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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1425

Part of Session 154: A tale of six cities (Other abstracts in this session)

The City of Pula: Multilingual Landscapes and Politics of Naming Through History

Authors: Sujoldzic, Anita
Submitted by: Sujoldzic, Anita (Institute for Anthropology, Croatia)

This article examines the spatial and multiple temporal trajectories of the linguistic landscape of the city of Pula, a major tourist resort and regional urban centre in Croatia. The city's discursive location - as part of the bilingual border region of Istria, with a significant population of Italian nationality and other ethnic groups from the Balkan area, and a social memory that is linked to the socialist Yugoslavia, Italian and Austro-Hungarian past, creates a complex social context of contested and changing multilingualism and imaginaries embedded in relations of power. The paper studies the evolution of the historical discourses and ideologies underlying linguistic landscape through reconfigurations of space and time at both ‘popular’ and ‘official’ levels. Theoretically the research is interdisciplinary, based on sociology of space, sociolinguistics, ethnography and visual culture, and it adopts multimodal semiotic analysis to examine the juxtaposed multiple times and spaces through three interrelated aspects: 1) the historical aspect through analysis of old city postcards and public advertisements from the Austro-Hungarian era as a cultural text that reflects popular discourses of place and identity, 2)  the synchronic aspect through analysis of present city public signs, and  3) transformation of street names throughout history.
In the discussion historical versions of the popular urban imagery of cosmopolitanism are contrasted with observed contemporary forms of proclaimed multicultural coexistence and its spatial linguistic forms. The relation between memory and identity as revealed in present official street naming is discussed as well as the extent to which their selection add new layers of meaning to urban space and reflect mixture through history, piecing together local heterogeneities, competing memories and a plurality of historical voices.