This panel aims to expand the study of sociolinguistics by interrogating spectral landscapes. It does this by problematizing the metaphysics of presence in sociolinguistic research, questioning what counts as data, interrogating the role of the researcher’s body on data production, testing out established and new methodologies, and discussing the political and ethical endeavours with which spectres confront us. We define spectral landscapes as those inhabited by spatio-temporally evasive social figures (ghosts), with meanings emerging and disappearing as they are assigned by and shift together with the viewer (or senser). We understand these landscapes as “absent presences” (Derrida, 1994/2006) manifesting themselves through hauntings experienced by the researcher.

With the aim of expanding recent work in the sociolinguistics of the spectre (Deumert, 2022), contributions in this panel examine various contexts haunted by the continuing discursive-material effects of violence, dispossession, and displacement. They capture ways of addressing and coming to terms with the spectre, but also attend to the vibrant mattering of human and non-human forces by investigating empirically and conceptually how absences come to matter. Papers thus illuminate vibrant voids (Volvach, 2023) – those gaps, silences, holes, shadows, and scars that “speak” to those who “listen”.

References

Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. Routledge.

Deumert, A. (2022). The sound of absent-presence: Towards formulating a sociolinguistics of the spectre. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 45(2), 135–153.

Volvach, N. (2023). Shouting absences: Disentangling the ghosts of Ukraine in occupied Crimea. Language in Society, 1–26.

Order of presentations

1. Caroline Kerfoot, Stockholm University
2. Lara-Stephanie Krause-Alzaidi and Irene Brunotti, Leipzig University
3. David Kroik, Nord University
4. Natalia Volvach, Stockholm University
5. Sean Smith, Tilburg University
6. Ana Deumert (Discussant), University of Cape Town

Violent voids: Producing bodies that /do not/ matter on South African street corners

Caroline Kerfoot, Stockholm University 

In this paper I investigate the everyday interactions of men who spend their days waiting for work on a Cape Town street corner. The corner is located in an area from which residents designated “non-white” were forcibly removed in the 1970s. Their descendants and others like them now spend several hours a day walking back from distant wastelands to street corners in this area. These daily, often fruitless, journeys are emblematic of the continuing effects of coloniality on which bodies can seek work, of what kind, where, and in which language. They also index the radicalization of vulnerability under neo-liberalism, the ongoing construction of dystopic futures.

Building on recent work on a sociolinguistics of the spectre (Deumert 2022; Volvach 2023), I use ‘more than human’ and ‘new’ materialist relational ontologies to illuminate the ways in which histories, repertoires, bodies and the scars they bear, the spatial location, and material realisation of the street corner intra-act with the spectral remnants of policies and practices over the decades. Drawing on archival sources, interviews, and ethnographic observations over several years, I show how these ‘absent presences’ (Derrida 1994/2006) continue to produce silenced voices and speaking bodies, those semiotically charged by their contested presence in public spaces. Dense historical indexicalities of race, language, and legitimacy endure across assemblages producing bodies that (do not) matter and perpetuating the colonial wound. 

References

Deumert, A. (2022). The sound of absent-presence: Towards formulating a sociolinguistics of the spectre. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 45(2), 135–153.

Derrida, J. (1994/2006). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, The work of mourning & the new international. Routledge.

Volvach, N. (2023). From words to voids: Absencing and haunting in Crimean semiotic landscapes [PhD thesis, Stockholm University].

Un/ghosting the void: Matterphorics of the collapsed House of Wonders in Zanzibar

Lara-Stephanie Krause-Alzaidi & Irene Brunotti, Leipzig University 

The House of Wonders (HoW) in Zanzibar was racialized urban matter, built under the command of ‘Arab’ bodies, then bombed and rebuilt by white British colonialists. In 2020, under the ‘African’ party (which had also led the violent revolution against Arab and British domination in 1964), the HoW collapsed. Here, we attend to the void left by this collapse, in the middle of recurring political violence against some-bodies in Zanzibar. We center Zanzibari reactions to the HoW’s collapse – videos of the void, eulogies mourning the house, interviews with Zanzibari intellectuals and Irene’s personal communication with friends and relatives – which relate to, and co-constitute, (racializing) political debates around the fallen house. Analytically, we decide against using spectrality and ghosts as concepts, opening up a space for debate across this panel around the potentials and limitations of these notions in sociolinguistics. In Zanzibar, ghosts are present beings sharing lived space with humans. Ghosts are not spatio-temporally evasive figures animating a space of past and absenced realities (as they may well be in other research contexts). Wanting to become response-able towards relational Swahili onto-epistemologies, we share Deumert’s (2022) concern that concepts of spectrality distance us too far from any suggestion that we might actually believe in the reality of ghosts. Therefore, to analyze the absent presence of the HoW in Zanzibar’s material-discursive landscape, we turn to the matterphorical void, a concept that thinks apparent absence as a desiring orientation towards being/becoming, co-constituted by shifting (i.e. phoric) matter that never settles but remains open for constituting ever new relationalities. Thinking and writing with the void allows us to show how the absent presence of the HoW can produce different un/racializing dynamics that are ongoing and open, holding indeterminate potentialities for healing the Zanzibari wound of race and/or for inflicting more pain.

(In)visible presences and (dis)continuities in a colonized Saami linguistic landscape

David Kroik, Nord University

In the colonized Saepmie in Sweden, an imagined periphery, Swedish national assimilatory policies the suppressed the South Saami language. Although South Saami has held official status as a minority language in Sweden for over 20 years, Kroik et al. (Forthcoming) show that in the Semiotic Landscape (SL), discourses related to Indigenous Saami epistemologies clash with ones related to settler-colonialism. This case shares similarities with others postcolonial contexts, in which “coloniality and its violence” (Deumert, 2022, p. 136) haunt the contemporary moment. 

Against this backdrop, I aim to investigate the SL of the settler-colonial village where I grew up: Borgafjäll, in the southern part of Saepmie. As a Saami person and as a learner, speaker and advocate for the South Saami language, I leverage my ways of seeing, being in and sensing the SL. Thus, I engage with ghost ethnography (Volvach, 2023) to tease out how monolingual signs create voids and absences that speak of lost futures that could have been. Moreover, guided by the concept of Indigenous efflorescence (Roche et al., 2018), I explore how South Saami emerges anew and how an art installation in the SL envisages a future for the language and its speakers.

References

Deumert, A. (2022). The sound of absent-presence: Towards formulating a sociolinguistics of the spectre. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 45(2), 135-153. https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.21039.deu

Kroik, D., Huuva, K., & Milani, T. (Forthcoming). Linguistic landscapes, settler colonialism and acts of decoloniality. In R. Blackwood, S. Tufi, & W. Amos (Eds.), The handbook of linguistic landscapes. Bloomsbury. 

Roche, G., Maruyama, H., & Virdi Kroik, Å. (Eds.). (2018). Indigenous Efflorescence: Perspectives from Sapmi and Ainu Mosir. https://doi.org/10.22459/IE.2018. 

Volvach, N. (2023). Shouting absences: Disentangling the ghosts of Ukraine in occupied Crimea. Language in Society, 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404523000325

The researcher’s body as a sensing agent: Ghost (auto)ethnography in contested semiotic landscapes

Natalia Volvach, Stockholm University 

In studies of semiotic landscapes and sociolinguistics more generally, the current methods fall short of grasping the complexity and unpredictability of social life, thus necessitating methodological innovation. This paper addresses this challenge by introducing a ghost (auto)ethnography. I argue that this methodology, while particularly relevant in restrictive and nondemocratic spaces, can also be effectively applied in other settings where “absenced” semiotic landscapes (Volvach, 2023) are explored.

My previous work in Crimea has shown that the researcher’s body may serve as a productive entry point when attempting to study the phenomena that appear to be “lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes” – phenomena that can be defined as ghosts or apparitions (Gordon, 2008: 8). While several (auto)ethnographic studies have aimed to capture the tension between the body and place in semiotic landscapes, the researchers’ gut feelings of the fieldwork spaces have remained largely unexplored. This paper chooses to fill this gap. I argue that by centering the researcher’s body and self registering certain ‘appearances’ arising when engaging with a place, it becomes possible to reflect and unpack the affects exuded by the absenced semiotic landscapes, and learn about the mechanics of power and violence piercing the place.

Thus, a methodological approach of ghost (auto)ethnography that accounts for the researcher’s affective bodily responses caused by spatial encounters during the fieldwork process has the potential to enhance semiotic landscapes studies conducted in socio-politically uneasy places. Attending to the affective impact of absenced semiotic landscapes through the body as sensing agent may be useful for further engagement with the vibrant afterlives of erased landscapes as inhabited by ghosts.

References

Gordon, A. F. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Volvach, N. (2023). Shouting absences: Disentangling the ghosts of Ukraine in occupied Crimea. Language in Society: 1-26.

Absence in the Anthropocene: a semiotics of deep history and entanglement through the temporal palimpsest

Sean P. Smith, Tilburg University

As modern binaries of society/nature break down in the Anthropocene era, this paper locates human and non-human ghosts in one ostensibly “natural” landscape. Enjoining perspectives on the material production of nature (N. Smith, 2010) with the production of space through multimodal sign-making (Lefebvre, 1991), ethnographic study in 2022-23 of the Jebel Shams “Grand Canyon” in Oman illustrates that hegemonic nature/society spatializations are shaped by mediatized discourses circulating through off/online nexuses (Blommaert & Maly, 2019), in this instance Google Maps and Instagram. An Anthropocenic lens, however, reveals that such (digital) productions of “nature” are enacted through erasure and modern epistemologies of linear time. Drawing upon theorizations of deep history (Chakrabarty, 2021) and sociolinguistic haunting (Deumert, 2022), a heuristic of the temporal palimpsest is instead proposed, in which attention to voids and traces (Volvach, 2023) of the past reframes landscapes as formed through cumulative and multiscalar histories of the human production of nature, colonial resource extraction, and global climate change. A semiotics of the Anthropocene, it is suggested, locates deep history and more-than-human entanglement in recurrent (digital) signs of absence.

References

Blommaert, Jan & Ico Maly (2019). Invisible lines in the online-offline linguistic landscape. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 223.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2021). The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Deumert, Ana (2023). The sound of absent-presence: Towards formulating a sociolinguistics of the spectre. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 45:135-53.

Lefebvre, Henri (1991). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.

Smith, Neil (2010). Uneven development: Nature, capital, and the production of space. Savannah: University of Georgia Press.

Volvach, Natalia (2022). Shouting absences: Disentangling the ghosts of Ukraine in occupied Crimea. Language in Society:1-26.

Discussion: Spectral landscapes: Making Voids Matter in Sociolinguistics

Ana Deumert, University of Cape Town