic and Semiotic Landscapes of Ajaccio’, French Studies, 68 (1): pp. 61–77. Blackwood, R. (2015), ‘LL Explorations and Methodological Challenges: Analysing France’s Regional Languages’, Linguistic Landscape: An International Journal, 1 (1/2): pp. 38–53. Blackwood, R. (2018a), ‘Revitalization and the Public Space’, in W. Ayres-Bennett and J. Carruthers (eds.), Romance Sociolinguistics, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 541–561. Blackwood, R. (2018b), ‘“Taste the Caribbean … mangé lokal … cuisine traditionelle”: Contested ideologies and food in Guadeloupe’s Linguistic Landscape’, in R. Kailuwiet, C. Pusch and M. Castillo (eds.), Linguistic Landscape Studies, the French Connection, Freiburg: Rombach. Blackwood, R. and Tufi, S. (2015), The Linguistic Landscape of the Mediterranean: French and Italian Coastal Cities, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bokamba, E. G. (2008), ‘The Lives of Local and Regional Congolese Languages in Globalized Linguistic Markets’, in S. S. Mufwene and C. Vigouroux (eds.), Globalization and Language Vitality: Perspectives from Black Africa, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 97–125. Bonilla, Y. (2010), ‘Guadeloupe Is Ours: The Prefigurative Politics of the Mass Strike in the French Antilles’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 12 (1): pp. 125–137. Bonilla, Y. (2012), ‘Nonsovereign Futures? French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment’, in L. Lewis (ed.), Caribbean Sovereignity, Democracy and Development in an Age of Globalization, New York: Routledge, pp. 208–227. Bonilla, Y. (2015), Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Cresswell, T. (1992), ‘The Crucial “Where” of Graffiti: A Geographical Analysis of Reactions to Graffiti in New York’, Environment and Planning D, 10 (3): pp. 329–344. Duchêne, A. and Heller, M. (2012), Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit, London: Routledge. Edwards, J. (2007), ‘Back from the Brink: The Revival of Endangered Languages’, in M. Heliger and A. Pauwels (eds.), Handbook of Language and Communication: Diversity and Change, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 241–269. Fenet, A. (2004), ‘Difference Rights and Language in France’, in T. Judt and D. Lacorne (eds.), Language, Nation, and State: Identity Politics in a Multilingual Age, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 19–61. Hazaël-Massieux, M.-C. (2002), ‘La codification des créoles, avec un regard particulier sur le créole antillais’, in D. Caubet, S. Chaker and J. Sibille (eds.), Codification des langues de France: actes du colloque « Les langues de France et leur codification », écrits divers – écrits ouverts (Paris-INALCO, 29-31 mai 2000), Paris: L’Harmattan, pp. 207–218. Hazaël-Massieux, M.-C. (2013), ‘Les créoles français’, in G. Kremnitz (ed.), Histoire sociale des langues de France, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, pp. 639–670. Heller, M. and Duchêne, A. (2012), ‘Pride and Profit: Changing Discourses of Language, Capital and Nation-State’, in A. Duchêne and M. Heller (eds.), Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit, London: Routledge, pp. 1–21. Kelly-Holmes, H. and Mautner, G. (2010), Language and the Market, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Leeman, J. and Modan, G. (2009), ‘Commodified Language in Chinatown: A Contextualized Approach to Linguistic Landscape’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13: pp. 332–362. Pennycook, A. (2009), ‘Linguistic Landscapes and the Transgressive Semiotics of Graffiti’, in E. Shohamy and D. Gorter (eds.), Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery, London: Routledge, pp. 302–313. Pennycook, A. (2010), Language as a Local Practice, London: Routledge. Saint-Ruf, G. (1977), L’Epopée Delgres: la Guadeloupe sous la Révolution française (1789–1802), Paris: L’Harmattan. Schnepel, E. M. (2004), In Search of a National Identity: Creole and Politics in Guadeloupe, Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag. Spolsky, B. (2004), Language Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stroud, C. (2008), ‘African Modernity, Transnationalism and Language Vitality: Portuguese in Multilingual Mozambique’, in S. S. Mufwene and C. Vigouroux (eds.), Globalization and Language Vitality: Perspectives from Black Africa, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 70–96. Viala, F. (2014), ‘Introduction – the Post-Columbus Syndrome: A Comparative Approach to Caribbean Memory in the Longue Durée’, in The Post-Columbus Syndrome: Identities, Cultural Nationalism and Commemoration in the Caribbean, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–17. Williams, C. H. (2012), ‘Language Policy, Territorialism and Regional Autonomy’, in B. Spolsky (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Language Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 174–202.

7

Negotiating Institutional Identity on a Corsican University Campus H. William Amos

Introduction The Mariani Campus of the University of Corsica is a space of language activism. The campus is located on the fringes of Corte, a small inland town situated in Corsica’s mountainous centre, at roughly half the distance between the cities of Ajaccio and Bastia. Corte has a historic association with Corsican independence leader Pasquale Paoli, who designated the town the island’s capital during the brief fifteen-year period of independence following Genoese control of the island and preceding its transferal to French ownership in 1768.1 The town can be described as a site of regional (and regional language) activism, given its historical associations and the symbolic value attributed to it by supporters of Corsica’s various independence movements. As the data in this chapter demonstrate, the university can similarly be considered a site of Corsicanlanguage activism, and its status as the island’s largest educational institutional space firmly underlines the association between Corsica’s public education system, its historic independent capital and its regional language. In addition to the Mariani campus, the university operates on five other sites across Corsica: a smaller campus to the south of Corte; a scientific research institute outside the small town of Cargèse on the west coast of the island, about 20 km north of Ajaccio; a marine biology research centre at Biguglia, 10 km south of Bastia; and two environmental research centres based at the Centre de Recherche Scientifique Georges Peri in the small town of Vignola, about 10 km west of Ajaccio.2 The Mariani campus, a large site constructed on a plateau overlooking the town, is the largest of these and the nucleus of the institution. All around the Mariani campus, the university’s logo appears in Corsican, bearing the text Università di Corsica Pasquale Paoli alongside a stylized image composed of the island’s outline and a cropped portrait of Pasquale Paoli (cf. upper left of Figure 7.1). This is reproduced on many of its official inscriptions: pathways around the site, entrances and exits to buildings, maps and documents, as well as on the university’s multilingual website, available in Corsican, English, French and Italian. Although

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frequently referred to in French as l’Université de Corse Pascal Paoli, the institution’s official logo is produced in Corsican on all its documentation, and French is often omitted.3 This practice of self-identifying in Corsican is echoed in the institutional motto Studia hé Libertà (Study and Freedom), reproduced on merchandise, marketing materials and official social media channels, and enshrined in the university’s research ethos which aims to promote institutional identity by ‘transferring knowledge and skills back to the [Corsican] island territory’ (Università di Corsica, 2017). In addition to the logos, which are commonplace on campus, the majority of permanent, official signage is written in Corsican only, visible in the names of buildings, departments and research institutes, as well as on signs labelling them on maps and directing pedestrians towards them from car parks, courtyards and paths. However, other signage on campus, such as building opening times and information about teaching, meetings and social activities, are written in French. This invokes a similar sense of necessity as that described by Stroud and Mpendukana (2009), in which information essential to the everyday running of the university tends to appear in word-processed and handwritten French, rather than on permanently erected Corsican signs. The fact that these signs are authored by members of the university (i.e. staff and students) challenges not only the institutional-wide claim to Corsican identity, but also the structural composition of its linguistic hierarchy. This chapter explores the dynamics of institutional identity on the Mariani campus in the context of French and Corsican linguistic markers. As well as reporting on language practices in one of Corsica’s largest and most prominent public institutions, it contributes to broader discussions about institutional identity from the perspective of the linguistic landscape (LL) (Hanauer, 2010; Marx and Nekula, 2015; Waksman and Shohamy, 2016). Through an analysis of the contextual and spatial presentation of Corsican on campus, the chapter addresses the complexities of identity presentation and maintenance, which are subject to the management strategies not only of the institution as a whole, but also of the individual LL actors who represent the institution in different settings. This is also considered in the context of the non-policy (Blackwood and Tufi, 2012) concerning Corsican visibility on campus. While the institution gives a clear indication of a pro-Corsican ideology through using the regional language, this is expressed without any specific declaration of an embedded institutional language strategy. This lack of an obvious guiding policy echoes the legislative gap concerning the visibility of regional languages in other aspects of the French public space, where laws limiting non-French use in the LL have since 2014 been clarified as not affecting the nation’s regional languages (Amos, 2017: p. 102). While, in one regard, the linguistic composition of the space illustrates the language ideology of the institution and its members collectively, in another there are clear discrepancies between the language choices of members at different institutional levels. This chapter thus argues that the LL reveals divisions in the institutional structure, where members at different levels adhere more or less to the apparent dominant ideology. Scrutinizing a corpus of 394 LL items photographed on the campus site in April 2015, this chapter carries out a quantitative analysis of language use by authors affiliated in different ways to the institution. It hypothesizes that it is the LL itself – that is, the textual objects in the landscape – which mediates the competing linguistic identities defining ‘the

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institution’ as a collective unit on the one hand and as a shared space constructed by its individual members on the other. It is argued that the notion of institutional identity may therefore be usefully conceptualized in terms of authorship.

Identity and institutional space A university campus is a typical example of an institutional space. It belongs to a larger organization (i.e. ‘the university’) insofar as it is usually owned and managed by that organization, though it also contains a variety of substructures with greater or lesser autonomy from the institutional whole. These are normally broken down administratively in terms of faculties, schools, departments, centres and institutes. They are also manifested physically as buildings, classrooms, libraries and residences, which formulate institutional members’ and visitors’ conceptions of the structural composition of the institution. Even external organizations who run sports centres, cafés and other franchises on campus do so with the permission of the institution, and in so doing contribute to its collective identity. Similarly, those who study, work and visit the institution are normally required to adhere to its rules, and to respect some form of institutional code. These different institutional levels relate in diverse ways to the central management, since they are administered and experienced by employees, students, visitors and (in the case of accessible campuses) the public. It may be argued, therefore, that the relationships between the core organization and its constituent parts are mediated by individuals, who act both within their microstructures and on behalf of the (macro) institution. As argued elsewhere (Hogg and Terry, 2001; Polletta and Jasper, 2001; Stensaker, 2015), it therefore follows that staff, students and workers on campus all contribute in various ways to the collective identity of the institution, even if they do not represent the senior management of the organization individually and have limited or no personal contact with those who do. The frequency of Corsican on institutional signs around the campus embodies the university’s ideological promotion of and support for the Corsican language. As Mayr (2008) reasons, the embedding of this ideology in physical objects in the landscape further legitimizes the identity promulgated by the institution. Moreover, it can be reasonably argued that the ubiquity of the regional language on campus is made all the more striking by its absence elsewhere on the island, which further highlights the comparative impact of the university’s policy aimed at creating a conspicuously Corsican space.4 As Fairclough (1995: p. 38) and Kreiner et al. (2015) argue, this type of containment to a designated space and differentiation from realities in the outside world are both important factors in building a strong institutional identity. Given the frequency of Corsican on campus and its infrequency elsewhere in Corsica, it may therefore be said that the regional language identity of the university is particularly strongly maintained. Moreover, it may be argued that the university is deliberately creating a site of ‘legitimate distinctiveness’ (Navis and Glynn, 2011), the visual impact of which strengthens the links between the institution’s identity and the Corsican language.

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This can also be understood in terms of Luhmann’s (1990) theory of self-referentiality, which posits that institutional systems (of which the university’s language practices is an example) define their own boundaries, create their own internal conditions and develop according to their own operational logic rather than any external influences (cf. also Beck, 1997; and Jessop, 2001). Following Celano (1999: p. 240–241), it may further be suggested that the institution’s maintenance of a Corsican identity relies not on a particular reality (i.e. that the university ‘is’ Corsican), but on promulgating the belief that Corsican is the most appropriate language through which to express this identity. To borrow from Van Herzele and Aarts (2013: p. 67), this self-produced linguistic identity is not just a by-product of its signage, but a ‘concrete condition for its self-preservation’. The consistent presentation of Corsican on official signs around the campus can therefore be understood not only as a symbolic indication of an institutional policy to display the language, but also as a self-referential marker of this process and its deliberate implementation through the LL. Despite the distinctiveness of Corsican at entrances, exits and throughout the campus, however, a closer examination of the LL suggests that Corsican identity is upheld inconsistently. In fact, the data reveal a number of contexts in which French is the preferred language used by a variety of authors in different spaces. This reality illustrates Humphreys and Brown’s (2002: p. 440) argument that institutional spaces are characterized by a ‘multiplicity of individual and collective identity narratives which variously stand alone, inform each other, harmonize, and clash’. Applied to the campus LL, the variation of language choice on signs and the absence of the regional language in specific areas indicate a clash between users at different micro-structural levels and the official macro-institutional ideology. Furthermore, the inconsistent management of Corsican indicates that the linguistic identity of the institution is subject to mediation on the part of sign authors. Hence, the physical properties of signs provide important indications of authorship, and of author membership of or divergence from the institutional language identity. Understanding identity as a ‘multimodal literacy phenomenon’ (Hanauer, 2010: p. 153), this study argues that modality is a key feature of the hierarchical dynamics of agency within an institutional setting. Echoing similar conclusions of Marx and Nekula (2015) and Waksman and Shohamy (2016), the data indicate that the site of the institution itself, rather than any abstract ideology or policy, is central to the negotiation of its identity as it is interpreted by those inside it. This is because the campus space, or rather the 394 items of written text within it, is the nexus at which various strands of institutional agency meet and are expressed.

Research questions and methodology Following the broader aim to explore the notion of institutional identity from the perspective of the LL, this chapter addresses three research questions: 1. To what extent is the linguistic ideology of the institution expressed in the LL? 2. What are the links between language choice and institutional identity?

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3. To what extent is institutional identity negotiated by different stakeholders in a shared space? Photographs were taken of the 394 items visible on the Mariani Campus in April 2015. In contrast to what might be described as the typical LL approach (as described by Backhaus, 2007, and adopted by the majority of studies in the quantitative arm of the field ever since), items were determined not according to the boundaries of a ‘spatially-definable frame’, but by the communicative function of text units. The purpose of this was to isolate data points in terms of function rather than according to the physical boundaries of text carriers. Thus, establishment names, establishment descriptions, slogans, instructions, trademarks, advertisements, information bulletins and directions were all considered fundamental categories of meaning making, and were recorded individually as ‘items’. Items were coded separately, even when more than one appeared on a single spatially defined ‘sign’.5 Once identified, items were attributed one of a number of independent values across six variables: languages contained; type of multilingualism (based on Reh, 2004); spatial location (e.g. wall, door, window, noticeboard and freestanding); materiality (e.g. permanent, professionally printed, handwritten and word processed); authorship (e.g. management, individual workers, individual students, student groups and external organizations) and field (e.g. learning and research, course information, student welfare, accommodation, social and night life, and sport and recreation). Though they are applied to a relatively small corpus, and are necessarily based on subjective arbitration on the part of the researcher, these categorizations offer the potential for a statistical cross-comparison of Corsican and French visibility on the campus, by various authors in different places, using a number of materials and concerning a variety of subjects. The following section discusses the general findings, providing an overview of the spaces and places in which the languages were recorded. Section ‘Overview of findings: The language situation on the Mariani campus’ focuses on the agency of three institutional levels illuminated by the data, and explores the dynamics between French and Corsican in terms of practical necessity and linguistic symbolism. The data illustrate that, given the variety of items associated with both languages, the LL offers an important insight into the negotiation of institutional identity by numerous and competing stakeholders in a shared space.

Overview of findings: The language situation on the Mariani campus On the day on which the fieldwork was carried out, 154 signs were visible on the campus. Some, such as word-processed small advertisements or handwritten slogans, contained only one item, while other signs, for example a commercially produced poster featuring an event name, a number of slogans, contact details and the trademarks of various sponsors, featured as many as nineteen items. In total, 394 items were recorded. Three languages were visible: French, Corsican and English. French was present on 240 items (61 per cent) and Corsican on 164 items (42 per cent).6 The impact of English

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on the LL was almost negligible, featuring on only 3 items (1 per cent). In terms of multilingual distribution, 226 items (57 per cent) exhibited only French, 149 (38 per cent) only Corsican and 14 (4 per cent) both languages. Ten communicative functions and twenty-four fields were recorded. Table 7.1 lists the eight most common values for each of these variables. While seventeen fields were collectively responsible for the ‘other’ grouping in Table 7.1 (108 items; 27 per cent, cf. note b), the most common single field was learning and research (17 items; 18 per cent). This was composed mostly of directions (41 per cent) and slogans (30 per cent). The former were typically permanent signs attached to walls or freestanding along pathways; the latter were visible on posters advertising educational events. Learning and research items exhibited the most balanced distribution of both languages, where 49 per cent contained French and 51 per cent contained Corsican. Examining this more closely, the majority of the Corsican items were monolingual direction signs, of which only three contained establishment names in French. Along with the rest of the official signage, this highlights one of the principal characteristics of Corsican on the campus: namely that the names of departments, subject areas and academic disciplines are predominantly written in Corsican only. Table 7.1 Number and proportion of items by communicative function and field Communicative Function

a b

No. of Items

%

Field

No. of Items

%

Slogans

85

22

Learning and research

70

18

Trademarks and group names

82

21

Institutional administration

50

13

Event information

63

16

Corsican independence

44

11

Directions

37

9

Student welfare

41

10

Information bulletins

36

9

Estates management

23

6

Establishment names

35

9

Social and night life

22

6

Advertisements

23

6

Class information

20

5

Announcements

20

5

Media

16

4

Othera

13

3

Otherb

108

27

Total

394

100

Total

394

100

Establishment descriptions and instructions.

Accommodation; Art; Associations; Jobs & Careers; Small Ads & Sales; Conferences & Conventions; Food & Drink; Festivals; Finance; History, Commemoration & Museums; Language Activism; Lost & Found; Music; Public Administration; Religion; Sport & Recreation. These and other values are based on similar categories developed for quantitative LL studies (e.g. Blackwood, 2010; Franco-Rodríguez, 2009; Reh, 2004; Solé Camardons and Romaní, 1997), and are discussed further in Amos and Soukup (forthcoming).

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Figure 7.1 Names of departments and buildings.

This preference for the regional language is echoed in the institutional administration field, the second most prevalent in the corpus, in which thirty-four items (68 per cent) contained Corsican. These were the trademarks denoting the university logo, and campus maps indicating the locations of departments and buildings on the signage

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discussed earlier, as well as practical administration signs such as opening hours and signs regulating eating and smoking areas. This field contained only twelve French items: the proper name Service commun de la documentation (General Administration Office: two occurrences) and Campus Mariani (ten occurrences). The former denotes the association which links university libraries across France, and its appearance in the national language is therefore uncontroversial. The latter, Campus Mariani, frequently appears alongside the Corsican university logos (cf. Figure 7.1), and is presented in French. This is despite its inclusion (widespread across the campus) of what is ostensibly a Corsican name in Mariani. On the one hand, the proper name Mariani is likely to be interpreted as Corsican through its historical associations with a figure of the island’s heritage, namely the nineteenth-century Corsican chemist Angelo Mariani, creator of Vin Mariani, the first drink to incorporate coca leaves and therefore widely considered the European forerunner to Coca Cola (cf. Freye, 2010: p. 15; Pendergrast, 2013: p. 20–22). Coupled with the established practice of naming public institutions after important historical figures in France, as well as the morphological resonance of the word-final grapheme ⟨i⟩, which is not a common occurrence in standard French, most readers are likely to associate the proper name of the campus with Corsican. On the other hand, the presence of the word campus, a noun without any ostensible Corsican morphological features by contrast, and mirroring the naming process of university campuses across the rest of France and elsewhere in the world, suggests that the dominant semantic function of the sign is not conveyed in Corsican.7 While the historical implications of Mariani are important, the primary function of the text Campus Mariani is to indicate the role and function of the space, which is that it is a university campus. Since none of the consulted sources indicate that campus can confidently be classified as Corsican, the term is more likely to be interpreted as a loanword from the national language, in the absence of any obvious Corsican alternative. Campus Mariani may therefore be considered as a translingual text incorporating elements of both languages, on which a proper noun is given in Corsican, and a common noun – also used widely internationally – associates the primary communicative function of the item with French. Despite this, the learning and research and institutional administration fields offer significant indications of an engrained policy to use Corsican as much as possible around the campus. This is uncontroversial considering the strategic aim of the institution to direct its research towards the island’s culture and industry (Università di Corsica, 2017). Perhaps in line with the Studia hé Libertà (Study and Freedom) motto, the third most common field in the corpus is Corsican independence. An average of one in ten items engages with this subject, almost exclusively in Corsican. These are predominantly slogans (57 per cent) calling for independence and the release of political prisoners, expressed as transgressive (Soukup, 2016) hand-painted graffiti or printed stickers and posters adhered to walls and other signage (cf. Figure 7.2). These include the names of the student groups Ghjuventù Indipendentista (Separatist Youth) and Ghjuventù Paolina (Paoli’s Youth – after the historical revolutionary figure from whom the university takes its name). Most importantly, this field contains items relating to meetings, events and co-ordinated political and linguistic activism which are described solely in Corsican. A number of posters advertising political demonstrations

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organized by Ghjuventù Indipendentista even display essential information such as dates, times and meeting places in Corsican, as well as the usual political slogans. In other fields, communications as important as these normally rely on French; it is remarkable that signs advertising public activities choose to omit the national language in these sites of necessity (Stroud and Mpendukana, 2009) despite the risk of excluding French-only readers. Although French dominates the majority of contexts, Corsican is not restricted to political and linguistic activism and the official institutional signs. It is consistently present (between three and twelve items) on signs relating to social and night life, sport and recreation, music, media, history, commemoration and museums, and conferences and conventions. The regional language is also relatively varied in terms

Figure 7.2 Corsican nationalist slogans and a public demonstration poster.

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of communicative function, expressed as trademarks and group names (51 items), slogans (38 items), directions (31 items), and event information (28 items), and to a lesser degree as establishment names, establishment descriptions and announcements.

Authorship: Three levels of institutional agency The empirical breakdown of the campus LL indicates seven distinct categories of authorship: university management (150 items; 38 per cent), external organizations (28 per cent), student organizations (18 per cent), collaborations (7 per cent), graffiti (5 per cent), individual workers (3 per cent) and individual students (1 per cent). There is a clear division within these between authors which may be considered internal to the institution and those which are external to it. As described earlier, signs produced by the university management dominate the LL, though they are complemented by other internal items authored by student organizations and groups and individuals who work and study in the university. In addition to the internal items, almost one-third of the LL testifies to the contribution of external organizations. These identify autonomously from the institution, but are nevertheless stakeholders in the activities of the people who reside, study and work there. The national student organization Centre régional des œuvres universitaires et scolaires (CROUS; Regional Centre for Scholarly and University Activities) supports various aspects of student life on campuses around France in terms of finance, accommodation and pastoral support. The significant presence of trademarks, advertisements, slogans and information bulletins produced by CROUS is therefore unsurprising, as is their almost-exclusive presentation in French. Indeed, 95 of the 109 items produced by external actors appear in French only, coded in a range of fields including student welfare, social and night life, jobs and careers, sport and recreation, and learning and research, which are expressed as advertisements for exhibitions and sports clubs, parties, fundraisers, conferences and meetings hosted by external organizations. However, 65 per cent of the signage on campus does not have any obvious link to external organizations. This includes the permanent signs erected by the institution’s management, administrative messages written by staff members concerning classroom changes, module descriptions, and timetables, posters attached to noticeboards by student groups and societies, and messages and advertisements posted in the LL by individual students. Together, these multiple strands of authorship intertwine to construct what Stensaker (2015) describes as the ‘collective’ identity of the institution. The large, permanent management signs indicating the name of the campus and its departments and buildings clearly imply the official agency of the institution, as they are detached from the individuals involved in their construction in order to imply production by ‘the university’. However, below this primary level of institutional agency lies a secondary level of actors who contribute to, but do not ostensibly manage, the identity of the institution. Items of the secondary level are identifiable by their relation to the academic and administrative workings of the university, their positioning in the LL and their material ephemerality indicating their short-term functionality, essential to

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the everyday running of the organization. In terms of authors, this level is occupied by individual employees and students who, due to their inclusion in the academic and administrative systems of the university, may be categorized as internal agents of the institution’s identity. This category extends to those fields which do not deal with the workings of the institution per se – e.g. small advertisements announcing the sale of a car and student accommodation for rent – since these items are authored by institutional members who are using designated noticeboards provided by the university for this purpose. This secondary level differs significantly from the primary level in that French is by far the most common code used for communication. The thirteen word-processed items authored by individual workers, for instance, contained two Corsican items, both bilingual and recorded on the same sign: the establishment name scularità centrale/ scolarité centrale (Central Administration [Office]) and its opening hours, which are given in both languages. It is notable that it is through its materiality that this sign suggests secondary-level authorship. In terms of its content, it performs the same informational role as some of the permanent institutional signs on campus: it features the name and office hours of the university’s central administration department, placed in the door at the building’s entrance. The other word-processed signs in the dataset display more obvious indications that they were authored by individuals, acting with some degree of autonomy within the institutional structure. Of these, all the announcements, slogans and information bulletins relating to learning and research, estates management and lost property appeared in French only. Similarly, the six signs authored by indivdual students, comprising accommodation requests and the renting and selling of flats, cars, and homewares, featured no Corsican at all. The noticeboards on which they are posted are nexus points of secondary-level interaction, yet they are distinctly non-Corsican zones. These differ considerably from the primary level, ‘front region’ (Jaffe, 1999: p. 203; cf. also Goffman, 1959) areas represented by building names and official university signage, which are subject to consistent top-down control in order to maintain the presentation of Corsican identity desired by the university’s senior management. As has been argued elsewhere (Cook, 2015), the transient and amateurish materiality of noticeboard signs underscores that practical, everyday communications on campus are more commonly carried out in French than in the regional language. Since the noticeboards are arguably the most obvious connecting point of the different levels of institutional authorship, the reliance on French contrasts heavily with the preference for Corsican on primary-level signs. The notional ‘university’ thus appears to privilege Corsican in its outward projection, yet the LL suggests that the secondary level of the institution, managed more or less autonomously by the individuals who work and study there, identifies predominantly in French. While the internal signs can be categorized straightforwardly on primary and secondary levels of institutional agency, the various examples of graffiti on the campus present a more complex case. It is argued elsewhere that graffiti constitute unusual characteristics of agency, in that their provenance is often deliberately vague or anonymized due to their engagement with taboo or controversial subjects, and because their inscription normally transgresses on the hegemony instilled by those who own

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or manage that particular part of the LL (Hristić and Antonijević, 2006; Pennycook, 2009; Rodriguez and Clair, 1999). The graffiti on the Mariani campus are no different in these respects, in that one cannot easily assume that the slogans painted on walls, in courtyards and along corridors have been commissioned or are in some way permitted by the institution. Despite the possibility that they have been authored by individuals who may also contribute to the secondary or primary institutional levels elsewhere on the campus (i.e. registered students or employees), the graffiti imply a sense of extrainstitutionality, beyond the control and influence of internal agency. Yet, certain characteristics of the graffiti on the Mariani campus challenge this assumption, and associate the inscriptions with what might be described as a tertiary level of institutional authorship. This is predominantly in terms of field: without exception, every transgressive text references the Corsican independence movement. This includes nationalistic slogans such as U Fronte Vincerà (The [Corsican National Liberation] Front Will Be Victorious – cf. Figure 7.2) and Tarra Corsa a i Corsi! (The Corsican Land to the Corsican People!). These mantras are echoed on posters around the campus (and elsewhere on the island) calling for the release of Felix Benedetti and Eric Marras, and amnesty for other individuals convicted by the French state and considered heroes by elements of the independence movement (cf. Figure 7.3)8. The fact that the messages of the campus graffiti are duplicated on university noticeboards indicates a wider engagement with the subject within the institutional dimension. The second argument for considering the graffiti within the limits of institutional agency concerns the associations commonly drawn between universities and social and political protest (De Groot, 2014; Waters, 2004; i.a.). The Corsican slogans here are undoubtedly protest slogans and, following Schreer (1997), Waldner and Dobratz (2013), and others, the common associations attached to campus graffiti encourage the assumption that they are authored by students, and thus may be considered as institutional markers. The fact that the management had not yet removed the slogans at the time of photographing strengthens this association further. It might therefore be argued that the anonymity of the graffiti is offset by its presence in the institutional space. The ideological alignment with the institutional motto’s reference to libertà (freedom – expressed only in Corsican) constructs a political association between the two that is difficult to ignore. Despite the widespread use of Corsican in the independence field and on the primary level, however, the consistent reliance on French on the secondary level indicates that the institution’s actors more regularly express themselves in the national language.

Conclusion In many respects, the LL of the Mariani Campus is an institutionally Corsican space. Forty-nine per cent of the items authored by the university’s management are written in Corsican, predominantly without French translations, and every official sign contains at least one item in the regional language. Moreover, 149 out of the 164 Corsican items (91 per cent) were monolingual, underscoring the authors’ interest in presenting Corsican without translation from/into (and therefore potential mediation by)

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Figure 7.3 Nationalist posters.

French, and the desire to encourage readers to engage with the regional language. This not only suggests a deliberate strategy to use Corsican wherever possible, but results in a significant proportional reduction in French visibility. This highlights the self-referential approach to language management, where official signs are used as

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overt markers of the intention to privilege Corsican over French within the campus boundaries. The significance of these Corsican items, frequently inscribed on large, permanent signs in prominent positions on buildings and pathways, is amplified by the comparative lack of Corsican on similar types of sign elsewhere on the island. This juxtaposition creates a sense of significant otherness which accentuates the impact of Corsican on the campus and strengthens the linguistic identity of the institution. It is also worth noting that while French appears on noticeboards and in the doors and windows of individual buildings, external spaces and pathways are saturated with the regional language, and the placement of the directional signs (such as those exemplified in Figure 7.1) maps out a route around Campus that may broadly be experienced in Corsican only. The LL also indicates that institutional agency can be usefully understood as multidimensional. Beyond the directions, campus maps and building names produced officially by the university, there are distinct dimensions of the LL which exhibit alternative varieties of institutional agency, where signs are authored by administrative and academic staff and students. These signs – timetabling information, bulletins about teaching groups and classrooms, messages about lost items or items for sale and changes to library opening times – are not representative of the institution’s outward communication strategy, but rather of a secondary level of internal agency. On this secondary level, sign authors act individually within, but not independently of, the institution to which their signage contributes a constituent part. In terms of language, signage here frequently challenges the ideology of the primary level. The communications between staff, students, student societies, external partners and other parties embody similar characteristics to Stroud and Mpendukana’s (2009) ‘sites of necessity’, in that many are non-permanent (i.e. word-processed or handwritten) items, which indicate a short lifespan in the daily running of the institution. While the university is capable of communicating in Corsican on the primary level, therefore, the secondary level’s educational, administrative and social communications rely on French, and Corsican is restricted to less-essential information such as slogans, trademarks and place names. However, by categorizing the associated fields of LL items, it is possible to isolate another area of Corsican use: the Corsican independence movement. This was the third most common subject displayed in the LL, in which forty-eight of forty-nine items appeared in Corsican only. The single French item appeared on a poster referencing Eric Marras (cf. Figure 7.3), reading depuis 4 ans en préventive à Paris (four years on remand in Paris). It is interesting to note that this text arguably indicates the necessity to use the national language to convey more specific information than many of the symbolic clichés found elsewhere. However, Corsican is nevertheless used on other items to convey key information relating to the organization of meetings, protests, demonstrations and social events (e.g. Figure 7.2). While Corsican is generally inscribed in non-essential communications elsewhere on the campus, therefore, in terms of the political independence discourse it is generally the preferred code in specific communications as well. The unclear authorship of graffiti – defined less by its anonymous authors and more by its transgressive nature – suggests that it may usefully be categorized on a tertiary level of institutional agency. This is embedded in the long-standing associations of

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university spaces with political graffiti, in the parallels between the slogans and the institution’s official linkages with Pasquale Paoli and the frequent references to ghjuventù (youth) which hint at student agency. The various instances of graffiti also raise the question of institutional collusion, since it is possible to consider the failure to erase the texts as an indication of some degree of tolerance, however short-lived. As such, the graffiti appear not in the social margins of the space as in the contexts explored by Christen (2003) and Pennycook (2009), but rather as established focal points which contribute to one of the most popular conversations on campus. This chapter has explored how Corsican identity is negotiated on a site belonging to one of the island’s most prominent public institutions. In addition to commenting on the specific issue of the regional language and its role in the university space, the study echoes recent arguments that the LL can offer new perspectives on complex issues of institutionality and the construction and negotiation of identity by multiple stakeholders in shared spaces. In particular, it provides evidence to support Kreiner et al.’s (2015) suggestion that institutional identity is defined not only by ‘attributes’ determined by leaders and managers, but by ‘tensions’ between multiple elements of the organizational hierarchy. Future studies may choose to examine these tensions more closely, or to explore connections between the domains and contexts of Corsican use on this campus with alternative spaces on the island (Blackwood and Tufi, 2015: p. 134–138; Jaffe, 1999); the specific contribution of this chapter has been to illustrate the significance of the LL in undertaking this type of research.

Notes 1 For overviews of this period and of Pasquale Paoli’s legacy, cf. Arrighi and Pomponi (1967); Blackwood (2008); Carrington (1971), and Pellegrinetti and Rovère (2004). 2 For details of the university sites and their activities, cf. https://www.universita.corsica/ fr/universita/voir/. 3 Evidence for this is provided by the university’s website (https://www.universita. corsica/), on which the logo appears exclusively in the regional language. 4 A parallel study carried out for a doctoral thesis on Corsican visibility and status analysed 5,638 signs in the two Corsican cities of Ajaccio and Bastia, and found a Corsican presence of 13.4 per cent – proportionally far lower than on the Mariani campus. 5 Cf. the poster in Figure 7.2, which contains a trademark, event information and a slogan. This methodological approach reflects developing aspects of multimodal analysis in empirical LL research, which is explained, critiqued and reflected upon in more detail in Amos (2016), and Amos and Soukup (forthcoming). 6 All percentages given in this analysis are rounded up to the nearest 1 per cent. 7 It is difficult to argue that campus is definitively a French term, however, since various etymological sources consider its university context to originate from Princeton University in the eighteenth century (e.g. Collins English Dictionary, 2017; Oxford English Dictionary, 2017). Since none of the consulted sources suggest a specific alternative in Corsican, it might therefore be argued that campus is here borrowed into Corsican as it has been into French (and other languages). However, the ubiquity of

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the term’s visibility alongside other institutional names in the country, as well as its use within otherwise-French texts around the university, suggests that it is more likely to be interpreted as le campus in French, rather than u campus in Corsican, which was not recorded anywhere in the survey area. 8 Upper posters: ‘Amnesty for the imprisoned and hunted patriots’. Lower posters: ‘Freedom for Felix Benedetti’ and ‘Freedom for Eric Marras – four years on remand in Paris’.

References Amos, H. W. (2016), ‘Chinatown by Numbers: Defining an Ethnic Space by Empirical Linguistic Landscape’, Linguistic Landscape, 2 (2): pp. 127–156. Amos, H. W. (2017), ‘Regional Language Vitality in the Linguistic Landscape: Hidden Hierarchies on Street Signs in Toulouse’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 14 (2): pp. 93–108. Amos, H. W., and Soukup, B. (forthcoming), ‘Quantitative 2.0: The Potential for a Canon of Variables in Quantitative LL Research’, in D. Malinowski and S. Tufi (eds.), Questioning Boundaries, Opening Spaces: Reterritorialising Linguistic Landscapes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arrighi, P., and Pomponi, F. (1967), Histoire de la Corse, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Backhaus, P. (2007), Linguistic Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in Tokyo, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Beck, U. (1997), ‘Ecology and the Disintegration of Institutional Power’, Organization and Environment, 10 (1): pp. 52–65. Blackwood, R. (2008), The State, the Activists and the Islanders: Language Policy on Corsica, London: Springer. Blackwood, R. (2010), ‘Marking France’s Public Space: Empirical Surveys on Regional Heritage Languages in Two Provincial Cities’, in E. Shohamy, E. Ben-Rafael and M. Barni (eds.), Linguistic Landscape in the City, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, pp. 292–307. Blackwood, R., and Tufi, S. (2012), ‘Policies vs Non-Policies: Analysing Regional Languages and the National Standard in the Linguistic Landscape of French and Italian Mediterranean Cities’, in D. Gorter, H. F. Marten and L. Van Mensel (eds.), Minority Languages in the Linguistic Landscape, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 109–126. Blackwood, R., and Tufi, S. (2015), The Linguistic Landscape of the Mediterranean, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carrington, D. (1971), Granite Island: A Portrait of Corsica, London: Longman. Celano, B. (1999), ‘Collective Intentionality, Self-referentiality, and False Beliefs: Some Issues Concerning Institutional Facts’, Analyse & Kritik, 21 (2): pp. 237–250. Christen, R. (2003), ‘Hip Hop Learning: Graffiti as an Educator of Urban Teenagers’, Educational Foundations, 17 (4): pp. 57–82. Collins English Dictionary. (2017), Definition of ‘Campus.’ https://www.collinsdictionary. com/dictionary/english/campus (retrieved 21 March 2017). Cook, V. (2015), ‘Meaning and Material in the Language of the Street’, Social Semiotics, 25 (1): pp. 81–109. De Groot, G. J. (ed.) (2014), Student Protest: The Sixties and After, Oxford: Routledge.

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Fairclough, N. (1995), Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language, London: Longman. Franco-Rodríguez, J. M. (2009), ‘Interpreting the Linguistic Traits of Linguistic Landscapes as Ethnolinguistic Vitality: Methodological Approach’, Revista Electrónica de Lingüística Aplicada, 8: pp. 1–15. Freye, E. (2010), Pharmacology and Abuse of Cocaine, Amphetamines, Ecstasy and Related Designer Drugs: A Comprehensive Review on their Mode of Action, Treatment of Abuse and Intoxication, Dordrecht: Springer. Goffman, E. (1959), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Anchor. Hanauer, D. (2010), ‘Laboratory Identity: A Linguistic Landscape Analysis of Personalized Space within a Microbiology Laboratory’, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 7 (2–3): pp. 152–172. Hogg, M. A., and Terry, D. J. (eds.) (2001), Social Identity Processes in Organizational Contexts, Philadelphia: Psychology Press. Hristić, L., and Antonijević, D. (2006), ‘Belgrade Graffiti: Anthropological Insights into Anonymous Public Expressions of “Worldview”’, Ethnologia Balkanica, 10: pp. 279–290. Humphreys, M., and Brown, A. (2002), ‘Narratives of Organizational Identity and Identification: A Case Study of Hegemony and Resistence’, Organizational Studies, 23 (3): pp. 421–447. Jaffe, A. (1999), Ideologies in Action: Language Politics on Corsica, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Jessop, B. (2001), ‘State Theory, Regulation, and Autopoiesis: Debates and Controversies’, Capital and Class, 25 (3): pp. 83–92. Kreiner, G. E., Hollensbe, E., Sheep, M. L., Smith, B. R., and Kataria, N. (2015), ‘Elasticity and the Dialectic Tensions of Organizational Identity: How Can We Hold Together While We Are Pulling Apart?’ Academy of Management Journal, 58 (4): pp. 981–1011. Luhmann, N. (1990), Essays on Self-Reference, New York: Columbia University Press. Marx, C., and Nekula, M. (2015), ‘Constructing a Cross-Border Space through Semiotic Landscapes: A Case Study of a German-Czech Organization’, in M. Laitinen and A. Zabrodskaja (eds.), Dimensions of Sociolinguistic Landscapes in Europe, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, pp. 149–168. Mayr, A. (2008), Language and Power: An Introduction to Institutional Discourse, London: Continuum. Navis, C., and Glynn, M. A. (2011), ‘Legitimate Distinctiveness and the Entrepreneurial Identity: Influence on Investor Judgments of New Venture Plausibility’, Academy of Management Review, 36 (3): pp. 479–499. Oxford English Dictionary. (2017), Campus, n. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/26840?rs key=BKIbTt&result=1#eid (retrieved 21 March 2017) Pellegrinetti, J.-P., and Rovère, A. (2004), La Corse et La République: La vie politique de la fin du second Empire au début du XXIe siècle, Paris: Editions du Seuil. Pendergrast, M. (2013), For God, Country & Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It, 3rd edition, New York: Basic Books. Pennycook, A. (2009), ‘Linguistic Landscapes and the Transgressive Semiotics of Graffiti’, in E. Shohamy and D. Gorter (eds.), Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery, London: Routledge, pp. 302–313. Polletta, F., and Jasper, J. M. (2001), ‘Collective Identity and Social Movements’, Annual Review of Sociology, 27: pp. 283–305.

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Reh, M. (2004), ‘Multilingual Writing: A Reader-Oriented Typology – With Examples from Lira Municipality (Uganda)’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 170: pp. 1–41. Rodriguez, A., and Clair, R. P. (1999), ‘Graffiti as Communication: Exploring the Discursive Tensions of Anonymous Texts’, Southern Communication Journal, 65 (1): pp. 1–15. Schreer, G. E. (1997), ‘Private Restroom Graffiti: An Analysis of Controversial Social Issues on Two College Campuses’, Strichartz, Jeremy M., 81 (3): pp. 1067–1074. Solé Camardons, J., and Romaní, J. (1997), ‘Els usos lingüístics en la retolació a Barcelona’, Llengua I Ús, 10: pp. 58–67. Soukup, B. (2016), ‘English in the Linguistic Landscape of Vienna, Austria (ELLViA): Outline, Rationale, and Methodology of a Large-Scale Empirical Project on Language Choice on Public Signs from the Perspective of Sign-Readers’, Vienna English Working Papers, 25: pp. 1–25. Stensaker, B. (2015), ‘Organizational Identity as a Concept for Understanding University Dynamics’, Higher Education, 69: pp. 103–115. Stroud, C., and Mpendukana, S. (2009), ‘Towards a Material Ethnography of Linguistic Landscape: Multilingualism, Mobility and Space in a South African Township’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13: pp. 363–386. Università di Corsica. (2017), La Recherche à l’Université de Corse. https://ricerca. universita.corsica/article.php?id_art=887&id_rub=372 (retrieved 25 February 2017). Van Herzele, A., and Aarts, N. (2013), ‘“My forest, My Kingdom”: Self-referentiality as a Strategy in the Case of Small Forest Owners Coping with Government Regulations’, Policy Sciences, 46 (1): pp. 63–81. Waksman, S., and Shohamy, E. (2016), ‘Linguistic Landscape of Social Protests: Moving from “Open” to “Institutional” Spaces’, in R. Blackwood, E. Lanza and H. Woldemariam (eds.), Negotiating and Contesting Identities in Linguistic Landscapes, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 85–98. Waldner, L. K., and Dobratz, B. A. (2013), ‘Graffiti as a Form of Contentious Political Participation’, Sociology Compass, 7 (5): pp. 377–389. Waters, S. (2004), ‘Mobilising against Globalisation: Attac and the French Intellectuals’, West European Politics, 27 (5): pp. 854–874.

8

The Semiotic Paradox of Street Art: Gentrification and the Commodification of Bushwick, Brooklyn Kellie Gonçalves

Introduction Street art and its artistic antecedent, graffiti, are both considered transgressive, radical, rebellious, territorial and aesthetic discursive practices (Jørgensen, 2008; Karlander, 2016; Kitis, 2011; Muth, 2014, 2016; Papen, 2015; Pennycook, 2010; Schachter, 2014; Sebba, 2007) often associated with struggles concerning the right to be seen as well as to create in urban contexts. A postmodern genre and a paradigm of hybridity within global visual culture (Irvine, 2012), street art is an ideologically driven act that has the power to reappropriate space, mobilize subcultures and serve as a means of placemaking (Iveson, 2010), place-marketing (Schachter, 2014) and a key strategy for the commodification of urban space (Papen, 2015), where symbolic (Zukin, 1995) and market economies intersect relying on ‘growth machines’ (Logan and Molotch, 1987) within the political economy of place under contemporary neo-liberal governance (Kramer, 2016). In this chapter, I examine how the Bushwick Collective, a grass-roots initiative that was established in 2012 by one local resident, has been successful in altering the physical, cultural and semiotic landscapes (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010) of Bushwick, Brooklyn, by means of commissioned street art. Artwork is a cultural symbol and through its regime of high public and therefore also global visibility located on large, local, private city spaces, I argue that the showcased street art is being used to commodify the neighbourhood becoming the catalyst of gentrification, the process by which changes in a neighbourhood are brought on by artists, policymakers, investors and real estate speculation resulting in the displacement of working-class residents by more affluent individuals. The street art in Bushwick is reminiscent of what Markusen and Schrock refer to as an ‘artistic dividend’, the added value to both regional and local economies through means of artistic work (2006: p. 1661). Indeed, the ‘artistic dividends’ present This work was supported by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 223265.

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within Bushwick are changing the way this once-poverty-stricken and -crime-ridden neighbourhood is being viewed, commodified and discursively constructed by local residents, visitors and investors in the area. In sum, it appears that Bushwick is currently undergoing what Zukin calls ‘the artistic mode of production’, meaning that gentrification is accomplished through artists’ symbolic appropriation of space (1982). In other words, artists and their artwork indirectly set the stage in attracting capital reinvestment into an area. Such reinvestments serve as a means to transformation entire neighbourhoods and have vital socio-economic ramifications for the neighbourhood’s local residents ultimately serving the interests of specific local, regional and, even, global investors perpetuating the cycle of social, cultural and racial inequality. Following Zukin (1982, 1995), I introduce the term the semiotic paradox of street art within this study to explain the double-edged sword being experienced and maintained by locals, investors, visitors and even street artists themselves. In the hopes of revitalizing a specific neighbourhood by means of street art which initially appears to contribute to a neighbourhood that strives to represent, applaud and even honour a place that is socially, linguistically, culturally, racially and ethnically diverse, the result becomes a more homogeneous local resident population, which, by means of socioeconomic class and other inequalities, are being regionally displaced.

Methodology and data This study is part of a larger ongoing project that began in 2011 and documents gentrification processes in various Brooklyn neighbourhoods (see Gonçalves, 2018a). I have been engaging in multisited ethnography by means of collecting data of the changing linguistic and semiotic landscapes of neighbourhoods as well as conducting interviews with local residents, artists, tourists, business owners and developers. The Bushwick data consist of over 3,000 images of the changing semiotic landscapes and approximately 250 semi-structured interviews that were carried out from 2011 to 2016.1 Multisited or so-called mobile ethnography is not a new methodology within the social sciences, but one that has existed since the nineteenth century with the work of (cultural) anthropologists moving around in their field of study living together and observing their informants’ behaviour and socio-cultural practices (see Mead, 1928). The work of Marcus (1995) is especially relevant here since it sparked a debate within the social sciences about how to conduct fieldwork advocating that methodological changes were required in order to properly observe and document particular social phenomena across diverse spaces extending beyond a single site. The sentiments of Marcus’ work could not ring more true for the diversity and mobility captured by contemporary postmodern times (Giddens, 2002) within urban spaces. In a more recent paper, O’Reilly claims that ‘in the context of increased global interconnectivity, and mobility of people, objects and ideas, ethnographers are taking their methodology to multiple and mobile places and spaces’ (2009: p. 144). In an urban context, we may therefore ask if it is still adequate or viable to focus on just one spot, area or locale in order to detect the changes and fluctuations of a city’s semiotic landscapes specifically when the focus shifts to gentrification processes

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(Gonçalves, 2018a; Papen, 2012, 2015; Trinch and Snajder, 2017; Lou, this volume). While my discussion pertains primarily to the Buchwick Collective in this chapter, which encompasses several streets in the ‘heart of Bushwick’, it also accounts for one piece of street art located on Knickerbocker Avenue, considered to be Bushwick’s major commercial avenue that is not part of the Collective. Its inclusion is vital to our understanding of the socio-political challenges and socio-economic struggles faced by local Bushwick residents one year prior to the establishment of the Collective. In line with the themes of this edited volume, I want to acknowledge that engaging in this kind of research brings with it an inevitable discussion of ontology in the postmodern world that we live in. Today, mobility and travel, whether for leisure or for professional purposes, are considered to be not only the epitome of being modern (Cresswell, 2006; Sennett, 1994), but also ‘part of the problem’ (Minca and Oakes, 2006). While ‘living a modern life demands a certain level of mobility’ (FrendendalPedersen, 2005: p. 36), it also necessitates that individuals have the economic means and other forms of capital (cultural, social, network) required to be both mobile and modern, which, as we know, is not distributed evenly across different societies. While this point has been raised in other fields, being mobile and thus postmodern or being postmodern because we are mobile deserves mention among scholars investigating the linguistic and semiotic landscapes of particular places we travel to in order to carry out our work.

Bushwick: Setting the scene Brooklyn is one of the five boroughs along with Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx and Manhattan that make up the metropolitan area known as New York City. At present, Brooklyn is the most populous borough with a resident population of approximately 2.6 million people, compelling Trinch and Snajder (2017) to refer to the borough as a ‘city’. In fact, if Brooklyn were a city, it would rank as the fourth largest in the United States following New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Bushwick is located in the north-east of Brooklyn neighbouring Williamsburg and the borough of Queens. Founded in 1661 by the Dutch as Boswijck, it was one of the five original towns of Kings County. From a historical perspective, Bushwick was well known for its beer brewing industry, which, before the prohibition, is said to have produced an output of 2.5 million barrels that accounted for nearly 10 per cent of all beer consumed in the country.2 The penchant for beer within this area is considered by Onofri (2007) to have started as early as the late eighteenth century, when Hessian soldiers stationed in the United States, during and after the American Revolution from 1776 to 1783, assisted the king’s army with the Battle of Long Island, known to local Brooklynites as the Battle of Brooklyn, and considered by Paley (2016) to be the ‘most important battle of the American revolution’.3 By the mid-nineteenth century, Bushwick’s population was comprised of primarily German immigrants (Ernst, 1994), who had fled Europe as a result of political upheaval. The industries that were established in Bushwick (in addition to beer brewing) included sugar, oil, rope, lumber, shipbuilding and glue (Ernst, 1994). The prohibition coupled

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with the advance of inexpensive railroad transportation and mechanical refrigeration allowed entrepreneurs access into this niche market, resulting in the decline and eventual demise of the beer brewing industry in Bushwick. The 1930s and 1940s saw a rise of Italian-Americans into the neighbourhood, which later experienced an influx of African Americans and Puerto Ricans in the 1950s and 1960s. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the neighbourhood’s economy had plummeted and its middleclass residents had moved to the suburbs. The recession of the 1970s in the United States experienced a period of economic stagnation with rising unemployment and poverty affecting citizens in many US cities and New York in particular. This, together with what is considered to be the ‘biggest blow’ to Bushwick’s collapse, was the 1977 blackout (Onofri, 2007). In July 1977, New York City experienced a 26-hour citywide blackout, during which ‘looters and arsonists laid siege to ghettos like Bushwick’ (Onofri, 2007: p. 135). According to Onofri, ‘by the time the lights came on, some 35 blocks in Bushwick had been nearly destroyed and $300 million in damage done’ (Onofri, 2007: p. 135). Unsurprisingly, the blackout led to the closing of many businesses (40 per cent within a year) and a decrease in its resident population. The economic downturn of the 1970s coupled with the 1980s’ crack epidemic saw Bushwick morph into a neighbourhood ridden with high crime, arson and drug abuse. The 1990s were a time in which social services were implemented, and by the mid-2000s both the state and the city of New York assisted the neighbourhood with a programme entitled the Bushwick Initiative (2006). The goals of the initiative were to assist in crime reduction, housing improvement, commercial revitalization, sanitation improvements and housing costs. By 2008, Bushwick was considered to be New York City’s seventh poorest neighbourhood with a median household income of $28,000 with a predominantly African American and Hispanic resident population. Today, it is considered to be the seventh coolest neighbourhood in New York City with a resident population of 80,000: 70 per cent Hispanic, 15 per cent black and the rest Asian, white mixed. According to Florida (2016), Bushwick’s white population tripled from 2000 to 2015 with an increase of nearly 20,000 white residents4 exemplifying the rapidly changing demographics of the neighbourhood that have led to the displacement of both racial and ethnic minorities. These demographic changes also coincided with a 44 per cent increase in rent prices in the neighbourhood during that time. Although Bushwick is still considered to be a working-class neighbourhood that is ethnically mixed, it has been referred to as ‘hipster heaven’ and recently ranked the second hottest neighbourhood to reside in the United States that is undergoing semiotic transformation as a result of industrial displacement, soaring real estate prices and arts-led revitalization, three closely linked processes connected to gentrification.5

Gentrification, street art and the commodification of place The term ‘gentrification’ was coined by British sociologist Ruth Glass in the 1960s after observing the influx of a new ‘gentry’ that were well educated and financially better off than their working-class neighbours in different London neighbourhoods.

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At the time, Glass wrote, ‘once this process of “gentrification” starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the original working class occupiers are displaced and the social character of the district is changed’ (Glass, 1964: p. xix). While many researchers of gentrification are well aware of its variations (Shaw, 2008), which include revitalization, renaissance and even redevelopment (Hamnett and Randolph, 1986; Smith, 1996), a classic understanding of gentrification has meant the renovation of old building structures, which lead to an aesthetically nicer-looking neighbourhood and the displacement of residents due to increased rent and housing prices. At the turn of the century, Hackworth and Smith (2001) identified three global waves of gentrification. The first one, which is considered to have started in the 1960s and early 1970s prior to the global economic recession, occurred in the north-east of North America, the south-east of Australia and in urban centres throughout Western Europe. There were no patterns of gentrification processes as such, but these authors indicate that it was intermittent and occurred in small neighbourhoods within major cities. This first wave was possible due to government assistance and incentives for residents to purchase homes and improve the state of their properties, for example, through restoration grants (Beauregard, 1990). The first wave is concomitant with so-called ‘marginal gentrification’, a term used to refer to the non-threatening lack of displacement and the ability of residents to remain in their neighbourhoods despite gentrification processes taking place. Nevertheless, the authors claim that state involvement at the time was already ‘highly class specific’ (Hackworth and Smith, 2001: p. 466). The second wave of gentrification took place in the aftermath of the global economic recession in the late 1970s. The second wave is considered to be much more widespread and taking place at both global and national scales. This second wave has also been understood as being primarily market led, meaning that local state efforts that were made were done largely within the private sector. And finally, unlike the first wave, the second wave experienced resistance due to human displacement based on soaring real estate prices. This became especially evident in neighbourhoods or areas ‘where homelessness, eviction and the increasing vulnerability of poor residents was directly connected to gentrification’ (Hackworth and Smith, 2001: p. 468). The economic boom of the 1990s instigated the third wave, which according to the authors was tied to large-scale and even global capital ‘as large developers rework entire neighborhoods, often with state support’ (Hackworth and Smith, 2001: p. 467). For them, this third wave has distinct traits that set it apart from the other two. First, gentrification can continue to expand in already-gentrified (or partially gentrified) areas, a process known as ‘super-gentrification’ (cf. Lees, 2003b); it requires larger-scale developers with the economic means to invest in an area, less resistance from workingclass residents and, lastly, increased involvement from the state. Within the third wave and within the context of New York City more specifically, there were significant events that took place that were highly influenced by the Giuliani administration, which favoured globalization processes and, therefore, also neo-liberal urban policies (Smith, 2002). In other words, the state experienced a reversal of roles: where states once formerly regulated the market, they became proponents and also ‘consummate agents’ of them (Smith, 2002). This later led Smith to talk about a type

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of new ‘revanchist urbanism’ (2007), which ‘replaces liberal urban policy in cities of the advanced capitalist world by favoring capitalist productions rather than social reproduction’ (Smith, 2002; Zukin, 1995). Indeed, globalization affects the way that urbanism is both characterized and conceptualized. Because people, capital, material, ideas and an array of other semiotic and cultural resources circulate the world faster than before, metropolitan centres are being restructured and thus ‘recast’, with gentrification processes emerging as a significant factor leading Smith to claim it as a ‘global urban strategy’. In the early twenty-first century, the City of New York along with several Brooklyn neighbourhoods was experiencing a metropolitan revitalization movement largely based on New York City’s Waterfront Revitalization Program (WRP), which was originally adopted in 1982 and twice updated in 2002 and 2016. This, together with Mayor Bloomberg’s rezoning policies, has led to modern developments, restorations and new semiotic landscapes of entire waterfront areas (cf. Gonçalves, 2018a for a discussion of Brooklyn Bridge Park in Dumbo) within the region. Although waterfronts had been the initial target for this revitalization plan, not surprising given that the city itself is a conglomerate of islands and peninsulas, it has had and continues to have drastic affects and major socio-economic consequences for residents in several eastern Brooklyn neighbourhoods (waterfront or not), one of which is Bushwick. Within any discussion of gentrification, both the market economy and symbolic economy come to the fore. In fact, renovation, revitalization and any amount of neighbourhood change, whether big or small, requires some sort (but usually large amounts) of economic capital and within the context of Bushwick, symbolic capital too. Economic capital coupled with local and, to some degree, even regional sanctions are two relevant factors affecting neighbourhood change. As such, a neighbourhood or place becomes a product or even a commodity, one which is invested in and recreated with the aim of improving residents quality of life, but also making economic profit for those who financed it from the start. Within the field of sociology and, more specifically, the political economy of place, Logan and Molotch (1987) in their work on US cities as ‘growth machines’ refer to alliances between local political elites, private landowners, corporate developers and entrepreneurs as key players in urban expansion and change. What all of these individuals have in common is an ‘interest in extracting the maximum profit possible from how land is put to use as opposed to using land for the satisfaction of relatively modest needs’ (Kramer, 2016: p. 410). In Bushwick, the street art–led revitalization movement known as the Bushwick Collective relies on the symbolic economy defined as ‘the intertwining of cultural symbols and entrepreneurial capital’ (Zukin, 1995: p. 3) in order for it to exist. In the symbolic economy, cultural symbols such as artwork play a salient role in how certain products and services are sold, but also how the production of images are materialized, recognized and valued, attested by consumers’ attraction, which serve to maintain entrepreneurial investments and make way for urban transformation. For Zukin, a neighbourhood is a ‘landscape of consumption’ (1998: p. 825) and where consumption-based economies of contemporary cities promote the aestheticization of urban landscape, cultural image production is key in how a neighbourhood is commodified, advertised and marketed to the public, potential residents, visitors and developers. In Bushwick, this

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is done by means of street art, which has become its unique selling proposition (USP) (Kelly-Holmes, 2010) on local, regional and global scales. The Bushwick Collective was founded in 2012 by Joseph Ficalora. Ficalora is a long-time resident of Bushwick, who grew up in the poverty and crime-ridden neighbourhood, where his father was murdered. This traumatic experience was one main incentive for Ficalora to establish the Collective, a grass-roots initiative that is presently curated by him. Ficalora maintains that the Collective was established based on his vision and hope for a socially and aesthetically improved neighbourhood with less crime and poverty through the introduction of street art. In the five short years of its existence, the Bushwick Collective has become New York City’s prime spot to engage in legally sanctioned street art and thereby attracting internationally acclaimed street artists to Bushwick. The history of graffiti and street art in the United States dates back to the 1960s and is associated with predominantly African American and Latino urban youth cultures in the streets of Philadelphia and New York City, peaking in the 1980s and proliferating throughout metropolitan centres around the world (Iveson, 2010). It may be considered somewhat of a local practice and localized form of public address that has become global despite efforts of urban authorities to eradicate its placements on urban walls or moving trains (Campos, 2016; Karlander, 2016; Iveson, 2010: p. 26; Pennycook, 2010), raising questions about ideologies of aesthetics and individuals’ rights to city spaces. Currently, numerous kinds of graffiti and street art exist, which continually apply and remix materials, styles, imageries and techniques by drawing on a range of sources and different types of media. In fact, many artists that began working on the streets have made their mark in the contemporary (art) world and made their way into museums, galleries and other institutionalized spaces; think of Keith Haring, JeanMichel Basuiat, Bansky and others whose work by means of ‘secondary mediated versions’ such as T-shirts (Coupland, 2012) have become consumable cultural objects (Papen, 2015). As a globalized art form found primarily in urban space, street art is considered a paradigm of hybridity of contemporary visual culture. For Irvine (2012: p. 1), it is a community of practice with its learned codes, rules, hierarchies of prestige, and means of communication [what] began as an underground, anarchic, in-your-face appropriation of public visual surfaces […] has now become a major part of visual space in many cities and a recognized art movement.

Street art represents a cultural turning point yet remains situated at the crossroads of the social political regimes of visibility; public space and the art world (Irvine, 2012: p. 2). Of course urban space is never neutral (Lefebrve, 1991; Harvey, 2006) and city walls are rarely public. Within the context of contemporary Bushwick, street art exhibits a specific kind of visibility in public space that is recognized, acknowledged and welcomed before it is tagged, buffed or completely erased. Street art contains an ephemeral message encompassing identity and territorial claims, and comes in many forms: protest, irony, a prank, humour, subversion, a commentary, a dialogue

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critique, an intervention, an individual or collective manifesto or simply an assertion of existence (Irvine, 2012: p. 3). Whatever the statement, message or motive, ‘the city is the assumed interlocutor, framework, and essential precondition for making the artwork work’ (Irvine, 2012: p. 3). As ‘masters of the semiotics of space’, artists’ work marks a spot semiotically, culturally and symbolically albeit temporarily at a specific location and may therefore be considered a spatial, social and stylized place-making practice, where specific spaces become materially created (and created materially) and used for reasons of mediation, which in turn become recognized and legitimized, and places imbued with symbolic power (Bourdieu, 1991). As a genre within contemporary mass visual culture, street art intersects the ways meaning and values are achieved within local communities in which it is found and practised, but also among the artistic elite and their spectators, given its global circulation that is networked by advanced information and communication technology (Blommaert, 2016) in our post-internet and digitalized world. Indeed, its mediatization and instant dissemination on blogs and other online platforms have affected the reputation of many street artists and the ways in which their work is recognized and valued. What was once regarded as fleeting and illegal is now being sanctioned, commissioned, archived and used for commercialization purposes (Borghini et al., 2010; Muth, 2016; Papen, 2015) Street art plays a significant role in a neighbourhood’s commercialization and aestheticization inevitably contributing to the discursive production and commodification of urban space and particular neighbourhoods (Papen, 2015) due to the high symbolic value attached to it. This is not to say, however, that all street art is evaluated equally. Critiques of the genre have been voiced by scholars, curators and activists (cf. Ross, 2016) that see street art (and artists) as ‘selling out and selling itself ’ as a false notion of place not only acting as a façade but a mere marketing tool for the so-called ‘creative city’ brand, a tool that advances material but not societal terms that is bound to a corporate institutional visual regime (Schachter, 2014: p. 162; cf. Dickens, 2010; for a counterargument). As so-called ‘public art’, Schachter claims that it has become ‘beholden to strategic, acquisitive desires of the contemporary neoliberal city’ (2014: p. 162; cf. Gonçalves, 2018a; for a discussion of public art in Dumbo, Brooklyn). Indeed, the socio-cultural changes that have taken place since Ficalora’s initiative have been influenced by the drastically altered semiotic landscape and continued landscaping of Bushwick and, as such, accelerated the gentrification processes under way contributing to social inequality and the displacement of ethnic and racial minority residents resulting in what I call the semiotic paradox of street art.

Discursive and semiotic constructions of place: ‘I don’t particularly love it around here’ and ‘Bushwick is beautiful’ In this section, I analyse extracts from interviews conducted with local residents of Bushwick before and after the establishment of the Collective, and three different murals. A discourse analytic approach is taken with regard to the interviews with locals, and secondary sources were consulted that included websites, media texts and other online platforms. Unfortunately, I was not able to speak to any local municipal council members, Joseph Ficalora or any other representative of the Bushwick Collective.

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During our first year of fieldwork on this project in 2011, few individuals we spoke with made reference to Bushwick. In fact, Willamsburg was still all the rage, a place where rent was considered semi-affordable but rising and a juncture where hipsters and ‘hedge fund kids’ collided creating a distinct breed of individuals belonging to a counter and subculture that favours progressive politics, independent thinking and the deconstruction of societal and cultural norms. Extract (1) is taken from one local male resident, who described Bushwick as follows: Extract (1) 1. Oh, I mean, I don’t particularly love it around here, I used to live on 2. Jefferson Evergreen, my house got broken into twice, a girl got raped on 3. my corner, I dunno … I don’t think it’s like crime rise, but I’m from New 4. York, so, maybe it’s different.

In extract (1), Bushwick is depicted negatively due to existing crime. There is no reference made to the arts but this informant hints at the socio-political challenges present while also implying the socio-economic differences that exist between Bushwick and its residents compared to residents of other possible New York City neighbourhoods. This is done through his use of the hedge marker maybe (line 4), which signals his degree of assertiveness (Carter and McCarthy, 2006) regarding these apparent differences. The inferences made about the socio-political and economic challenges found within Bushwick closely paralleled one particular piece that we came across on Knickerbocker Avenue, considered to be Bushwick’s main commercial avenue in Figure 8.1. Figure 8.1 showcases a mural of hope and precarity on what Kallen (2010) calls the ‘wall frame’. The combination of bright colours, text and use of the imperative

Figure 8.1 Bushwick is Beautiful.

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form ‘say yes to affordable housing’ highlights the diverse social issues such as housing costs and health care present to local community members. The large abandoned brownstone situated in a green park adorned with red apple trees neighbours the newly renovated and modern apartment complex with a price tag of $666,000. This image indexes an eco-friendly and expensive space while asserting its aesthetic nature through its use of alliteration in the declarative statement ‘Bushwick is Beautiful’. There is an intertextual link to be made with the ‘Black is Beautiful’ movement of the 1960s, which started in the United States and later spread to South Africa. Of course, one cannot overlook the use of the number 666 in this image, which, in modern popular culture, has come to symbolize the devil or the antichrist. In other words, while Bushwick is in one way characterized as beautiful, this piece points to investors and elite society members as individuals who can actually afford to purchase such properties as being the social agents directly responsible for the socio-economic and socio-political problems including the displacement of local residents. Extract (2) below comes from a resident we spoke with in 2013, one year following the establishment of the Bushwick Collective: 1. It’s definitely diverse and has many labels … some people have ideas that it’s like still 2. this run-down neighborhood, but then other people have the idea that it’s like this 3. romantic, up-and-coming new place. It’s like the next Williamsburg. As far as like 4. being inside it, it definitely feels like very diverse and definitely sort of every corner is 5. being re-discovered constantly. People are constantly trying to like find the next corner 6. that’s gonna be great and like buy the building and sort of make money off of it. So, I 7. feel like it’s definitely become this place where people feel like money can be made. 8. And there’s a new up-and-coming artist community that’s happening here. And it is 9. indeed happening. In this extract, we encounter contrasting viewpoints based on insider resident knowhow versus outsider perceptions of Bushwick, which correlate to ideologies of the area being run-down or, as this informant states, an ‘up-and-coming new place’ (line 3) yet to be discovered, where an artistic scene exists and economic profit can still be made, ultimately depicting this area as opportunistic for those who can actually afford to invest in it. The repetitive use of the boosting adverb definitely (lines 4 and 7) functions to make his claim more assertive, while the stance marker indeed (line 9) indexes his point of view about Bushwick’s future potential. While he does not mention gentrification explicitly, he implies it by making reference to Williamsburg, a wellknown gentrified Brooklyn neighbourhood (Patch, 2004) where ‘hipsters’ first emerged in addition to outlining what potential investors do in a systematic way by means of discovering, finding and buying a place for reasons of economic profit.

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During our last few trips to Bushwick, we spoke to potential investors walking through the streets of Bushwick debating about what building to buy and what streets were forecast to be popular among future residents and visitors to the area. This shows the direct correlation between cultural symbols such as art, gentrification processes and real estate speculation (Gonçalves, 2018a; Warf, 2000).

The wall as a signifying space When Ficalora established the Collective, he began wall by wall, contacting artists, obtaining permits and asking other private business owners to donate the walls of their buildings to be used for public street art. An entrepreneur himself, he started using the walls of his own family’s steel business and was successful in acquiring more. Walls are both material and symbolic spaces that serve as canvasses for street artists. Many murals that make up the Bushwick Collective encompass entire building facades, and massive vertical spaces that become completely totalizing spectacles by the sheer size of their existence. In Bushwick, artists are allocated space and time to work on their murals that remain on the walls from one week to possibly even two years, an existential amount of time for such art given its ephemeral nature. The murals displayed are therefore given and guaranteed a high rate of visibility due to their size, time allocation and carefully orchestrated placement (Gonçalves, 2018a; Jaworksi and Thurlow, 2010; Scollon and Scollon, 2003) within the Collective landscape. Figures 8.2 and 8.3, for example, are situated perpendicular to each other located on the corners of Wyckoff and Troutman, considered to be the heart of the Collective, imbued with high symbolic value due to its fundamental visibility to pedestrians, cyclists, motorists and passengers. Figure 8.2 entitled ‘The Hand of Protest’ was created by Chilean artist Dasic Fernandez, who is known for his use of bright colours and political innuendos.6 Figure 8.2 is a political commentary on the events taking place in different countries throughout the Middle East that centre primarily around the raw material and energy commodity of crude oil. Under neo-liberal rule, intergovernmental agencies such as OPEC are continuously exploring and monitoring oil market developments including supply and demand levels within the global energy landscape, where geopolitical issues such as civil wars and social unrest often get bypassed at the expense of economic profit and trends in the world economy that are ruled by large financial corporations and the global elite. This mural may therefore be interpreted as a socio-historic and political message that symbolizes cynical views of events happening in the world today under neo-liberal regimes while considered to be a hopeful tribute to the people of the Middle East. In the Urban Revolution (2003: p. 19), Lefebvre maintains that urban space is a ‘place where speech can become “savage” and, by escaping the rules and institutions, inscribe itself on walls’. Indeed, the appropriation of city walls and buildings within Bushwick has become a space where human actions come to life and a medium for which to display human struggles, triumphs and a collective memory (Irvine, 2012). Figure 8.3, entitled ‘Invent the Future’, was created by two American artists, Chris Stain and Billy Mode. This collaborative mural was inspired by fusing aesthetics of

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Figure 8.2 The Hand of Protest.

Figure 8.3 Invent the future.

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mathematics and design to represent the under-represented in both urban and rural environments, which resulted in a piece that stood 27 feet by 57 feet and required seven days to complete.7 With this piece, the artists considered the racial and ethnic roots of Bushwick’s local resident population and aspirations for the future. As such, this mural may be seen as a response to neo-liberal cities such as New York, where inequalities are remarkably apparent (and growing) centring around issues of age, class, gender and race.

Conclusions In this chapter, I have investigated the semiotic transformations taking place in Bushwick, Brooklyn, over a five-year time frame as a result of gentrification processes that have been instigated by the establishment of the Bushwick Collective, a local grass-roots initiative that commissions international street art. I have argued that the use of street art has been used as a means to commodify Bushwick both instigating and accelerating gentrification processes currently under way, which has in many respects been successful in creating an ‘aesthetically’ dynamic neighbourhood, but resulted in the displacement of both ethnic and racial minority residents, which I have termed the semiotic paradox of street art. Drawing on the notions of ‘growth machines’ (Logan and Molotch, 1987) and the ‘symbolic economy’ (Zukin, 1995) within the political economy of place has allowed me to illustrate the different values of cultural, symbolic and economically

Figure 8.4 Image of annual art festival in Bushwick.

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driven displays of artwork in ‘public’ space. There is no doubt that the appeal of street art for certain global subcultures has manifested its way to Bushwick, which now offers guided tours (some even free of charge) and stages art festivals annually (Figure 8.4), mobilizing local, regional and international audiences, influencing and, to some extent, being directly responsible for creating different types and niches of commercialized spaces, where other cultural symbols such as food and fashion are sold and purchased. Since 2012, local private businesses have mushroomed around the Collective indicative of the type of socio-cultural, political and economic changes and exchanges occurring there. Each year that we have gone back to do fieldwork, we have noticed the increased number of private establishments that were once industrial spaces that have now been transformed into trendy bars and hip cafés, restaurants, hairdressers, clothes shops, tattoo parlors, organic grocery stores and much more resonating the predicaments expressed by one resident in extract (2) about Bushwick not only being ‘up and coming’ but asserting the existence of a vibrant arts scene that in 2013 (one year after the Collective’s establishment) was ‘indeed happening’. Of course, the willingness of artists to travel to Bushwick and create their artwork is an example of a highly valued symbolic exchange. While most artists pay for their own transportation and materials, they are granted wall space and time to produce their work and thus guaranteed high visibility, publicity, symbolic value and, for some, even financial compensation. As in all free markets, the walls of Bushwick are now in particularly high demand creating competition not only among street artists, but also between private entrepreneurs. For the last couple of years, aspiring artists have had to submit a portfolio to Ficalora in order to be considered and officially invited to create their artwork in the Collective’s space that since its establishment has continued to expand and permeate the streets of Bushwick. This attests to the high symbolic value associated with the street art located in the Collective on a local level and in New York City more globally. Most recently, in November 2017, private business owners in Bushwick, many of whom still have ties to industrial businesses and warehouses, have been offered large amounts of economic capital by private media firms in exchange for sizeable wall spaces and building façades to be used primarily for advertising purposes by international corporations indexing both the symbolic and economic value of certain city walls. Street art signals, represents and indexes ways in which visual images of and on the built environment and landscapes of urban space can be used materially to create, express, mediate and map out possible new ways of place-making practices within urban hubs. The semiotic, visually powerful and aesthetic messages of the murals discussed in this chapter all draw on historical and contemporary discourses of social inequality, politics of gender relations, race, class and ethnicity, and point to the sociopolitical struggles many of us encounter daily in our own cities or through different media outlets. We are all well aware of the socio-political struggles taking place between the East and the West and the North and the South due to unequally distributed resources including oil, economic capital and political power of certain nation states and the global elite ruling class(es), which have and continue to lead to war, fear and loss, possible themes displayed in ‘Hand of Protest’. In ‘Invent the Future’, the mural points

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to the sociocultural, gendered and racial inequalities that have been so historically entrenched in various countries around the world (including the United States, Brazil and South Africa), which continue to play a significant role in how particular societal structures are perpetuated and maintained and where questions of access to cultural, economic, material and symbolic resources and capital always emerge. In ‘Bushwick is Beautiful’, a mural that was not part of the Collective but displayed approximately a year before its establishment, we were confronted with socio-economic and sociopolitical issues of affordable housing, healthcare and displacement as a result of local, regional and global alliances that maintain austerity and inequality in metropolitan centres around the globe. In order to attend to such complex socio-political and economic processes taking place in urban neighbourhoods like Bushwick, I introduced the term the semiotic paradox of street art, a process that builds on ‘the artistic mode of production’ (Zukin, 1982) as part of a neighbourhood’s and therefore also a city’s transformation based on the changing semiotic landscapes of urban places (Stroud and Jegels, 2013). Indeed, artistic revitalization processes have been regarded as one major contributing factor to gentrification that negatively effect individuals at the other end of the socio-economic scale, many of whom are ethnic (and linguistic) and racial minorities as recent studies show. However, economically powerful social agents including individual gentrifiers and investors are also key players within such processes (Gonçalves, 2018a). The commissioning of international street art that is both mediatized and circulated globally due to advanced technology has altered Bushwick’s reputation along with real estate prices and local demographics. Indeed, the neighbourhood’s demographics have radically shifted, attracting a new and primarily white gentry and affluent investors that is inevitably displacing long-established industrial businesses and also long-time Latino and African American working-class residents. If gentrification is considered to be a ‘global urban strategy’, my study of Bushwick’s semiotic transformations based on local residents’ descriptions and the street art investigated is one example of how such a strategy is being carried out on a local level, which is always tied to larger economic and socio-political structures that continue to favour competition and free markets and therefore connected to contemporary global capitalism and neo-liberal regimes, where inequalities are a given.

Notes 1 This study has been done in collaboration with Beatrix Busse at Heidelberg University, Germany. 2 https://bushwick-studio.wikispaces.com/Bushwick+History. 3 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/nyregion/the-battle-of-brooklyn-a-loss-thathelped-win-the-revolution.html?mcubz=3. Valerie Paley, vice president and the chief historian of the New York Historical Society. It is important because it provided a distraction to the British and allowed George Washington to flee across the East River. 4 From 2000 to 2014, Bushwick experienced a decrease of 10,063 Hispanics and 6,032 African American residents.

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5 https://www.hotspotrentals.com/hottest-neighborhoods-america/. This survey was based on six main criteria: transit, walkability, entertainment, budget, lifestyle and weather. Bushwick ranked # 2 following the Mission District in San Francisco, California. 6 https://streetartnews.net/2014/08/dasic-fernandez-new-mural-hand-of.html. 7 https://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/street-artists-chris-stain-and-billy-modepaint-a-mural-video.

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Hackworth, J. and Smith, N. (2001), ‘The Changing State of Gentrification’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 94 (4): pp. 464–477. Hamnett, C. and Randolph, B. (1986), ‘Tenurial Transformation and the Flat Break-up Market in London: The British Condo Experience’, in N. Smith and P. Williams (eds.), Gentrification of the City, Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin, pp. 121–152. Harvey, D. (2006), Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographic Development, London: Verso. Irvine, M. (2012), ‘The Work on the Street’, in B. Sandywell and I. Heywood (eds.), The Handbook of Visual Culture, London: Berg, pp. 235–278. Iveson, K. (2010), ‘Graffiti, Street Art and the City’, City, 14 (1–2): pp. 25–32. Jaworski, A. and Thurlow, C. (eds.) (2010), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. Jørgensen, J. N. (2008), ‘Urban Wall Languaging’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 5: pp. 237–252. Kallen, J. L. (2010), ‘Changing Landscapes: Language, Space and Policy in the Dublin Linguistic Landscape’, in A. Jaworski and C. Thurlow (eds.), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, New York: Continuum, pp. 41–58. Karlander, D. (2016), ‘Backjumps: Writing, Watching, Erasing Train Graffiti’, Social Semiotics, 28 (1): pp. 41–59. Kelly-Holmes, H. (2010), ‘Languages and Global Marketing’, in N. Coupland (ed.), Handbook of Language and Globalization, Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 475–492. Kitis, E. D. (2011), ‘The Subversive Poetics of a Marginalized Discourse and Culture’, in E. Foust and S. Fuggle (eds.), Word on the Street, London: IGRS Books, pp. 53–70. Kramer, R. (2016), ‘New York City’s Moral Panic over Graffiti: Normalizing Neoliberal Penality and Paving the Way for Growth Machines’, in J. I. Ross (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art, New York: Routledge, pp. 401–414. Lees, L. (2003a), ‘Policy (Re)Turns: Gentrification Research and Urban Policy – Urban Policy and Gentrification Research’, Environment and Planning A, 35: pp. 571–574. Lees, L. (2003b), ‘Super-Gentrification: The Case of Brooklyn Heights. New York City’, Urban Studies, 40 (12): pp. 2487–2509. Lefebrve, H. (1991), The Production of Space, Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers. Lefebrve, H. (2003 [1970]), The Urban Revolution, translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Logan, J. and Molotch, H. (1987), Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, Berkeley, CA: California University Press. Marcus, G. (1995), ‘Ethnography in/of the World System – The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24: pp. 95–117. Markusen, A. and Schrock, G. (2006), ‘The Distinctive City: Divergent Patterns in Growth, Hierarchy and Specialization’, Urban Studies, 43 (8): pp. 1301–1323. Mead, M. (1928), Coming of Age in Samoa, New York: William Morrow & Company. Minca, C. and Oakes, T. (2006), Travels in Paradox: Remapping Tourism, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Muth, S. (2014), ‘Informal Signs as Expressions of Multilingualism in Chisinau: How Individuals Shape the Public Space of a Post-Soviet Capital’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 228: pp. 29–53. Muth, S. (2016), ‘Street Art as Commercial Discourse: Commercialisation and a New Typology of Signs in the Cityscapes of Chisinau and Minsk’, in R. Blackwood, E. Lanza and H. Woldemariam (eds.), Negotiating and Contesting Identities in Linguistic Landscapes, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 19–36.

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New York Times. (2016), https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/nyregion/the-battle-ofbrooklyn-a-loss-that-helped-win-the-revolution.html?mcubz=3 (accessed September 2017) Onofri, A. (2007), Walking Brooklyn: 30 Tours Exploring Historical Legacies, Neighborhood Culture, Side Streets and Waterways, Berkeley, CA: Wilderness Press. O’Reilly, K. (2009), Key Concepts in Ethnography, London: Sage. Papen, U. (2015), ‘Signs in Cities: The Discursive Production and Commodification of Urban Spaces’, Sociolinguistic Studies, 9 (1): pp. 1–26. Papen, U. (2012), ‘Commercial Discourses, Gentrification and Citizens’ Protest: The Linguistic Landscape of Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16 (1): pp. 56–81. Patch, J. (2004), ‘The Embedded Landscape of Gentrification’, Visual Studies, 19 (2): pp. 169–186. Pennycook, A. (2010), Language as a Local Practice, Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Ross, J. I. (2016), ‘Introduction: Sorting It all Out’, in Routledge Handbook of Graffiti and Street Art, New York: Routledge, pp. 1–10. Schachter, R. (2014), ‘The Ugly Truth: Street Art, Graffiti and the Creative City’, Art & the Public Sphere, 3 (2): pp. 161–176. Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. W. (2003), Discourses in Place: Language in the Material World, London: Routledge. Sebba, M. (2007), Spelling and Society: The Culture and Politics of Orthography around the World, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Sennett, R. (1994), Flesh and Stone: The Body and City in Western Civilization, New York: Norton. Shaw, K. (2008), ‘Gentrification: What It Is, Why It Is and What Can Be Done about It’, Geography Compass, 2 (5): pp. 1697–1728. Smith, N. (1982), ‘Gentrification and Uneven Development’, Economic Geography, 58 (2): pp. 139–155. Smith, N. (1996), The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City, London: Routledge. Smith, N. (2002), ‘New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as a Global Urban Strategy’, Antipode, 34 (3): pp. 427–450. Smith, N. (2007), ‘Toward a Theory of Gentrification – A Back to the City Movement by Capital, Not People’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 45 (4): pp. 538–548. Stroud, C. and Jegels, D. (2013), ‘Semiotic Landscapes and Mobile Narrations of Place: Performing the Local’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 228: pp. 179–199. Trinch, S. and Snajder, E. (2017), ‘What the Signs Say: Gentrification and the Disappearance of Capitalism without Distinction in Brooklyn’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 21 (1): pp. 64–89. Warf, B. (2000), ‘New York: the Big Apple in the 1990s’, Geoforum, 31: pp. 487–499. Zukin, S. (1982), Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Zukin, S. (1995), The Cultures of Cities, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Zukin, S. (1998), ‘Urban Lifestyles: Diversity and Standardization in Spaces of Consumption’, Urban Studies, 35 (5–6): pp. 825–839. Zukin, S. (2011), ‘Reconstructing the Authenticity of Place’, Theory and Society, 40 (2): pp. 161–164.

Part Three

Imagining Futures, Imagining Selves

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Injurious Signs: The Geopolitics of Hate and Hope in the Linguistic Landscape of a Political Crisis Rodrigo Borba

Introduction In early 2016, charged for using money from national banks to paper over budget shortfalls, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president, was the object of a parliamentary coup d’état, which was disguised by right-wing politicians as a legal impeachment process. As several commentators have noted (Jinkings et al., 2016; Souza, 2016), there was no legal basis for her demotion since the budget manoeuvers she made were common practice among her male predecessors in office. Allegedly, she was impeached as a strategy to prevent investigations of a huge kickback scheme at Petrobras, the state oil company, in which many of her accusers seem to be involved. At the time of writing, these investigations have not indicated that Ms. Rousseff was implicated in this corruption scheme, whereas Michel Temer, who replaced her in office, and many of his ministers and secretaries are suspected of abusing power for their personal gain.1 In such a controversial scenario, according to Ortellado et al. (2016: p. 159), ‘one of the most dramatic consequences of the impeachment process […] is the social dichotomization [of the country] in two alleged opposing groups, not of adversaries, but of enemies’. Such dichotomization was highly visible on 17 April 2016, when the lower house of Parliament voted to start the impeachment proceedings. In one of the most virulent episodes of Brazilian politics, lawmakers who supported

This chapter forms part of a larger project titled Gender politics, language politics: Linguistic activism and acts of citizenship in contemporary Brazil, funded by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), to which I am grateful for the research grant (BEX00000.61/2017-4). Thanks are also due to Ashlee Dauphinais Civitello, Daniel do Nascimento Silva, Erez Levon, Tommaso M. Milani and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments on previous versions of this chapter. Any remaining mistakes are my own responsibility.

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Dilma’s ousting prefaced their votes with references to ‘the traditional Brazilian family’, to ‘God’ and, in the case of the outspokenly misogynist and homophobic extreme-right politician Jair Bolsonaro, to colonel Brilhante Ustra, who tortured a 22-year-old Dilma Rousseff while she was arrested as a member of the movements against the Brazilian dictatorship. Most relevant for the purposes of this chapter, however, is what happened in the demonstrations both for and against Ms. Rousseff ’s deposition. In such protests, citizens semiotically galvanized the political dichotomization of the country, which escalated to levels of symbolic and physical violence. Specifically, I analyse the geopolitics of hate and hope which were materialized in the semiotic actions of the supporters and of the detractors of the impeachment process in order to discuss how the political turmoil in Brazil helped shape larger affective discourses and situated agentic attachments which are tantamount to understanding the ways citizens locally react to an otherwise-debilitating political context. Interestingly, though, analysts have so far ignored the affective aspects of this political crisis. In order to delve into the semiotic and geopolitical materialization of these affective regimes (Wee, 2016), I scrutinize semiotic acts which, on the one hand, illustrate the feelings of hate against Ms. Rousseff ’s moderately leftist political agenda and, on the other, expressions of hope for a better Brazil. This will be done by comparing the embodied affective responses to the impeachment process in demonstrations around the country and a localized semiotic conflict over the meanings of space at São Salvador Square, in Rio de Janeiro. This analytical perspective, simultaneously broad and situated, will allow me to demonstrate how the political cleavages engendered by the recent impeachment proceedings are emplaced in the Brazilian semiotic landscape more generally and the ways individuals locally react to it in their everyday lives. An example of how the national political crisis impacted on citizens’ daily actions and their affective attachments to it is the conflict over the meanings of São Salvador Square. As we will see, such semiotic imbroglio both responds to and takes issue with the larger affective scenario of the country, which is fraught with feelings of impotence towards the conservative backlash the impeachment process helped get established. On 30 April 2016, a few weeks after the lower house authorized the impeachment proceedings, the façade of a stationery store in São Salvador Square in Rio de Janeiro was spray-painted with what Butler (1997) would call ‘injurious words’: faggot, dyke, get the fuck out, old homo and so on. In her provocative discussion of hate speech, Butler, following Althusser’s concept of interpellation, explains that injurious language is one of the clogs in the mechanisms of social power and serves to put allegedly ‘deviant’ individuals in their ‘rightful’ subjugated place. It is because of its interpellative character that injurious speech ‘constitute[s] the subject in a subordinate position’ (Butler, 1997: p. 18) and in a ‘circuit of abjection’ (p. 5). In this sense, the local materialization of these injurious words at São Salvador Square may help us understand the dynamics between the macro-political scenario and its situated effects on the micro details of how people interact and react to the encroachment of conservative ideologies regarding gender and sexuality in contemporary Brazil. This is so because public signage interpellates subjects and calls them into being as they walk around the city (see also Pennycook, 2009).

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On the following day, the collective of activists À Esquerda da Praça (i.e. To the Left of the Square, AEP, henceforth), who had been a key actor in reclaiming the square as a place for political contestation and dissent, commissioned a graffiti artist to cover the offensive inscriptions with art. I argue that the sequence of offensive signs and graffiti art to cover them offer a case in point of what Stroud (2016) calls ‘turbulent linguistic landscapes’ in which semiotic processes of othering and citizenship emerge. More specifically, the semiotic struggle for space on the façade of the stationery store emplaces a conflicting geopolitics of belonging, delegitimation and spacialization fraught with multiple layers of meaning over who and what ideologies have the right to circulate in the square. These entextualizations also emplace macrosociological phenomena with regard to sexuality, age and class which, according to many commentators (see Souza, 2016; Jinkings et al., 2016), were some of the driving forces behind Ms. Rousseff ’s deposal. As I will illustrate in this chapter, these entextualizations, in their temporal and geographical situatedness, may help us better understand the affective dimensions of Brazil’s recent political history. In this political turmoil, hate has increasingly developed against the leftist governments who have been in power for the last thirteen years. Such hatred, however, has not remained unchallenged inter alia by activist groups like AEP, which reacted with the production of hope, and, in doing so, intervened in the ‘scopic regime’ (Jay, 1988) of the square and in the broader ideological scenario of the country. As such, the interconnection between the wider political context and the signs at São Salvador Square underpins one of Butler’s central concerns in her discussion of words that wound, namely the role of agency in countering (and subverting) the interpellative power of injurious language (and of the sociocultural structure it reiterates). According to Butler (1997: p. 2): ‘The injurious address may appear to fix or paralyze the one it hails, but it may also produce an unexpected and enabling response.’ This chapter, thus, aims to give empirical detail to Butler’s theoretical concerns by investigating how the AEP activists spoke back both to the injury the signs provoked (at a local level) and to the recalcitrance of misogynist and homophobic ideologies fueled by the Brazilian political crisis (at a broader macrosociological level). In this scenario, it is the semiotic dynamics of hate (in its incarnation as injurious signs) and hope (in its semiotic materialization as an ‘unexpected and enabling response’) in the turbulent linguistic landscape (LL) of the recent political crisis in Brazil that this chapter aims to unveil. Grounded in an archive of images that tells this semiotic story as well as interviews with the square’s regular visitors, I discuss the politics of the (re/de)entextualization of injurious signs and how it semiotically as well as spatially shapes and contests sexual and political dissidence in contemporary Brazil.

What’s in a sign? The performativity of affect in linguistic landscapes In order to understand the semiotic and political dynamics of belonging and othering that are emplaced in the trajectory of injurious signs in the Brazilian political crisis, this chapter engages with two recent developments that characterize the ‘critical turn’

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(Barni and Bagna, 2015) in LL, namely its empirical attention to performativity and to affect. What may be called the first wave of LL research was inaugurated by Landry and Bourhis (1997) in a seminal article which called our attention to the fact that language is materially implicated in the public sphere. By defining the LL as composed of ‘the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings’ (Landry and Bourhis, 1997: p. 25), the authors set off a research tradition which analyses the salience and vitality of ethnolinguistic varieties by counting the languages that are represented in the LL of given locales. In this tradition, the LL is a matter of visibility of specific ethnolinguistic communities in the public realm. The languages in the public signage tend to be seen in a one-to-one relationship with the groups that inhabit a region and, as such, the LL is analysed ‘as an indicator (in this case, of “ethnolinguistic vitality”), rather than as a form of discourse’ (Kallen, 2009: p. 272, original emphasis). As such, space seems to be conceptualized as a static, pregiven context on which linguistic items are inscribed. Following human geographers’ and sociolinguists’ incorporation of Butler’s (1990) highly influential theory of gender performativity, LL scholars have progressively expanded their definition of what constitutes language to encompass all types of semiotic aggregates (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010) from clearly linguistic items to the multimodality of graffiti (Pennycook, 2009), bodies (Kittis and Milani, 2015; Milani, 2015; Stroud, 2016), tattoos (Peck and Stroud, 2015) and smells (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015), to name just a few. This conceptual expansion has at least two implications for LL research. At the analytical level, landscapes are regarded not as a priori contexts on which dispassionate, impersonal, uninterested signs can be inscribed. Rather, just as discourses are sets of ‘practices that systematically form the objects about which they speak’ (Foucault, 1972: p. 49), so are landscapes constituted by the very inscription of certain signs. Or, in the Butlerian jargon, it is by being interpellated within the terms of certain signs that the social existence of places first becomes possible. Landscapes and signs are thus in a symbiotic relation in which one performatively constitutes the other; signs do not represent space in a one-to-one relation, but, instead, stylize space and bring it into being by inserting it in a chain of repetitions and citations. In this vein, ‘LL can […] be viewed as a visible interface and arena of negotiations and contestations’ (Shohamy and Waksman, 2009: p. 320) in which the meanings and uses of the public space are always on the move. At the methodological level, the post-representational (Stroud, 2016) take of performativity theory forces us to look beyond the signs and places themselves so as to grasp the historical and political processes that lead to their situated emplacement. A cartography of signs, as is practised in certain strands of LL research, is not enough to unearth the multiplicity of meanings and power relations public signage impinges on space. After all, as Butler (1997: p. 14) contends, a speech act ‘is not a momentary happening, but a certain nexus of temporal horizons, the condensation of an iterability that exceeds the moment it occasions’. This condensed historicity of signs indexes multiple pasts, simultaneous presents and possible futures that mould how we make sense of place. Instead of a cartography, we need a genealogy of signs

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– a signealogy,2 which could enable us to better understand the social history of the sign and the conditions of possibility for its local emplacement. The condensed historicity of injurious signs is the driving force for such a methodological endeavour. As Butler puts it: injurious names have a history, one that is invoked and reconsolidated at the moment of utterance, but not explicitly told. This is not simply a history of how they have been used, in what contexts, and for what purposes; it is the way such histories are installed and arrested in and by the name. The name has, thus, a historicity, what might be understood as the history which has become internal to a name, has come to constitute the contemporary meaning of a name: the sedimentation of its usages as they have become part of the very name, a sedimentation, a repetition that congeals, that gives the name its force. (Butler, 1997: p. 36, original emphasis)

As such, in order to understand LL in its socio-cultural complexity, a signealogy should tell the fractured histories and describe the plethora of semiotic processes that allow signs to point to several directions and temporalities; we should track their multiple points of origin and follow the intricate web of knowledges and practices that make their emergence possible in certain times so as to comprehend their potential to wound. As place is always contested and negotiated by its semiotic interpellation, LL scholars have recently recognized that individuals develop different senses of belonging to, and distance from, certain locales. This is, to various extents, mediated by affective attachments which are (in)formed by semiotic resources found in space. In this sense, Stroud and Jegels (2014: p. 180) emphasize that ‘a central aspect of place-making is in fact the way affect […] is organized, narrated and interactively accomplished by means of – direct or indirect – engagement with situated material semiotic artefacts’. Landscapes are, thus, places of affect (Milani and Levon, 2016; Stroud, 2016; Wee, 2016). Following the attention to the politics of affect in the social and human sciences (see, for example, Wetherell, 2012; Massumi, 2015), LL researchers turn their attention not to the ontological character of emotions (i.e. What is hate?) but their performativity (i.e. What are the effects of injurious signs?) in order to investigate the ‘spatial politics of affect’ (Thrift, 2004). From such a perspective, the central analytical concern is not what are emotions, but what do emotions do, how they ‘align […] bodily space with social space [and] mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective’ (Ahmed, 2004: p. 19). Such emotional attachments to place are semiotically distributed (and made visible) in affective regimes (Wee, 2016), a set of moral rules and conditions that govern the circulation of affect and how they can be materialized in a given place and time. Affect is therefore central to how individuals make sense of and experience place as well as to how they forge emotional relationships between Self and Other. Importantly, local affective regimes are not stable, but shift shape and content depending on macrosociological phenomena which influence the types of emotions that may be displayed in certain places. Inspired by Butler’s approach to injurious speech, Ahmed (2014: p. 51) explains that hate is ‘involved in the very negotiation of boundaries between selves and

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others, and between communities, where “others” are brought into the sphere of my or our existence as a threat’. In this sense, the performativity of hate as an emotion with the capacity to draw physical and subjective boundaries has, indeed, been the focus of critique by queer theorists according to whom hate speech is a mechanism to defend social norms, especially (but not exclusively) heteronormativity (Butler, 1997; Milani, 2014). As noted before, the power of words to wound is not encapsulated in words themselves, but in their previous uses and their contexts of emergence which stick to a sign and (in)form its local meanings. According to Butler (1997: p. 13), linguistic (or, better still, semiotic) injury ‘exceeds itself in past and future directions, an effect of prior and future invocations that constitute and escape the instance of utterance’ (1997: p. 3). In this sense, injurious signs may be understood as semiotic assemblages that entextualize (re)citations of hate discourses by emplacing here and now a history of semiotic vulnerability and, thus, performatively draw geopolitical, subjective, affective boundaries and/or allegiances between place, self and other. Paradoxically, however, it is this fractured history of injurious speech where past, present and future meet that opens up possibilities for agency (Borba and Milani, 2017). In this sense, Butler (1997) contends that injurious speech ‘may well solicit a response […] that it never anticipated, losing its own sovereign sense of expectation in the face of a resistance it advertently helped to produce’ (p. 12); and she goes on to argue that ‘instead of obliterating the possibility of response, paralyzing the addressee with fear, [hate speech] may well be countered by a different kind of performative act, one that exploits the redoubled action of the threat’ (p.12). To illustrate this paradoxical relation between injurious speech and agency, take, for example, the reappropriation of the word ‘queer’ in the United States in the 1990s. Once a derogatory term, ‘queer’ was resignified by activist groups, which were tired of the identity politics that governed LGBT activism at the time and which started affirming: ‘We queer, we are here, get fucking used to it.’ With this semiotic twist, these activists addressed the offense to themselves and changed, thus, the power relations and the history that produced ‘queer’ as an injurious word, which started a new chain of citations with immense impact in both activist and academic circles. Such semiotic reappropriation shows that ‘hate speech does not destroy the agency required for a critical response’ (Butler, 1997: p. 41), but, instead, provides the possibilities for its contestation (see also McConnell-Ginet, 2002; Wong, 2008). In this context, I would like to propose that resistance to hate speech and to its materialization in injurious signs is fueled by acts of hope which aim to temporally and geographically reorient power relations and, in the case of LL, scopic and affective regimes by promoting a shift in the way we see and emotionally experience places. In the face of the recent encroachment of neo-liberal, conservative (and often violent) politics in Western societies, social scientists have turned to hope as a category of both experience and analysis (Capranzano, 2003; Mahmood, 2005; Miyazaki, 2004). Of course, hope has been of interest to philosophers and theologians since at least the third century BC when Aristotle defined it as ‘a waking dream’. Since then, this literature has variously considered hope as transcendent and immaterial, and as a result of our inherently limited agency as humans who need to resort to more powerful abstract entities when in dire circumstances. In other words, this tradition considers that one

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hopes because one is incapable of changing one’s reality. This essentialist perspective, however, has been challenged by Bloch (1986), who criticizes the mismatch between philosophy as an introspective, contemplative form of knowledge and the outward, future-oriented basis of hope. According to him, it is this mismatch that has made it difficult for philosophy to understand hope not as the incapacity for action but, rather, as its source. In this perspective, hope may be seen as a crucial affective dimension (and one of the driving forces) of human agency. Or, as Castells (2015: p. 14) puts it, ‘since a distinctive feature of the human mind is the ability to imagine the future, hope is a fundamental ingredient in supporting goal-seeking action’. In other words, one hopes because one wants to change one’s reality. For Bloch, then, hope entails an anticipation of the future, of what has not yet become. His understanding of hope poses a challenge for LL researchers and sociolinguists in general: How can we, as analysts of the materiality of language in well-defined places and times, capture hope as an analytical category if it has a ‘tendency to slip away from the realm of the specific’ (Miyazaki, 2006: p. 149)? An alternative to Bloch’s broad and unspecific view of hope is to see it, according to Miyazaki (2004: p.5), as a ‘radical reorientation of knowledge’ and, I would add, of action. In this view, hope is neither a subject of analysis nor is it encapsulated in the content or form of language and other semiotic codes, but is, rather, a method that underlies and, importantly, constitutes their use. The method of hope (Miyazaki, 2004) can be seen, for instance, in the reappropriation of ‘queer’ by activists and academics which has reoriented the uses of the term and added a new layer of meaning to the history the sign condenses without ever closing other possibilities of resignification, keeping thus the future of queer open. In this chapter, I argue that the field of LL, with its detailed attention to the materiality of semiotic resources found in place, may at once provide a privileged perspective for unpacking the ‘discursive and metadiscursive range of hope’ (Capranzano, 2003: p. 4) in a given sociolinguistic scenario and be analytically enriched by hope’s forwardlooking indexical potential.3 If neither hate nor hope are in the words themselves but, in the case of the former, in words’ condensed historicity and, in the case of the latter, in their capacity to point to a reorientation of action (and, one might argue, of history), a description of the form and content of signs will not suffice to explain the geopolitics and affective regimes of contested public spaces. Butler’s understanding of hate speech and Miyazaki’s perspectives on the method of hope suggest that what is in a sign exceeds its moment of emplacement. Therefore, in order to understand the geopolitics of injurious signs in the Brazilian political scenario, the next sections provide a signealogy of the web of power relations and discourses that underlie their inscription.

The (geo)politics of hate and hope in the Brazilian political crisis Dilma Rousseff, the Worker’s Party candidate, was re-elected in October 2014 with 54,501,118 votes (51.64 per cent). Her opponent, the right-wing representative, Aécio Neves, obtained 51,041,155 votes (48.36 per cent). Ms. Rousseff ’s re-election was the fourth consecutive victory of the Workers’ Party and represented the hopes of the

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Brazilian population to maintain the social and economic growth the country had been witnessing since 2003, when Lula da Silva became the first left-wing president of Brazil. In a decade of cautiously leftist governments, Lula and Dilma implemented policies that have changed the make-up of the Brazilian population. Some of these policies include the annual raise of the minimum wage above inflation rates, the income redistribution programme which benefited millions of families who lived in extreme poverty, and the widening of higher education access through the implementation of racial quotas in public universities. It was also during their governments that policies for the empowerment of women and the LGBTIQ population were established. These include the creation of the Ministério das Mulheres, Igualdade Racial e Direitos Humanos (Ministry of Women, Racial Equality and Human Rights), the sanctioning of the Maria da Penha law which criminalizes domestic violence, and the implementation of Brasil sem Homofobia (Brazil without Homophobia) – a nationwide programme to fight discrimination on grounds of sexual identification. According to Chauí (2016), such programmes brought about profound changes in Brazilian public discourses especially with regard to class, gender and sexual identity. Quite unsurprisingly, these changes displeased a great part of the Brazilian conservative middle class, which had to share formerly exclusive places such as shopping malls, prestigious universities and airports with ‘hoards’ of people they abhor. Such socially inclusive policies also annoyed the many Pentecostal churches in the country, which dislike the few (but powerful) changes in matters related to gender and sexual identity. The difference in the number of votes between the two candidates of the 2014 ballot, however, demonstrates that Brazil is a polarized country. Such polarization grew more intense in the impeachment process against Ms. Rousseff, during which the political division of the country also acquired affective contours. While lawmakers in the lower house discussed Ms. Rousseff ’s political destiny in a forty-hour session which started on 17 April 2016, right across from the Parliament thousands of people gathered to demonstrate their support for or against her deposition. Separating the crowd of demonstrators was a wall erected by the police in order to

Figure 9.1 The impeachment wall.

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avoid confrontation, given the animosity between the groups. As Figure 9.1 shows, the ‘impeachment wall’, as it became known, separates demonstrators according to their allegiance: on the right side of the wall, we see demonstrators for Dilma’s impeachment donning the national flag colours (yellow and green) in a clear act of nationalism; on the left side, we find those who were against her removal wearing red, the colour of the Worker’s Party. As Lopes (2016: p. 118) contends, during the controversial removal of Ms. Rousseff from office, no one stood on the wall, and this is indicative of the fact that one was either for or against the coup. However, this polarization is not the result of this political crisis; rather, it is one of its driving forces. On the one (right) hand, we find the so-called coxinhas, an overwhelmingly white, middle-class and upper-middleclass, conservative to reactionary group which supported the coup by stylizing their moral and aesthetic outlook with nationalist symbols such as the colours of the country’s banner and proclaimed themselves as warriors against corruption. On the other (left) hand, we find the so-called petralhas, a group of individuals with various political allegiances ranging from moderately progressive to radical leftist tendencies who, although not necessarily entirely satisfied with the Workers’ Party administration, worried that the coup would destroy the few social advancements made since 2003. Allegedly, the slang word coxinha originally referred to certain police officers who, in exchange for special safety services to fancy high street bakeries in the city of São Paulo, accepted as payment a coxinha de frango – a kind of fried dough stuffed with shredded chicken meat, the shape of which resembles a chicken thigh. They were called coxinha by the homeless kids they violently removed from the sidewalks. The derogatory use of the term has expanded to refer to people who accept (and help support) the status quo to which they do not belong, being, thus, instruments of the elite to keep order and good morals. Petralha, on the other hand, was coined by the extreme right-wing journalist Reinaldo Azevedo in his blog for the weekly magazine Veja. The word is a neologism which joins together the term petista (Workers’ Party supporters) and metralha – the Brazilian incarnation of the Disney-animated characters The Beagle Boys (irmãos metralha), a family clan of clumsy (dis)organized criminals. Azevedo first used the term to refer to Workers’ Party corrupt politicians, but it has been widened to refer to any supporter of the party and/or anyone with a slightly progressive political inclination. Each of these categories was originally used by the opposing group as injurious words against their political standing. In this sense, they could be classified as items of hate speech used to diminish one’s social position or, in Butler’s (1997: p. 4) terms, to ‘put one in one’s place’ in either side of the impeachment wall. As instances of hate speech, these labels were not self-professed by the different groups. Rather, they are the result of a convoluted discursive process engineered by the mainstream media’s coverage of the political crisis in Brazil. Such coverage, according to Souza (2016), uses the interpretative rationality of novelas, in which the world is portrayed not as constructed by conflicting overlapping interests, but as a place where actors’ good or bad intentions structure society. This leads to a dichotomous and simplified

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understanding of the social arena as divided in two groups: the bad guys and the good guys.4 Although the impeachment process galvanized the constitution of clear-cut opposing political groups, the resentment among them has a long historical pedigree: it dates back to Lula’s first election in 2003. The three subsequent victories of the Workers’ Party and its socially and finantially inclusive policies increased the tension of the Brazilian class struggle since ‘the middle class and the elites […] seemed to be destined to lose all elections’ (Souza, 2016: p. 119) due to the strong support Lula and Dilma received from the economically disadvantaged fractions of the population. The feeling of hatred between coxinhas and petralhas, however, have become more explicit and escalated to levels of physical and symbolic violence since the jornadas de junho (June journeys), a series of demonstrations which took place in June 2013. Space constraints prevent me from delving into the details of these protests (see Castells, 2015, for a more comprehensive analysis). It is important to note, however, that they were highly manipulated by the mainstream media in order to besmirch Dilma’s position in the government. TV Globo and its daily news programme Jornal Nacional were central in the orchestration of the coup (Lopes, 2016). Although in June 2013 coxinhas and petralhas protested together (despite their different agendas), since Dilma’s return to office in 2014 the groups organized their protests on different dates and at different places. The construction of the impeachment wall in Brasilia epitomizes this polarization. The media carefully engineered this opposition by portraying coxinhas as beacons of morality and petralhas as rowdy rioters.

Figure 9.2 Dilma is a whore.

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Figure 9.3 ‘Feminicide yes! Hungercide no!: “#OUT WITH THE PT!!!”’

Figure 9.4 Car sticker.

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This portrayal of the protesters, however, is quite different if we scrutinize the semiotic materialization of feelings against Ms. Rousseff ’s government.5 As the figures above forcefully indicate, coxinhas’ semiosis was fraught with injurious signs that addressed not the administration of the country, but issues of gender and sexuality – prime realms of semiotic vulnerability. Queer geographers have argued that the public space is fraught with gendered and sexual layers of meaning (Johnston and Longhurst, 2010). In this context, Milani (2014: p. 204) urges LL scholars to pay close attention to banal sexed signs, ‘mundane semiotic aggregates, which, precisely because of their fleeting and unassuming character, can easily be ignored’, but nonetheless shape understandings of gender and sexuality in the public sphere. The earlier-mentioned signs are clearly sexed in the sense that they emplace available (misogynist) discourses about female sexuality. They are, however, far from being banal. During Ms. Rousseff ’s impeachment, one could hardly ignore them due to their ferocity (they were carefully hidden in the mainstream media coverage of the demonstrations, though). They are signs that wound not only their addressee but anyone with a slight sensitivity to the highly oppressive patriarchal structure of Brazilian society. It is their wounding quality that makes injurious signs stand out. Their salience in the political crisis helps us understand the circulation of hate and the configuring of certain political (in)sensibilities. Surprisingly, however, gender and sexuality have not been regarded as central matters underlying Ms. Rousseff ’s demotion. The fact that she was the first female president of the country who had to govern with the support of ancient male-dominated political oligarchies has practically gone unnoticed (see, however, Rubim and Argolo, 2018). The semiosis of the coxinhas, though, shows a different picture, one in which gender and sexuality figure prominently in the material design of feelings against her government. In Figure 9.2, a demonstrator stands out of the crowd while he holds a sign which reads DILMA PUTA (Dilma is a whore). In Brazil, the word puta is a common derogatory term which refers to the fact that a woman is believed to be promiscuous. In this scenario, puta interpellates its addressee and ‘constitutes a being within a possible circuit of […] abjection’ (Butler, 1997: p. 5) and this is so because as an injurious sign ‘it does not describe an injury or produce one as a consequence; it is […] the performance of the injury itself, where the injury is understood as social subordination’ (p. 18). It is in this sense an injurious sign which attempts to control women’s sexuality and constrain it to the private sphere. The promiscuity the term puta indexes also alludes to Dilma’s political allegiances while in office. In 2014, Brazil elected the most reactionary and corrupt Parliament in its history (Souza, 2016), which forced Ms. Rousseff to make certain suspicious alliances in order for her to be able to govern. According to Waiselfisz (2015), of every 100,000 women, 4.8 are murdered in Brazil, which places it as the fifth most violent country for women. The statistics are even more staggering if one looks at the intersection of gender and race. Between 2003 and 2013, the number of murders of black women increased from 1.864 to 2.875, a 54 per cent rise. This, however, is not a problem for the demonstrator in Figure 9.3 whose plaque reads ‘yes to feminicide’. What underlies this sign is the price of basic food items which had increased due to a handful of factors such as the global economic crisis of 2008 and, most centrally, the draughts Brazil faced in 2014 and 2015, which

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affected agriculture and, as a consequence, the prices of food. The sign in Figure 9.3 is injurious because it naturalizes the murder of women and places it as less important than economic hardships over which Ms. Rousseff had little (if any) control. The global economic crisis and the kickback scheme at the state oil company were the main vectors for the fluctuation of petrol prices in the country between 2014 and 2015. When the price of petrol reached its peak, in June 2015, coxinhas demonstrated their disapproval semiotically. Figure 9.4 shows car stickers which represent Dilma seated with her legs wide open on the car’s fuel tank. Every time someone filled up the car, the ex-president would be metaphorically raped by the gas pump.6 The injurious character of this sign is materialized in the way Ms. Rousseff ’s body is semiotically reappropriated and demonstrates that ‘hate has effects on the bodies of those who are made into its objects’ (Ahmed, 2014: p. 58). Although the protests for and against the impeachment were motivated by a sparkle of hope for political change, they soon became instruments of (geo)political segregation. The aforementioned figures show that, contrary to their portrayal in the mainstream media as beacons of hope for a better Brazil, the pro-impeachment protests were filled with hate, which, according to Ahmed (2014: p. 55), ‘is a negative attachment to an other that one wishes to expel, an attachment that is sustained through the expulsion of the other from bodily and social proximity’. Most importantly, these injurious signs index the conservative middle class’ old-age dissatisfaction with the social advancements that the Workers’ Party governments helped establish, a condensed historicity which encapsulates the temporal sedimentation of disappointment with the reconfiguration of power relations in Brazil. In this sense, injurious signs work by looking backwards at a past one despises and reinstantiating such hate locally. As such, the LL of the political turmoil helped shape (geopolitical) affective regimes. On 31 August 2016, the upper house of Parliament approved Ms. Rousseff ’s demotion. When he took over office, Michel Temer nominated a completely white male, heterosexual cabinet. One of his first actions as president was to extinguish the Ministério das Mulheres, Igualdade Racial e Direitos Humanos (Ministry of Women, Racial Equality and Human Rights). At first sight, hate seems to have won this political imbroglio. However, hate speech does not erase the possibility for agency. As Butler (1997: p. 2) explains: ‘If to be addressed is to be interpellated, then the offensive call runs the risk of inaugurating a subject in speech who comes to use language to counter the offensive call.’ As such, injurious signs provide the grounds for their contestation. In fact, Ahmed (2014: p. 59) propounds that ‘we need to relate the question of the effect of hate speech with affect, which includes the question of how others have been affected by hate speech’. In this sense, in order to understand how individuals resist signs that wound, one needs to look locally at micro contexts. The semiosis of São Salvador Square helps us understand how the broader political scenario impacts on citizens’ daily lives and underlies their design of resistance to an otherwise constraining context. The square is located at the intersection of two overwhelmingly white, middle- and upper-middleclass neighbourhoods where one finds many supporters of the impeachment. However, it has been recently reclaimed as a place of political dissent. In other words, it is a site where hate and hope interact on a daily basis. If hatred aims at expelling those who are

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seen as a threat, hope, in its slippery immateriality, provides individuals a method to reimagine futures. In this sense, as Moltman (1967: p. 25) explains, hope is not simply ‘a transfiguring glow superimposed upon a darkened existence, but [is a] realistic way of perceiving the scope of our real possibilities, and as such, [it sets] everything in motion and keep[s] it in a state of change’. Hope, however, tends to be understood in very abstract terms such as anticipation, expectation, possibility, dreams and so on, which makes its empirical analysis difficult. I argue, however, that as LL scholars who focus on the materiality of public signage, we can analytically capture the semiosis of acts of hope. If hope is a reorientation of knowledge and action (Miyazaki, 2004), semiotic acts of hope involve the situated emergence of signs that disrupt established oppressive orders by creating a sense of possibility, of a reconfigured present and of a future that has no place as of yet, but can acquire one. The case of how the group of activists À Esquerda da Praça (To the Left of the Square) resisted the injurious signs mentioned in the introduction of this chapter provides us evidence of how acts of hope emerge and semiotically disrupt macropolitical oppressive orders.

Figure 9.5 First injurious signs on the bookshop.

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Two weeks after the lower house of Parliament approved the impeachment proceedings against Ms. Rousseff, the façade of a stationery store at São Salvador Square was spray-painted with injurious words that condense locally a broader dissatisfaction with her party’s LGBTIQ-inclusive policies. As Figure 9.5 shows, as signs of hate they demand that their recipients be expelled from the square surroundings. Following is the translation of the signs as shown in Figure 9.5: Fagot Out with the Workers’ Party Dyke Out with Cunha Get the fuck out Too On the left-hand side of Figure 9.5, we see common derogatory terms used to offend non-heterosexuals. Viado refers to feminine gay men; sapatão addresses masculine lesbians. Both these groups are asked to get the fuck out of the square. Since São Salvador Square has been reclaimed as a place of political dissent, it has also become popular among LGBTIQ individuals who use the square and the many pubs that surround it as a meeting point for both fun and political activism. This has displeased the inhabitants of the surroundings, who constantly complain on their Facebook pages about the parties and the public demonstrations of homosexual affection.7 Such injurious signs, then, locally materialize this discomfort. Unsurprisingly, they are intertextually linked with the semiosis of the coxinhas in which gender and sexuality played a central part in the material design of hatred against Ms. Rousseff. The AEP collective did not take the injury these signs caused lightly, however. On the following day, they commissioned a graffiti artist who coated the injurious words

Figure 9.6 The lotus flower.

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Figure 9.7 Recurrent injurious signs on the bookshop.

with a stylized lotus flower, the Buddhist symbol that represents love and compassion for all things. As an act of hope, the graffiti art that covered the injurious words reconfigured a present that was fraught with hate and discrimination against nonheterosexuals and re-emplaced the square as a site of communion and mindfulness. Nonetheless, as Figures 9.6 and 9.7 show, the newly painted façade of the store did not last long as other injurious words were spray-painted once again. Following is the translation of the signs as shown in Figure 9.7: Old faggot Queer and Dyke Get the fuck out Out The reinscription of these injurious words adds still another layer of hate to their materialization. Age now figures as a focus of attack. This probably refers to the fact that the media coverage of this incident framed AEP as helping the 92-year-old owner of the shop, who became metonymically linked to the broader political scenario that these signs addressed. Most importantly, the fact that new injurious signs were painted over the lotus flower indexes the recalcitrance of the dissatisfaction towards the changes the leftist governments implemented in the last few years. Since hate generates ‘a subject that is endangered by imagined others whose proximity threatens not only to take something away from the subject, but to take the place of the subject’ (Ahmed, 2014: p. 43), its performativity is not easily challenged. Such difficulty emerges from

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Figure 9.8 Rainbow.

the fact that hatred is past oriented; it encapsulates an encroached history of citations that produces semiotic vulnerability and by so doing materializes in the here and now macrosociological discourses. In this sense, the present becomes a site for the condensation of such a history. If the present of São Salvador Square is the result of a hateful political historicity, how can one resist this affective regime? Looking onward at a possible future-to-come provides a vantage point from which to challenge such history of hate. It is this futureoriented character of hope that propelled AEP’s activists to once more repaint the façade of the shop and, thus, (re)claim it as a place of resistance to the encroachment of the conservative ideologies that underlies the semiotic actions of the demonstrators for Ms. Rousseff ’s demotion. Figure 9.8 shows the graffiti artists covering the injurious signs with the image of two hands joined in solidarity and painted with the rainbow colours. According to one of the square’s regulars, in a semi-structured interview with me, são salva (i.e. the square) is all about love and solidarity. The square is where we gather, have fun, make friends, fight against this deplorable state Brazil is in. It’s also the place that gives us strength and stamina to dream of a better country for our kids. We are Brazilians, we never give up. The square is ours. Coxinhas won’t win. Their hate won’t win. Hope never dies, right? So we shall never fear. (Interview, 20 January 2017)8

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In fact, at the time of writing (November 2017), the façade of the stationery store still displays the image of the rainbow-coloured hands. If, in the broader political scenario, hate appears to have won, in local contexts and grass-roots activism hope for a better future thrives. In this geopolitical interplay of injurious signs and acts of hope, we see that although ‘the terms by which we are hailed are rarely the ones we choose […] these terms […] are the occasion for something we might still call agency, the repetition of an originary subordination for another purpose, one whose future is partially open’ (Butler, 1997: p. 38). In fact, it is an openness to the future that local semiotic acts of hope materialize and, thus, help intervene in the broader ideological scenario of this political (and representational) crisis.

Final remarks The dynamics of the emergence of injurious signs and their subsequent erasure by graffiti art points thus to the reconfiguration of politics of place and affective regimes (Wee, 2016) provoked by an intricate history of political changes that Brazil has been through in recent years. The incident at São Salvador Square points yet to another reconfiguration of time which is central to how the square is (re)emplaced in the current political scenario. If the injurious signs encapsulate a history of animosity between different fractions of Brazilian society and, most importantly, reiterate the old-age dissatisfaction of part of the population with the social advances of recent years, the actions taken by the AEP reorient the scopic regime of the square to the future, one in which such hateful discourses may not be entextualized. This spatial and temporal dynamics emplaces power struggles in which a multiplicity of meanings is encroached not only on the façade of the stationery store but, more generally, in the contested space of the square and in the daily actions and subjectivities of those to whom the square serves as a gathering point. The case of the semiotic materialization of hate and hope in the Brazilian political crisis highlights the fact that linguistic and other semiotic resources found in space ‘index particular localities [and histories], orient us through different levels of territorial and societal stratification’ (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010: p. 8) and, hence, help us understand how people make sense of place and, conversely, how place makes sense of people, in a synergy that is shaped by the history of the signs, of the people and of the places implicated in such semiosis. In this sense, this chapter has argued that LL scholarship should attend to the fractured temporality of signs, for this offers an analytical avenue to unearth how individuals semiotically disrupt oppressive social orders by reclaiming place, reimagining selves and others, reconfiguring the present and redesigning futures.

Notes 1 Space constraints prevent me from discussing the details of this political imbroglio. International media coverage can give the reader a more nuanced view of the

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impeachment process. The BBC, for example, published a useful summary of the political crisis which is available at https://goo.gl/IcdOjZ. Malinowski (2009) and Pennycook (2009) use the term ‘signography’ to refer to a similar methodological procedure. I prefer the use of ‘signealogy’ to keep its proximity with the Foucauldian practice of genealogy. Although hope has never explicitly been mentioned as an analytical category in LL, some studies indirectly show that hope is in fact a method individuals use to make sense of place and of themselves in place. See, for example, Milani (2015), Stroud (2016) and Kittis and Milani (2015). The polarization of the Brazilian society into coxinhas and petralhas is not an absolute one. As Ortellado et al. (2016) argue, despite their differences, there is considerable overlap between these groups if one scrutinizes people’s narratives about the coup in detail. Here I focus only on the demonstrations for the impeachment since coxinhas tended to be portrayed by the mainstream media as pacifists that fought for a better Brazil. Looking locally at their embodied affective actions, though, shows us an entirely different picture. The semiotic shape of the protests against the impeachment also deserves an analysis of its own, though. The circulation of these stickers caused outrage in many sectors of the Brazilian society. The Secretary of Women’s Policies eventually prohibited their manufacture, circulation and sale. The designers, sellers and producers of the stickers were fined. I am not claiming, however, that the local residents tagged the store’s front. Indeed, authorship of public signage is a complex issue whose origin may be hard (if not impossible) to track (Malinowski, 2009). What matters is the fact that these inscriptions emerged in a time in history and at a place which overlap multiple layers of political (and semiotic) contestation. Temer (stress on the second syllable) which means to fear, and Temer (stress on the first syllable) the surname of the politician who replaced Ms. Rousseff in office, are homographs. The interviewee plays with the similarities of these words.

References Ahmed, S. (2004), ‘Affective Economies’, Social Text, 79 (22): pp. 117–139. Ahmed, S. (2014), The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2nd edition, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Barni, M. and Bagna, C. (2015), ‘The Critical Turn in LL: New Methodologies and New Items in LL’, Linguistic Landscape, 1 (1/2): pp. 6–18. Bloch, E. (1986), The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Borba, R. and Milani, T. (2017), ‘The Banality of Evil: Crystalized Structures of Cisnormativity and Tactics of Resistance in a Brazilian Gender Clinic’, Language and Discrimination, 1 (1): pp. 7–33. Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1997), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York: Routledge. Capranzano, V. (2003), ‘Reflections on Hope as a Category for Social and Psychological Analysis’, Cultural Anthropology, 18 (1): pp. 3–31.

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Castells, M. (2015), Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Cambridge: Polity. Chauí, M. (2016), ‘A nova classe trabalhadora brasileira e a ascensão do conservadorismo’, in I. Jinkings, K. Doria and M. Cleto (orgs.), Por que Gritamos Golpe? Para Entender o Impeachment e a Crise Política no Brasil, São Paulo: Boitempo, pp. 15–22. Foucault, M. (1972), The Archeology of Knowledge, New York: Harper and Row. Jaworski, A. and Thrulow, C. (2010), ‘Introducing Semiotic Landscapes’, in A. Jaworski and C. Thrulow (eds.), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London: Continuum, pp. 1–40. Jay, M. (1988), ‘Scopic Regime of Modernity’, in H. Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality, Seattle: Bay Press, pp. 3–23. Jinkings, I., Doria, K. and Cleto, M. (orgs.) (2016), Por que Gritamos Golpe? Para Entender o Impeachment e a Crise Política no Brasil, São Paulo: Boitempo. Johnston, L. and Longhurst, R. (2010), Space, Place and Sex: Geographies of Sexuality, New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Kallen, J. (2009), ‘Tourism and Representation in the Irish Linguistic Landscape’, in E. Shohamy and D. Gorter (eds.), Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery, London: Routledge, pp. 270–283. Kittis, D. and Milani, T. (2015), ‘The Performativity of the Body: Turbulent Spaces in Greece’, Linguistic Landscape, 1 (3): pp. 268–290. Landry, R. and Bourhis, R. Y. (1997), ‘Linguistic Landscape and Ethnolinguistic Vitality: An Empirical Study’, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16 (1): pp. 57–76. Lopes, M. (2016), ‘As quatro famílias que decidiram derrubar um governo democrático’, in I. Jinkings, K. Doria and M. Cleto (orgs.), Por que Gritamos Golpe? Para Entender o Impeachment e a Crise Política no Brasil, São Paulo: Boitempo, pp. 118–125. Mahmood, S. (2005), Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Malinowski, D. (2009), ‘Authorship in the Linguistic Landscape: A MultimodalPerformative View’, in E. Shohamy and D. Gorter (eds.), Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery, London: Routledge, pp. 107–125. Massumi, B. (2015), Politics of Affect, Malden, MA: Polity Press. McConnell-Ginet, S. (2002), ‘Queering Semantics: Definitional Struggles’, in K. CampbellKibler, R. J. Podesva, S. J. Roberts and A. Wong (eds.), Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. Stanford, CA: CSLI, pp. 137–160. Milani, T. (2014), ‘Sexed Signs: Queering the Scenery’, International Journal for the Sociology of Language, (228): pp. 201–225. Milani, T. (2015), ‘Sexual Cityzenship: Discourses, Spaces and Bodies at Joburg Pride 2012’, Journal of Language and Politics, 14 (3): pp: 431–454. Milani, T. and Levon, E. (2016), ‘Sexing Diversity: Linguistic Landscapes of Homonationalism’, Language and Communication, 51: pp. 69–86. Miyazaki, H. (2004), The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy and Fijan Knowledge, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Miyazaki, H. (2006), ‘Economy of Dreams: Hope in Global Capitalism and Its Critiques’, Cultural Anthropology, 21 (2): pp. 147–172. Moltman, J. (1967), Theology of Hope: On the Grounds and Implications of a Christian Eschatology, London: SCM Press. Ortellado, P., Solano, E. and Moretto, M. (2016), ‘Uma sociedade polarizada?’, in I. Jinkings, K. Doria and M. Cleto (orgs.), Por que Gritamos Golpe? Para Entender o Impeachment e a Crise Política no Brasil, São Paulo: Boitempo, pp. 159–164.

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Peck, A. and Stroud, C. (2015), ‘Skinscapes’, Linguistic Landscape, 1 (1/2): pp. 133–151. Pennycook, A. (2009), ‘Linguistic Landscape and the Transgressive Semiotics of Graffiti’, in E. Shohamy and D. Gorter (eds.), Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery, London: Routledge, pp. 302–312. Pennycook, A. and Otsuji, E. (2015), ‘Making Scents of the Landscape’, Linguistic Landscape, 1 (3): pp. 191–212. Rubim, L. and Argolo, F. (2018), O golpe na perspectiva de gênero. Salvador:EdUFBA Shohamy, E. and Waksman, S. (2009), ‘Linguistic Landscape as an Ecological Arena: Modalities, Meanings, Negotiations, Education’, in E. Shohamy and D. Gorter (eds.), Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery, London: Routledge, pp. 313–331. Souza, J. (2016), A Radiografia do Golpe, Rio de Janeiro: Leya. Stroud, C. (2016), ‘Turbulent Linguistic Landscapes and the Semiotics of Citizenship’, in R. Blackwood, E. Lanza and H. Woldermariam (eds.), Negotiating and Contesting Identities in Linguistic Landscapes, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 3–18. Stroud, C. and Jegels, D. (2014), ‘Semiotic Landscapes and Mobile Narrations of Place: Performing the Local’, International Journal for the Sociology of Language, 2014 (228): pp. 179–199. Thrift, N. (2004), ‘Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect’, Geografiska Annaler, 86B (1): pp. 57–78. Waiselfisz, J. (2015), Mapa da Violência 2015: Homicídio de Mulheres no Brasil, Brasília: Flacso. Wee, L. (2016), ‘Situating Affect in Linguistic Landscapes’, Linguistic Landscapes, 2 (2): pp. 105–126. Wetherell, M. (2012), Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding, London: Sage. Wong, A. (2008), ‘The Trouble with Tongzhi: The Politics of Labeling among Gay and Lesbian Hongkongers’, Pragmatics, 18 (2): pp. 277–301.

10

Of Monkeys, Shacks and Loos: Changing Times, Changing Places Sibonile Mpendukana and Christopher Stroud

Introduction and background1 There is a burgeoning wealth of studies that interrogate and explore the politics of place (Aboelezz, 2014; Barni and Bagna, 2016; Kitis and Milani, 2015; Rojo, 2014, 2016). Of particular interest to this chapter is the work that focuses on the use of semiotic landscapes, such as placards in street demonstrations (Rojo, 2014, 2016), graffiti as protest (Kitis, 2011) or turbulent bodies (Kitis and Milani, 2015). Such studies promise to extend our understanding of the political workings of language more generally and of how semiotic landscapes actively contribute to an affective belonging in place. The present study deals with one recent (and ongoing) such protest, specifically looking at how semiotic landscapes are actively deployed in the (re)claiming of space and in countering alienation, and estrangement. The protest action in focus is a two-day event involving the building of a shack-cum-portaloo on the campus of University of Cape Town (UCT) as part of the ongoing student movement to decolonize institutions of higher learning. The organization that organized the protest goes by the name #RhodesMustFall, which later morphed into the broader #FeesMustFall; it remains an active stakeholder in contemporary student politics. In actual fact, the scale of this movement is quite unprecedented in contemporary time, exerting a significant influence on educational politics and beyond over the last two years. The #RhodesMustFall movement started with the young activist Chumani Maxwele’s political gesture of throwing human faeces at what was viewed as a celebration of colonial conquest, the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the UCT. The university, founded in 1829, was born into colonialism, and thrived throughout South Africa’s darkest days of apartheid. Writing from a historical perspective, Tim Crowe (2017), a former professor at UCT, notes of UCT as an institution that although it appeared to be non-racist, non-sexist and not overtly aligned with colonial masters, in practice UCT has been experienced as a place which racism

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and sexism have thrived – just as they did everywhere else in South Africa. (http:// www.biznews.com/thought-leaders/2017/01/26/uct-racism-sexism/)

Now on the cusp of decoloniality, UCT appears to have evolved and transformed with the times. Its official website boasts an enduring commitment to transformation as a core value with the following words: UCT is committed to the goal of non-racialism. A non-racial university is one where historical apartheid categories no longer have relevance to the probability that a student will be admitted or will pass; or to a staff member’s likelihood of promotion. (http://www.uct.ac.za/main/exploreuct/transformation#towardsnonracialism)

Despite thus positioning itself as liberal and inclusive, many black academics at UCT, such as the vocal Xolela Mangcu, who has penned many a formidable diatribe revealing shortcomings of the institution with respect to equity, could not agree less (Mangcu, 2016) (https://www.iol.co.za/sundayindependent/racism-has-roots-in-theuniversities-2021735). Deeply unhappy with the slow pace of transformation at UCT, Maxwele ignited the birth of the #RMF campaign with the following words: As black students we are disgusted by the fact that this statue still stands here today as it is a symbol of white supremacy. How we can be living in a time of transformation when this statue still stands and our hall is named after (Leander Starr) Jameson, who was a brutal lieutenant under Rhodes. (http://www.iol. co.za/news/south-africa/western-cape/protesters-throw-poo-on-rhodesstatue-1829526)

As ‘collective memory and remembrance, memorials may also be arenas of conflict, political interests, clashes of ideologies or antagonisms of religious beliefs’ (Ben-Rafael, 2016: p. 207). The defacement of the Cecil John Rhodes monument was a rallying call for the decolonization of UCT, South African universities more generally and the country at large. It was an invitation to reimagine spaces and practices of the academy as inclusive of African identities and diversity, and an injunction to dismantle and replace the power of hetero-normative white patriarchy still felt to endure. More broadly, the #RMF movement echoed the daily trials of post-millennial post-apartheid South Africa, a country fraught with multiple contestations around race, class and patriarchy, variously articulated in forms of black disempowerment, and alienation. In the post-apartheid era, racial segregation is no longer lawful, but black bodies remain obliged to contend with evermore nuanced forms of exclusion and stoppage, new forms of absence and curtailed presence, suffering daily physical and intellectual discomfort in ‘structurally white’ spaces. The present study takes its point of departure in the contemporary South African dilemma and offers an analysis of an event that took place as part of the broader #RMF protest. This was an ‘occupation’ of a key space on the main campus of UCT in 2016 that lasted two days, and that centred around the placing of a shack and portaloo – structures made of corrugated iron sheets typical of black township dwellings – on the Jameson stairs, upper campus. #Shackville, as it was called, was one of the turning points

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in the trajectory of the student movement. In its final hours, the event that had started with the building of a shack culminated in the public burning of UCT artwork that the students deemed to be ‘symbols of colonialism’. Not surprisingly, the destruction of irreplaceable paintings resulted in suspensions, arrests and the expulsion of the students involved. However, the action also had the effect that the university management now turned its full attention to engaging with the students around their concerns to the issues. A so-called ‘institutional truth and reconciliation committee’ (ITRC), tasked with seeking solutions to the problems that sparked #Shackville, was set up in 2017 on the students’ initiative, and management and students began to engage in a series of dialogues overseen by neutral mediators. Against all odds, the students had succeeded in bringing the university management to the negotiating table and doing so around rules of engagement that they themselves had had a large part in determining. In this chapter, we attempt to capture the processes whereby a disruptive and ‘unrecognized’ (UCT Management, 2016) occupation seen by management as the difficult antics of unruly youth who refused to play by the rules came to determine the rules (https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2016-02-16-dvc-desk-campusupdatereleased-16h55-16-february-2016). We ask how it could come about that voices that had earlier been ignored, and agencies denied, succeeded in countering their historical erasure to become audible architects of a process of negotiated change. We approach such an analysis from the vantage point of a material ethnography of semiotic landscapes (Stroud and Mpendukana, 2009). Semiotic landscape analysis promises to offer unique insights on #Shackville precisely because one of its central concerns is that of mapping the semiotics of presence, erasure or absence of voices in place (e.g. Train, 2016), and about turning space into place, or ‘thin place’ into ‘thick place’ (Casey, 1997). We explore here how place was semiotized through #Shackville in ways that articulated a particular voice and a specific presence, and by way of concluding discussion we frame this analysis in terms of the notion of linguistic citizenship (LC; Stroud, 2001, 2017), the use of language (and semiosis more generally) to create ‘spaces’ of unanticipated action by rewriting pasts and refiguring futures. In what follows, we offer (in 2) a more detailed analysis of #Shackville, emphasizing throughout how #Shackville contributes to a new figuration of space through the material-semiotic use of complex plays of temporalities. We introduce a specific approach to semiotic landscapes, namely material ethnography, and suggest that it is in how temporalities are juxtaposed in the material unfolding of the protest that allows students to find spaces to exercise agency. In section ‘Discussion’, we return to the question posed initially of how the violence and trauma of upset and disruption can author new rules of dialogic engagement and reconciliation, and discuss this in terms of the notion of LC (Stroud, 2001).

#Shackville: The material analysis of protest landscape #Shackville was a tangible as well as existential ‘presence of absence’. It was about students’ felt alienation and exclusion and their attempt to (re)claim a sense of

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ownership and agency for blackness in place. When the students built #Shackville, they inserted themselves into a space where they were not welcome, thus performing a solidly material and physical manifestation of absence. In a sense, there is no better example of absence than not having a space to be and making that absence tangibly present in a space where it normatively should not be. However, by placing the shackcum-portaloo on Jameson stairs in the middle of the night, the students were making an ‘illicit appearance’, transgressing a boundary, not only of good behaviour, but a boundary that has historically marked the existential divide between whiteness and blackness. For Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquan-Algerian psychiatrist and revolutionary, blackness resides in the ‘zone of non-being’ (Fanon, 1967), that is, the space Blackness occupies outside the boundaries of ethical self-other relationships. Lewis Gordon (2012) notes that for blackness to cross this boundary is an act of ‘illicit appearance’, leading in turn to blackness becoming seen through the white gaze as a ‘paradoxical hypervisibility’, devoid thereby of individuation or context. Blackness as a mass outof-place, as an all too keenly felt illicit appearance, precludes other ways of knowing the black individual or his/her conditions of existence. This in turn leads to a stance of white ‘epistemic closure’, where nothing can be known of blackness above and beyond what is hypervisible. In a very Fanonian sense, then, #Shackville was about students crossing the boundaries in search of ethical self–other relations of engagement, but they were met instead with foreclosure of further engagement. The key to understanding #Shackville is in grasping how the event – albeit in a minor way – shifted the students out of a state of illicit appearance and into an ethical self–other relationship. As we shall see, temporality is of particular importance here – not as a backdrop to the events, but as a part in their very constitution. Semiotic landscapes provides an appropriate approach to study the unfolding of events as it is fundamentally a discipline concerned with the erasure or rehabilitation and visibility of voices in place. Furthermore, research on semiotic landscapes has more recently come to interrogate temporality as a formative aspect of place, such as in the fleeting mobilities of trangressive subway graffiti (Karlander, 2018) or the more stable materiality of ‘objects’ such as statues, plaques and other memorabilia (e.g. Blommaert, 2014; Pavlenko and Mullen, 2015; Train, 2016). A temporal focus on semiotic landscapes thus promises insights into how students semiotically construct their new visibility and presence in place over the course of the protest, and how time itself is used in this construction. The emphasis on time and change in the semiotic landscape requires a longitudinal and ethnographic approach. In practical terms, this meant that the first author embedded himself and formed part of the unfolding of the protests, paying special attention to the interactions of the material (buildings) and semiotics (inscriptions and practices) in place, and how these changed over time and de facto ‘changed time’. The data thus comprise photographs of the chronicity of the protest over a number of days (see Seals, 2011; Stroud and Jegels, 2014; Barni and Bagna, 2016 and Said and Kasanga, 2016).2 In the following, we look more closely at #Shackville through the lens of material ethnography. A material ethnography traces how meanings over time take on more or less tangible forms of visibility – as forms of logographic, pictorial or multimodal

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inscription, as artefacts of objects or structures (buildings) or as body shapes. It attends to the various forms and modes where inscriptions occur, and relates the unfolding of these inscriptions to each other over time and in relation to their material affordance. In particular, the approach suggests we need to explore how the physical appearance contributes to the form and content (including language choice) of the message and, most importantly, its temporal distribution. We thus explore how the materiality of #Shackville in place orchestrates temporally linked discourses of black alienation in historical and contemporary time in ways that are not only re-tellings but also reactions to black pain through which student agency is fashioned in a particular way.

Time and place The structure #Shackville was erected on 15 February 2016. It is of a design typically found in informal settlements, constructed out of the prefabricated segments of material readily available in the township markets. The structure comprises the shack proper of zinc sheets and a portable toilet known as a ‘portaloo’. A material ethnographic approach to #Shackville interrogates its structure, not just as a ‘context’ for the inscriptions, but as part of the semiotics of place-making, an integral part of the message. The material features of the shack and portaloo in place index a multivocality of meanings pertaining to events in the apartheid past and its echoes in the present. Through #Shackville, place is structured and represented as layers of history, where the layers of history in turn emerge out of the materiality of #Shackville and its multiple temporal indexicalities. The idea behind #Shackville (Figure 10.1) was to ‘bring the township life into the posh and leafy suburbs of privilege’ (student comment), literally compressing, grafting or enfolding the township into the spatial envelope of upmarket structural whiteness in the guise of UCT. The shack-cum-portaloo as a form of protest orchestrates complex layerings of different temporalities that carries significance at multiple levels. The first set of temporal coordinates that #Shackville indexes are discourses of punctual moments in the present and near past. At its most basic, #Shackville references an immediate moment, namely the lack of student accommodation. By introducing the construction, the students are protesting the lack of accommodation at the same time as they are voicing their dissatisfaction with the passivity of university senior management in resolving the issue; despite a series of letters sent by the students pointing out the inadequacies, management has hitherto failed to act. With further reference to present time, the hashtag ties the event of #Shackville clearly to the broader ongoing student protest known as RhodesMustFall. Rather than an ‘arbitrary occupation’, the # inserts Shackville into a range of linked protest discourses and rallying calls on social media such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter that all draw attention to the felt ‘injustices’ thought to have been committed by the management, and their narrative misrepresentation of the protest. It thus loops the shack into a series of contemporary protest genres across media and modality. The presence of the portable loo also serves to further underscore the link to the RhodesMustFall protest. Moreover, because portaloos are popular and easily accessible instruments of protest, its use in

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Figure 10.1 #Shackville structure with occupants inside and a mattress they slept in.

#Shackville highlights and makes explicit the connection with service-delivery protests more widely – with a clear underlying message of indignity and deprivation.3 A second temporal envelope tethers #Shackville into the durative present (rather than the punctual present or past). This refers to states or conditions that have prevailed historically and remain in force today, such as the housing crisis. Such meanings are carried specifically by the location of the shack in the grounds of the university. Because housing in urban South Africa has long been a problem, with a mushrooming of informal settlements keeping good pace with urban migration of rural people to the cities in search of work, the so-called backyard dwellers have become an almost established – if informal – category of ‘domicile’. The term refers to people who rent a space for a shack in the backyard of a house. #Shackville was located – almost as an appendage – close to the student Halls of residence a stone’s throw away, which makes it highly suggestive of a backyard dwelling, although in the ‘yard’ of Jameson Hall rather than the cramped yard of the township. #Shackville thus ties the protest into the larger national discourses on black African dispossession and marginalized presence in the urban spaces of South Africa that has been ongoing since post-apartheid (and earlier). Another set of events in the durative present referenced by #Shackville is land occupation. In the post-1994 South Africa, land occupation using shacks was made popular by Abahlali base Mjondolo (roughly translated to Shack dwellers) – a social movement that fought for people’s rights to occupy land. Therefore, #Shacks are potent instruments of the decade-long occupations whereby citizens identify open land and forcefully take possession of it by building a shack on the premises. Thus, the shack along with a portable toilet can be read as a tangible articulation of ‘black pain’ – a

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notion that refers to a myriad socio-economic and affective issues following on the colonial dispossession of land. In fact, when the police removed the shack at UCT, it resembled how most black townships were removed during the 1950s and throughout the past seven decades without the consent or engagement of those who lived there. #Shackville also references the momentous past of resistance. In choosing to call the event #Shackville, the students explicitly connect the contemporary condition of ‘black pain’ to apartheid pasts. #Shackville is a clever play on ‘Sharpeville’ of the Langa/ Sharpeville massacre, the place forever known in history where a peaceful protest against the pass laws organized by the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania was shot by the police, killing 69 people and wounding over 200.4,5 Thus, the choice of Sharpeville, invoking the themes of identity assertion and self-determination in the face of historical constraints on movement, serves as a metapragmatic commentary on the nature of the demonstrations the students are carrying out. Explicit comparisons are drawn between what is happening at UCT with the planting of a shack in the university grounds and the concerns that motivated the Sharpeville protests in the 1960s. And another such reference to a momentous historical moment was the students’ renaming of The Jameson Hall stairs on which the shack was erected as the Marikana Memorial in remembrance of the Marikana massacre of forty-four mine workers by the police in 2012. (UCT has since initiated a formal process of renaming the hall. This is still ongoing.) These references serve to ground the legitimacy of the #Shackville protest in the shared historical narrative of the nation. By way of partial summary, the presence and form of #Shackville in the grounds of UCT is indexical of the apartheid of times past. It draws attention to the continuous presence of structural whiteness in the present; references punctual moments of significant historical events (such as the Sharpeville massacre) and the repeated moments of post-apartheid struggle (such as land invasions); and locates Shackville in the more recent coordinates of the protest events themselves. All these different temporal envelopes are brought to bear on the university space. The township shack literally transposes the complex temporalities circumscribing black pain in the past and present into the contemporary space of the ‘white’ university.

Time and transcript Another way in which the materiality of #Shackville structures time and thereby reconfigures place is how it regulates the flow and circulation of linguistic form, and the attendant significance of inscriptions. In #Shackville, inscriptions such as placards, notices pinned to the structures, graffiti and so on wax and wane and are carried across modalities and modes. As noted initially, forms of presence and absence and the temporalities and orders of their ‘visibility’ (Kerfoot and Hyltenstam, 2017) over time are highly relevant to understanding the condition of ‘illicit appearance’. First, at a general level, the materiality of the structure itself directs the temporal unfolding of the protest in that both the shack and the portaloo are temporary structures. The temporary and mobile dimension of black lives (organized by forced removals) was the dynamo of apartheid-era South Africa, although it also continues until today. Shacks are the epitome of black lives. They have always been seen as

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temporary places that will one day be removed from whatever site they occupy to be placed into new habitable areas, together with the people that live in them. This is even more the case for the portaloos that are replaced on a frequent basis with new portaloos as the old ones are taken away and emptied. And although both structures are designed to be temporary and mobile, they have become a permanent fixture of the township environment (even as they are regularly replaced by new shacks and portable toilets). In other words, the temporarinees is underlined at the same time as the permanent nature of this temporariness is underscored. Shacks and loos thus are the very epitome of constrained mobility and temporariness, thus allowing the presence of these structures in UCT grounds to create a particular post-apartheid chronotope. At a more specific level, the structure indexes the ever-changing, non-permanent, temporary and arbitrary. It is the complex temporalities of the materiality of #Shackville that structure the circulation, flow and significance of messages, providing for a compendium of intersecting voices and metacommentary of different dignity and reach. The sign in Figure 10.2 is a case in point. The placard depicted in Figure 10.2 is mounted on the portable toilet and is handwritten on cardboard with red paint. The phrase ‘asinamali & asiyindawo’ is in isiXhosa, and roughly translated reads, ‘we don’t have money and we are not going anywhere/we won’t move’. The form, in isiXhosa, red paint on cardboard, and handwritten suggests an interpretation as a rallying cry, a slogan, a call for action against poverty, dispossession and spatial exclusion. The temporary–permanent dimension noted in the previous section is clearly articulated in these words.

Figure 10.2 A handwritten sign in isiXhosa attached to the portaloo next to #Shackville.

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As with the materiality of the shack and loo, this handwritten slogan works as a node for a number of different discourses located in different temporalities. On the one hand, it refers to the crisis of the present moment, namely that the students themselves have no money and cannot afford to find accommodation off-campus. On the other hand, it references back in time to the ‘forced removals’ of black and coloured South Africans who were the drivers of the apartheid state. The phrase ‘asiyindawo’ is especially embedded in the history of this country where the lament of ‘we are going nowhere/we won’t move’ directly refers to the evictions as a result of the Group Areas Act of 1950 that relocated people according to racial categories. The other sentence ‘we don’t have money’ also speaks to inequality and exclusion based on lack of money that suggests that UCT allocates residences to students that can pay. These are part of the macro discourses of exclusion. When read with #Shackville, they reveal old burdens of dispossession, displacement and deprivation of the majority, again carried forward unchanged to the present moment. In addition to this, the phrases ‘asinamali & asiyindawo’ can also be read as declaratives of resistance against a looming forced removal. In other words, the phrase predicts the outcomes and response to the erection of a shack at UCT and, by so doing, reinforces the idea of illicit appearance as an inherent trait of blackness at UCT. Appended to the bottom of the hand-painted slogan is a piece of paper machinetyped in the font Times New Roman with the words ‘yhuu abelungu’. Beneath that, in turn, in smaller print and with a different font and placement reminiscent of a metacommentary, is the phrase ‘Old African Proverb’. The stiff paper is more permanent than the painted, cardboard slogan. The isiXhosa part on this piece can be roughly transliterated to ‘Ooh white people’. This segment is clearly appended to the original cardboard on a later date or as an afterthought. The juxtaposition of these messages on the different materials suggests that the decision to stay put, to not move, and not having money is the fault of white people; ‘yhuu’ is an expletive, pronounced with an expiration and folded tongue, suggesting exasperation, disbelief at ‘how inconsiderate/ ignorant’ white people can be, thus also linking whiteness as the reason for the battle slogan. Interestingly, the phrase ‘Old African Proverb’ typed in this way projects the prior utterance as something historical but continuing into the present – proverbs are quintessentially timeless truths. This ‘truth’ is inscribed, however, in a form that is reminiscent of a museal note: the typescript, the white paper appended to the artefact and the explanatory phrase are suggestive of a particular white historical/imperial gaze on the collected experience of otherness. Thus, we find in this note appended to the structure of the loo a layeredness of temporalities and a multivocality, subtly indexed for racial voice: first, the immediate, imminent time of action (through sloganeering and the medium of paint and cardboard on the temporal structure of the loo); secondly, the long duree of colonial time linked to the present through the museal gaze, a genre indexical of whiteness and the production of black otherness. Thirdly, the meshing of time is pinpointed in the now of protest – with a certain permanence – a continuous past in the present. An interesting aspect of materiality is that the ‘undignified and temporary, visceral structure of the portaloo’ is the board for rallying calls and more militant sloganeering, recalling the immediate history of the portaloo in the run-up to the #RMF protest.

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We note, then, how the linguistic characteristics of the inscriptions and the choice and design of language and orthography are related to materiality and mode. The affordances of the structures and the temporal progression of inscriptions across materialities contribute to the meaning and significance of the message. In particular, the way in which the materiality of the #Shackville structures the flow and circulation of messages is what gave place to a variety of voices. The semiotic landscape kept changing continually as different contributors/authors inserted their artefacts and inscriptions to the scape. Graffiti writings on walls were continuously erased and cleaned, and as more students joined the protest, new placards were added into the protest, and old ones removed or taken down. This editing of inscriptions – the heterogeneity of modality and mode, the combination of genres, the time ‘allotted’ to where inscriptions were permitted to appear and the hierarchy of places/materials in which they appeared over time (e.g. shack and portaloo) – was very much part of what made #Shackville the dynamic changing and fleeting event it was. In fact, in one respect the editing could be seen as one of the overriding authorial principles of this event, as more and different voices layered themselves into the space with different spaces of articulation, allowing different types of speakership or authorial roles and forms of engagement. Additionally, the flow of clock time itself – the time allotted to messages on the different structure and the duration of the event over two days – defined the protest as a particular genre of sit-down protest, and also determined the flow/audibility/visibility of voices.

Time and race A third sense in which the temporality of #Shackville contributed to structure place was in the formation of the social bodies that could reside there. #Shackville recategorized white bodies as suffering Blackness. The structure and placement of #Shackville created a particular rhythm of movement that was definitional of racialized, social bodies. Because it was built in a very busy spot of the university with large numbers of people walking past, its placement not only guaranteed maximum exposure, but also caused maximum ‘disruption’ to the rhythm and flow of traffic around it. In so doing, it also created an arena for certain social actors defined by the time segments of their appearance. We see how this works in relation to the sign in Figure 10.3. Material ethnography points us to interrogating how different social actors acted and were authored by the semiotic artefacts they engaged with. Figure 10.3 is ostensibly a warning to trespassers to keep out. It reinforces the red tape surrounding the structure. Its formulation TRESPASS – ERS straddles a nice ambiguity between the act of trespass and the social role of the trespasser. Such writings are often seen put outside private properties and act as warnings to any potential trespassers. It brings into sharp focus the politics of restriction, order and authority as well as ownership and belonging. To read this within UCT and at #Shackville reveals many levels of contestation, exclusion and policing. In this context, this particular sign was written as a warning targeting exclusively White individuals who were barred from entering or crossing the red tape that had demarcated #Shackville. During data collection, the first

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Figure 10.3 A handwritten sign attached at the back of #Shackville as a warning.

author witnessed two incidents where two white males where physically manhandled and stopped from passing through #Shackville, Semiotic landscape analysis is increasingly occupied with the question of how bodies are created by and, simultaneously, create place (Milani, 2015; Peck and Stroud, 2015). Peck and Stroud (2015), for example, suggest the notion of skinscapes as a way of understanding how a corporeal linguistics ‘offers a particular understanding of racialization’ and how ‘race’ can be seen ‘productively as a marking of the body subjected to situated normative regimes of what can constitute an appropriate aesthetics of fit to place and time’ (p. 146). In #Shackville’s temporalization of place at UCT, racialization is authored by the time segment in which bodies are allowed to appear, or from which they are barred – constituting an illicit appearance. Mupotsa (2015) uses the notion of ‘being stopped’ to describe how those who are not used to ‘being stopped’ or inconvenienced often protest against this while those who protest ‘live-in-being-stopped’. In #Shackville, it is the white bodies that are not admitted and racialized roles are reversed temporality.

Time and trajectory A final inscription points to yet another temporal dimension of #Shackville. It refers to discourses of future change and impacts directly on the trajectory of the protest. In yet another slogan, depicted in Figure 10.4, the words ‘the apes are out’ are spray-painted in versals (almost like graffiti) on one side of the portable loo. There are clear racial overtones here, not least due to the portaloo contextualization. One reading of this artefact is how it subliminally plays into racial and stereotypical beliefs that are covertly held but which we have come to witness in online comments

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Figure 10.4 A spray-painted graffiti-style sign on the back of the portaloo.

on various publications in South Africa. One can also see how this writing implicates whiteness through this statement that is often whispered in the construction of black people as monkeys, lesser mammals beneath humans on the hierarchy, that are prone to mischief and messiness. More specifically, almost a year prior to this, a Facebook posting by a residential agent, Penny Sparrow, in Durban caused a racial uproar when she referred to blacks as ‘monkeys’. Her post was referring to the abysmal state of the beaches after the New Year revellers had left without cleaning up after them, claiming that ‘from now on, I Shall address the blacks of South Africa as monkeys as I see the cute little wild monkeys do the same pick drop and litter’.6 During the #Shackville event, a number of smaller videos (shot predominantly with mobile phones) were made as ongoing commentary to the unfolding of events and posted on social media. In one such video, one of the student activists makes an explicit interdiscursive reference to the Sparrow monkey allusion. Placing himself standing in front of the portaloo text represented in Figure 10.4, he comments on university management’s unwillingness to engage with the students, that is, ‘peoples’ management, with the words, ‘you guys did not want to engage with the monkeys; now the monkeys are out climbing trees and the humans want to talk’. This commentary is not just a rhetorical linkage between the broader racial antagonisms of the country and the specific events unfolding at Shackville. The utterance is contextualized by the wording and placement of the graffiti on the portaloo. The words ‘The Apes are Out’ are highly suggestive of the classic movie The Planet of the Apes when Lt. Col. Grace Alexander utters the words that suggest a new order is about to be unleashed on humankind; in a fluttering grey and barely audible transmission to senior command

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captured on a communications screen, Lt. Col Alexander can be heard uttering ‘the apes are out of control’. It is no coincidence that the graffiti writing is scrawled on the portaloo – an affect-laden and intimate space, where ‘signs of immediate action’ (imminence) are posted in calls to action. Although portaloos in one sense are the ultimate indignity, they are sharply indexical of a point of change in time – a new beginning – as it was from a portaloo that the activist Maxwele collected the fuel that would ignite the swell of #student protest nationwide – the faeces that brought down the statue of Rhodes at UCT. Taken together, the semiotic chains joining Sparrows monkey – to the ‘monkeys of UCT’ who want to talk – to the monkeys/apes of the planet of the apes heralding a new age – to the geosemiotic significance of the loo graffiti as a call for imminent action of the portaloo comprise the ‘turbulent tip’ (Stroud, 2016) that presages a qualitatively new development of the protest. Retrospectively, this sign can also be read as sounding a warning of what was to take place during #Shackville, and it can be seen as a declaration of war. In many ways, it connected to the dominant media reports around ‘savage and violent behavior of the activists’, signalling a shift away from ‘peaceful’ and ‘orderly’ protest towards more disruptive and shocking forms of protests. A few hours later, the protest was to escalate into the burning of the paintings, arrests of students and the inevitable violence of the South African Police Services against students. Two weeks later, university management sat down with students to talk – the first serious, discursive engagement since preceding #Shackville.

Discussion This chapter has been concerned with how students used semiotic landscapes as a tactic in promoting their agency and voice, and specifically in changing the conditions of engagement with the management of the university. It has sought to explore how they contested division and exclusion, and worked to create spaces for themselves and assert their belonging in spaces that alienated them. More specifically, it has been about the role of temporal discourses in the re-figuration of place, and the part played by the dynamic entanglement of place, body and semiotic landscape in the attainment of student agency. Stroud and Jegels (2014) have suggested that senses of self in place are narratively constructed around the praxeological experience of moving through place, at the same time incorporating features of the semiotic landscape into narratives of self-emplacement, as how one feels about oneself and others are very much spatially mediated constructs (e.g. Crouch, 2003; Mondada, 2011). Therefore, movement through space intersects with understandings of local sense of place through linguistic landscapes providing semiotic coordinates (Leeman and Modan, 2009). In the case of Shackville, it is also the layered temporal coordinates of place, carried and mediated through the materialities of shacks, and how these refigure spaces that contribute to how place is lived and experienced. Students built place through the clever use of a semiotics connected to plays of temporality, that is, the productive use of juxtapositions of fleeting moments and the temporary with permanence; orders of visibility or presence/absence (to different degrees) over time and place; the long duree of apartheid history and its more contemporary forms of remembering; bringing the stop–go

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rhythms of apartheid mobilities into the contemporary post-apartheid moment. At UCT, black dispossession and poverty were put in the same space as white privilege; and black time was transposed onto white time, thus highlighting the sad durability of structural whiteness and bringing into relief the slow pace of serious transformation since democracy. The protesting students of #Shackville created meaningful place through the semiotic orchestration of complex temporalities of scaled voices and discourses in order to build a semiotic landscape and determine what social bodies could legitimately reside there. In referencing these discourses, #Shackville offered an invitation to explore the potentialities of the past that were never actualized in the present, and that could provide pointers for alternative trajectories for the future. In what it accomplishes, we see #Shackville as an exercise of LC (Stroud, 2001, 2016). LC is about the ways in which creative, novel uses of language – and other forms of semiosis more generally – make visible and present that which has been marginalized and invisibilized. The notion builds on the critical insight that language, as with all forms of semiosis, has historically provided a powerful technology for the marginalization and disempowerment of significant populations of speakers (cf. Fanon, 1967). LC is what people do when they engage critically with repressive semiotic structures in ways that (momentarily) change the conditions of play and open up opportunities for the participation of voices previously heard as ‘noise’ to become meaningfully audible. Such engagement can involve, among other things, the appropriation or ‘re-defining’ of repertoires and registers of language so as to articulate alternative social indexicalities, thus easing the way for ‘other subjectivities’ to appear and attain legitimacy and recognition (cf. Stroud, 2016, 2017). The way in which #Shackville re-semiotizes the university landscape lends itself well to a politicization in terms of LC. #Shackville is fundamentally about absence and presence and about transforming absence, the illicit and unthinkable, into the actualized, real and present. This is a paradigmatic act of LC in that the way in which new social actors emerge and new norms of deliberative engagement are crafted is through complex material-semiotic genres of protest. Importantly, in this context the semiotic tool par excellence is the play of temporality. Again, this resonates with the notion of LC that takes the utopian surplus of citizenship (Anderson, 2006; Stroud, 2016) as a point of departure rather than the present and/or past. It is about ‘speaking’ futures that have appeared as potentials in the past, but not actualized in the present.7 In this sense, LC is fundamentally about futurity, and thus a practice and philosophy of linguistically mediated political engagement built around temporality, a use of language to facilitate change. #Shackville was about inserting the past into the present – almost collapsing the past and the present happenings of apartheid – in order to contextualize contemporary contestations of belonging as present-day manifestations of old racial discrimination, thus opening up these pasts and presents to a potential ‘re-purposing’, and providing moments for building new future trajectories. The unfulfilled potentialities of the past and ongoing protest are laid bare for actualization through #Sharpeville. In this sense also, #Shackville demonstrates a key feature of LC, namely a form of agency that has the ‘capacity to make the future diverge from the patterns and causes of the present’ (Grosz, 2005: p.

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3), what Grosz (2005) calls a ‘politics of surprise’. Arendt captures a similar idea to LC when thinking politics as promise. With her notion of ‘natality’, the human capacity to ‘begin something new’, she notes that it is ‘only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents’ (1998 [1958]: p. 240). Ultimately, the act of LC that was #Shackville led to students being able to (re) claim legitimacy and visibility, and to initiate a process whereby illicit appearance was reconstituted into a platform for a more ethical engagement for action and change. #Shackville shifted the frame for negotiation and deliberation and brought the management of UCT to the table to talk.

Conclusion In the South African context, contemporary issues of (post-)apartheid are very much about the many ways in which the past finds resonance and echo in moments of the present and the problem of how to overcome the persuasive force of this past/present in the future. #Shackville functioned essentially as a reconstruction and repoliticization of discourses that are prevalent in South Africa around ownership, politics of belonging, displacement and contestation of space. LC has provided a vantage point on understanding how #Shackville as an illicit appearance of blackness in the form of a transgressively built structure on the Jameson stairs becomes a transformative remedy. By choosing a shack and naming it #Shackville and by locating this shack in the grounds of the university, the students embedded the local protest in national concerns of urban access and to the historical events of antiapartheid protest. Ultimately, this enabled a shift in the underlying conditions for selfethical relations, and a revision of the rules for engagement with whiteness.

Notes 1 It is easy to glamourize the protest and view the actions of the students – sometimes violent and destructive – as the considered and thoughful politics of an Avant-garde politics in the face of an unrelenting reactionary university executives. We are, of course, aware of the entanglements and complexities, the complicities and the difficulties in situtions of intense conflict. Our interest here is in understanding the efficacy of a chain of protest events, and not to attribute blame or critique. 2 At this point, the archive comprises 215 photographs of the event of #Shackville itself. For the purpose of this chapter, only four photographs will be analysed that illustrate how the events unfolded – or fold into each other – from the construction of #Shackville to its destruction and the subsequent chain of events that this led to – the burning of the paintings. 3 Service delivery protest is the name given to the many protests that regularly take place in and around the black townships with demands on central or municipal government for better provisions of basic services, such as sanitation, water, road (safety), transport, housing and other infrastructural urgencies. Service delivery protests often result in violent clashes with the police, and, at times, significant material destruction. On average, there are hundreds of protests per year.

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4 Today, Sharpeville is celebrated annually on 21 March as the day of Human Rights. 5 The pass laws constrained and regulated mobility according to what time a person was permitted to be in a particular place and the reasons for being there. Being caught by the police without a pass meant arrest for black people. The momentous and horrific events of Sharpeville have left a big imprint in hearts and souls of South Africans. 6 She went on to say in a later defence of her words that ‘Monkeys are cute and they’re naughty, but they [black people] don’t see it that way, but I do because I love animals’. ‘I wasn’t being nasty or rude or horrible, but it’s just that they [black people] make a mess. It is just how they are.’ 7 For uses of LC in other contexts, cf. Stroud, 2016.

References Aboelezz, M. (2014), ‘The Geosemiotics of Tahir Square’, Journal of Language and Politics, 13 (4): pp. 599–622. Anderson, B. (2006), ‘“Transcending without Transcendence”: Utopianism and an Ethos of Hope’, Antipode, 28 (4): pp. 691–710. Arendt, H. (1998), The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barni, M. and Bagna, C. (2016), ‘“1 March – ‘A Day without Immigrants’: The Urban Linguistic Landscapes and the Immigrants’ Protest’, in E. Lanza and H. Woldemariam (eds.), Negotiating and Contesting Identities in Linguistic Landscapes, London and New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 55–70. Ben-Rafael, E. (2016), ‘Introduction’, Linguistic Landscapes, 2: pp. 3. Bloomaert, J. (2014), ‘Infrastructures of Superdiversity: Conviviality and Language in an Antwerp Neighborhood’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 17 (4): pp. 431–451. Casey, E. (1997), The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Berkley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Crouch, D. (2003), `Spacing, Performing, and Becoming: Tangles in the Mundane’, Environment and Planning A, 35: pp. 1945–1960. Crowe, T. (2017), ‘UCT Liberal? Roots of Racism, Sexism Run Deep, Reveals Emeritus Professor’, http://www.biznews.com/thought-leaders/2017/01/26/uct-racism-sexism/ (retrieved 15 August 2017). Fanon, F. (1967), Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press. Gordon, G. (2012), ‘Of Illicit Appearance: The L.A. Riots/Rebellion as a Portent of Things to Come’, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/9008-of-illicit-appearance-the-la-riotsrebellion-as-a-portent-of-things-to-come (retrieved 12 August 2017). Grosz, E. (2005), Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kalander, D. (2018), ‘Backjumps: Writing, Watching, Erasing Train Graffiti’, Social Semiotics, 28 (1): pp. 41–59. Kerfoot, C. and Hyltenstam, K. (eds.) (2017), Entangled Discourses: South-North Orders of Visibility, New York: Routledge. Kitis, D. (2011), ‘The Subversive Politics of Subversive Discourse and Culture’, in E. Foust and S. Fuggle (eds.), Word on the Street, London: IGRS Books. Kitis, D. and Milani, T. M. (2015), ‘The Performativity of the Body: Turbulent Spaces in Greece’, Linguistic Landscapes, 1 (3): pp. 268–290.

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Leeman, J., and Modan, G. (2009), ‘Commodified Language in Chinatown: A Contextualized Approach to Linguistic Landscape’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13: pp. 332–362. Mangcu, X. (2016), Racism Has Roots in the Universities, https://www.iol.co.za/ sundayindependent/racism-has-roots-in-the-universities-2021735 (retrieved 1 August 2017). Milani, T. (2015), ‘Sexual Cityzenship: Discourses, Spaces and Bodies at Joburg Pride 2012’, Journal of Language and Politics, 14 (3): pp. 319–334. Mondada, L. (2011), ‘The Interactional Production of Multiple Spatialities within a Participatory Democracy Setting’, Social Semiotics, 21 (2): pp. 289–316. Mupotsa, D. (2015), ‘I was Never Ready for What Happened at Wits Yesterday’, https:// www.thedailyvox.co.za/i-was-never-ready-for-what-happened-at-wits-yesterday/ (retrieved 12 August 2017). Pavlenko, A. and Mullen, A. (2015), ‘Why Diachronicity Matters in the Study of Linguistic Landscapes’, Linguistic Landscapes, 1 (1–2): pp. 114–132. Peck, A. and Stroud, C. (2015), ‘Skinscapes’, Linguistic Landscape, 1 (1–2): pp. 133–151. Rojo, L. M. (2014), ‘Taking over the Square: The Role of Linguistic Practices in Contesting Urban Spaces’, Journal of Language & Politics, 13 (4): pp. 583–598. Rojo, L. M. (ed.) (2016), Occupy: The Spatial Dynamics of Discourse in Global Protest Movements, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Said, B. S. and Kasanga, L. A. (2016), ‘The Discourse of Protest: Frames of Identity, Intertextuality and Interdiscursivity’, in E. Lanza and H. Woldemariam (eds.), Negotiating and Contesting Identities in Linguistic Landscapes, London and New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 71–78. Seals, C. A. (2011), ‘Reinventing the Linguistic Landscape of a National Protest’, Working Papers of the Linguistic Circle of the University of Victoria, 21: pp. 190–202. Stroud, C. (2001), ‘African Mother Tongues and the Politics of Language: Linguistic Citizenship versus Linguistic Human Rights’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 22 (4): pp. 339–355. Stroud, C. (2016), ‘Turbulent Landscapes and the Semiotics of Citizenship’, in R. Blackwood, E. Lanza and H. Woldemariam (eds.), Negotiating and Contesting Identities in Linguistic Landscapes, London and New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 1–18. Stroud, C. (2017), ‘Linguistic Citizenship in the Multilingual Citizen: Towards a Politics of Language for Agency and Change’, in L. Lim, C. Stroud and L. Wee (eds.), The Multilingual Citizen: Towards a Politics of Language for Agency and Change, Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Stroud, C., and Jegels, D. (2014), ‘Semiotic Landscapes and Mobile Narrations of Place: Performing the Local’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2014 (228): pp. 179–199. Stroud, C. and Mpendukana, S. (2009), ‘Towards a Material Ethnography of Linguistic Landscape: Multilingualism, Mobility and Space in a South African Township’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 13 (3): pp. 363–386. Train, R. W. (2016), ‘Connection Visual Presents to Archival Pasts in Multilingual California: Towards Historical Depth in Linguistic Landscape’, Linguistic Landscapes, 2: pp. 33. UCT Management (2016), DVC Desk: Campus Update Released: 16h55, 16 February 2016. https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2016-02-16-dvc-desk-campus-updatereleased16h55-16-february-2016 retrieved on 1 August 2017.

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Micro-Landscapes and the Double Semiotic Horizon of Mobility in the Global South Kasper Juffermans

This chapter tries to come to terms with a paradox: that in the global south and in West Africa in particular, mobility and globalization are extremely present yet elusively absent: common and rare at the same time, highly desirable but practically inaccessible, and constantly in sight but generally beyond reach.1 As a result of advanced and relatively affordable technologies of long-distance travel and communication, we live more than ever now in an age of mobility and transnationalism: migrants today are no longer just émigrés and immigrants but ‘transmigrants’, that is, mobile persons going back and forth and sustaining multiple engagements and relationships between homelands and new homes (Glick-Schiller et al., 1995; Grillo and Mazzucato, 2008). At the same time, evermore strict certification regimes in the North make it more difficult than ever for many in the global south today to achieve global mobility (Bordonaro, 2009; Gaibazzi, 2013; Kresse and Liebau, 2013). These constraints provoke more complex and dangerous migration trajectories as well as a sense of ‘transnationalism at home’ (Åkesson, 2008) involving frustrations about non-migration and the (im)possibilities of mobility. While it may be true that ‘more people are now moving from more places, through more places, to more places’ (Vertovec, 2010: p. 86), more people are now also in a state of ‘involuntary immobility’ (Carling, 2002), that is, aspiring to migrate but practically incapable to do so. As a correction to the superdiversity thesis of unprecedented migrant diversity in immigrant-receiving societies, Czaika and de Haas (2014) emphasize asymmetry and not a general increase in the volume, diversity and geographical scope of international migration: ‘Although various parts of the world are more connected than ever, in many ways, the world has become less flat, for instance through rising income inequality between and particularly within countries’ (p. 318). While sociolinguistics has rather successfully engaged with transcultural flows and mobilities in globalization (e.g. Blommaert, 2010; Canagarajah, 2013; Coupland, 2003; Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010; Otsuji and Pennycook, 2015), it has perhaps insufficiently

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engaged with those who do not travel well. Sociolinguistics arguably struggles with the ‘not-there’, the ‘absent presences’, with ‘what gets left out’ (Kulick, 2005). Various sociolinguists, however, have begun to address and challenge their discipline’s metropolitan and Northern bias (see, e.g., Wang et al., 2014; Kerfoot and Hyltenstam, 2017). This chapter therefore adopts a Southern perspective on language and migration, investigating the banal mobilities of everyday life in the South at moments and places that are not characterized by much movement or mobility, but by immobility and permanence instead. In doing so, it follows a theoretical lead from the anthropology of migration and globalization in West Africa (Bordonaro, 2009; Gaibazzi, 2013; Graw, 2012; Kresse and Liebau, 2013; Jónsson, 2012) and elsewhere (Ferguson, 2006; Xiang et al. 2012) in which the study of migration is shifted towards the South and sending contexts (see Lorente, 2017, for a rare example in the sociolinguistics of migration). I take a Southern perspective not to mean theorizing with academic writers from the South or to be from the South, but rather seeing from the materiality of the South (Milani, 2014). The very attempt to see, that is, to take a viewpoint, from the South and to engage with voices from the South constitutes a Southern perspective. This means engaging central theory into debate with the South, critically decentring theory on its validity as seen from a Southern, that is, globally more marginal, viewpoint. The analytical techniques or methodologies remain all the same; only the perspective is different. To a large extent, this decentring of sociolinguistics or migration studies amounts to its ‘anthropologization’: by engaging with anthropological theory and conducting anthropology-style fieldwork, I engage in a Southern perspective. Drawing on data from an ongoing multisited ethnographic project at the University of Luxembourg on trajectories and repertoires of language and mobility between Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and Luxembourg (see Juffermans and Tavares, 2017 and Tavares and Juffermans, 2018), this chapter explores how inequalities around mobility – aspired, imagined and remembered mobilities against the background of commonly experienced immobility – can be read in the semiotic landscapes of Guinea-Bissau, a small and fragile state in West Africa and according to most measures one of the world’s poorest countries. The chapter attempts a multimodal analysis of two semiotic environments that illustrate different forms and relations to transnational mobility in Guinea-Bissau. The places that are chosen are not the typical public spaces linguistic landscape (LL) studies have favoured so far, but are private or semi-public environments – a workplace and a home: micro-landscapes – and their description is anchored in deeper ethnographic engagement with their owners, two young men on the move (both friends and research participants). In what follows, the chapter will first suggest that studies of linguistic and semiotic landscapes can fruitfully be extended from its traditional focus on public spaces to smaller, more private spaces (hence micro-landscapes) and goes to theorize the notion of horizon in relation to globalization and the LL. The next two sections will analyse the semiotics of two micro-landscapes – a suburban Bissau living room and a small-town hair and beauty salon – for what they reveal on global connections. The first example is centred around a display cabinet filled with souvenirs from China and interpreted in terms of mobile nostalgia, pride and inspiration. This example is triangulated with a second, shorter case, of the interior decoration in a hair and beauty salon that reveals

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hope and precarity in mobility. The chapter concludes by arguing that that linguistic and semiotic landscape analysis with its meticulous multimodal descriptive methods has much potential to investigate micro-landscapes, mobile horizons and the global inequalities they reveal.

Micro-landscapes and global horizons Recent work in the anthropology of migration has suggested the notion of ‘horizon’ as a theoretical construct in understanding movement and mobility from a Southern perspective. The original meaning of the term ‘horizon’, Graw and Schielke (2012: p. 15) note, is ‘the (limit of the) spatial extension of the visual field’. This implies ‘a person who views his or her surroundings from a specific vantage point’. They however extend the notion of horizon from the realm of visual perception and the physical world to inner perception and the world of the mind (2012: p. 14). A person’s horizon, for Graw and Schielke, refers to ‘the reach and orientation of her or his knowledge, expectations and personal ambitions’ (2012: p. 14), thus including fantasies, dreams, desire and imagination. This concept links well with LL theory, landscapes being that which physically constitute the horizon. In LLs of the South, I argue, there is often a double horizon: the immediate one of the material signifiers, a bricolaged semiotic environment of necessity (recall Stroud and Mpendukana, 2009), and the distant one it signifies, a second-order indexicality, to speak with Silverstein (2003), of images of luxury. The first horizon signifies precarity and immobility; the second horizon signifies hope and mobility. Early definitions of LL, such as those by Landry and Bourhis (1997: p. 25, cited and recited ad nauseam), are concerned with the public space as that which is open and accessible to the people but often not owned by the people. For obvious reasons, a great amount of attention has gone to commercial and corporate agents in the construction of linguistic and semiotic landscapes around the world, with shopping streets and commercial districts being the default sites for LL research (for an early example, see Collins and Slembrouck, 2007; see also Juffermans, 2008). Students of linguistic and semiotic landscapes have long theorized and problematized the public–private or topdown and bottom-up distinction in signage. The public space, a decade of LL studies has shown, is marked up by a combination of signage by (and for) public and private actors, with the line between the two being thin and often difficult to draw. In their study of Khayelitsha township in South Africa, Stroud and Mpendukana (2009) argued that constructs of space are constrained by ‘material conditions of production’ and ‘sensibilities of mobility and gaze’ more than by public–private considerations. Hence, their call for a material and ethnographic linguistic landscaping as a resource for ‘the study of social circulations of meaning in society’ and for what they call, following Nuttall (2004), ‘the politics of aspiration’ – the self-stylization and transformation by means of consumer commodities in a structurally unequal world. More recently, LL researchers have turned towards spaces beyond the public or to tensions between private practices and identities in public. Milani (2013), for instance,

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considers stickers on an office door, T-shirts, flags and indoor notice boards in the corridors as sites of contestation and struggle over sexual and gendered identities in the landscape. Jaworski (2010) considered the significance of landscape representations on postcards in the construction of tourist landscapes and explored with Thurlow the landscapes of luxury and privilege in the spaces of elite tourism in top-end hotel foyers, bathrooms, business class lounges and cabins, private beaches and other spaces that are inaccessible to the general public (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2012). Schools and classrooms (Brown, 2012), corner shops (Serwe and de Saint-Georges, 2014), indoor markets (Otsuji and Pennycook, 2015), transport systems (Karlander, 2016), screens and virtual spaces (Ivkovic and Lothering, 2009) and even the human body (Peck and Stroud, 2015) increasingly feature as sites for LL research, taking the approach out of the public space and even indoors. By micro-landscapes I mean those spatial constellations that are smaller than the usual understanding of landscape. Landscape is mostly defined as ‘a piece or expense of scenery’ or a picture representation of that (Gorter, 2006: p. 1) or ‘a way of seeing the external world’ (Cosgrove, 1984: p. 46; in Jaworski, 2014: p. 525). In both definitions, landscape is vast, all-encompassing and outdoors and limited only by the horizon, the limit of our vision. Micro-landscapes take the idea of landscape indoors to any piece of vision limited by walls with or without doors or windows, ceilings and floors. More specifically and prefixed with linguistic or semiotic, the term refers to the semiotics/linguistics of interiors beyond the façades early LLs privileged and moves inside those private and public spaces, including homes and workplaces. Or even smaller: to the semiotic arrangement of a desk, counter, fridge or to small printed material like menus, postcards and business cards, examples of which have featured in various LL studies over the years. Of course, even when handling a broad definition of landscape as some form of scenery, LL studies have typically focused on smaller units than that what reaches the eye – at most that what the camera can capture and what catches the researcher’s attention. The notion of micro-landscapes deliberately seeks this limitation of narrow, walled-in spaces as many of the spaces that surround us do not offer wide 360° views and those that do (e.g. stunning seaviews and mountain views) generally do not offer much in terms of a linguistic or social semiotic object of enquiry. Indoor spaces, by virtue of being shaped and arranged by human beings, are inherently semiotic. The micro-landscapes I am concerned with in this chapter are domestic scenes and relate to classic LLs (as streetscapes or cityscapes) in the same way as Vermeer relates to Van Ruisdael or as genre scenes or still lifes relate to great landscapes. Cultural and human geography have considered the complexity of home as object of enquiry. Jacobs and Smith (2008: p. 515), for instance, note that ‘home is a complex field of feelings and subjectivity: an anchor for senses of belonging, a mechanism for living with, and in, the experience of transnationalism, and a site for constituting and performing selfhood.’ Duncan and Lambert (2004: p. 382) point out that the notion of home carries a broad range of meanings, ‘from a mental state, to a house, to a continent’. The sense of home that informs this chapter is in the first place the materiality of the furnished home, the household. Tolia-Kelly (2004), for instance, has investigated postcolonial geographies of home by reading photo-objects and images

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through a materialist lens. Such objects, she suggests, are irreplaceable representations of landscapes of distant homes at new homes after migration and refract lived landscapes of transnational pasts into the transnational present of the diasporic home. In this way the home can be ‘read’ for the multiple histories it tells. So the notion of micro-landscapes seeks to apply the idea of landscape at an uncomfortably small scale (Duncan and Lambert, 2004: p. 382) and awkwardly large scale (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2003; Ferguson, 2006) at once. It attempts to recognize the very large in the very small, to read the asymmetrical world order at the scale not of the nation, city or street, but of the home and the workplace.2 This approach is indebted to what is sometimes called the new materialism, which considers the importance of people’s relationships with things as part of and alongside relations with other people (Jacobs and Smith, 2008; Latour, 1991; Woolgar, 2002). In its most basic sense, this considers that people can get attached to objects as they do to other people. To understand the social significance of objects, we need to move beyond pure iconography, della Dora (2009) explains in her essay on ‘travelling landscape-objects’, and look at portable transnational objects not merely as representations or evidence of globalization and mobility, but as ‘storied objects’ with the ability to emotionally ‘enchant’ the global and the mobile. That is to say that small objects of everyday life such as souvenirs perform the global and the mobile, and can be said to have a social life or their own agency. In the next section, I will be exploring the visual culture of souvenirs as remembered mobility, for its nostalgic capacity to bring travels home. And in the following section I will be exploring the performativity of popular images as aspired mobility. Both images of remembered and aspired mobility can be understood as ‘global shadows’ (Ferguson, 2006) that witness Africa’s marginalization within the global community. But before we proceed, the engagement with mobility in LL studies has at least two important precursors that have gone unmentioned so far. First, there is Moriarty’s (2014) special issue on multilingualism and mobility in the LL that is concerned with the symbolic construction of multilingual spaces by means of mobile language resources. The LL here is a ‘site for the investigation of how processes of mobility are impacting on the linguistic hierarchy of given places and spaces’. Departing from a view of space as ‘dynamic, fluid and everchanging’ and a critical view of language as multimodal and material, Moriarty and the papers there take the LL as ‘a vehicle for the spatialisation of culture and commodification of space’ (p. 459) and thus as a way of uncovering sociolinguistic change and ideologies of language in a globalizing society. Secondly, there is Stroud and Jegels (2014) work on mobile narrations of place. Where Moriarty was mainly interested in the mobility of language, they are more concerned with theorizing the mobile and multivocal construction of space and place. For Stroud and Jegels, ‘places themselves are “mobile”: they change and shift shape over time as new building constructions, transport systems, and patterns of migration alter the physical, cultural and LL of a site’. Note, however, that they put mobile between scare quotes – places are ‘mobile’ only so to speak, but are not actually able to move in the same way as objects and people do. Taking a non-representational perspective on place, Stroud and Jegels regard the act of walking itself as an epistemological and

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methodological tool of mobile engagement with the landscape. As we walk for research or in everyday life, the horizon continually changes with our gaze, and so does our sense and understanding of place. Let us then finally move to two concrete examples of such micro-landscapes as mobile horizons. Both examples are drawn from recently completed fieldwork (2014–2017) on language and migration in Guinea-Bissau, a small and impoverished Portuguese postcolony in West Africa.

Mobile nostalgia in a living room display cabinet The first example centres around a display cabinet in the central living room of a young English teacher’s extended family home on the outskirts of the capital Bissau. The cabinet and the walls of the house prominently display signs of my friend’s – Reinaldo Natcha – incidental travel experiences to China and Ghana as trophies of mobility. The family’s land is a rectangular piece of land between Rua Bula and Rua Cá Facil in Bairro Militar. Rua Cá Facil means literally ‘Uneasy Street’. The name refers to the bad condition of the road but is an apt descriptor for life in suburban Bissau in the early twenty-first century more generally: with frequent blackouts of electricity supply on the grid, no piped water supply or domestic waste collection in most of the city, soil erosion during the heavy rainy season, high unemployment, frequent delays in public salaries, overpopulated and understaffed schools, a general life expectancy of fifty-four years and a GDP per capita that is only 4 per cent of the world’s average and an overall dysfunctional government, life certainly is not easy in Guinea-Bissau (cf. Bordonaro, 2009; Chabal and Green, 2015). Managing life in this weak or failing state requires a great deal of creative problem-solving and social resilience (Vigh, 2006). Although unfenced, the land belongs to the families of two brothers: the widow of the elder brother with her three sons – including my friend – and her youngest daughter and some nephews, nieces and grandchildren, and next to it the younger brother (my friend’s uncle) with his wife and family. Both families have their own houses but share toilet and bathroom facilities and a hand dug water well. The land can be reached only on foot as cars cannot pass the final end of the street due to the holes in the road and the informal urbanism. Urban planning in this part of Bissau is chaotic if not to say absent altogether. The urban infrastructure cannot keep up with the pace of growing families and people moving to and settling in the city. Like most areas of Bissau, this family land is unconnected to a piped water supply scheme and was not until very recently (before my last visit in early 2017) connected to the erratic electricity network of the city. Lus bai (the light has gone) and lus ka ten (there is no light) were among the first phrases I learned in Guinean Creole, Guinea-Bissau’s national language, a Portuguese-based Creole that developed from the Creole of Santiago on Cape Verde during the time of the Atlantic slave trade (Jacobs, 2010). At night the area used to be pitch-dark and a torch light was standard equipment when going out. Radios and whatever electrical appliances in use are battery charged. In the immediate vicinity of the family land, there are many small generator-powered shops that charge mobile phones at a fixed cost.

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The family are Balanta, Christian and predominantly Creole-speaking. Reinaldo’s father bought this land and moved his young family there in the early 1990s, when the area was still much less developed and considered a remote and bushy place (matu). The area quickly developed, and by the time I first visited (2014), it had become hard to buy land around this area. When my friend’s father passed away in 2001, Natcha’s education was disrupted as he had to go out and earn money to assist in the family’s livelihood. He sold sweet bread, cleaned floors in a roadside restaurant, charged mobile phones, had a banka (a gambling game) and did various other trades as a teenager. He soon managed to earn enough to send himself back to school and to sponsor some of his younger siblings schooling too. Before he could complete his secondary school, he became a young father himself. After secondary school, he continued his education at the national teacher training college choosing English as his subject. Due to his educational success and responsibility towards his (extended) family as well as his commitment to church and overall exemplary behaviour, he had acquired considerable respect in his area and beyond. When walking with him in the area and throughout Bissau, he would often be greeted by children as ‘teacher Naaa-tcha’ and by fellow student-teachers with doutor (doctor) or master-mind. Natcha and I were introduced through a friend I had met at a winter school in Greece who had then just visited Guinea-Bissau, while I was preparing to undertake new fieldwork I had received funding for. We exchanged greetings and personal information via Facebook messenger and agreed to meet as soon as I would get to Bissau. There we became close friends, and as my fieldwork unfolded over an aggregate of six months split between five visits over three years (2014–2017), Natcha assumed various roles in my research: participant, consultant, assistant, translator, language teacher and co-researcher. As is often the case in ethnographic research, our intimacy and friendship was both the condition for and the outcome of the research findings presented here, and extends beyond the fieldwork setting and researcher–participant relationship. When we first met in January 2014, Natcha was in his late twenties and a teacher in two local private secondary schools and a school secretary in one of them, as well as a final year student in teacher training. He had finished building a third house on the land that was in use as a private nursery school he founded and named after Martin Luther King. Upon graduation he was posted at a remote school in the south of the country but successfully fought against this decision and managed to be reposted within the Bissau metropolitan area. Towards the end of my research, he combined one of his teaching jobs first with a paid internship at mobile telephone operator MTN and later at SOS Kinderdörfer and was occupied with church activities as a youth leader on Sunday. He often told me that he liked to keep himself busy. Still during his teacher training, in which he excelled, Natcha had unexpectedly been given the opportunity to participate in a training programme in China in 2010 and again in 2011 and 2012. Before this, he had never set foot outside Guinea-Bissau. About this, Natcha told me in an interview: ‘I couldn’t believe this is happening to me, that I’m having this experience. As a child I dreamt of going outside of my country before the age of 25, but I was thinking of Portugal, not China.’

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These travels – to Ningbo for a programme on vocational education management for developing countries, to Beijing for a seminar for teachers of primary and middle school for English-speaking African countries and to Tai’an for a course on greenhouse vegetables cultivation for developing countries – were life-changing experiences and had a lasting inspiring effect on him. Material proofs of these unexpected travels are preciously stored in his mother’s display cabinet in the central sitting area of the house, where guests are received (see Figure 11.1). The cabinet itself is locally made from timber wood (madeira) with glass doors and inside mirrors and is the central piece of furniture in the central living room, part of the sitting area that includes a set of also locally made upholstered sofas and armchairs around an imported glass coffee table with a tablecloth. The lower part of the cabinet has wooden panels, doors and drawers and stores items out of sight, but the higher part of the cabinet has two large wood-framed glass doors and glass shelves and stores items for display, like in a museum. This part of the cabinet is filled with various luxury items that are not normally used but for display only. Apart from souvenirs Natcha brought home from his trips, the glass closet stores especially a collection of glasses (champagne flutes and long drink glasses), an empty bottle of Cutty Sark blended Scotch whisky and two mini bottles – also empty – of Gordon’s London Dry Gin, as well as decorative tableware and some small porcelain items that – Natcha wrote to me – ‘my mum and sisters bought to make the cabinet more attractive’.

Figure 11.1 Natcha’s mother’s display cabinet, Bairro Militar, Bissau. Photo courtesy Reinaldo A. Natcha, November 2016.

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Four of the different items on display were brought as souvenirs from China: •

•

• •

A stone picture frame with a composition of pictures of the seminar participants in the shape of the Chinese characters ஦ࠅ (Zhongguo, meaning China), brought from the 2010 Ningbo seminar (Figure 11.1.1) A plastic mascot bear with blue-and-white striped jersey number 10, a present Natcha brought ‘from Ta’ian city, Jinan province – China’ [sic], in 2012 after a competitive soccer game organized by the organizers (Figure 11.1.2) A black pen in a luxury leather pen case (Figure 11.1.3) Two pairs of flower-decorated chopsticks in their original packaging (Figure 11.1.4)

Elsewhere in the house, there are more souvenirs from his international travels on display: •

A colourful dragon-shaped kite. Natcha’s own explanation in a casually written e-mail: ‘The dragon-shaped kite, was a present I got in Sept. 2012, when [we] were counting down the days to come back to Bissau, in a tour of five days visiting “Quindao City” JINAN province, maybe I have missed the spelling of the city but I’ll check. We went to a place called dragon kite city centre. We were taught how to fly it. It has been given back home to Silveria [his daughter] has [as] a special present and [I] give [gave her] instruction on how to fly too. She really Lv [loved] it’ (Figure 11.2).

Figure 11.2 Dragon-shaped kite from China in Natcha’s room, Bairro Militar, Bissau. Photo courtesy Reinaldo A. Natcha, November 2016.

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Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes The personal name badges of all three Chinese seminars and a conference he and I attended together in Accra, Ghana, in September 2015 (also visible in Figure 11.2). A wooden-and-cloth decoration piece of a traditionally dressed young African woman against a colourful mosaic background with the text ‘Greetings from Ghana’ above and below her. This piece clearly replaces an older piece of furniture that was not removed when repainting the room’s interior walls (Figure 11.3).

Other presents brought home from these trips were wearable items that are not permanently on display but visible as moving objects: ‘Well, there are several others presents that I gave to Tina [his girlfriend and mai di fidju “mother of child”] such as necklaces, bracelets, telephones, blouses, shoes, photos album and so. For Silveria, she has also got a lot of presents from me, skirts, blouses, shoes, school back [bag] and many others school items. My mum, brothers and sisters even my in-laws, have got somethings from me, once I am back home. I tried to bring underwear, t-shirts to my

Figure 11.3 ‘Greetings from Ghana’ in Natcha’s room, Bairro Militar, Bissau. Photo courtesy Reinaldo A. Natcha, November 2016.

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boys.’ Further kept out of sight, but within easy reach, were the diplomas, certificates and programme booklets of the seminars. I would like to suggest that the souvenirs on display are important elements of interior landscapes. I have encountered similar references to global elsewheres experienced by family members in many West African urban living rooms. The significance of these objects, I believe, is that they can trigger conversations about strange cultural habits or concrete travel experiences, for example to dragon kite city. That Natcha’s recollection of the precise location of this place is not entirely accurate is not the point.3 Tourist memories are rarely precisely accurate as local place names and other details are concerned, but the objects embody and remediate the memory of the experience. That is the very meaning of the word souvenir, from the French verb ‘to remember’. Insofar as souvenirs are given away, they serve to remind others of the giver’s mobile or tourist experience often as a proxy for their social mobility. In a context where lived transnational mobility is extremely scarce and highly valued such as around the Rua Cá Facil in Bairro Militar, this is a highly significant marker of distinction. In my conversations with him, Natcha kept telling me how important his mobility was in the eyes of his daughter, girlfriend and mother. This is what he wrote to me in an email: I have gave [given] to my mum several presents from all my travel[s], [e]specially the ones from China. All the presents that I was given in China, represents [represent] something relevant to my mum as well as my family. My brother[s] and sister[s] feel always proud [of] me by seeing all presents and knowing that I was [have] brought them from [a] trip. For them, and other relatives, it’s a way of introducing people to me even [when] I am not there.

And in a formal, edited interview with me about his Chinese travel experience: People take it as a big thing; people see great value in it. I’m still nobody, but people see me as a grand patron now. Sometimes they think my girlfriend is eating money now because I went to China. I cannot describe the way people look at me. It makes my girlfriend and my daughter proud. My daughter tells everybody ‘My father went to China,’ and she has asked me when I’m going back again.

The souvenirs in his mother’s display cabinet, in itself banal objects, are a source of pride and inspiration. They are banal in the sense that they are rooted in everyday actions and practices, part of the domestic interior of the family house and often go unnoticed, but at the same time consequential as tangible proof of someone’s son’s, partner’s and father’s prestigious mobility. For Jaworski and Thurlow, who have theorized in various publications the notion of ‘banal globalization’, it is ‘at the level of “innocent” texts and “harmless” (inter)actions that globalization is actually realized’ (Thurlow and Jaworski, 2011: p. 308). Souvenirs are space–time compressions and thereby objects of globalization par excellence. Souvenirs are here-but-from-there and point back at who carried them

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from there to here. In a context such as Bissau where global mobility is extremely inaccessible, such souvenirs carry a sense of prestige and function as subtle markers of distinction. They are tokens of prestige by association, and as easy to ignore as to pay attention to. As a footnote, on my visits to West Africa, I have frequently been asked, especially at the beginning and end of my visits, by nearly anyone I relate to, what I have brought or what I will leave behind as a present. Gradually I began to understand that bringing something from somewhere else – irrespective of its monetary value or value of use – carries some symbolic value of remembered interaction with someone from somewhere else, and that that in itself is invaluable. We need to bear in mind that the objects in the display cabinet Natcha brought home did not cost much but are valued because of the lived experience they embody, as signifiers of Natcha’s expanded horizon – in itself a marker of status and social mobility. Not their material but their social value is the reason his mother displays them in the most prominent place of the house. However, Natcha’s souvenirs are not only displayed in the sitting room in the centre of the house but also in his private quarters where guests rarely enter. They are not only tokens of prestige-by-association for others but also memories for himself, precious evidence of moments past in which he embodied movement. For Natcha, these objects are more than a source of pride, tokens of motivation that his hunger for further mobility and education is not stilled, an inspiration for future mobility to come. The souvenirs are objects of nostalgia: reminders of times spent across the horizon, but equally of desire: of yearning for that horizon. All of that is embodied and remediated by these banal mnemonic objects. ‘After all, much of the significance, the cultural capital, of tourism lies in the tourist haze created as tourists return home – or prepare for home – with their stories, their souvenirs, their memories’ (Jaworski and Thurlow, 2011: p. 363). Jaworski and Thurlow refer to ‘tourist haze’ here drawing on wordplay with the more often invoked notion of tourist gaze (Urry, 1990) which refers to the ways of seeing, experiencing and consuming places in tourism. Tourist haze then refers to the blurred, murky and indistinct ways the ‘perceived space’ (to use Lefebvre’s term) of the places visited live on as mental images in the travellers and all those (e.g. mothers, daughters, brothers, friends) who share in the remediation of the travel experience after coming home. The flower-decorated chopsticks in the cabinet for instance or the Chinese characters on the stone photo frame may lead into small-talky conversations about Chinese eating habits or their writing system – both utterly exotic in West Africa. The discourses these souvenirs produce will be rarely accurate or scientific descriptions of the place as perceived but more likely conceived as hazy as Natcha’s recollection of the dragon kite experience suggests. Souvenirs have little intrinsic value other than what they enact beyond their general representation. A dragon-shaped kite represents a dragon and can be used to kite, but this dragon-shaped kite embodies a unique experience and emotional memory from where it was picked up. The significance of this kite as a travelling landscape-object lies in the fact that it travelled in the opposite direction – home with Natcha, from China to Guinea-Bissau. As such, it is a three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional object

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(della Dora, 2009): the third dimension, beyond its materiality and representation, resides in its biography. The kite thus performs something akin to what the great Dutch cultural historian (Huizinga, 1950) has called ‘historical sensation’ – the sense of excitement of direct and immediate contact with the past that brings with it an understanding of the past. The objects in the cabinet trigger a ‘mobile sensation.’ For Natcha himself, these objects act as mnemonic devices that activate connections and memories of his travels, ‘materializing ephemeral experiences of place’ (della Dora, 2009: p. 344) and transforming there into here, then into now and exterior into interior. For Natcha’s daughter, girlfriend and mother, they are equally sensational by association as nostalgic proof of the disruptability of boundaries, of the (distant) possibility of transnational mobility and as objectified pride in their father, partner and son. For Natcha himself then, these storied objects are not merely nostalgic but equally aspirational. Having exhausted all the educational opportunities in his field (language teaching) at home, and inspired by his visits to China and a growing network of friends and relatives who have gone to study and live abroad (mostly in Portugal, UK or Brazil), Natcha actively and passionately pursued opportunities to study abroad all the time I have known him, whether to the UK, China, Turkey, India, the United States, Luxembourg or Brazil. In the three years or so that we have been friends, exploring and pursuing study-related migration opportunities have been a constant concern and even daily business. Going to embassies, collecting documentary evidence from various authorities and for various applications, renewing passports, and acquiring information about scholarships have been part of his daily and ordinary routine as much as going to work or school. In another formal interview, he confessed to me: ‘I will do anything to go out of this country. I am ready to go anywhere, even to Gambia or Senegal.’ In February 2017 – incidentally during the last of my five fieldwork visits – his efforts and perseverance were finally rewarded as he was granted a study visa for Brazil, and left a few weeks later, ironically with a heavy and nostalgic heart, to join his uncle and study theology and language studies in the state of Minas Gerais.

Mobile desire in a small town hair and beauty salon The second micro-landscape I consider here, more briefly, is the interior of a small town hair and beauty salon run by a young immigrant entrepreneur whose migration story to Guinea-Bissau forms the basis for a longer paper on ‘landscaped narration’ in preparation. The section here draws on material from a series of hairdressing and barber salons in the north and north-east of Guinea-Bissau I visited as part of my interest in the life history of El-Hadj Mamadou Bah. Like in the previous section, I will begin by sketching his personal history here. How I met Mamadou lends itself well for a comment on how researchers recruit their participants. Well-meaning critics sometimes ask on the basis of what criteria I came to select my participants. I often stumble on having to admit the amount of

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unscientific coincidence involved. In this case, I accidently walked into his salon as I was strolling around the central praça of Bissorã – the other location I had chosen to base my research in, next to Bissau. He called me and asked me to sit with him. I accepted his invitation but initially declined to have my hair cut. He reassured me that he had cut des blancs before, but later told me I was his first white customer and friend. I returned the next day and the day after that and finally agreed to have my hair cut. I did not pick any of the hairstyles from the walls of his salon but had it millimetred for the first time since my pre-teens. Like with Natcha, I also developed a fairly intimate friendship with him. The methodological comment here is that sometimes it is not researchers selecting participants but the other way around. Mamadou is a so-called nania which is the somewhat depreciating term for Fulaspeaking immigrant newcomers from neighbouring Guinea-Conakry in GuineaBissau. The term nania, Mamadou explained to me, derives from the Fula phrase nane mi ari (I have just arrived), which immigrants of this category allegedly and stereotypically reply to immigration police officers and tax collectors in an appeal to their humanity and patience. Some nanias, the word goes, use this excuse for many years after settling in Guinea-Bissau. Mamadou was born in a village near the mining town of Sangaredi in the west of Guinea, 250 km north of the capital Conakry as the last child of both his father and mother. From a poor family with ageing parents (his father was an ancient combattant for the French colonial army during the Second World War) and lacking the necessary local support and opportunities after finishing lycée and an unsuccessful year at university in Conakry, Mamadou decided to choose the path of migration like so many of his fellow countrymen but as the first in his family. He left for Guinea-Bissau on 1 April 2012, two and a half years before I first met him in the town of Bissorã (in September 2014). It was the first time he left his native country. He kept his travelling secret from everyone until he arrived at his destination, and so left without any prior networking or preparation and barely enough money for the journey. He did bring three sets of clothes and a small number of objects and instruments that would enable him to become a coiffeur (hairdresser/barber) in Guinea-Bissau: these included a set of posters of men’s and women’s hairstyles, some combs and razor blades, and a mirror. The first two years of his migration, he spent working at four different salons in Gabú in the north-east of the country – where most nanias enter and begin their immigrant life in Guinea-Bissau, but I met him when he had moved on to Bissorã. He invited me to come into his salon and choose a hairstyle from the posters on the wall (see Figure 11.4). The posters I saw included pictures of multiple rows and columns of black men and women’s with fashionable hairstyles and were captioned – in English and capital lettering – ‘international hair cuts’ and ‘for the big boyz’. These were most likely produced as far away as Ghana or Nigeria and arrived in small town Guinea-Bissau via Guinea-Conakry. Another poster even had inscriptions in Ge’ez and Habesha models and so must have travelled all the way from the Horn of Africa as a ‘truly moving text’ (Kroon et al., 2015) turning up in an ‘unexpected place’ (Pennycook, 2012). Hanging out in Mamadou’s salon, I learned that men came to the salon on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to ‘remove’ their hair, while women came to ‘build’ their hair

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Figure 11.4 Interior of El-Hadj Mamadou Bah’s hair and beauty salon, Bissorã, GuineaBissau. Photo by the author, March 2015.

(kumpu kabella) or to have their nails done. Men basically had three options: tira korti (cut short), pela kabesa (skin head) or moda (the special fashion styles from the posters on display). I observed that men are quick and cheap as well as flexible customers and that women are slow and expensive customers who plan ahead and negotiate about the price before accepting an appointment. Men would come without an appointment, walking away when it looked like Mamadou was too busy, but women would schedule a day for their hair or nail job, rescheduling or cancelling these if they could not manage to save enough money. He often complained to me that girls often enquired about but seldom used his services, except during the cashew campaign ‘when everybody has money’. Mamadou also told me that he refrained from engaging romantically with girls as this would cost a lot of money and negatively affect his business. When he was ready for it, he would marry straightaway, not wasting his time and money on ‘playing’ (brinka), as he called it. I began to see the salon as an important space for masculine sociability and conviviality but also as a site of relative luxury and consumption in an environment of evident precarity, and as a visually rich and pleasant surrounding. Mamadou’s salon in Bissorã had posters of hair fashion styles and a world map, the other salons I visited with him in Gabú often had the same posters (including the one from Ethiopia) as well as images of international hip-hop and football stars: Samuel Eto’o, Cristiano Ronaldo,

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Figure 11.5 Interior of a hair salon in Gabú, Guinea-Bissau. Photo by the author, March 2015.

Puff Diddy, 50 Cents. Apart from their practical use as exemplary haircuts, these posters also decorated the space with images of wealth, luxury and urban cool that act as role models for those frequenting the salon. I only occasionally observed male customers asking for moda, but saw many young men with basofu (show-off ) hairstyles in the streets of Bissorã and Bissau. Paying for it in a salon rather than having one’s hair cut at home for free has the advantage that it is done efficiently, quick, by a professional and, for what it is worth, in a visually attractive environment. The aesthetics of the posters perform luxury in otherwise rather modest material conditions. Dotted with images of extreme wealth of global football and hip-hop, BissauGuinean hair and beauty salons can be seen to embody local desires for upward and outward mobility and imaginations of a brighter future (see Figure 11.5). At the same time, these global shadows underline Africa’s marginalization in the neo-liberal world order (Ferguson, 2006). The double horizon signifies that these domestic and workplace spaces are simultaneously sites of necessity and of luxury (Stroud and Mpendukana, 2009), epitomizing dreams and expectations of geographic and social mobility within an environment that does not cease to remind of poverty and need. My friendship with Mamadou was marked and sometimes disturbed by our opposite positions on the continuum of global immobility to hypermobility. While my life as a migrant and an academic the last ten years at least has been characterized by exaggerated global mobility, Mamadou as a migrant entrepreneur never even moved

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back and forth between the two Guineas, except virtually, and could only imagine what lies beyond the horizon while entertaining hopes of himself one day moving on. His desire for a more mobile future surfaced in nearly every conversation I had with him. For instance, he would repeatedly ask my advice about how useful his skills as a hairdresser would be in Brussels or Paris or what other work he could do, how much a plane ticket would cost, the procedure to get a visa and what I – his friend – could do to help him get there. In a formal letter he addressed to me soon after I began interviewing him, he requested me ‘de venir au secour pour y arrivée en Europe’ (to come and rescue in order to arrive in Europe). Where I saw him as a mobile and accomplished person who had arrived from somewhere else, he saw himself essentially as immobile and unaccomplished, still struggling to get out. Eventually, that mobile inequality and economic differential between us charged our friendship: while I tried to see him as my coeval and peer, he would treat me with humbling deference and respect; quite literally, I felt, as his patron. It is hard to be equal in a world that allows so much inequality.

Conclusions Sheller and Urry (2006) have argued that today’s mobilities are diverse and intersecting and that ‘people and places are located in the fast and slow lanes across the globe’. It occurs that modernity here is not light and liquid but heavy and solid (Bauman, 2000; Sheller and Urry, 2006: p. 210). The world is indeed ‘smooth’, hybrid and deterritorialized as far as flows of images and communication are concerned. It takes about the same effort to call or text from Bissau and Bissorã to Lisbon or Luxembourg than vice versa, or to stay tuned with Premier League or Primera Division football via satellite or to follow American and African politics via radio and the internet. But as human mobility is concerned, the world is highly disconnected and a patchwork of borders and boundaries with highly uneven rights of movement. Guinea-Bissau is clearly located in the slow lane of global travel. ‘A landscape is the visually represented form of a culture at a certain moment. A painted landscape is as represented form of a culture, an explicatio culturae, a selfexplanation and self-representation of a culture’, writes Lemaire in his Filosofie van het landschap (2007 [1970]: p. 22, my translation). The micro-landscapes explored here are not painted but they are arranged and preserved and ready to be seen and to be interpreted. Like a painting, they reveal themselves. If we can accept Lemaire’s definition, then these micro-landscapes potentially tell us a lot about Bissau-Guinean culture and society. On the earlier pages, I have laid out my reading and understanding within the limitations of my capacity to grasp their meaning. The general point I have been trying to make is that signs of mobility and globalization are quite banal in Guinea-Bissau but point at how precious and exclusive physical opportunities for mobility are. The travelling landscape-objects in Natcha’s mother’s display cabinet and the photo-images on Mamadou’s posters point at worlds elsewhere that have been experienced by chance and/or are desired to be experienced

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sometime (or again). The salon and the display cabinet like so many West African sitting rooms and workplaces are composed windows into other worlds, of fortunately experienced pasts or desired futures elsewhere. The paradox this chapter attempted to describe was that in Guinea-Bissau, mobility and globalization are present and absent at once: both common and rare, desirable and inaccessible. First of all, both Natcha and Mamadou were in fact quite mobile, but in their own eyes relatively immobile and in need of mobility. Note that Natcha said that despite his travels he is ‘still nobody’ and that Mamadou resisted upon my framing of his experience in terms of immigration and kept reminding me of his unfinished emigration aspirations. Secondly, all mobility is desirable and hard to access – not only mobility to affluent countries in the North. Note that Natcha himself, perhaps more than his mother, girlfriend and daughter, cherished and memorized his visit to Ghana, similar to his visits to China. And note that Mamadou also took pride in the trajectory he had already achieved as a way of taking up responsibility for his own life and that of his parents. Thirdly, mobility to affluent countries (Europe and America on top) is both the most desirable and the least accessible. Before applying for a Brazilian visa, Natcha experienced a harrowing series of disappointments and failures in seeking travel rights to more exclusive destinations such as the United States and, through me, Luxembourg. Also note that Mamadou articulated aspirations to travel to France or Belgium rather than Senegal or Cape Verde. Fourthly – and this is an obvious but important point – mobile desire generally is not primarily oriented towards physical geo-mobility, but towards general socioeconomic mobility and status. In fact, the term ‘mobility’ as used in this chapter was shorthand for geographical, social and economic mobility and stability. Migration, in imagination, if not also in actual fact, is the golden path to accomplish this escape out of poverty and hardship. But there are ironies involved here: When Natcha finally secured his student visa to Brazil – his sustainable ticket out of Guinea-Bissau – he had doubts, since his social position and status had improved locally and were still improving on multiple fronts: His position was more secure now, he told me, than it ever was, and better than many of his peers. He was a responsible person and doubted if leaving now was the most responsible thing to do, given that many of his kin relied on his efforts to realize their dreams and desires. My engagement with these spaces and their authors also points back at the rather grotesque mobile inequalities engrained in our respective subjectivities and the moral complexity in researching this. The ease at which I could move back and forth between Europe and Africa and beyond (I carried a golden frequent flyer pass with ‘elite plus’ status during most of this period) stands in sharp contrast with the hardship both Natcha and Mamadou endured in seeking further transnational movement. I have more questions than answers in this regard, both moral and methodological ones. For instance: • How was I supposed to respond to Mamadou’s appeal for help with migration? And for help more generally? • To what extent can we afford to (not) get involved in participants’ struggles for mobility when researching mobilities?

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• Does engaged mobility research mean we are advocating for, or perhaps against, certain types of mobility? • When the broader spatial semiotics of mobility are considered, whose interpretations and representations count? I leave these questions open-ended, and conclude by expressing hope that a more equal global order with reduced mobile inequalities and greater mobile justice lies somewhere at the horizon.

Notes 1 I acknowledge the generous support from the Fonds Nationale de la Recherche Luxembourg and the Institute for Research on Multilingualism (MLing) at the University of Luxembourg for this research. I’m also grateful to Adam Jaworski, Beatriz Lorente, Crispin Thurlow, Kerry Taylor-Leech, Bernardino Tavares and two anonymous reviewers for conversations and feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter. Most of all, I’m indebted to Reinaldo Natcha and El-Hadj Mamadou Bah and other research participants in Guinea-Bissau for their friendship and the knowledge they shared with me about global mobility and precarity. 2 The distinctions between workplace and home and between private, semi-public and public spaces are complex, and are not systematically interrogated in this chapter. It suffices to say that in the context of a largely informal economy as in Guinea-Bissau what is workplace is often also home (i.e. a place to eat and sleep) and that in the context of extreme hospitality, homes are by no means spaces of seclusion and privacy, but very much also meeting places. 3 An internet search reveals that the kite should come from Weifang and not Qingdao which lies just besides it and that Jinan is not the province but the capital of Shandong province. Likewise, his description of the mascot bear as brought ‘from Ta’ian city, Jinan province – China’ contained the same province/capital confusion and a clerical error in the name of the city, which is normatively spelled Tai’an.

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Afterword David Malinowski

Making sense of people, place and linguistic landscapes: Visibilizing absences Among its many other contributions, this volume speaks powerfully to the contention that, in seeming contradiction to its name, linguistic landscape (LL) is fundamentally about people (e.g. Shohamy, 2015: p. 154). Through their explorations of ‘the sense that people make of place and how place makes sense of people’ (Introduction) in practices of memory, imagination, aspiration, resistance and desire, the volume’s chapters suggest that, as a site of research, the ‘linguistic landscape’ necessarily relates geosemiotic meaning to affective resonances, fixed materiality to moving bodies, ‘phenomena of interest’ to the researchers who investigate them and, most basically, places to people. With respect to the growing discipline of LL itself (here I leave aside distinctions between LLs, LL studies and semiotic landscapes), this volume not only encompasses recent disciplinary reframings that take into account the symbiotic relationships between people, place and signifying practices – as Bock and Stroud elaborate (p. 11, this volume) – but also ‘smellscapes (Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015), chronoscapes (Baro, this volume), mobilescapes (Stroud and Jegels, 2014) [and] skinscapes (Peck and Stroud, 2015)’. In foregrounding the agentive semiotic practices of social actors, both seen and unseen, in contexts of political and personal precarity, it further commits the field to the cause of epistemic visibility and justice for those people whose histories, knowledges and aspirations remain under-voiced in socioand applied linguistics (cf. Kerfoot and Hyltenstam, 2017; Rubdy and Ben Said, 2015; Blackwood et al., 2016). Examined more closely, the commitment of Making sense of people, place and linguistic landscapes is not just to people, but also to selves, a fact of great importance as the deictic centrings in the lives and experiences of the subjects of its chapters reveal multilayered chronotopes of individual and collective experience (see especially the chapters by Baro and Guissemo), each entailing their own spatially, temporally and intersubjectively positioned ‘yous’ and ‘thems’. Selves’ memories and experiences (and experiences of memories) of conflict, persecution, division and exclusion permeate and condition the narratives and sites of research that speak from the pages in this

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volume where, on outward appearance at least, ‘hope’ and ‘precarity’ are premised on what is in their various heres and nows. But what is can only be postulated in terms of what was, what could not have been, what now is and is not, what in the future might or could be, and, crucially, what is for, by, and against whom. Bock and Stroud’s chapter tracks the narrative traces and discursive stances taken by young South Africans, revealing how ‘apartheid as place’ (Bock and Stroud, this volume, p. 22) remains an agentive ‘zombie’ force constraining subjectivities and movement more than twenty years after apartheid’s formal dismantling. Borba’s call for a ‘signealogy’ to investigate the social conditions of possibility of protest signs in Rio de Janeiro is borne of a desire to understand ‘how individuals semiotically disrupt oppressive social orders by reclaiming place, reimagining selves and others, reconfiguring the present, and redesigning futures’ (Borba this volume, p. 178), all of which turn on the ‘fractured temporalities’ of performative ‘chain[s] of repetitions and citations’ (this volume, p. 7). And when Juffermans writes of his participants’ homes in GuineaBissau that their ‘small objects of everyday life such as souvenirs perform the global and the mobile, and can be said to have a social life or their own agency’ (Juffermans, this volume, p. 205), he argues that they do so always through horizons of elsewheres and elsewhens, where the mobile present remains beyond reach for the majority of selves. In this sense, while this volume casts new light upon subjectivity, emotion and the ‘materiality of affect and sensuality’ (Introduction, p.1) as key facets of present and future research in LL, it suggests as well the importance of contending head-on with the nature and role of absence in the LL, both as a heuristic for thinking about the operations of affect in the LL, on one level, and possibly as a latent phenomenon greatly motivating other LL research. Indeed, absence, and its corollary conditions of visibility and invisibility, audibility and silence in the LL, are named as such in many chapters here, including: Peck and Williams’ observations about whiteness, tattoos and silencing of bodies of colour in South Africa; Blackwood’s assertion of the political significance of the presence of Creole in the face of its statistical near-absence from the Frenchdominated landscape of Guadeloupe; and Mpendukana and Stroud’s contention that the RhodesMustFall student occupation and emplacement of #Shackville on the University of Cape Town’s campus in late 2015 was ‘a solidly material and physical manifestation of absence’ of blackness in place. These chapters highlight the way in which absences must be understood and challenged as outcomes (deliberate or not) of regimes of invisibilization amidst ‘hierarchies of objects, social relations, ways of knowing, being, and saying concealed or embedded beneath the apparently common sense and taken for granted in policies and practices’ (Kerfoot and Hyltenstam, 2017: p. 5). In the following text, I contend that while bearing in mind the aim of exposing and critiquing the regimes of visibility, there should be a discussion about absences in LL scholarship (Mpendukana and Stroud’s invocation of Stroud’s notion of linguistic citizenship, this volume, p. 185, is especially helpful here); absence in the LL as a site and phenomenon of research must also be carefully examined inasmuch as what is absent may produce regimes of affective potential and emotional response (see Wee, 2016) as much as (or more than) what is present, and what is visible.

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Two present themes: Historicization and subjectivation of people and/as landscape To some degree, LL research always invokes history, or at least historicity, either explicitly or tacitly: the materiality of signs and the physical landscape are embodiments in and of themselves of things that have been said and done before, made all the more legible in the ‘historical layers’ of the material world (cf. Pennycook and Otsuji, 2015; Train, 2016) than they are in the ‘layered simultaneity’ of spoken discourse (Blommaert, 2005). ‘Every sign originates in a prior sign,’ as van Lier (2011: p. 388) has written. Still, the ‘snapshot simultaneity’ of much linguistic landscape research today gives ample reason to bear in mind Pavlenko and Mullen’s (2015: p. 116) reminder, to wit, ‘it is crucial to establish what plausible assumptions can be made when we actually do attempt to “read back” from signs to (discontinued) practices and (absent) people and what constraints should be placed on these assumptions’ (cf. Blommaert, 2013; Ben Rafael, 2016). In this volume, this assertion is tangibly represented and the need for such an effort is most explicitly asserted in Borba’s call for ‘a genealogy of signs – a signealogy,’ which, he writes, ‘could enable us to better understand the social history of the sign and the conditions of the possibility for its local emplacement’ (p. 165). Making sense of people, place and linguistic landscapes speaks powerfully to the role of affect as a lens on historicity in LLs, in that emotional resonances in place are intimately linked to individual and collective memory. To be sure, affect is visible in previous works such as that of Pavlenko and Muller (2015), which employs a cognitive processing approach to show how, when people read signs, they evaluate not just their informational content but also their ‘salience, affective valence (positive/negative), and relevance to [their] own goals, values, and needs’ in light of individual memories (p. 118). Yet, the chapters in this volume attend centrally to memory processes that are invested and imbricated in places, objects, dialogues and even flesh – not all of which may be recognizable as ‘signs’. These are power-laden sign relations that may remain invisible to the powerful but which are, as in Bock and Stroud’s ‘zombie landscapes’, ‘reconstructed and imagined landscapes, pieced together through traces of memory and the visceralities of affect these memories call forth’ (this volume, p. 15). In the material ethnography of Mpendukana and Stroud’s investigation of #Shackville, the lasting transformative potential of a protest action whose very embodiment (a shack portaloo) embodied impermanence may be seen in its commitment to an understanding of inscription as, in practice, the ‘rehabilitation and visibility of voices’ (this volume, p. 186, italics added). Baro’s ‘Chronoscape of authenticity’ and Peck and Williams’ ‘Skinscapes with friction’ both critique discourses of authenticity (The Sheds’ deployment of decor evoking mining-era Johannesburg; Ninja’s Stoeka-style tattoo signs) precisely for the fact that they erase histories of domination and exclusion – and, in so doing, demonstrate how perceptions of inauthenticity are (also) historically informed relations of affect. In this sense, rereading Blackwood’s chapter, we may see Creole also as existing in the Guadeloupean linguistic landscape nearly everywhere precisely through its absencein-coloniality, made real to us, via the author’s account, through an extended encounter with the 99.6 per cent of 5,408 signs that did not, or could not, ‘contain’ it.

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As clearly as it calls for a diachronic (or ‘chronotopic’) orientation to LL studies, this volume’s foregrounding of the materiality of affect, emotion and even sensuality also insists that we call into question the locations and distributions of subjectivity between people and landscape. On the one hand, such a move finds resonance in such arguments as Pennycook’s for a post-humanist applied linguistics that does away with attachments to notions such as the autonomous human subject/speaker and languages as uniform ‘systems’; as he writes, ‘Breaking down distinctions between interiority and exteriority allows us to understand subjects, language, and cognition not as properties of individual humans but rather as distributed across people, places, and artefacts’ (Pennycook, 2016: p. 2). In this sense, we need not doubt that the University of Corsica’s linguistic landscape itself may exert an authorial agency, independent of any individual social actor, as Amos (this volume) intimates: ‘It is the LL itself – i.e. the textual objects in the landscape – which mediates the competing linguistic identities defining “the institution” as a collective unit on the one hand, and as a shared space constructed by its individual members on the other’ (this volume, p. 124). And such notions have clear and provocative implications for methodology in LL studies as well. Bock and Stroud, observing the contradictory and often conflictual meanings that are written into and read from any given place, leave us with a provocative challenge: ‘rather than searching for a singular intention behind how we are reading a sign, should we not rather be generating a force-field of possible meanings and readings?’ (this volume, p. 24) Yet, the chapters in this volume do not allow us to rest with the understanding that people and LLs co-constitute each other in any uniform way. Quite obviously, they are not made of the same stuff, nor with the same consequences. It is here that the fact of inscription as a social, semiotic and physical marking renders ‘landscaping’ as a sometimes sensuous but also often brutal act with lasting consequences. Here, the material ethnographic methods employed by Mpendukana and Stroud orient us towards ‘interrogating how different social actors acted and were authored by the semiotic artefacts they engaged with’ (this volume, p. 192), bringing to light how human subjects are themselves, in part, inaugurated through landscaping processes (cf. Stroud and Jegels, 2014). In Borba’s reading of the back-and-forth struggle over the LL of São Square, the subjectivation-through-landscaping often takes place via injurious speech (a la Butler’s reading of Althusser), a human and material calling-tobeing-in-exclusion through racist, homophobic and misogynistic interpellations that cannot but also open possibilities for resistance and resignification. And, at a collective level, the ‘semiotic paradox of street art’ that Gonçalves’ chapter exposes in Bushwick, New York, may be seen as a massive and recursive erasure-through-inscription, where paintings made on the walls of the neighbourhood’s buildings performatively absence (as a verb) the ‘socially, linguistically, culturally, racially and ethnically diverse’ peoples (this volume, p. 142) that they are ostensibly meant to represent. In this light, the presence in this volume of the human body both in and as landscape cannot be understated. Whereas Chmielewska before elaborated the corporeal and sensory unfoldings that condition human subjects’ situated readings of/in place (‘place demands tactile attentiveness to topography and surfaces, a corporeal engagement with its “concrete particulars”, and an intimacy of objects,’ she wrote; Chmielewska, 2010: p. 288), Peck and Stroud’s positing of ‘skinscapes’ (Peck and Stroud, 2015) has encouraged

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detailed attention here and in LL scholarship more broadly to the consequential and differential ways in which places quite tangibly write (themselves onto) people – just the corporeality of place-making discursive practice can no longer be overlooked (cf. Kitis and Milani, 2015; Stroud, 2016). Bodies, and especially the tattooed bodies studied in Peck and Williams’ chapter (this volume), become a primary site of place signification, a nexus of symbolic, affective and political struggle for control over the meanings to be made, and people who will belong, in a place.

Making sense of absence in linguistic landscapes As suggested earlier, a central contention of this Afterword is that the concerns of the chapters in this volume with history and embodied subjectivity ought (also) to be read as a statement about the presence and power of absence in and for linguistic landscape research – a point made directly by Mpendukana and Stroud when they write that the #Shackville occupation and emplacement ‘was a tangible as well as existential “presence of absence”’ (this volume, p. 185). Of course, ‘absence’ in some form has been with the field since its early days, inasmuch as studies such as by Landry and Bourhis (1997), Ben-Rafael et al. (2006), Lanza and Woldemariam (2009), Du Plessis (2011) and many others have concerned themselves with the lack of minority languages in public signage, and the consequences of this invisibility (cf. Mendisu et al., 2016). Yet, the pages of Making sense of people, place and linguistic landscapes give us an opportunity to conceive of absence in a much more dynamic, heterogeneous and lively way as well, just as the cultural geographer Doreen Massey has written that ‘space’ is not emptiness but rather a ‘positive multiplicity’ and ‘simultaneity of stories-thus-far’ (Massey, 2005: p. 12). One benefit of a historical (or diachronized) approach to LL is that even signs that are seen in the here and now are understood to be authenticated by their articulations in prior times and other places (cf. Bakhtin’s dialogism), and in the cognitive and affective functions of human memory (Pavlenko and Mullen, 2015). Furthermore, it is not only the signs and geosemiotic discourses in place that are absent in their presence: to take seriously Chmielewska’s phenomenological claim that ‘it is in the complex here-now-I that semiosis takes place’ (Chmielewska, 2010: p. 289; italics in original), the self-reflexive reader and writer of signs may also see herself refracted in similar encounters across place and time, in semiotic landscapes that are subjectively reconstructed and ‘at base fundamentally inscriptions of human intentionality’ (Bock and Stroud, this volume, p. 10). In order to be somewhere, it would seem, one must vacate it as well. Of course, animating earlier LL studies’ rather positivistic concern with ‘absence’, and running like a current through the affective orientation of the research in this volume, is the spectre of being made absent through no choice of one’s own. It is this sense in which I suggested earlier that Gonçalves’ ‘semiotic paradox of street art’ in Bushwick suggests an agentive role for absence as much as it does a ‘naturally’ occurring phenomenon. To this point, especially, Guissemo’s ‘Orders of (in)visibility in Maputo’ discusses the invisibility of African languages from the LL of Mozambique through a chronotopic analysis that ‘oblige[s] us to explore what is, or is not, manifest in artifacts

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and inscriptions of memorization’. Here, whereas ‘invisible’ may be a passing descriptor in a synchronous analysis, a diachronic approach requires him to make the word into a verb instead: in colonial Mozambique, ‘local African languages were invisibilized and hidden away because they were spoken by a subject who was often erased from the colonial narrative’ (Guissemo, this volume, p. 39; emphasis added). At the end of this text, I feel that we, too, are asked to make ‘absence’ into a transitive verb, to continually interrogate the operations of power at work within the orders of visibility, memorization complexes, and affective regimes and other conceptual frames that help LL research to question the seen (cf. Kerfoot and Hyltenstam, 2017; Train, 2016; Wee, 2016). In this sense, the chapters in this volume take the field and a significant step forward in allowing us to ask who, and what, has absenced who, and at what costs, such that what we now see, photograph and name as ‘the linguistic landscape’ remains. There is, of course, a growing tension here (a friction, even) as LL is asked to outgrow its predilection for surface documentation like a skin to be shed, to see what may become of its analytic and interpretive work when it closes its eyes and uses its hands. In fact, the dilemmas caused by the field’s ocular fixation, its commitment to approaching language, places and people as landscape, and the consequent difficulties of charting methodological paths forward have been thoughtfully considered for years (see, for instance, Jaworski and Thurlow, 2010; Milani, 2014; Blackwood, 2015; Lou, 2016). Yet, just as Wee (2016: pp. 107–108) contends that to situate affect in the LL is not to assert the existence of any(one’s) particular emotions, a rubric of absencing need not make claims on the reality of the material world, or on the definitional and enduring interest of LL researchers in what is, inscribed in public space. Indeed, it depends on these very things in order to show, as these chapters of Making sense of people, place and linguistic landscapes have, that there is evermore need to attend with care to the living pasts, alternative presents and imagined futures of selves in the LL.

References Ben-Rafael, E. (2016), ‘Introduction’, Linguistic Landscape, 2 (3): pp. 207–210. Ben-Rafael, E., Shohamy, E., Hasan Amara, M., and Trumper-Hecht, N. (2006), ‘Linguistic Landscape as Symbolic Construction of the Public Space: The Case of Israel’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 3 (1): pp. 7–30. Blackwood, R. (2015), LL Explorations and Methodological Challenges: Analysing France’s Regional Languages’, Linguistic Landscape, 1 (1–2): pp. 38–53. Blackwood, R., Lanza, E., and Woldemariam, H. (eds.) (2016), Negotiating and Contesting Identities in Linguistic Landscapes, New York: Bloomsbury. Blommaert, J. (2005), Discourse: A Critical Introduction, New York: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. (2013), Ethnography, Superdiversity and Linguistic Landscapes: Chronicles of Complexity, Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Chmielewska, E. (2010), ‘Semiosis Takes Place or Radical Uses of Quaint Theories’, in A. Jaworski and C. Thurlow (eds.), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, London and New York: Continuum, pp. 274–291.

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Index affect 3, 4, 15, 17, 23, 30, 163, 164, 165, 173, 224, 225, 226 affective Regime 2, 5, 162, 165, 166, 167, 173, 177, 178, 228 Africa 60, 94, 98, 109, 201, 202, 205, 206, 212, 214, 216, 218 agency 24, 35, 54, 56, 101, 111, 114, 115, 119, 126, 127, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 163, 166, 167, 173, 178, 185, 186, 187, 195, 196, 205, 224, 226 apartheid 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 49, 50, 58, 59, 60, 67, 92, 93, 101, 102, 103, 183, 184, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 195, 196, 197, 224 belonging 1, 2, 13, 22, 63, 108, 110, 111, 118, 119, 137, 149, 163, 165, 183, 192, 195, 196, 197, 204 body 6, 17, 23, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 173, 187, 193, 195, 204, 226 Brazil 4, 155, 161, 162, 163, 168, 172, 173, 178, 213, 218 Brooklyn 4, 141, 142, 143, 146, 148, 150, 153 Bushwick Collective 141, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153 carnality 3, 16, 91, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104 China 5, 39, 51, 52, 202, 206, 207, 209, 211, 212, 213, 218 chronotopes 2, 3, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 40, 43, 190, 223 colonial 2, 3, 4, 11, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 51, 53, 59, 107, 114, 183, 189, 191, 214, 228 commodification 50, 65, 141, 148, 205 condensation 14, 16, 21, 23, 24, 164, 177 Corsican 4, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137

Die Antwoord 3, 91, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102 Du Bois 14, 16, 17, 21 emigration 218 French 4, 35, 65, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 211, 214, 224 Freudian 14, 16, 21, 23, 35 Friction 3, 91, 99, 100, 102, 103, 225, 228 gender 57, 100, 109, 153, 154, 161, 162, 164, 168, 172, 175, 204 gentrification 4, 53, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 148, 150, 151, 153, 155 global south 29, 201 globalization 57, 145, 201, 202, 205, 211, 217, 218 graffiti 3, 65, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 95, 97, 98, 101, 104, 111, 112, 118, 119, 130, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137, 141, 147, 163, 164, 175, 176, 177, 178, 183, 186, 189, 192, 193, 194, 195 anti-graffiti 75 backjump 3, 72, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84 transgressive 93, 101, 104, 112, 118, 130, 134, 136, 141 grass-roots initiative 141, 147, 153 Guinea-Bissau 202, 206, 207, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 224 hate 4, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 169, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178 hope 4, 5, 6, 147, 149, 162, 163, 166, 167, 173, 174, 176, 177, 178, 203, 219, 224 horizon 164, 202, 203, 204, 206, 212, 216, 217, 219, 224

Index identity 4, 6, 55, 56, 57, 59, 100, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 118, 119, 124, 125, 126, 127, 132, 133, 136, 137, 147, 166, 168, 189 immigration 214, 218 immobility 29, 72, 79, 201, 202, 203, 216 institutions 11, 19, 20, 29, 124, 130, 137, 151, 183 linguistic landscapes 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 30, 31, 32, 58, 91, 94, 98, 99, 107, 124, 163, 195, 202, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228 zombie landscapes 13, 15, 21, 25, 225 Maputo 3, 29 materiality 6, 14, 23, 30, 98, 102, 103, 104, 127, 133, 167, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 202, 204, 218, 224 memorization 15, 16, 30, 31, 32, 41, 43, 228 memory 14, 15, 16, 30, 31, 40, 43, 54, 55, 61, 100, 101, 151, 184, 211, 212, 223, 225 migration 22, 188, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 213, 214, 218 mobility 5, 13, 15, 22, 41, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 93, 94, 102, 142, 143, 190, 198, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 211, 212, 213, 216, 217, 218, 219 movement 5, 11, 21, 25, 31, 33, 39, 50, 71, 72, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 111, 114, 123, 134, 136, 146, 147, 150, 162, 183, 184, 185, 188, 189, 192, 195, 202, 203, 217 Mozambique 3, 29, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 227, 228 marrative 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 30, 31, 35, 37, 39, 52, 61, 93, 94, 97, 108, 113, 114, 118, 126, 187, 189, 195, 223, 224, 228

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place xv, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42, 51, 52, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 67, 71, 72, 73, 74, 82, 83, 93, 94, 107, 110, 115, 117, 118, 136, 141, 142, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 163, 164, 167 race 11, 18, 19, 20, 21, 33, 58, 110, 153, 154, 172, 184, 192, 193 semiotic landscapes 2, 3, 4, 5, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 24, 43, 50, 91, 141, 142, 143, 146, 148, 155, 162, 183, 185, 186, 192, 193, 195, 196, 202, 203, 223, 227 sexuality 23, 92, 162, 172, 175 skinscapes 3, 15, 30, 91, 92, 94, 101, 102, 103, 104, 193, 223, 225, 226 South Africa 2, 11, 12, 13, 19, 20, 22, 49, 52, 63, 67, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 150, 155, 183, 184, 188, 189, 191, 194, 195, 197, 203, 224 souvenir 5, 202, 205, 208, 209, 211, 212, 224 Stoeka 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 225 subjectification 14, 21, 22, 23 tattoos 3, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 164, 224 trace 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 24, 30, 31, 42, 43, 50, 55, 58, 65, 111, 118, 119, 186, 224, 225, 213 trains 3, 72, 74, 75, 78, 80, 84, 99, 147 Zef 3, 91, 92, 94, 99, 100, 105