Abstract This article investigates linguistic and visual representations of the Ainu, the indigenous people of northern Japan, in Satoru Noda’s popular televised Japanese anime Golden Kamuy (GK). The study employs multimodal analysis, focusing on content, context, characters, and perspectives related to the deployment of the Ainu language using the perspectives of raciolinguistics, coloniality, and intersectionality, to examine GK’s representations of Ainu regarding two Japanese national discourses on race: the current discourse of “ethnic harmony” (or multiculturalism) and Ainu as a dying race, popularized in the early 20th century. It argues that GK unintentionally constructs a sanitized Ainu-Japanese relationship that epitomizes the discourse of ethnic harmony by erasing Japan’s colonial past. Simultaneously, GK reproduces Ainu as a dying race discourse by contrasting a young bilingual Ainu co-protagonist and her monolingual grandmother. The article discusses how advanced/backward distinctions that the Japanese elites appropriated from the 19th-century colonial discourse are reinscribed in this anime with a modern twist. It also advocates our need to raise critical questions about language, race, and power for a just society in various contexts, including popular media.

Abstract Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, there has been an upsurge of anti-Chinese racism. This paper investigates the socio-pragmatic processes through which Chinese international students in Belgium discursively deal with othering processes in the stories they tell about racist incidents during semi-structured research interviews. These processes are closely linked to various identities which are sometimes projected upon them and often take the form of the Standardised Relational Pair of victim and perpetrator. Our analysis illustrates the complexities of these multi-directional othering processes which span a continuum from merely acknowledging to challenging and rejecting. Findings not only contribute to current conceptualisations of othering, but also give a voice to those who are othered and demonstrate that they can be powerful agents who may find ways of speaking up and re-claiming agency rather than silently accepting the victim identities that are often assigned to them.

Abstract This paper analyzes the naturalization of Nazism, through semiotic processes of enregisterment, circulation, and regimentation of the register “nature-tradition” associated with a characterological figure I term the Granola Nazi. Granola Nazi is assembled through a rhematized set of semiotic elements, images, practices and forms of talk, which have come to indicate socially typified personae – strong virile white farmers, traditional earthy homesteading moms – and the moral order they embody. Using linguistic anthropological and digital methods, this analysis draws on 885 Instagram accounts as well as linked data from YouTube and print media (i.e. cookbooks, diet advice), to explore how the worlds of far right neo-folkish movement intersect with discourses of health and wellness, creating moralized discourses of “natural beauty” and “folk vitality” which naturalize far- right racial hierarchies. This is at once a co-option of discourses of health and environment, but also one which reveals the how the naturalization of Nazism is made possible by racism and sexism in long present in liberal talk about nature, beauty or wellness.

Abstract Previous critical studies of language textbook analysis have explored politics of content selection in textbooks, examining the way selection of certain materials instead of others or the interaction between various multimodal contents selected for textbooks reinforces certain ideological meanings at the expense of certain others. The current study views language textbooks through lenses of politics of content creation, analyzing such politics in a series of English as a Foreign Language textbooks produced by Iranian Ministry of Education. Using a theoretical framework that draws on theories of language ideology and social semiotic theories of multimodality, the study explores the way ideological meanings are simultaneously created at different orders of language and the way such created meanings multimodally shape different contents of the textbooks, such as lessons and learning activities. The study contributes to the filed of critical language textbook analysis by uncovering the relation between power and ideologies within the generic structure of language textbooks.

Abstract This paper discusses the interactions of the so-called lusophone migrants in ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) i.e., outside the Portuguese geographical colonial matrix. Part of a larger project interested in studying whether new solidarities or old hierarchies replay when all lusophones meet and struggle in a new context, the paper examines traces of what Mignolo (2005) has termed of ‘coloniality of being’ i.e., everyday remnants of colonial modes and hierarchies. It draws from postcolonial theory and sociolinguistic ethnography to examine how coloniality perdures in intersubjective relations among lusophones, by exploring the narrative of two Cape Verdean retirees who (re)migrated to Luxembourg in 1971 and 1981. The paper uses narrative analysis to examine how they report coloniality in lusophone interactions being challenged or perpetuated at workplaces and social encounters, via stereotyping jokes, naming, and language use. It fosters a critical understanding of lusophone subjects’ interactions, marked by language and their colonial history, beyond Portuguese-speaking states.

Abstract This article uses contemporary Swedish fiction to explore sociolinguistic phenomena, and argues that literature constitutes an important arena for studying the (re)production and circulation of sociolinguistic experiences and ideas at a particular time and place. It builds on qualitative analysis of 65 Swedish books, published between 2000 and 2020, which depict protagonists with multilingual and migrant backgrounds. The study examines patterns of repetition in these works of fiction. It foregrounds recurring sociolinguistic experiences that are made relevant in the depiction of the fictional characters’ lives, and how they are emotionally interpreted. The analysis shows that the narrated experiences are often told and organized in similar ways and they tend to use the same social images of speakers to highlight processes of boundary-making and social differentiation. Language is used as an important part of the entextualization of these social experiences. For example, the authors often depict “the immigrant” and “the Swede” as binary opposites, which are linked to certain typical forms of speaking and being. By way of repetition, we argue, these recurring fictional experiences contribute to the formation of a grander narrative about language, belonging and social boundary-making in contemporary Sweden, and to the construction of Sweden as a society that is increasingly segregated and stratified.

AbstractDuring the first months of 2020, our everyday life suddenly changed when the novel Coronavirus started to infect humans at a very fast rate, causing serious respiratory and other diseases, death, and fear of the unknown. Local friends and family members shared traumatic stories, images, and videoclips about death and dread in Northern Italy, where the first confirmed COVID-19 cases were discovered, just two months after the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China (Worobey, 2021). Inspired byBakhtin’s (1981)notion of chronotope, by autoethnography and phenomenology, within a linguistic anthropological framework, this article examines how individuals have been embodying COVID-19 related uncertainties and fears in their everyday life. Through the analysis of (auto)ethnographic narratives, recontextualized images and videoclips, including the ones related to the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic, I show how regionalizedchronotopes of warand more globalchronotopes of dreadhave emerged and solidified across pandemic times.

AbstractDr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, was accused of spreading rumors when he sent a WeChat message containing the diagnostic report of a suspicious pneumonia case to a group of friends. When he later died from COVID-19, his Weibo page quickly become known as “China’s Wailing Wall,” where hundreds of thousands of netizen shared replies to his final post in a mega-thread that continues into the present. Drawing upon a selection of posts from an archive of messages posted to Li’s Weibo in the year following his death, this article examines how participants used chronotopes (Bhaktin 1981) to situate Li vis-à-vis various culturally salient “figures of personhood” (Agha 2005;Park 2021), including “moral hero,” “kin figure,” and/or “deity.” Our analysis further suggests how such positioning, as a response to grief and uncertainty, “moved” authors into a position of distance from hegemonic national chronotopes situating people in a symbiotic relationship of mutual care with the Chinese state. Our analysis thus offers insight into the ways in which collective crises have the capacity to (but do not necessarily) motivate a complex discursive and relational process through which interlocutors enactscalar intimacy(Pritzker and Perrino 2020) as they grapple with shifts in their felt experience of nationhood and/or “culture.”

Abstract In this article I apply the notions of chronotope and (re)chronotopization to the case of grassroots, migrant domestic worker (MDW) led activism during the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong. I compare the chronotopes that are produced by the Hong Kong government with those produced by migrant-led organizations to understand how migrants are marginalized and how they resist this marginalization. More specifically, I show how the spatiotemporal configurations of “home,” “days off,” and “the time of COVID-19 in Hong Kong” are rechronotopized – that is, reimagined, remoralized and rematerialized – through the discourses and actions of these grassroots organizations. I use this data and analysis to reflect on how the notion of rechronotopization can account for the social processes involved in activism more broadly; and to draw attention to the dialectic relationship between differently scaled chronotopic materialities and morally loaded chronotopic imaginaries.