Further advances in Linguistic Landscape research: Language and identity-work in public space

Abstract

Negotiating and Contesting Identities in Linguistic Landscapes is a collected volume featuring selected papers presented at the 4th Linguistic Landscapes (LL) Workshop which was held in Addis Ababa (November 2012). Brewed during a time of rapid changes in LL research, in the aftermath of landmark publications inaugurating a wider semiotic and ethnographic turn in LL research (see, e.g., Shohamy & Gorter, 2009; Shohamy, Ben-Rafael & Barni 2010; Jaworski & Thurlow 2010; Blommaert 2013, 2015; Blommaert & Maly 2014; Blommaert & De Fina 2015, to name just a few) and the launching of Linguistic Landscapes: An International Journal in 2015 (see esp. Shohamy & Ben-Rafael 2015; Shohamy 2015), it invites interested readers to engage with a whole new range of concepts, methodological innovations, and priorities, while critically revisiting previous findings. Incidentally, anyone who attended the 10th LL Symposium, appropriately subtitled X-Scapes and held in Bern in May 2018, will understand that the work in the present volume, albeit initiated earlier, has set the tone for the surprising variety of approaches and areas of investigation which were the trademark of X-Scapes. The book is organized in five parts –featuring three papers each— which are the major axes this review shall examine. Although the choice of having a bare minimum of papers in each part of the volume may compartmentalize research, it has an obvious advantage: it suggests (from the very table of contents) that LL is by now a radically interdisciplinary and multilayered field, even if we limit ourselves to issues of identity construction. The first part, Political and Economic Dimensions of Identity Constructions in the Linguistic Landscape, which follows a short preface, opens with Christopher Stroud’s contribution on issues of citizenship in the LL of post-apartheid South Africa, ‘a restless society in the midst of an extensive transformation’ (p. 3), in which the author documents the (regulation of) circulation of performing bodies-in-place, exploiting both verbal and non-verbal data. Stroud prePunctum, 5(1): 264-270, 2019