Mobilities of a linguistic landscape at Los Angeles City Hall Park

Abstract

In this chapter, I expand a category of linguistic landscapes, the signs by individuals in public spaces, to include another form of linguistic landscape even more transgressive in nature and intent: the panoply of protest signs produced and mobilized by the Occupy Movement during the Fall of 2011 at Los Angeles City Hall Park. My data are drawn from the photographs I took of these signs at the Park and the near vicinity, a YouTube video of a protest sign, a blog commenting on this sign, and a political cartoon using the same image featured on two other signs. I explore how social actors drew upon and mediated specific discourses in their protest signs that became transportable across time and space, the role of these signs in transforming public space, and this linguistic landscape’s ensuing mobilities in its mediated relocations to online social media sites and blogs.

Understanding the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement: A critical discourse historiographical approach

“…Occupy, can be seen as a reflection of the sort of society the Occupiers wanted to see. As Chun (2014) has written, again,…”

Language, discourse, and class: What's next for sociolinguistics?

“…These linguistic landscapes are not necessarily spatially rooted (such as billboards and storefront signs), but can be of course mobile (e.g. Chun, ). One example would be in the form of writing on clothing apparel indexing a classed identity.…”

Itineraries of protest signage

“…And when requesting people not to take close-up photos of students' faces in order to protect their anonymity ( Figure 24), the Cantonese expression 唔該嗮(m goi sai) was used to show appreciation instead of 謝謝 (xiexie), which could be either Mandarin or Cantonese. In fact, even the choice of language in the name of the Movement was heavily politicized, as in the example drawn from social media ( Figure 9) [Note 5] , in which the Cantonese word for "umbrella" 遮("Ze") is recommended in place of Mandarin 傘 (San), with the added pun of YouTube (Chun 2014). Similarly, the Umbrella Movement was not only a part of the daily TV news in Hong Kong with a calendar counting its days, it was also streamed "live" by independent news outlets such as inmedia.hk and SocREC.org through their Facebook pages and YouTube channels.…”

“…Signage, then, inevitably became an important element of mediatization of the Movement for the consumption of local and global audiences. Chun (2014) has analyzed the trajectory of one particular sign in Occupy L.A., from the moment it was seen carried by a protester to its temporary location in the park, to its appearance in a participant video commentary on YouTube, and, finally, to the blog discussion that it triggered. Even though it is almost impossib le to map the course of a sign completely, this method of tracing a sign in its various mutations shows clearly the interaction between texts, objects and actions in the process of resemiotization (Iedema 2001(Iedema , 2003Scollon 2008) shedding light on the textual, spatial and embodied relationships of protest discourse.…”

“…One aspect of analysis has involved the mobility of signs as spatialized practices and performances resemiotized rapidly on photographs circulating from the physical spaces of their emplacement to the online spaces of social media (e.g. Chun 2014). Likewise, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong witnessed intense activity of resemiotization of its signage and imagery, frequently moving across offline, online and "back" to offline emplaced spaces of protest sites and further afield in the city, as well as mediatized well beyond the city's boundaries (see also Ben Said and Kasanga 2016).…”