Colonialism’s Mortal Remains

Semiotic Landscapes of Ambivalence in Oran, Algeria

Abstract

Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oran, Algeria’s second- largest city, I argue that some cemeteries serve as semiotic landscapes of ambivalence— places that people cannot or refuse to classify within a culturally recognized, hegemonic symbolic category of meaning. Ambivalence emphasizes the irreducible complexity and undecidability of meaning-making and identity, connecting people, places, and language in complex, uneasy, and non-unilinear temporal relations. 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.