This is a collection of studies on monuments, museums, and linguistic landscapes in linguistically and geographically diverse locations, which include New Zealand (chapter 1), Zambia (chapter 4), and Brazil (chapter 8). The central question raised is ‘to what extent multilingualism legitimizes memory and memorialization’ (1). The studies included in the volume explore a variety of themes using different (mostly qualitative) methodologies and are organized into three parts.
In Part 1, ‘Monuments’, John Macalister (chapter 1) studies two monuments in Wellington and interprets the usage of Māori at the contemporary Pukeahu war memorial as contrasted with the 1931 Cenotaph, as a way of constructing New Zealand's bilingual and bicultural national identity. Patricia Lamarre (chapter 2) discusses the history and treatment of Montreal's ‘Black Rock’, a monument for Irish immigrants who died of typhus in the mid-nineteenth century, attempting to uncover an ideological shift from anglophone to multilingual memorialization discourse. Dawn Marley (chapter 3) interprets the symbolic usage of Arabic on six monuments commemorating the French-Moroccan relationship as an attempt to include North African immigrants in the French collective memory.
In Part 2, ‘Museums’, Hambaba Jimaima & Felix Banda (chapter 4) study the minimal presence of local languages relative to English on signs at the Livingstone Museum in Zambia as an indicator of long-standing colonial structures which downscale local multilingual history. Robert Blackwood & James Costa (chapter 5) view the mere referential use of Modern Scots at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum as reinforcing stereotypes that Scots is old-fashioned and not a full-fledged language. Rebecca Todd Garvin & Yasushi Onodera (chapter 6) interpret Japanese and English signage on monuments at the Japanese American Relocation Memorial in Rohwer, Arkansas, as a representation of internees’ bicultural identity, despite competing narratives of internment and war. Maida Kosatica (chapter 7) reads the unconventional set-up and the inclusion of autobiographical stories at the Sarajevo War Childhood Museum as a strong antiwar message by avoiding a narrative that focuses on the perpetrator.
In Part 3, ‘Memories’, Branca Falabella Fabrício & Rodrigo Borba (chapter 8) analyze the Valongo Wharf in Rio de Janeiro as a eurocentric monument that euphemizes Brazil's colonial period, while other historical sites critically portray the district's historical involvement in slavery. John Macalister & Teresa Ong (chapter 9) examine the iron rod sculptures displayed at different locations throughout Georgetown, Malaysia, as humoristic attempts to remind both tourists and locals of the city's multilingual past and to invoke feelings of national unity. Stefania Tufi (chapter 10) shows the importance of local institutions advocating for representation of Italian and Alguerese and the exclusion of Sardinian, a competing minority language, on street signs in Alghero, Sardinia. Christian Bendl (chapter 11) reads the Viennese Heldenplatz as a spatial palimpsest, emphasizing that the public events and usage of this space represent Austria's ever-changing political discourses, ideologies, and identities.
The volume provides a good picture of the methods used in memory studies, particularly from the perspective of linguistic landscapes (especially chapters 1, 4, and 10), but multilingualism is often more a circumstantial factor than an object of study in itself. For example, the object of study in chapter 2 is monolingual in nature, chapter 7 does not look at the original Bosnian texts and exclusively relies on English translations, chapter 8 focuses on the absence of African languages in Brazil, and the linguistic landscape in chapter 11 shows only one Latin phrase in a predominately German scenery. Therefore, the interest that this book will generate in scholars researching multilingualism from a (socio)linguistic perspective is likely to be limited.
