The ordinary semiotic landscape of an unordinary place: spatiotemporal disjunctures in Incheon's Chinatown

ABSTRACT

This article examines the semiotic landscape of the Chinatown in Incheon, South Korea. Using the geosemiotic framework as a heuristic guide, we analyze how the spectacle of Chinatown is constituted through spatial, linguistic, semiotic, and material resources, and find that the unordinariness of the place is contingent on and emerges through its juxtaposition with ordinary space, practice, and language use. We suggest this apparent paradox can be understood through the process of scaling, during which signs and practices that might have been considered quotidian become monumentalised and ritualised when they are transported across timescales and spatial scales. Incheon's Chinatown then affords an opportunity to understand the semiotic and material production of ‘unordinariness’ through ‘ordinariness’. These collective spatiotemporal disjunctures or juxtapositions reveal unexpected but nonetheless crucial intersections among language, semiotics, and nationness.

KEYWORDS:

• Translinguistics
• geosemiotics
• space
• Chinatown
• Korea

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 As of 2018, it can be argued that the ‘new’ Chinatown of Song-do has not lived up to expectations. It has even been characterised as a ‘ghost city’ (Jeon, forthcoming; on other Chinatowns as ‘ghost cities’, also see Yu, 2014).

2 In fact, Garibong-dong is the setting of Beomjoedosi, or The Outlaws, the 2017 crime action film about Chinese gangsters in Korea. Considering the reputation of Chinese-Korean areas, such as Garibong-dong, to be associated with criminal activity, perhaps the Jung-gu Chinatown is not so much an effort to revitalise an ‘old’ Chinatown as it is an effort to manufacture a ‘good’ Chinatown.