This edited volume takes people in place as a central concern in linguistic landscapes studies (LLS). It is organized in three thematic sections, which reflects a temporal complexity: Part 1, ‘Living the past in the present’; Part 2, ‘Alternative places, alternative people’; and Part 3, ‘Imagining futures, imagining selves’. Drawing upon the typological triangle—the subjective, the intersubjective, and the object (20)—the book links linguistic landscapes with identity, community, and their embodiments and materiality across time and place.
The first section deals with the layered historicalities in contemporary linguistic landscapes. By what they refer to as ‘zombie landscape’, Zannie Bock & Christopher Stroud's chapter highlights how the conceptual landscape of the apartheid past in South Africa gets internalized and embodied in individuals’ everyday subjectivity. Also looking at this layered regime, Manuel Guissemo analyzes public artefacts and inscriptions in Maputo through the lens of intertextualities and emphasizes the indexical value of LL pointing to history. Turning to a middle-class market in Johannesburg, Gilles Baro indicates that a gentrified urban experience is authenticated by visual and discursive representation of a selected past. Moving from sedentary to mobile semiotic landscapes, David Karlander examines train graffiti in Stockholm and argues that mobility is a multifarious interplay of absence and presence, breaks and continuities.
The second part concerns how people live in commonality when developing and negotiating their sense of relatedness through linguistic landscapes. Amiena Peck & Quentin Williams approach the gangster-style tattoo of a hip-hop star (‘corporeal LL’) as a result of cultural appropriation that causes the loss of its transgressive values and a frication of interconnectedness across difference. Diverging from multimodal analysis, Robert Blackwood investigates the written Guadeloupean creole presented in public space within different domains of activity and explores how it contributes to a new collective identity of community and of place. Moving to the linguistic landscape of a Corsican university campus, William Amos stratifies different levels of authorship in the linguistic composition of space and highlights the complexity of the presentation and maintenance of institutional identity. Finally, through a mobile ethnography on street art in Bushwick, New York, Kellie Gonçalves concludes that in the context of gentrification, street art serves to commodify a sense of place.
The theme of the third section shifts to the employment of linguistic landscapes in order to, in the editors’ own words, ‘(re)construct relationships to others and imagine new (more ethnical) futures’ (24). Through an examination of the affective discourse materialized in the semiotic actions in a Brazilian political crisis, Rodrigo Borba shows how individuals interact and react semiotically to disrupt the ‘injured’ social orders and reclaim place. With the same concern for materiality, Sibonile Mpendukana & Christopher Stroud's study looks at the material semiotics of ‘shackville’ as a temporal index to point out the role played by linguistic landscapes in making the politics of place visible and audible. Similarly, in his ethnographic study in West Africa, Kasper Juffermans includes the semiotic arrangement of private and semipublic environments (‘micro-landscapes’) into the scope of LLS and highlights the importance of material in indexing aspired global mobility.
Comprising eleven studies in varied locations, particularly in the global South, the book provides rich theoretical insights into the agentive power of linguistic landscapes in people's practices of ‘memory, imagination, aspiration, resistance and desire’ (David Malinowski, p. 265). With a diverse representation of data and approaches, the collection makes a timely contribution to LLS by demonstrating its potential in making sense of people and place in a superdiverse world.
