Liminalising and affectivising cityscape as a branding practice: a sociolinguistic ethnography in urban China

ABSTRACT

The emerging ‘affective turn’ across different disciplines has demonstrated how affect serves as indispensable driving forces in the constitution of practices in social life. Against this backdrop, inspired by posthumanism, the materialisation of affect in the field of linguistic/semiotic landscape is still short on empirical backgrounds, especially in the urban context of China. In this article, by combining approaches of sensory ethnography and walking ethnography, I conducted a fieldwork in the ‘old commercial port area’, Jinan city, to investigate affective regimes of how affects are discursively organised and situated through different semiotic artefacts. Based on various ethnographic data including photographs and walking narrative interviews, the results showed that generic liminality and concrete liminal affects of ‘nostalgia' and ‘multilingualism-friendliness' are created and situated for branding the city’s new icons as a symbolic economy. During this process, multilingual, multimodal and multi-layered spatiotemporal resources are mobilised for reproducing and humanising cityscapes as commodified affective experiences. In doing so, the transformed urbanscapes radically subvert local and societal normalcies and cultivate citizen-consumers’ new perceptions, values and identities towards local heritage, multilingualism and global multiculturality. The intersections and interplays between language, psychosocial constitution of space, urbanisation, globalisation and authenticity are also proposed and discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Semiotic landscape (SL)
• affect
• liminality
• chronotope
• city branding
• posthumanism

Acknowledgements

The author first would like to show sincere appreciation for the supervision from Dr. Songqing Li. The author also extends his thanks to the constructive comments of Mr. Guangxiang Liu, the anonymous reviewers and the editor on an earlier version of this paper, the continuous support from Dr. Rining Wei, Dr. Hong Liu, Dr. Yi Zhang, and Mr. Shijie Wang on the author's research skills cultivation and Bachelor study, and the heart-felt warmth from the author's university friends. Thanks for all the participants in the walking narrative interviews.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Linguistic landscape research focuses on how the linguistic objects distributed in public places index dynamics of social life. However, non-linguistic resources are increasingly taken into consideration (see Jaworski and Thurlow 2010). This paper chooses ‘semiotic landscape’ (SL) to stress the multimodal nature of space as a historically, culturally and spatially situated practice in which discourses are multi-semiotically mediated and (re)constructed.

2 Although traditionally ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ are interchangeably used, a distinction is made in this paper to indicate a paradigm shift to a posthumanist, ecological and semiotic lens. To emphasise the interaction between surroundings and the individual, affect is defined as any evaluative orientation towards an object and/or landscape, which is essentially always environmental and contextual (see Robinson, Smith-Lovin, and Wisecup 2006; Wan, Hall-Lew, and Cowie 2022). It is ‘affect’ rather than ‘emotion’ that better illustrate the relevance and analytical value in semiotic landscape research (see Wee and Goh 2020).

3 The present study adopted a humanistic, constructivist, relational and progressive perspective of space/place (vis-à-vis a scientific perspective), taking space/place as embedded with mobile routes towards meanings experienced by humans during their interaction with the world and constructed by their social practices under relationships of power (see Lefebvre 1991; Cresswell 2009; Massey 2012; Gao 2019). In various fields including SL research, space and place are often used interchangeably. Nevertheless, strictly speaking, space is a more abstract notion than place; undifferentiated abstract space becomes transformed into place as endowed with human meaning and we get to know it better: ‘if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place’ (Tuan 1977, 6).

4 During the history of (semi-)colonialism in modern China, some cities (e.g., Shanghai) became forcibly-opened sites for foreign trade (the ‘treaty ports’) under the control of international imperialism. Different from these ports, the ‘commercial port area’ was implemented, controlled and governed by the local government.

5 See http://www.jnio.gov.cn/html/2021/jnfg_0817/3446.html, http://www.jnio.gov.cn/show-6-4785-1.html and http://www.jnio.gov.cn/show-6-3940-1.html for more details.