New article in "Place" issue (4-14-2025)!

Semiotic Review is delighted to announce the publication of a new article in "Place" issue by Stephanie Love (University of Pittsburgh, Department of Anthropology): "Colonialism’s Mortal Remains: Semiotic Landscapes of Ambivalence in Oran, Algeria." 

Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oran, Algeria’s second- largest city, Love shows how cemeteries serve as semiotic landscapes of ambivalence: places that people cannot or refuse to classify within a culturally recognized, hegemonic symbolic category of meaning. As she argues, the contradictory semiotics of colonial-era cemeteries in postcolonial Algeria—sites that are often abandoned but left in place—lay bare the sentimental, political, and poetic potential of spatiotemporal disorder for social imaginaries in transformation. This stems from how people sometimes fail or choose not to create coherent, unified narratives of what this place means to who we are. Rather, semiotic landscapes often mark the unstable boundaries between self and other, potentially allowing for alternative interpretations or even creating a space for the outright rejection of interpretation, along with the complex sentiments such contradictions evoke.

As always, thematic issues of Semiotic Review are open for new submissions! The Call for Papers for the "Place" issue can be found here. In this issue, guest editors Jeffrey A. Tolbert and Bryan Rupert invite essays, articles, and book reviews for this special issue on the semiotics of place. For more information on how to submit to Semiotic Review, go here.