Cover not available
Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 21:5 (2022) ► pp.697–720

Temporal agency of social movements

A semio-chronotopic analysis of the Floyd protests

ORCID logo | Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport
The article examines, through the lens of cognitive semiotics, temporal agency and experiences that define the protestors’ identity within the space of the Floyd protests as visualized in AP sequenced news photos. The analysis points to the role of resemiotized chronotopic motifs that bring together the past, present and future times of racial discrimination. In this regard, the paper synthesizes the Bakhtinian chronotope with Multimodal Conceptual Metaphor. Synthesizing Multimodal Metaphors with the chronotope is meant to conceptualize the temporality of the social movement, assigning it agentive identity. That is, chronotopic temporality is deployed in this article as a metaphorical placeholder for movements agency and individuality. Two chronotopes interact within the visualized space of the protests: one is centred in the memories of past apartheid and a desired future, the other conceptualizes a resistant and angry present.
Keywords: Bakhtinian chronotope, MCM, social movements, social semiotics, spatial orientations, temporal agency
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Situating the Floyd protests within the different histories of BLMM
  • 3.Chronotopic agency
  • 4.A multimodal approach to conceptual metaphor: A focus on spatio-temporal orientations
  • 5.Data collection and analysis procedures
  • 6.Analysis
    • 6.1 racism as suffocation: The Air chronotope
    • 6.2 fire is freedom: The Fire chronotope
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 February 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.21049.faw
References (64)
References
Adams, Paul and Jansson, André. 2012. “Communication Geography: A Bridge Between Disciplines.” Communication Theory 22(3): 299–318. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience. trans. Liz Heron, London & New York: VersoGoogle Scholar
Apata, Gabriel O. 2020. “‘I Can’t Breathe’: The Suffocating Nature of Racism.” Theory, Culture & Society 37(7–8): 241–254. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. “The Dialogic Imagination.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. by Michael Holquist and Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. (V. W. McGee, Trans.). Austin,TX: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
. 1994. The Bakhtin reader: Selected writings of Bakhtin. Medvedev, and Voloshinov.Google Scholar
Barassi, Veronica. and Zamponi, Lorenzo. 2020. “Social Media Time, Identity Narratives and the Construction of Political Biographies.” Social Movement Studies 191: 1–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bezemer, Jeff, and Kress, Gunther. 2008. “Writing in Multimodal Texts: A Social Semiotic Account of Designs for Learning. Written Communication 25 (2): 166–195. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blanton, Ryan. 2011. “Chronotopic Landscapes of Environmental Racism.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 211, 76–93. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, Jan. 2015. “Chronotopes, Scales and Complexity in the Study of Language in Society.” Annual Review of Anthropology 44(1): 105–116. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (2017). “Mobility, Contexts, and the Chronotope.” Language in Society 46(1): 95–99. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blommaert, Jan, and Anna De Fina. 2016. “Chronotopic Identities: On the Timespace Organization of Who We Are.” In Diversity and Super-Diversity. Sociocultural Linguistic Perspectives, ed. by Anna De Fina and Didem Ikizoglu, 1–15. Washington: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Brantner, Cornelia and Rodriguez-Amat, Joan Ramon. 2016. “New ‘Danger Zone’ in Europe: Representations of Place in Social Media Supported Protests.” International Journal of Communication 101: 299–320.Google Scholar
Caple, Helen. and John Knox. 2012. “Online News Galleries, Photojournalism and the Photo Essay.” Visual Communication 11 (2): 207–236. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2015. “A Framework for the Multimodal Analysis of Online News Galleries: What Makes A “Good” Picture Gallery?” Social Semiotics 25 (3): 292–321. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Charteris-Black, Jonathan. 2016. Fire Metaphors: Discourses of Awe and Authority. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Chovanec, Jan. 2019. “Multimodal Storytelling in the News: Sequenced Images as Ideological Scripts of Othering.” Discourse, Context and Media 281(2019): 8–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cimasko, Tony and Dong-shin Shin. 2017. “Multimodal Resemiotization and Authorial Agency in an L2 Writing Classroom.” Written Communication 34(4): 387–413. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Economou, Dorothy. 2008. “Pulling Readers. In News Photos in Greek and Australian Broadsheets.” In Communicating Conflict: Multilingual Case Studies of the News Media ed. by Peter White and Elizabeth Thomson. U.K: Continuum Publications.Google Scholar
El Refaie, Elizabeth. 2009. “Metaphor in Political Cartoons: Exploring Audience Responses.” In Multimodal metaphor, ed. by Charles J. Forceville and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 173–196.Google Scholar
Fabian, Louise. 2013. “The Spatial Turn Within Social and Cultural Studies – Spatial Theory as an Interdisciplinary Praxis.” In What is Theory? Answers from the Social and Cultural Sciences, ed. by Hervé Corvellec, 283–298. Stockholm: Liber.Google Scholar
Fawzy, Rania. 2018. “A Tale of Two Squares: Spatial Iconization of the Al Tahrir and Rabaa Protests.” Visual Communication 20(1): 59–80. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2019. “Neoliberalism in Your Living Room: A Spatial Cognitive Reading of Home Design in IKEA Catalogue.” Discourse Context & Media 311 (2019): 1–8. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Feagin, Joe R. and Kimberley Ducey. 2017. Elite White Men Ruling: Who, What, Where, and How. New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Feng, Dezheng. 2011. “The Construction and Categorization of Multimodal Metaphor: A Systemic Functional Approach.” Foreign Language Research, 11, 24–29.Google Scholar
Feng, Dezheng, and Kay O’Halloran. 2013. “The Visual Representation of Metaphor: A Systemic Functional Approach.” Review of Cognitive Linguistics 11(2): 320–335. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Forceville, Charles. 2009. “Nonverbal and Multimodal Metaphor in a Cognitivist Framework: Agendas for Research.” In Multimodal metaphor, ed. by Charles Forceville and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, 19–42. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Fowler, Roger. 1991. Language in the news: Discourse and ideology in the Press. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ganser, Alexandra, Julia Puhringer, and Markus Rheindof. 2006. “Bakhtin’s Chronotope on the Road: Space, Time, and Place in Road Movies Since the 1970s.” Linguistics and Literature, 4 (1), 1–17.Google Scholar
Gao, Shuang. 2019. “Chronotopic Identities and Social Change in Yangshuo, China.” In Chronotopic identity work: Sociolinguistic Analyses of Cultural and Linguistic Phenomena in Time and Space, by ed. Xuan Wang and Sjaak Kroon, 86–104. Berlin: Peter Lang. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garza, Alicia. 2014. “A Hestory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement.” The Feminist Wire.Google Scholar
Gillan, Kevin. 2020. “Temporality in Social Movement Theory: Vectors and Events in the Neoliberal Timescape.” Social Movement Studies 19(5–6): 516–536. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Halliday, Michael. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
. 1982. “The De-automatization of Grammar from Priestley’s ‘An Inspector Calls’.” In Language and Linguistic Variation: Papers Dedicated to Angus McIntosh ed. by John Anderson, 129–159. Amsterdam: Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hamilton, Charles V., and Kwame Ture. 2011. Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America. New York: VintageGoogle Scholar
Hart, Christopher. 2018. “‘Riots Engulfed the City’: An Experimental Study Investigating the Legitimating Effects of Fire Metaphors in Discourses of Disorder.” Discourse & Society 29(3): 279–298. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hartikainen, Elina I. 2017. “Chronotopic Realignments and the Shifting Semiotics and Politics of Visibility in Brazilian Candomblé Activism.” Signs and Society 5 (2): 356–89. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Iedema, Rick. 2001. “Resemiotization.” Semiotica 37(1/4): 23–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2003. “Multimodality, Resemiotization: Extending the Analysis of Discourse as multi-Semiotic Practice.” Visual Communication 2(1): 29–57. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Issa, Rana and Einar Wigen. 2020. “Levantine Chronotopes: Prisms for Entangled Histories.” Contemporary Levant 5(1): 1–12. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kövecses, Zoltan. 2002. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Koven, Michele. 2019. “Narrating Desire for Place: Chronotopes of Desire for the Portuguese Homeland Before and After “Return””. In Discourses of Identity in Liminal Places and Spaces, ed. by Roberta Piazza, 42–63. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. “ Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2nd ed). London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Karimzad, Farzad. 2020. “Metapragmatics of Normalcy: Mobility, Context, and Language Choice.” Language & Communication, 70 1, 107–118. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kroon, Sjaak and Jos Swanenberg. 2019. “Introducing Chronotopic Identity Work.” In Chronotopic Identity Work: Sociolinguistic Analyses of Cultural and Linguistic Phenomena in Time and Space, ed. by Sjaak Kroon and Jos Swanenberg, 12–28. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lawson, James. 2011. “Chronotope, story, and historical geography: Mikhail Bakhtin and the space-time of narratives.” Antipode 43(2): 384–412. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lundström, Markus and Paola Sartoretto. 2021. “The Temporal Nexus of Collective Memory Mediation: Print and Digital Media in Brazil’s Landless Movement.” Social Movement Studies 1984–2019. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maraj, Louis, Pritha Prasad, and Sherita Roundtree. 2018. “#BlackLivesMatter: Pasts, Presents, and Futures.” Prose Studies 40(1–2): 1–14. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McKersie, Robert. 2021. “The 1960s Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter: Social Protest from a Negotiation Perspective.” Negotiation Journal, 371: 301–323. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Messaris, Paul. (1994). Visual Literacy: Image, Mind and Reality. Boulder: Westview Press.Google Scholar
McCluskey, Michael, Susan E. Stein, Michael P. Boyle and Douglas M. McLeod. 2009. “Community Structure and Social Protest: Influences on Newspaper Coverage.” Mass Communication and Society 12(3): 353–371. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Nummi, Jozie, Carly Jennings, and Joe Feagin. 2019. “#BlackLivesMatter: Innovative Black Resistance.” Sociological Forum 34 (S1): 1042–1064. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oostendorp, Marcelyn. 2017. “Extending Resemiotization: Time, Space and Body in Discursive Representation.” Social Semiotics 28(3): 297–314. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Parmentier, Richard J. 2007. “It’s about Time: On the Semiotics of Temporality.” Language & Communication 271(2007): 272–277. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Perrino, Sabina. 2007. “Cross-Chronotope Alignment in Senegalese Oral Narrative.” Language & Communication 271(2007): 227–244. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Poell, Thomas. 2020. “Social Media, Temporality, and the Legitimacy of Protest.” Social Movement Studies 19(5–6): 609–624, DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Raggatt, Peter. T. F. 2014. “The Dialogical Self as a Time-Space Matrix: Personal Chronotopes and Ambiguous Signifiers.” New Ideas in Psychology 321(2014): 107–114. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ritellaa, Giuseppe, Antti Rajala, and Peter Renshaw. 2020. “Using Chronotope to Research the Space-Time Relations of Learning and Education: Dimensions of the Unit of Analysis.” Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 1003811 (2020). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sinatora, Francesco L. 2019. “Chronotopes, Entextualization and Syrian Political Activism on Facebook.” Multilingua 38 (4): 427–458. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tateo, Luca. 2021. “Face Masks as Layers of Meaning in Times of COVID-19.” Culture & Psychology 27(1):131–151. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thielmann, Tristan. 2010. “Locative Media and Mediated Localities.” Journal of Media Geography 5(1): 1–17.Google Scholar
Thompson, Debra and Chloe Thurston. 2018. “American Political Development in the Era of Black Lives Matter.” Politics, Groups, and Identities 6 (1): 116–119. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tuomi, Ilkka. 2019. “Chronotopes of Foresight: Models of Time-Space in Probabilistic, Possibilistic and Constructivist Futures.” Futures & Foresight Science 1 (2): e11. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Fawzy, Rania Magdi
2023. Translocalizing the space of old Nubia in digital narrative: Resemiotized chronotopes as markers of identity. Russian Journal of Linguistics 27:4 ► pp. 843 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.