Liminalising and affectivising cityscape as a branding practice: a sociolinguistic ethnography in urban China

Abstract

ABSTRACT The emerging ‘affective turn’ across different disciplines has demonstrated how affect serves as indispensable driving forces in the constitution of practices in social life. Against this backdrop, inspired by posthumanism, the materialisation of affect in the field of linguistic/semiotic landscape is still short on empirical backgrounds, especially in the urban context of China. In this article, by combining approaches of sensory ethnography and walking ethnography, I conducted a fieldwork in the ‘old commercial port area’, Jinan city, to investigate affective regimes of how affects are discursively organised and situated through different semiotic artefacts. Based on various ethnographic data including photographs and walking narrative interviews, the results showed that generic liminality and concrete liminal affects of ‘nostalgia' and ‘multilingualism-friendliness' are created and situated for branding the city’s new icons as a symbolic economy. During this process, multilingual, multimodal and multi-layered spatiotemporal resources are mobilised for reproducing and humanising cityscapes as commodified affective experiences. In doing so, the transformed urbanscapes radically subvert local and societal normalcies and cultivate citizen-consumers’ new perceptions, values and identities towards local heritage, multilingualism and global multiculturality. The intersections and interplays between language, psychosocial constitution of space, urbanisation, globalisation and authenticity are also proposed and discussed.