Vol. 6:1 (2020) ► pp.29–51
Timorese talking back
The semiotic construction of chronotopes in the Timor Sea protests
Taking the dispute between East Timor and Australia over their maritime boundary as an illustrative context, this article discusses the role of semiotic resources in constructing chronotopes of protest. Reflecting first on language choice in urban protests during East Timor’s struggle for independence, the paper goes on to analyse the deployment of material and virtual resources in East Timorese-led demonstrations against the Australian government’s stance in the dispute. Using ‘entanglement’ as a structuring metaphor, and looking at language choice, social and grammatical indexicality, imagery, embodied cultural capital, and the choreography of assembly, the paper explores how protesters constructed a set of chronotopes that drew on the injuries of the colonial past, and re-emplaced and re-framed them in the post-colonial present. The paper looks at the linguistic landscape of protest as a semiotic aggregate in which the periphery claims a voice and ‘talks back’ to the centre.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Introducing the actors and the southern perspectives in this paper
- 3.Multilingual entanglements
- 4.Ways of seeing the Linguistic Landscape
- 5.Narratives of resistance, struggle and injustice in the protests of the 1980s and 1990s
- 6.The geopolitics of oil
- 7.Narratives of justice, sovereignty, suffering and theft in the protests of 2013 and 2016
- 8.Choreography of assembly
- 9.Summary and closing comments: How the periphery talked back to the centre
- Notes
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References
https://doi.org/10.1075/ll.00016.tay