Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021. xi, 149 pp. (Illustrations.) US$100.00, cloth. ISBN 9781793611192.
Diane Johnson’s book is a welcome addition to the field of linguistic (and semiotic) landscape studies (LLS), especially given the absence of publications about the oceanic region beyond the Pacific. This is a serious lacunae given the potential for LLS projects not only to examine the diverse processes by which Indigenous lives and spaces are materially and symbolically colonized but also to buttress activist efforts to decolonize semiotic forms of discursive hegemony.
In the introduction, Johnson reviews the history of how French and British structures of administrative control (political, economic, cultural, and linguistic) were exerted on Indigenous peoples across the Pacific, using this overview to illustrate how “master signifiers” can “fix, disrupt, [and] reconfigure” (12) the landscape, both real and imaginary. She also provides a succinct overview of the LLS field and how the best studies not only contextualize signs within their specific political and sociolinguistic histories but also analyze how they move across time, space, and social networks via a range of modalities of expression that include writing, sounds, images, bodies, architecture, and social media. Her too brief survey of critical discourse theory and analysis, which fuels her complaint that too few LLS studies are conducted with a theoretically informed methodology, is also a problem for some of the findings presented in the book.
Nonetheless, the subsequent chapters do use rich ethnographic and semiotic detail (photos of signage and data from informal interviews) to explore the entangled relationship between political-economic regimes and sociolinguistic landscapes in four specific times and places: Hawai‘i, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Te Ao Maohi/French Polynesia, and Kanaky/New Caledonia in the 2010s. Each chapter begins by summarizing how Indigenous persons, territories, cultures, and languages have been violated and displaced from these landscapes before moving on to analyze some specific semiotic data. Unfortunately, she gives only footnoted explanations for why she employs the colonial names rather than the preferred Indigenous names of these regions.
Chapter 2 begins with the anglophone regimes by analyzing the semiotoscape of the Indigenous movement that began resisting the environmentally destructive project of building another observatory on the sacred mountain Maunakea on the Big Island of Hawai‘i in 2014 . Relying on photos of official signage and protesters’ placards, Johnson examines how the multilingual and multimodal forms are semiotically activated in the landscape during these protests. Hawaiian and English phrases, road regulations and hula lyrics, police clothing and skinscapes, staged bodies and environmental props, graffiti-styled placards and imagery of King Kamehameha III, signify not only administrative attempts to regiment the demonstrations but also the protesters’ messages of defiance and aloha ‘āina (love for the land). One failing is that, although the author mentions the intertextual links forged by the circulation of these signs on social media, she does not follow through to identifying their semiotic impact beyond the present situation.
In chapter 3, Johnson turns to another British-initiated settler colonial setting. Based on the words, fonts, construction materials, and imagery found on signage and buildings in the small rural town of Tirau, Aotearoa, the author examines the erasure of Māori culture and language from the landscape. Although the town was populated in 2016 to 2018 by a larger percentage of Māori (27.7 percent) than is found elsewhere in the country, their prior occupation was only evidenced by a Māori flag, a fish hook and ferns symbols, plus a few words: the name of the town, one street name (Okoreoire), and the phrase for welcome, haere mai, on a tourist information sign. Instead, in the service of constructing a fantasy-scape for tourist consumption, the artwork and commercial signage indexes with self-denigrating humour the “Kiwi” settlers who are presupposed to have tamed the country (with corrugated iron and fencing wire). Semi-structured interviews, designed to probe the pragmatic effects of this signage, revealed that only two respondents (both of Māori heritage) noticed the absence of Māori in the landscape, and yet she offers no hypotheses as to why. Despite the Māori revitalization movement, do activists still lack authoritative avenues for reinscribing their presence on the land? Or does it perhaps indicate their preference for the fluidity of orality?
With chapter 4, Johnson turns to the persistence of French colonialism in the Pacific by scrutinizing the architecture and wall writings of two institutions in Noumea, the capital of Kanaky, in 2019. She holds that although the Tjibaou Cultural Center (CCT) is named after an assassinated Kanaky independence leader, the museum itself represents French hegemonic design as it combines hints of Indigenous “huts” within a sleek exterior and features work by living Kanaky artists rather than older artifacts. Underappreciated by the local population, the CCT is primarily visited by foreign tourists, as indicated by the signage, which includes information in French, English, and Japanese, with Kanaky languages a distant fourth. By contrast, the Federation of Lay Works, once a popular community center for cultural events, was never restored after a cyclone took its roof off and is now slated for demolition, and has become the site of multilayered graffiti. Johnson analyzes the linguistic choices and meanings of the visible words and phrases and concludes that anti-colonial voices of “assertion and resistance” are finding their platform here.
Focusing in chapter 5 on street names and commercial signage in Pape’ete, the Tahitian capital of another French territory, Johnson finds little evidence that Indigenous Mā’ohi have reinscribed their cultural vision within their downtown landscape. The streets are named after French generals, explorers, and missionaries involved in colonizing Tahiti, and a very few Tahitians who submitted to the French colonial mission. In addition to official French, the commercial signage sports vastly more English than Tahitian. Based on informal conversations with Tahitians, Johnson concludes that the prevalence of written English was understood as practical for tourism, indicative of anti-French sentiment, and/or proof of American culture’s youth appeal. They deemed written Tahitian unnecessary but were proud of the ubiquity of spoken Tahitian. Johnson ends by visiting a memorial to the territory’s use as a nuclear testing site; although hard to find and under renovation, every inscription begins in Tahitian, followed by French and English.
The book suffers inevitably from the author’s untimely death. For instance, the notes for chapter 2 are cut off, and if she had had time, she might have used critical discourse analysis to dig more interdiscursively into her findings. Nonetheless, the book should be read as an instigation to carry on the LLS approach to data collection and analysis in the Pacific and beyond. Indeed, it should be celebrated for its delineation of an activist research agenda for analyzing multimodal signs as both traces of past colonial impact and visions of decolonized futures.
Kathleen C. Riley
Rutgers University, New Brunswick