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ABSTRACT
The present article offers a critical appraisal of resemiotisation through the investigation of a controversial comment made by South African president, Jacob Zuma. The comment (that Jacob Zuma took a shower to minimise his risk of contracting HIV/AIDS) was made during a rape trial in 2006. Over a period of eight years, this comment has been continually recontextualised into different modes, and has served different functions. This article investigates newspaper reports, cartoons and YouTube clips which were collected from 2006 to 2014. All of these texts refer to the “Shower comment” in linguistic, visual or multimodal ways. Drawing on a multimodal analysis, focussing specifically on modes of representation, the article critically discusses the notions of mode, time and space in connection to resemiotisation. I argue that a Bakhtinian account of time, space and body allows for a non-binary view of semiotic phenomena that will lead to a deeper theoretical understanding of semiotic transformations in all their complexity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Marcelyn Oostendorp is a lecturer in the Department of General Linguistics at Stellenbosch University. Her research is focussed on multimodality and linguistic diversity within various institutional settings.
Notes
1. The traditional definition of linguistic landscapes is that of Landry and Bourhis (Citation1997, 25). They state that a linguistic landscape refers to the “language of public road signs, advertising billboards, place names, street names, commercial shop signs and public signs on government buildings, of a given territory, region or urban agglomeration”.
2. Emphasis is my own.
3. I understand that Ravelli et al. (Citation2013) and also Kerfoot (Citation2011) did not originally set out to investigate if and how meanings move across modes and what the implications of this is for a theory of resemiotisation. However, it remains a shortcoming in current research.
4. ZA news is a satirical puppet show with weekly and daily sketches. The show can be viewed at www.zanews.co.za.
5. The transcripts are difficult to access since they are not in the public domain. Skeen (Citation2007, 11), who did have access to some of the (English) transcripts, states that “transcripts of the trial are available in only in a small, obscure office in the Johannesburg High Court where they are sold on a per page basis”.
6. No cameras were allowed in court to protect the identity of the accuser, so it is impossible to give an exact account of what non-linguistic elements formed part of the comment.
7. This event occurred before social media sites really took off.
8. ABC refers to a HIV/AIDS prevention campaign which urged South Africans to either “Abstain, Be Faithful or Condomise (use a condom)’.
9. Nkandla is Zuma’s private residence to which security upgrades of more than R260 million (more than $22 million) were made with state money. Some of the upgrades, for example, included a swimming pool and a visitor’s centre. The public protector indicated in a report that Zuma benefited from the upgrades and should pay back part of the money. Other parliamentary committees have, however, exonerated Zuma and placed the blame on other ministers and the architect of the project. After the case was heard in front of the constitutional court in 2016, the court ruled that the public protector’s recommendations were binding and that the president should pay back the money. Zuma has publically declared that he will abide by the court’s ruling and pay back a portion of the money as recommended by the public protector.
10. A recent high court ruling have called for the charges to be reinstituted again and called the previous dropping of charges “irrational”.
11. This is a very interesting phenomenon. The textual representation of the shower comment led to this every day, reference. However, it is outside of the scope of the current article to discussion the evolution of the shower gesture in more detail.