[Linganth] CFP: Imagining repères in (post)colonial semiotic landscapes

[Love, Stephanie Victoria]

Hi all,


Please consider submitting an abstract to the panel Kate Riley and I are organizing for the 2025 SLA conference in Chicago (May 29th-31st).


Thanks,

Stephanie


Panel Title: Imagining repères in (post)colonial semiotic landscapes

Co-organizers: Stephanie Love and Kathleen C. Riley

Abstract (466 words)


Email your abstract by November 26th, 2024, to svl11 at pitt.edu<mailto:svl11 at pitt.edu> and kcr58 at anthropology.rutgers.edu<mailto:kcr58 at anthropology.rutgers.edu>


In French, repères refer to the landmarks, signposts, or points of reference used to orient people as they move across space and time. Repères are practical, helping direct people through the landscape.  For example, in the metro and RER lines of Paris, repères are posted using a standardized system of letters and numbers indicating which trains will stop on the platform. But repères are also central to socio-political imaginations–orienting and guiding people through historical, social, and political “landscapes” by elevating certain people, places, and events as “landmarks” of history and devaluing others as something akin to trash in the landscape - impermanent and unauthorized.


This process of standardizing repères was, in turn, exported to French colonies, becoming a method of governmentality central to political processes of rooting and uprooting people in the landscape, as well as routing and rerouting them through it. In postcolonial Algeria, for example, taxi drivers and their clients communicate through layers of contradictory repères acquired through settler colonialism and its aftermaths, leading some taxi drivers to speak of "losing repères” as a political and existential crisis.


However, repères can also be modes of wayfinding that predate colonialism and continue to shape people’s belonging to the world. In the semiotic landscapes of French Polynesia, Oceanic navigators used something like (but different than) repères (e.g., stars, wave formations, and bird life) to anchor themselves when exploring and mapping far-flung islands. In many ways, repères might be understood as a “folk theory” of the concept of chronotopes–spatiotemporal nodes through which “time…thickens, takes on flesh, become artistically visible; likewise, space become charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin 1981, p. 84).


We hypothesize that, as in the case of Algeria and French Polynesia, the Napoleonic notion of repères (grounded in Roman orthogonal grids) has been imported and transformed through dialogue with pre-colonial repères in many (post)colonial contexts. If so, we ask how reperes  are instantiated, interpreted, and transmitted across generations, landscapes, and social networks? That is, how are the practices, habitus, and cultural knowledge associated with reperes semiotically socialized and interdiscursively contested?


Exploring repères as imaginative projections, we invite papers that investigate the adoption, adaptation, or rejection of “rational,” “enlightened” European signposts in (post)colonial (not necessarily francophone) contexts. While we don’t expect that the word itself will have been borrowed everywhere (especially in non-francophone settings), we would like to explore how European colonizers frequently attempted to impose not only their own historical chronotopes (for example, statues of European war heroes), but also a range of procedures for standardizing structures of feeling, thought, perception, and orientation. This panel opens up space for a discussion of various forms of sign-posting and sign-reading, as well as the routines of semiotic socialization that these knowledgeable practices occasion for miscommunication, disinformation, abuse, and resistance.

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