Making Sense of People and Place in Linguistic Landscapes

Amiena Peck, Christopher Stroud, Quentin Williams, Amiena Peck, Christopher Stroud, Quentin Williams

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350038004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Soziolinguistik

This volume offers comprehensive analyses of how we live continuously in a multiplicity and simultaneity of 'places'. It explores what it means to be in place, the variety of ways in which meanings of place are made and how relationships to others are mediated through the linguistic and material semiotics of place. Drawing on examples of linguistic landscapes (LL) over the world, such as gentrified landscapes in Johannesburg and Brunswick, Mozambican memorializations, volatile train graffiti in Stockholm, Brazilian protest marches, Guadeloupian Creole signs, microscapes of souvenirs in Guinea-Bissau and old landscapes of apartheid in South Africa in contemporary time, this book explores how we are what we are through how we are emplaced. Across these examples, world-leading contributors explore how LLs contribute to the (re)imagining of different selves in the living past (living the past in the present), alternative presents and imagined futures. It focuses particularly on how the LL in all of these mediations is read through emotionality and affect, creating senses of belonging, precarity and hope across a simultaneous multiplicity of worlds. The volume offers a reframing of linguistics landscape research in a geohumanities framework emphasizing negotiations of self in place in LL studies, building upon a rich body of LL research. With over 40 illustrations, it covers various methodological and epistemological issues, such as the need for extended temporal engagement with landscapes, a mobile approach to landscapes and how bodies engage with texts.

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, 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).

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

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 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 ‘nation-state’ 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 post-modernity. 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 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 stance-subjectivity. 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 post-humanist 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

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 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 memo...