Multilingual Memories: Monuments, Museums and the Linguistic Landscape

Description

Drawing on a range of disciplines from within the humanities and social sciences, Multilingual Memories addresses questions of remembering and forgetting from an explicitly multilingual perspective. From a museum at Victoria Falls in Zambia to a Japanese-American internment in Arkansas, this book probes how the medium of the communication of memories affirms social orders across the globe. Applying linguistic landscape approaches to a wide variety of monuments and memorials from around the world, this book identifies how multilingualism (and its absence) contributes to the inevitable partiality of public memorials. Using a number of different methods, including multimodal discourse analysis, code preferences, interaction orders, and indexicality, the chapters explore how memorials have the potential to erase linguistic diversity as much as they can entextualize multilingualism. With examples from Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, and North and South America, this volume also examines the extent to which multilingual memories legitimize not only specific discourses but also individuals, particular communities, and ethno-linguistic groups - often to the detriment of others.

Robert Blackwood is Professor in French Sociolinguistics at the University of Liverpool, UK. John Macalister is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

The investigation of multilingualism and memory constitutes a strong guiding thread that renders the entire work coherent, fully understandable and well-structured ... A valuable reference tool for scholars who deal with language and memory studies. * LINGUIST List * This is such an important book in sociolinguistics and beyond. Wonderful! Remembering and forgetting are not simply individual cognitive processes. They are historically and politically situated and part of defining who we are now and how we form societies. The book offers a wealth of fascinating insights into this process. * David Machin, Professor of Media and Communication Studies, OErebro University, Sweden * This powerful and profoundly important volume explores the 'realms of memory' through the multiple lenses of memory, memorialization and multilingualism. Focusing on a range of 'memory places' across the world, the authors interrogate the public political language of memorials and the extent to which multilingualism is deployed, silenced or even fetishized. * Nkululeko Mabandla, Lecturer in Sociology, University of Cape Town, South Africa *