Introduction
Linguistic/semiotic landscapes (LSLs) is a burgeoning area of study within sociolinguistics, which investigates the semiosis, or meaning-making practices, of public spaces as ‘places’, and regards space, broadly construed, as a semiotic resource in its own right in sense-making by social actors and communities (Ben-Rafael, Shohamy, Amara, & Trumper-Hecht Reference Ben-Rafael, Shohamy, Amara; and Trumper-Hecht2006; Jaworski & Thurlow Reference Jaworski, Thurlow, Jaworski and Thurlow2010; Stroud, Peck, & Williams Reference Stroud, Peck and Williams2019). As testament to the vitality of LSL scholarship, scores of edited volumes (e.g. Shohamy & Gorter Reference Shohamy, Ben-Rafael and Gorter2008; Shohamy, Ben-Rafael, & Barni Reference Shohamy, Ben-Rafael and Barni2010; Jaworski & Thurlow Reference Jaworski, Thurlow, Jaworski and Thurlow2010; Peck, Stroud, & Williams Reference Peck, Stroud and Williams2019; Putz & Mundt Reference Putz and Mundt2019; Malinowski & Tufi Reference Malinowski and Tufi2020), themed journal issues (e.g. Gorter Reference Gorter2006; Ben-Rafael & Shohamy Reference Ben-Rafael and Shohamy2016; Blackwood Reference Blackwood2017; Milani Reference Milani2018; Thurlow & Gonçalves Reference Thurlow and Gonçalves2019; Gaiser & Matras Reference Gaiser and Matras2020; Jaworski & Li Wei Reference Jaworski and Wei2021), and a journal on Linguistic Landscape (Shohamy & Ben-Rafael Reference Shohamy and Ben-Rafael2015) have emerged within a span of two decades.
Given the historical development of the field, space/place compared to time/temporality have received singular prominence in LSL scholarship. Descriptors such as ‘geosemiotics’ or ‘place semiotics’ (Scollon & Scollon Reference Scollon and Scollon2003), ‘a spatially interested sociolinguistics’ (Karlander Reference Karlander2018), and ‘spatial repertoires’ (Malinowski & Tufi Reference Malinowski and Tufi2020), for instance, index the foregrounding (even if unintentional) of spatial semiosis in the field. Geographer Doreen Massey's (Reference Massey1994:249) observation a few decades ago that ‘“space” is very much on the agenda these days’ still largely characterises the LSL field today. In the foregrounding of spaces/places in LSL scholarship, a corresponding emphasis on temporalities vis-à-vis spatialities remains comparatively under-explored and under-theorised in the field as a whole. The spatial hegemony in LSL studies has tended towards time and temporalities being overlooked, implicit, and assumed, or accorded ancillary attention (see, however, Blommaert Reference Blommaert2013; Stroud et al. Reference Stroud, Peck and Williams2019).
Time, space, and semiosis
Theorists especially from literary studies, geography, and sociology have emphasised that time cannot be bracketed off from the study of place, and that the two are mutually implicated and entangled (e.g. Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981; Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre2004; Massey Reference Massey2005; Harvey Reference Harvey2009; Glennie & Thrift Reference Glennie and Thrift2009), hence, the terminological expressions like ‘time-space’ or ‘timespace’/‘spacetime’ to conceptually signal their interconnectedness. In the humanities and social sciences literature on temporalities and spatiotemporalities, consensus converges on a couple of points. First, like space (see Massey Reference Massey2005), the temporal and temporal-spatialities are multiple, heterogenous, and complex in at least three ways. (i) There is more to temporality beyond simply the categories of ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’, and their assumed linearity. Temporality is multifaceted and comprises a range of dimensions or expressions, and coexist and interact in multiply complex ways (Adam Reference Adam1995). Among temporal dimensions that have been identified include synchronisation, memory and memorialising, repetition, delay, opportunity, inevitability, anticipation, events, speed, ephemerality, frequency, duration and passage, timed access, scheduling, historicity, contemporaneity, and change (Adam Reference Adam1995; Moran Reference Moran2015). (ii) What time ‘does’ in each situation varies tremendously, and spaces and times are made to interact in a multiplicity of ways; so, we might ask what kinds of time are seen interacting with what kinds of space (Crang Reference Crang2012; Moran Reference Moran2015). (iii) Sense-making of time and temporality are plural and heterogeneous. For instance, people can make sense of the experience of multiple times simultaneously (Moran Reference Moran2015). Temporalities are also lived and experienced differently in different situations and by different persons and communities (Adam Reference Adam1995; Schwanen & Kwan Reference Schwanen and Kwan2012).
Second, time is conceptualised as a social construct. Like the re-thinking of space/place that goes beyond physical location, scholars have argued that temporality is not merely about ‘objective’ measures of time, but is fundamentally social, subjective, and interpretive. Moran (Reference Moran2015:289) puts it this way: ‘it is not the source of that which we recognise as temporal, but the sense made of it’. Temporality lends itself to empirical investigation in and through social events and practices, and is made manifest materially through cultural artefacts and embodied actions. The sociality of time varies according to the manner and purpose for which it is employed in human societies (Cheng Reference Cheng2017). One could also speak of practices as ‘making’ time, in that it is in the practices that we experience the sense of temporality (Shove, Pantzar, & Watson Reference Shove, Pantzar and Watson2012) and its movements, and different practices create and make use of different conceptualisations of time (Harvey Reference Harvey2009). At the same time, scholars refer to time as performative—it ‘does things’ (Moran Reference Moran2015), and has influence on social life, and concretises social relations (Poulantzas Reference Poulantzas1978) through human (inter)actions.
In LSL research, time and temporalities have occupied a curious space between invisibility and visibility. One might contend that surely temporalities are implied in any LSL study, even when not attended to overtly, for signs-in-place are necessarily contingent upon sociohistorical contexts. In this case, temporality is assumed as an ‘absent presence’ in the background, and subsumed by a focus on space/place. More recently, however, a growing body of LSL scholarship has made temporalities explicit and visible, albeit to varying extents, in the semioticisation of spaces. These studies may be categorised, broadly, in the following ways, with the caveat that the categories are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive. Bakhtin's (Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981) concept of the ‘chronotope’ has proven to be a productive lens through which various inherently linked configurations of time and space expressed in LSLs have been identified (e.g. Pietikainen Reference Pietikainen2014; Guissemo Reference Guissemo2019; Lyons & Karimzad Reference Lyons and Karimzad2019; Dong Reference Dong2021). Foucault's (Reference Foucault1986) notion of ‘heterotopia’ has also sparked explorations of various temporalities (such as ephemerality and simultaneity) juxtaposed alongside heterogeneous spaces (e.g. Lou Reference Lou2007; Milani & Levon Reference Milani and Levon2019; Anfinson Reference Anfinson2020). Relatedly, Foucault's (Reference Foucault1986) lesser explored temporal notions of ‘heterochronies’ and ‘slices in time’ (découpages du temps) have been taken up to document complex, nonlinear patterns of temporal layering of material and discursive spaces (Milani & Richardson Reference Milani and Richardson2022a). Semiotic practices of memorialisation as acts of collective remembering have been an important thematic in LSL research alsoFootnote 1 (e.g. Kohn & Rosenberg Reference Kohn and Rosenberg2013; Moore Reference Moore2019; Kosatica Reference Kosatica2021; see also Ben-Rafael & Shohamy's Reference Ben-Rafael and Shohamy2016 special issue on ‘Memory and memorialisation’). Another dimension of historicity that has been discussed in LSL studies is the experience of the diachronicity of signs in any given environment (e.g. Bakhaus Reference Bakhaus2005; Pavlenko & Mullen Reference Pavlenko and Mullen2015; Tufi Reference Tufi2022), or what has been termed as ‘chronoscapes’ (Baro Reference Baro2019). Relatedly, others have investigated stability, change, and mobility in the semiosis of places. For example, in spatial representations of urban sites, multiple semiotic aggregates may interact and overlap over periods of time to create historical layers of a ‘palimpsest’ (e.g. Shep Reference Shep2015; Bendl Reference Bendl, Blackwood and Macalister2019; Starks & Phan Reference Starks and Phan2019); or spaces are momentarily transformed by the appearance and disappearance of transient acts of semiosis (Hanauer Reference Hanauer, Hélot, Barni, Janssens and Bagna2012; Karlander Reference Karlander2018) or through the material-semiotic orchestration of complex temporalities (Mpendukana & Stroud Reference Mpendukana and Stroud2019).
The sampling of recent research augurs well for the study of time and temporality in LSL scholarship. Multiple approaches, dimensions, and relations of temporality in a variety of spaces have begun to surface. Yet, the degree of explicitness and emphasis in theoretically conceptualising the inseparability of temporalities vis-a-vis spatialities, and a sustained analytical focus on time, remains variable and uneven.Footnote 2 In the context of the wider field of LSL, the unevenness of approach renders time and temporality as an optional, subordinate, and separate dimension in the study of place-making practices. May & Thrift (2001) caution against slipping into a ‘space and time’ dualism even among scholars interested in both, where space is still accorded priority over time, and the latter becomes an additive dimension in the study of place. It is timely (pun intended), therefore, to centre time and its imbrication with space, and shift the focus explicitly on temporalized place-making in LSL scholarship.
Semiotic timescapes: The special issue
Coined by Adam (Reference Adam2008:1), timescape refers to the ‘complex and multiplex’ dimensions of time existing in an interdependent relationship with spatiality, materiality, and contextuality (encompassed by the term scape). Among the multi-faceted dimensions of time explored by Adam (Reference Adam2008) include time frame (e.g. a day, generations, historical periods), temporality (e.g. processual, (ir)reversibility, directionality), timing (e.g. synchronisation, coordination, and social, political, technological contexts for action), tempo (e.g. pace and intensity of activity established for whom and on what basis), duration (e.g. instantaneity, extent, temporal distance), sequence (e.g. simultaneity, succession in what order), and temporal modalities (e.g. individual and/or collective past, present and future, memory traces, futurities). While her ideas and categorisations remain pertinent and insightful, Adam's approach has been sometimes criticised for prioritising the temporal over the spatial (May & Thrift Reference May and Thrift2001).
The adaptation of the term semiotic timescapes in this issue is intended to serve as a heuristic concept, rather than to operationalise or advance Adam's particular framework. Semiotic timescapes seek to take semiotic practices of time and temporality seriously in LSL scholarship, while upholding the interconnected and interdependent relationship between time and space. In relation to the latter, I agree with Malpas (Reference Malpas1999) that ‘there is no temporality which does not bring spatiality along with it, and no spatiality that does not bring temporality also’ (cited in Stroud et. al Reference Stroud, Peck and Williams2019:1), and highlight the role of semiosis in this process of mutual entanglement. The intertwining of time, space, and semiosis demands reflecting on the way we approach our subject matter ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically, that is, how we may know our subject matter and how we study it (cf. Adam Reference Adam1995, Reference Adam2008). The special issue embarks in this direction. Key points pertinent to the collection, as a whole, are first outlined, followed by a summary of individual articles.
Overview of the special issue
Several key points underpin and lend coherence to this special issue on semiotic timescapes. First, all of the articles seek to highlight time and temporalities, and their connections ineluctably with spaces and places, as important aspects of understanding social realities. The objects of analyses covered in the special issue are varied and wide-ranging from museum exhibits in Denmark (Maegaard & Mortensen), street art and mediated dance performance at a heritage site in Brazil (Borba, Fabrício, & Lima), protective shields used during political unrest in Venezeula (Velásquez Urribarrí), real estate advertisement hoardings for private housing in Singapore (Lazar), to discursive waste management and recycling in Switzerland (Thurlow, Pellanda, & Wohlgemuth). Whereas previous studies of similar objects of analyses have been largely spatiocentric, the present set of articles centres diverse ways of understanding time and its connectedness with space in the meaning-making practices of everyday situations. In dealing with temporal-spatial meaning-making practices that constitute and/or challenge social realities, the subject matter of the articles invariably impinges upon issues of power and dominance, regulation, privilege and/or resistance, in varying extents and explicitness. Timing and placing of events and practices, as critical scholars have emphasised, often reveal mechanisms of power and social, material, and experiential inequalities (Crang Reference Crang2012; Bastian, Baraitser, Flexer, Hom, & Salisbury Reference Bastian, Baraitser, Flexer;, Hom; and Salisbury2020). Referring to the ‘social life of time’, Bastian & colleagues (2020:293) observe that, ‘Where we find politics, in all its varied forms, we are likely to find time and temporality doing important conceptual and practical work in the service of governance and contestation’. This is borne out in the present collection as the topics variously grapple with responses to lingering colonial legacies in Denmark and Brazil respectively, violent protests in Venezuela, racial-class privilege in Singapore, and banal waste regulation in Switzerland. Temporalisations in and of spaces not only structure particular sociopolitical relations, but as Crang (Reference Crang2012:2119) suggests, power also gets ‘etched into the kinds of times and spaces that organise events and through which events unfold’. In a similar vein, Lazar (in this issue) explores the particular way social privilege gets chronotopically ‘etched’ on condominium hoardings.
Second, in efforts to avoid treating time and space as ontologically separate, social scientists, generally, have opted to conceptualise their relationship in the form of conjunctions (e.g. time-space) or imbrications (e.g. timespace), and order them in different ways (timespace or spacetime) to highlight temporalisations of space or spatialisations of time. For our purposes, all of these articulate ways of theorising the interdependence of these dimensions and allow differing points of entry as well as enable possibilities for shifting the relative focus within a given project, without overlooking their boundedness in researching any and all social, semiotic, and material practices and events. While these conceptual linkages are useful and necessary, one needs to be cognisant of a ‘chaotic’ assemblage that actually belies them, for the terms ‘space’ and ‘time’ encompass many different senses and interact in a multitude of ways (Crang Reference Crang2012). The articles in this issue evidence the ‘complex and multiplex’ (Adam Reference Adam2008) relationships of time, space, and semiotic practices at work in their selected case studies. Three of the articles (Thurlow et al., Lazar, and Borba et al.) engage with the notion of chronotopes as conceptual anchors in their respective studies. Although Bakhtin's chronotope (literally, timespace) was originally coined as an analytic device to identify and explain how literary genres work, its conceptual richness in theorising ‘the inseparability of space and time’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin and Holquist1981:84) in textual forms and meanings has inspired scholarship in linguistic anthropology, discourse studies, sociolinguistics, and LSL research. De Fina & Perrino (Reference De Fina and Perrino2019:67) note that the notion of chronotope has illuminated ‘understandings of reality and [participants’] relations within different discursive and semiotic practices’. The LSL studies in this issue advance this research trajectory in various ways. Thurlow & colleagues follow Crang's (Reference Crang, May and Thrift2001) understanding of chronotope as a ‘temporalised place’ comprising multiple temporalities inhabiting a concrete place, in order to show how the placing and timing of ‘stuff’ work simultaneously to produce it as (urban) waste. Lazar explores the notion of privilege through a chronotopic lens at two levels: the temporal-spatial artwork on condominium hoardings and the temporariness of the hoardings which allow for the visibility-yet-elusiveness of the particular workings of privilege. Borba & colleagues disrupt a ‘linear Eurocentric chronotope’ to show the mobilisation of a ‘necrotope’ (a spacetime of death during the Atlantic slave trade) and visceral resistance to the necrotope through emergence of a timespace at the crossroads of colonial power. Although the notion of chronotopes informs three of the articles conceptually, it is important to note that chronotopes are not the only conceptual anchor for investigating semiotic timescapes. As a heuristic, semiotic timescapes encompass heterogeneous ways to theoretically approach time. Maegaard & Mortensen's study, inspired by the works of time scholars Adam (Reference Adam1995) and Moran (Reference Moran2015), demonstrates how complex relations of past and present are constructed in the Danish National Museum, resulting in temporal ambiguity in the museum exhibitions, such that the latter avoid offering a conclusive understanding of the Danish colonial period. In Velásquez Urribarrí's study, Scollon's (Reference Scollon, Bhatia, Flowerdew and Jones2008) idea of ‘discourse itinerary’ is employed as a conceptual anchor for tracing transformative historical pathways in a semiotic artefact's itinerary to understand aspects of its emergence, circulation, and usage over different periods of time.
Third, methodologically, the study of semiotic timescapes is varied. Three methods are outlined in this special issue. (Visual) ethnography, conventionally employed in LSL research remains a significant method for documenting evolving and rhythmic movements in timescapes (see Borba et al. and Thurlow et al.). Borba & colleagues and Thurlow & colleagues’ ethnographic studies, moreover, highlight the importance of attending to the semiosis of historical traces and remnants of stories and experiences that might have been overlooked or suppressed, yet nonetheless hover over people's senses of space and place (see also Bock & Stroud Reference Bock and Stroud2019). Data mining from online archival sources has proven a useful way to document semiotic artefacts that are materially transient and bygone, but continue to exist virtually. Sourcing for photographs of protective shields used in past Venezuelan protests from public Instagram accounts, in fact, offered Velásquez Urribarrí the advantage of researching these artefacts virtually from a temporal and spatial distance, instead of having to be present in situ at the unfolding of the event. Close semiotic analysis of temporal-spatial representations of cultural artefacts is yet another method employed in timescape research (see Maegaard & Mortensen, and Lazar).
Regardless of methodology, the studies refuse to be limited by the linguistic aspects of their objects of analyses, without refusing the relevance of language in the overall constitution of the objects. Language is analysed, variously, in terms of presence of bilingual codes and scripts, and their chronotopic implications on advertising hoardings (Lazar), removal of words motivated by current verbal hygiene efforts and voicing in storytelling accounts of the past in museum exhibits (Maegaard & Mortensen), and a combination of overt discourses and implicit stories from the past that construct waste (Thurlow et al.). Multimodality, however, is a central analytical approach in the timescape studies in this issue. The multimodal character is evident in the analyses of visual images and symbolisms, sounds, videos, and embodied dance movements, besides language. Multimodal semiosis is often paired with the materiality of artefacts investigated and their emplacement in particular times and spaces. In this sense, a semiotic-materiality or a material semiotics is a feature that characterises the studies in this issue.
Fourth, in proposing time as an important analytical focus, it is worth highlighting that the assumptions and implications of the temporal-spatial dynamics revealed in the set of articles have wider global significance, in which the local temporal-spatial practices of the cases studied are embedded. In this regard, it is useful to consider the ‘semiotic timescape’ heuristic in relation to Appadurai's (Reference Appadurai1990:296) theorisation of global cultural flows, understood as ‘a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order’, which defies simple binaristic models. Appadurai proposed a set of ‘(land)scapes’, which serves as the basis for formulating the conditions under which current global flows occur, giving shape to larger ‘imagined worlds’, that is, ‘multiple worlds constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups around the globe’ (1990:297). To the list of ‘scapes’ identified by Appadurai (viz. ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes), we could add ‘semiotic timescapes’ as connected to larger dynamics of temporal-spatial meaning-making in global or transnational cultural flows. Here, I highlight a few of the larger connecting dynamics arising from the articles. Although not the specific focus of their present study, Thurlow & colleagues allude to ‘running out of time’ in relation to global environmental consequences of waste. Maegaard & Mortensen's case ‘speaks’ more generally to the role of national museums in constructions of central ideologies of nationalism, and especially how colonising nations come to understand themselves and their former colonies through memorialisation practices. Borba & colleagues’ study contribute to wider discourses of decolonisation, in dismantling teleological notions of time espoused by White modernity, and offering rival epistemologies of temporality ‘outside and against’ the dominance of racialized colonial conceptualisations. Velásquez Urribarrí's timescape example, in fact, intersects with Appadurai's notion of ‘mediascapes’, where she describes how images of successful use of shields as protective devices in other protest movements globally became viral, and influenced the itinerary of shields in the Venezuelan protests. In turn, the itinerary in the latter case has since continued in shields used in other parts of the world, owing to global media circulation. Lazar, in her study, identified a neo-traditional aesthetic, emergent from the blending of chronotopes of traditionalism and modernity in local advertisement representations—an aesthetic which resonates among the urban upper-middle class in Asia, more widely (see Bunnell, Goh, & Ng Reference Bunnel, Goh, Ng and Padawangi2018).
Summaries of individual articles
Jessica Velásquez Urribarrí documents the conditions of emergence and transformation of protective shields over time in situations of political unrest. Adopting Scollon's (Reference Scollon, Bhatia, Flowerdew and Jones2008) concept of ‘discourse itineraries’, she examines the transformative paths in the use of the said material-semiotic artefact in Venezuela when it first emerged in anti-government demonstrations in 2014, and again in a different protest cycle in 2017, against its wider use in historical and global spatiotemporalities. The author shows the evolution in the materiality of shields in Venezuela from improvised, repurposed objects to specifically purpose-built artefacts, as well as changes in the sociopolitical and religious symbolic meanings that accrued to the shields over time. Surfaced in this article, also, are methodological issues for LSL time studies regarding the delimitation of adequate historical surveys, and documentation of semiotic artefacts that either cease to exist or change over time.
The next two articles are concerned with temporal-spatialities of memorialisation and coloniality. Marie Maegaard & Kristine Kohler Mortensen show how the Danish National Museum reformulates the historical relationship between Greenland and Denmark in ways that avoid the colonizer's language, yet construct complex relations of past and present, resulting in a temporal ambiguity in the museum exhibitions. At the same time, they show how the presence and absence of colonial language in public space is inscribed into temporal frames legitimizing or problematizing their status. Their study offers an account of how the collective memory of the Danish nation is sought to be changed as the museum attempts to remove the monochrome authoritative voice from the telling of history and replace it with a plurality of voices and perspectives. Furthermore, the location of the colonial exhibition in a particular historical building erected on colonial wealth brings different times and different perceptions of colonialism into dialogue, again adding to the plurality of voices articulating different times and stances in relation to colonialism. The study shows how in the museum time is constructed not simply as past-present-future, but as complex and multi-faceted.
Rodrigo Borba, Branca Fabrício, & Fátima Lima's study is based on Pedra do Sal (‘Rock of Salt’) in Little Africa, near the port of Rio de Janeiro, which has become an epicenter for Afro-Brazilian culture and, notably, memorialization conflicts surrounding the Atlantic slave trade in that area. The authors explore the phantasmagoric nature of meanings at the site as an outgrowth of the ways colonial histories haunt everyday experiences in former colonies. Analytically, investigating the colonial histories that undergird signs, as Borba & colleagues argue, require attending both to their semiotic materiality as well as to the immaterial dimensions that anchor possible meanings. Drawing on the work of Gordon (Reference Gordon2008), they approach the LSL of Pedra do Sal as an expression of ‘ghostly matters’ in the sense of listening to the murmurs of stories that, having been forgotten or lost, keep manifesting as spectral memories in the present. This posture requires acute attention to nonlinear relations across and between times, different paces and durations of time, and to how history materializes in multiple apparitions. The authors examine multiple layers of temporal-spatial indexicalities with a view to inspecting both the present materiality of the sign in the LSL and the ‘ghostly’ dimensions that (in)form its temporal emplacement but are nevertheless immaterial.
Crispin Thurlow, Alessandro Pellanda, & Laura Wohlgemuth build on existing scholarship that has focused either on spatialities or temporalities of waste, by wanting to show how the placing and timing of materials work simultaneously to produce them as waste. The authors approach their study through the idea of ‘discursive chronotopes’ of waste, notably, how language mediates and frames the temporal-spatialities of domestic waste in the contexts of garbage collection and thrift store merchandising in Swiss cities. Three kinds of discursive chronotopes concerned with regulation, repression, and (re)valuation are identified in these situations, in which the authors demonstrate how waste is simultaneously ‘liminal’ and ‘laminated’ by a variety of spaces (e.g. inside/outside, private/public, micro/macro) and times (past/present, old/new, long-term/short-term). By approaching waste through a time-space lens, Thurlow & colleagues advocate for the study of ‘linguistic hauntings’ in LSL studies, by which they mean attending to language use that is not always visible or expressed, yet is no less significant.
Using a temporal-spatial lens, Lazar explores the particular way racialized ‘Chinese’ privilege is performed on advertisement hoardings for a condominium development in a multiracial neighbourhood in Singapore. She investigates ‘chronotopes of privilege’ on the artwork depicted on the hoardings as well as the temporariness of the hoardings emplaced proximally to the site while it is being built. The depictions on the hoardings reveal a complex assemblage of multiple timespaces, referred to as a chronotopic bricolage. This comprises a fusion of two overarching chronotopes, a ‘traditional racial-cultural chronotope’ and a ‘modern cosmopolitan chronotope’, into which are folded further multiplicities and complexities of times and spaces. Lazar argues that through this bricolagic chronotopicity, a ‘neo-traditional’ aesthetic is constructed for prospective upper-middle class Chinese Singaporean residents. The visible representability of a type of ‘Chineseness’ on the hoardings, however, is transient, which Lazar argues is a necessary characteristic for securing ‘immunity’ of racialized privilege—a contentious topic—in Singapore.
Conclusion and continuations
The articles in this issue attempt to foreground the centrality of time and its interweaving and interdependence on space/place as important dimensions for understanding social realities, via their entanglement with linguistic/semiotic and material practices. The studies surface a plurality of temporalities and timescales such as memorialisation of historical pasts; coloniality and decoloniality; transformation and change; interrelations of tradition and modernity; periodicity, rhythmicity, and cyclicity of time; complementarity and clashing of times; permeabilities of pasts in presents and futures; and durational appearances and disappearances of semiotic artefacts in spaces. The spaces in/on which the temporalities materialise are physically manifest (e.g. heritage sites, museum exhibitions, commercial hoardings, protest shields, designated street spaces, and thrift stores). However, it is also more complex and multiplex than that. Hoardings and museum exhibitions stand in relation to built environments, onsite activities are connected to discourses in digital online spaces, and an intertwining of inside/outside, private/public, and local/global spaces are evident. Times and spaces play a part in structuring power relations of various sorts, which include the dynamics of racial oppression and counter-movements of resilience, state repression and defiance of protestors, authoritative regulation of ‘good’ citizenry, colonial sense-making, and normalisation of racialised-class privilege. At the same time, the articles manifest the construal of a range of social identities (e.g. authoritative, commercialised, and contestative) for individuals and communities based on nationhood, coloniality, ‘race’, class, and to some extent gender and sexuality.
The objective of Semiotic timescapes is to contribute to, and extend further, LSL scholarship such that time/temporalities and place/spatialities are regarded seriously as coeval and inextricably bound up dimensions in the study of any and all LSLs. The special issue is not intended to be comprehensive nor conclusive in the kinds of issues raised, however. Instead, the aim is to instigate further dialogue, discussion, and research projects on timespaces as they are entangled with semiosis, materialities, embodiments, politics, and identities of social actors, communities, and ‘imagined worlds’. In that spirit, in bringing the introduction to a close, I leave with a number of open-ended questions, most of which emerge, in part, from the articles in the special issue, to serve as departure points for reflection and future LSL research: How from the perspective of time do meanings of spaces and places evolve, take shape, or get reconstituted? How from the perspective of space and place do temporalities become manifest? What various dimensions of temporalities intersect with dimensions of spatialities, semiotically and materially, in our LSLs? What types of temporalities (e.g. historicities) are foregrounded or backgrounded by social actors and for what purposes (e.g. commercial, religious, political, cultural)? What sorts of politics accrue to what sorts of timescales and timeframes and their circulation in places? What are the social and political implications in the mobilisation of different forms of temporality and spacetimes, and semiotic acts and meanings which in fact ‘exceed’ times and spaces (e.g. ‘out-of-placeness’, ‘timelessness’, extratemporalities, eternity)? What are various temporal-spatialities and their associative social meanings (e.g. modernity, cosmopolitanism, globalisation, traditional heritage, cultural authenticity, preservation or reclamation of histories, nostalgia, protest and defiance) in activating particular ideological effects and affects? How do multiple spacetimes interact in LSLs (synchronically, diachronically, hierarchically, convergently, chaotically)? How do people experience places temporally and time spatially? How do people make sense of movements of time in/through space? What sorts of metaphors are productive for conceptualising the multiplex assemblages of timescapes in LSLs (e.g. temporal lamination, temporal crossroads, discursive itineraries, bricolagic chronotopicity, layering, palimpsest)? How do we grasp the semiosis of absent-presences and their lingering significance on LSLs? What methodological challenges arise, and what kinds of methodological tools are needed for apprehending and documenting different kinds and spans of time in LSLs? How can temporal-spatialities inform our social-theoretical concepts of power, privilege, exclusions, inequalities, and identities?
