A semiotics of the otherwise: space, temporality and politics in Rana Bishara’s Roadmap for Elimination

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of Rana Bishara’s installation Roadmap for Elimination, which is semiotically and materially interesting due to the skillful combination of language, maps of Palestine, and other key symbolic elements of Palestinian resistance such as cactus leaves. The article illustrates how, in the artwork, space and time fold into each other for political purposes in such a way that the European colonial past is visually overlaid with the present Israeli occupation, and the vision of a different future. Ultimately, the argument mounted in the article is that the installation is a defiant act of linguistic citizenship through which Bishara engendered a momentary space of otherwise. The spatio-temporal elements in the artwork, in turn, activate a plethora of emotions that affectively interpellate a European viewer into complex discursive positions of implicated subject vis-à-vis the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. On a theoretical level, the article seeks to demonstrate how Povinelli’s notion of spaces of otherwise, coupled with Stroud’s linguistic citizenship, can be relevant to sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, giving us a conceptual apparatus for better understanding the nexus of agency, space and time. On a more empirical level, the article also seeks to bring more precision to the spatio-temporal dimensions of both Stroud’s and Povinelli’s work.