Overcoming Erasure: Reappropriation of Space in the Linguistic Landscape of Mass-Scale Protests

Abstract

This chapter looks at how the linguistic landscape of a mass-scale protest can utilize multimodal discourses which can serve as a means to overcome erasure and to reach visibility in the public space. Drawing upon Bakhtin's notions of dialogism, along with polyphony and heteroglossia to construct a theoretical framework, this study argues that it is not necessarily the message itself that is important in a protest so much as it is important to keep the dialogic discourses going. The data for this research come from two sources: first from the National Immigration Reform March, which took place in Washington, DC on 21 March 2010, and had the goal of bringing visibility to the issue of immigration reform. The data consist of over 200 photographs taken over the course of the four-hour march, and show how the protesters utilized the multimodal linguistic landscape to reach audiences of many different cultures and backgrounds in order to express individual voices and a shared group identity while participating in dialogic discourses, challenging the dominant discourses of power. This study utilizes a qualitative multimodal analysis of the semiotics and discourse present within the linguistic landscape of the protest to determine how visibility was achieved and why a reappropriation of space was important in allowing the participants to create a new linguistic landscape that supported their discourse of dissent. To further discuss dialogism and the reappropriation of space in the linguistic landscape as a means of overcoming erasure, this chapter will also introduce an examination of the 2011 Occupy movement, drawing upon fieldwork at Occupy Montreal and Occupy Auckland in 2011, which echo the structure of Occupy DC. While diverse in its end goals, the Occupy movement has agreed that visibility is the most crucial element for its success. As such, participants of the Occupy movement have reappropriated central spaces within cities around the world in order to create a new linguistic landscape of dissent and to achieve visibility, while encouraging a multiplicity of voices and views and spreading multiple dialogic discourses. This analysis shows how the means by which the Occupy movement has achieved visibility in the linguistic landscape are very similar to the Immigration Reform March. However, once visibility was achieved, the content expressed through the landscape of these two movements has differed remarkably, and through this we can see the difference in what has been achieved thus far by each movement.