Language, Space and Cultural Play: Theorising Affect in the Semiotic Landscape

Description

This multimodal approach to linguistic landscapes examines the role of linguistic and semiotic regimes in constructing landscape affect. Affect, as distinct from emotion, is object-oriented, and can be analysed in terms of structures of language and signs which operate on individuals and groups in specific spatial settings. Analysing a series of landscape types - including 'kawaii', 'reverenced', 'romance', 'friendly', 'luxury' and 'digital' landscapes - Lionel Wee and Robbie B. H. Goh explore how language plays a crucial role in shaping affective responses to, and interactions with, space. This linguistic and semiotic construction of different spaces also involves cultural contestations and modulations in spatial responses, and the book offers an account of the different conditions under which 'affective economies' gain or lose momentum.

Lionel Wee works on language policy, sociolinguistics and new Englishes. His publications include The Singlish Controversy (Cambridge, 2018), The Language of Organizational Styling (Cambridge, 2015), Markets of English (2012) and Language without Rights (2011). Robbie B. H. Goh works at the nexus of semiotics, cultural studies and narratology. His publications include Protestant Christianity in the Indian Diaspora: Abjected Identities, Evangelical Relations, and Pentecostal Visions (2018), Contours of Culture: Space and Social Difference in Singapore (2005) and Christianity in Southeast Asia (2005).