Temporal agency of social movements

Abstract

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.

Translocalizing the space of old Nubia in digital narrative: Resemiotized chronotopes as markers of identity

“…The article thus aims at situating itself within the current debate on relating chronotopicity to identity work , De Fina 2019, Fawzy 2022, Kroon & Swanenberg 2019, Li & Blommaert 2019 in general and at filling a gap in the literature of linguistic studies investigating the Nubian diaspora in particular by addressing the following overarching question and sub-questions: To answer these questions, the article draws on the notions of ''resemiotization" (Iedema 2001(Iedema , 2003 and "the chronotope" (Agha 2007, Bakhtin 1981, Oostendorp 2007, Perrino 2007, to discusses the notions of diaspora, Nubian identity and displacement. Chronotopic analysis situates the Nubian FB page the Al Nuba Café within discourses of specific tempo-spatial juxtapositions.…”