Paper short abstract:

This paper foregrounds absences in semiotic landscapes as they result from the processes of destruction, erasure, and extermination. Paying attention to what is ‘already not’ and ‘not yet’ in semiotic landscapes, it attends to absences as revealing complex invisibilized histories of violence.

Paper long abstract:

Feelings of isolation and loss, occasionally described in interviews as ‘cropping someone’s tail’ or ‘life in a shell’, characterize the taste of the realities in Crimea since its annexation by Russia in 2014. Deprivations of such fundamental human rights go hand in hand with the erasure of any material sign of belonging to Ukraine from the surface of Crimea.

This paper foregrounds absences in semiotic landscapes as they result from the processes of destruction, erasure, and extermination. Building on critical sociolinguistic research, it centers on non-representation as a semiotically rich and meaningful mode (Bennett, 2013; Perini, 2020). Paying attention to what is ‘already not’ and ‘not yet’ in semiotic landscapes, this paper attends to absences as revealing complex invisibilized histories of violence. It thus challenges the traditional approach in semiotic landscapes that focuses on visible representation. Processes of the production of absence are interrogated through an analysis of their material effects, that is, voids, holes, and blank walls in the landscape of Crimea. Photographic data from ethnographic fieldwork illustrates traces of the erasure of Ukrainian statehood, its languages, and peoples by the Russian regime temporarily occupying the peninsula.

In sum, the paper seeks to show how an ontologically different view at semiotic landscapes, in which absences are agentive, enables richer perspectives on meaning and representation. Disentangling the absences in/of semiotic landscapes, we may come closer to the richness of the social phenomena hidden behind the deceptive nothingness and indicate new perspectives for understanding the afterlives of violence and destruction.