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Chronotopeography: Nostalgia and modernity in South Delhi’s linguistic landscape

Issue: Vol 13 No. 1 (2019) Special Issue: Visceral landscapes

Subject Areas: Gender Studies Linguistics

Abstract:

This paper explores the processes through which visceral experience is cultivated, packaged and commodiﬁed in the Linguistic Landscape (LL) of South Delhi, India. We engage the theoretical concept of cultural chronotopes (Agha, 2007a) to demonstrate how spatially and temporally entwined experiences of nostalgia and modernity are produced in South Delhi’s commercial LL, and show how such positioning serves to compress or ﬂatten such experiences for ready consumption (Kockelman, 2006). Focusing on particularized chronotopes tied to a privileged and elite experience, imagination and aspiration, we highlight how discourses of the ‘ideal’ are reproduced and positioned as visceral through speciﬁc references or semiotic arrangements. In so doing, we discuss the quantiﬁcation of experience executed by these signs in commodifying the visceral, and the problematic way these instances propagate an idealized, sanitized and simpliﬁed understanding of Indian rural communities, Indian history and Indian traditional practices.

Author: Kate Lyons, Farzad Karimzad

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