Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that abandoned cemeteries in Algeria are semiotic landscapes of ambivalence—places that can’t be classified within a cultural category of meaning and identity. Ambivalence allows for new subjectivities, actions, and imaginaries to emerge through colonialism’s mortal remains.

Paper long abstract:

In 1962, nearly a million Christian and Jewish French Algerians fled Algeria after 132-years of settler-colonial rule. Sixty years later, abandoned Christian and Jewish cemeteries still litter the Algerian landscape. Cross-culturally, anthropologists have analyzed graveyards as places where societies remember themselves; however, cemeteries can also contain the material traces of discontinuity, rupture, and incoherence in the stories people try to make landscapes tell about their past, present, and future. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper argues that abandoned cemeteries constitute semiotic landscapes of ambivalence—places that people cannot or refuse to classify within a culturally recognized and/or hegemonic symbolic category of meaning. Ambivalence foregrounds the irreducible complexity and undecidability of meaning-making and identity that link people, places, and language in complex and uneasy temporal relations. By analyzing the conflicting semiotics of Christian and Jewish cemeteries in postcolonial Algeria—places that are often abandoned but left in place—I expose the sentimental, political, and poetic potential of spatio-temporal disorder for transforming social imaginaries, rooted in how people sometimes fail to create coherent, unified narratives of what "this place" means in relation to "who we are." Semiotic landscapes of ambivalence—as signs that fall between knowable categories or cannot be understood within the parameters of any system—can allow for new subjectivities, future actions, social imaginaries, and even hope to emerge through the potential for agency in the materiality of colonialism’s mortal remains.