Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T21:05:47.008Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Living memories of the changing same’: Rio's linguistic landscape at the crossroads of time and race

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2022

Rodrigo Borba Open the ORCID record for Rodrigo Borba [Opens in a new window] ,
Branca Falabella Fabrício Open the ORCID record for Branca Falabella Fabrício [Opens in a new window]  and
Fátima Lima Open the ORCID record for Fátima Lima [Opens in a new window]
Rodrigo Borba*
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Branca Falabella Fabrício*
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Fátima Lima*
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
*
Address for correspondence: Rodrigo Borba Av. Oswaldo Cruz, 101, apto 1002 Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil CEP 22250-060 [email protected] Branca Falabella Fabrício [email protected] Fátima Lima [email protected]
Address for correspondence: Rodrigo Borba Av. Oswaldo Cruz, 101, apto 1002 Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil CEP 22250-060 [email protected] Branca Falabella Fabrício [email protected] Fátima Lima [email protected]
Address for correspondence: Rodrigo Borba Av. Oswaldo Cruz, 101, apto 1002 Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil CEP 22250-060 [email protected] Branca Falabella Fabrício [email protected] Fátima Lima [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article questions the time of white modernity based on historical periodization and sequential progression, arguing for a more multifaceted approach to time and space in linguistic landscapes (LL). It rethinks the concept of chronotope by examining effects of the African diaspora in Brazil. The experience of radical uprooting it promoted fuses spatiotemporal dimensions that operate in complementary directions. On the one hand, a necrotope sets forth submission and destruction. On the other, visceral resistance to obliteration emerges when the timespace of encruzilhadas ‘crossroads’ is produced in the cracks of colonial power. The LL at Pedra do Sal in Rio de Janeiro suggests that approaching timespace from this perspective captures the juxtaposition of stasis and mobility, oppression and resistance, loss and life, past and present. We argue that thinking of time outside and against the Euro-chronometer requires decolonial epistemologies that have the potential to disrupt racist chronologies. (Chronotope, linguistic landscapes, African diaspora, temporality, race, Rio de Janeiro)*

Type
Article
Information
Language in Society , Volume 51 , Special Issue 5: Semiotic Timescapes , November 2022 , pp. 797 - 818
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

We are grateful for the insightful suggestions made by the two anonymous reviewers and the comments made by Jaspal Singh and Mie Hiramoto on previous versions of this article. We also thank Michelle Lazar for guiding us so graciously through the process of writing and publication. Any remaining errors are our own.

References

Araujo, Ana Lucia (2020). Ghosts of slavery. International Review of Social History 65(28):225–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Backhaus, Peter (2006). Linguistic landscape: A comparative study of urban multilingualism in Tokyo. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981). The dialogic imagination. Ed. by Holquist, Michael. Trans. by Emerson, Caryl & Holquist, Michael. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bastian, Michelle; Baraitsen, Lisa; Flexer;, Michael J. Hom;, Andrew R. & Salisbury, Laura (2020). Introduction: The social life of time. Time & Society 29(2):289–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ben-Rafael, Eliezer, & Shohamy, Elana (eds.) (2016). Memory and memorialization. Special issue of Linguistic Landscape 2(3).Google Scholar
Blackwood, Robert; & Macalister, John (eds.) (2020). Multilingual memories: Monuments, museums and the linguistic landscape. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan (2013). Ethnography, superdiversity and linguistic landscapes: Chronicles of complexity. London: Multilingual Matters.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borba, Rodrigo (2019). Injurious signs: The geopolitics of hate and hope in the linguistic landscape of a political crisis. In Peck, Amiena, Stroud, Christopher, & Williams, Quentin (eds.), Making sense of people and place in linguistic landscapes, 161–81. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Borba, Rodrigo, & Milani, Tommaso M. (2019). Colonial intertexts: Discourses, bodies, and stranger fetishism in Brazilian media. Discourse, Context & Media 30:100290.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bundl, Christian (2020). Appropriation and re-appropriation: The memorial as a palimpsest. In Blackwood & Macalister, 263–84.Google Scholar
Carvalho, Aline da Silva Azevedo (2020). Trajetórias textuais do assassinato de Claudia Silva Ferreira: Entre necrótopos e cartografias de reexistência. Rio de Janeiro: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
de Barboza, Rafael, & Borba, Rodrigo (2018). Linguistic landscapes as pornoheterotopias: (De)regulating gender and sexuality in the public toilet. Linguistic Landscape 4(3):257–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deumert, Ana (2022). The sound of absence-presence: Towards formulating a sociolinguistics of the spectre. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 45(2)135–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evaristo, Conceição (2003). Ponciá Vicêncio. Rio de Janeiro: Pallas.Google Scholar
Fabrício, Branca, & Borba, Rodrigo (2020). Remembering in order to forget: Scaled memories of slavery in the linguistic landscape of Rio de Janeiro. In Blackwood & Macalister, 187–212.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double-consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Avery (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Guissemo, Manuel (2019). Orders of (in)visibility: Colonial and postcolonial chronotopes in the linguistic landscapes of memorization in Maputo. In Peck, Amiena, Stroud, Christopher, & Williams, Quentin (eds.), Making sense of people and place in linguistic landscape, 29–48. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Karlander, David (2019). A semiotics of nonexistence? Erasure and erased writing under anti-graffiti regimes. Linguistic Landscape 5(2):198–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kilomba, Grada (2008). Plantation memories: Episodes of everyday racism. 2nd edn. Munster: UNRAST.Google Scholar
Kroon, Sjaak (2021). Language policy in public space: A historical perspective on Asmara's linguistic landscape. Journal of Eastern African Studies 15(2):274–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Landry, Rodrigue, & Bourhis, Richard Y. (1997). Linguistic landscape and ethnolinguistic vitality: An empirical study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16:23–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lanza, Elizabeth, & Woldemariam, Hirut (2014). Indexing modernity: English and branding in the linguistic landscape of Addis Ababa. International Journal of Bilingualism 18(5):491–506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, Jerry Won, & Lou, Jackie Jia (2019). The ordinary semiotic landscape of an unordinary place: Spatiotemporal disjunctures in Incheon's Chinatown. International Journal of Multilingualism 16(2):187–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lima, Fátima (2021). Um ebó artístico-epistêmico: Desobediências poéticas em Grada Kilomba. Espaço Acadêmico XX(226):42–54.Google Scholar
Martins, Leda Maria (2002). Performances do tempo espiralar. In Ravetti, Graciela & Arbex, Márcia (eds.), Perfomance, exílio, fronteira, 69–91. Belo Horizonte: UFMG.Google Scholar
Martins, Leda Maria (2003). Performances da oralitura: Corpo, lugar da memória. Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras UFSM 26:63–81.Google Scholar
Mbembe, Achille (2019). Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Mbembe, Achille (2020). Poder vital, resistência visceral. São Paulo: N-1 edições.Google Scholar
Milani, Tommaso (2015). Sexual cityzenship: Discourses, spaces and bodies at Joburg pride 2012. Journal of Language and Politics 14(3):431–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Milani, Tommaso, & Levon, Erez (2016). Sexing diversity: Linguistic landscapes of homonationalism. Language and Communication 51:69–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mills, Charles W. (2020). The chronopolitics of racial time. Time & Society 29(2):297–317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moran, Chuck (2013). Time as a social practice. Time & Society 24(3):283–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pavlenko, Aneta, & Mullen, Alex (2015). Why diachronicity matters in the study of linguistic landscapes. Linguistic Landscapes 1(1–2):114–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peck, Amiena, & Stroud, Christopher (2015). Skinscapes. Linguistic Landscape 1(1–2):133–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pennycook, Alastair, & Makoni, Sinfree (2019). Applied linguistics from the Global South. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pennycook, Alastair, & Makoni, Sinfree, & Otsuji, Emi (2015). Making scents of the landscape. Linguistic Landscape 1(3):191–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prigogine, Ilya, & Stengers, Isabelle (1984). Order out of chaos: Man's new dialogue with nature. New York: Bantam Books.Google Scholar
Rosa, Jonathan (2021). Haunting signs: Communicative overdetermination and the coloniality of sociolinguistic empiricism. Paper presented at Sociolinguistic Symposium 23. Hong Kong, China.Google Scholar
Sarr, Felwine (2019). Afrotopia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Silva, Denise Ferreira (2019). A dívida impagável. Rio de Janeiro: Casa do Povo.Google Scholar
Singh, Jaspal (2021). Forward global south. Gender and Language 15(2):207–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Starks, Donna, & Pham, Nhan (2021). An exploration of stasis and change: A park in the Old Quarter Hanoi as a palimpsest. Social Semiotics 31(4):550–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stroud, Christopher; Peck, Amiena; & Williams, Quentin (2019). Visceral landscapes (the inside story). Sociolinguistic Studies 13(1):7–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tufi, Stefania (2020a). Instances of emplaced memory: The case of Alguero/L'Alguer. In Blackwood & Macalister, 237–61.Google Scholar
Tufi, Stefania (2020b). Situated spatialities and the linguistic landscape: A diachronic account of an emblematic square in Naples. Social Semiotics 32(2):240–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wee, Lionel (2016). Situating affect in the linguistic landscape. Linguistic Landscape 2(2):105–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whitehead, Anne Martine (2017). Expressing life through loss: On queens that fall with a freak technique. In Croft, Clare (ed.), Queer dance: Meanings and makings, 281–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar