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The Power of Commemorative Street Names
Abstract
Street names are ostensibly visible, quintessentially mundane, and seemingly obvious. This might be the reason why social scientists have hardly addressed the issue of street names in their studies of the structures of authority and the legitimation of power. In this paper the author explores the semiotic and political operation of commemorative street names. He sheds light on the procedures of the naming and the renaming of streets and the utilization of street names for commemorative purposes as a fundamental feature of modern political culture. Further, he elaborates on how street names, in addition to their fundamental role in the spatial organization and semiotic construction of the city, are also participants in the cultural production of shared past. In addition, the author uncovers commemorative street names as a powerful mechanism for the legitimation of the sociopolitical order. Commemorative street names provide for the intersection of hegemonic ideological structures with the spatial practices of everyday life. Therefore they are instrumental in rendering natural the official version of history which they incorporate into the urban setting. The author concludes that the power of (commemorative) street names stems from their ability to implicate the national narrative of the past, though in a fragmented manner, in numerous narratives of the city.
... However, this type of spaces is not the only one that transmits a political view of the past. The geographers Azaryahu (1996) highlighted the street and street names as one of the main vehicles with which to transform the urban environment into a virtual political setting (Azaryahu, 1996: 311). Indeed, according to Entrikin (1991), the control to name the streets is an important expression of power. ...
... Monuments, following the suggestions by Smith (1986), contribute to establish a powerful link between community and territory, reclaiming a territory as the true homeland of a people. Thus, it could be stated that this physical intervention is the product of, and at the same time reinforces, hegemonic structures of power and authority (Azaryahu, 1996). ...
... Following the distinction formulated by Azaryahu (1996), the exercise of naming a street would form part of the type low-voltage interaction, unlike ceremonials or monuments that share a degree of information transfer of the type high-voltage interaction. While the first takes place in everyday contexts and, as Azaryahu asserts (1996), does not involve any substantial spiritual experience, the second one has the capacity to reinforce and transfer meanings that are then internalized by the individuals that participate in these performances and rituals. ...
... All the while, bilingual/multilingual signs likewise mirror the bilingual/multilingual nature of the area. Likewise, the dominantly displayed language wields power and glory in that locality (Azaryahu, 1996). ...
In recent times, the language in public spaces (as seen in street names, school names, names of buildings, names of metro stations, names of tourist attractions, and commercial signs) has attracted scholarly attention in onomastics, with the focus on how it reflects the linguistic situation of urban landscapes and how it can be used to construct several identities. The present study aimed to investigate names of hotels in Accra-the capital city of Ghana, with considerable financial, cultural, and industrial significance-using Landry and Bouris's (1997) Linguistic Landscape as a theory. The data comprises 160 hotel names accessed from the website of Yello Ghana, a well-known business directory. The analysis revealed, first, that most of the hotels deployed English monolingual names, with a few utilising bilingual names. Closely allied to this finding is the trend towards globalisation, as captured in some names of hotels. These key findings have implications for the scholarship in onomastics, urban landscape, language policy and planning, and further research.
... Examination of these relations has been deeply rooted in analysis within the scope of human geography since the critical turn in humanities and social sciences that took place in the early 1970s. The view regarding consolidation of political changes taking place in specific countries within the spaces of their cities was and still is mentioned by many researchers in various urban contexts -urban planning, architecture, urban nomenclature, as well as monumental sculpture (Harvey 1979;Cosgrove 1984;Duncan & Duncan 1988;Azaryahu 1996Azaryahu , 2011Alderman 2002Alderman , 2003Duncan 2005;Dwyer & Aldeman 2008). ...
This article examines the fate of colonial monuments in Africa during the post-colonial period, especially the monuments that the Portuguese erected in Bissau in West Africa. The discussion is preceded by a detailed analysis of the sources that describe the iconoclasm of colonial monuments in selected African cities and a thorough description of the field studies conducted by the authors in Guinea-Bissau in 2020. As new African states replaced former colonies, the removal of European monuments in their capitals became a widely discussed topic. Some expressly political colonial monuments were removed at the time of formal decolonization, others have fallen down over the years, and yet others still stand. What distinguishes Bissau from every other postcolonial capital in Africa is that, while all its colonial monuments were dismantled after 1973, most of the plinths on which they stood have remained. These empty plinths are a symbol of decolonization-sui generis monuments of dismantled monuments. They speak volumes about the nature of the transformations that have taken place in recent decades. The new way of commemorating people and events in the symbolic and political landscape of Bissau, viz. murals created on the grassroots initiatives of young Bissau-Guineans, is also examined.
... El importante peso de la religión en España durante la colonización de América sirvió para bautizar a las nuevas ciudades con nombres religiosos: San Juan de Puerto Rico, San Francisco. La Revolución Francesa marcó un hito al dar un significado político a los nombres de las calles: la Plaza Luis XV de París fue renombrada como Plaza de la Revolución, y más tarde otras capi tales como Berlín, Estocolmo o Viena fueron dando un significado político a sus calles (Azaryahu, 1996). ...
En este trabajo se analiza el género de los nombres de las vías públicas de la ciudad de Zaragoza (España), dada la importancia que tienen los nombres como una manera de transmitir y perpetuar determinados valores. El análisis tiene dos vertientes: por un lado, cuantitativo, contabilizando el número de calles de género femenino y clasificándolas en función de su trayectoria vital y atributos profesionales; y por otro lado, realizando un estudio con técnica de SIG (Sistemas de Información Geográfica) para analizar dónde se encuentran estas vías y sus principales características. Las conclusiones más evidentes son la escasa representación de las mujeres en el callejero, con un perfil de mujeres más tradicional, y la heterogénea distribución espacial en los distintos distritos.
In his work on memory, history and forgetting, Paul Ricoeur highlights a conflict between witnesses of historical events and historians. This problematic relationship between memory and history is echoed in a plastic cartography that the author returns to in this article. The study of the spatial organization of Tehran and the campaign to change the names of its streets after the 1979 Revolution allows us to better understand the interest of an aesthetic recourse to the map in the author's plastic process. It also shows how the map creates a dynamic but at the same time unstable link with both space and memory. The concept of "Memory Maps" was developed through the work of the Austrian artist Nikolaus Gansterer "Memory Map - A Topology of Rememberance" in order to show the artistic bias of the author.
This article contributes to research on commemorative naming strategies by presenting a comparative longitudinal study on changes in the urban toponymy of Leipzig (Germany) and Poznań (Poland) over a period of 102 years. Our analysis combines memory studies, linguistic landscape (LL) research and critical toponymy with GIS visualization techniques to explore (turnovers in) naming practices across time and space. The key difference between the two localities lies in the commemorative pantheon of referents—events, people, and places inscribed as traces of a hegemonic national past—that are replaced when commemorative priorities change. Other patterns are common to both study sites. Notably, in both Poznań and Leipzig, peaks of renaming occur at the threshold of regime change, after which commemorative renaming activity subsides. We report on our findings and propose methodological guidelines for analyzing street renaming from a longitudinal, transnational, and interdisciplinary perspective. (Collective memory, critical toponymy, memoryscape, linguistic landscapes, encoding of ideology, comparative analysis of Eastern Europe, longitudinal analysis, commemoration, GIS visualization)*
What are place names? From where do they originate? How are they structured? What do they signify? How important are they in our life? This groundbreaking book explores these compelling questions and more by providing a thorough introduction to the assumptions, theories, terminology, and methods in toponymy and toponomastics – the studies of place names, or toponyms. It is the first comprehensive resource on the topic in a single volume, and explores the history and development of toponyms, focusing on the conceptual and methodological issues pertinent to the study of place names around the world. It presents a wide range of examples and case studies illustrating the structure, function, and importance of toponyms from ancient times to the present day. Wide ranging yet accessible, it is an indispensable source of knowledge for students and scholars in linguistics, toponymy and toponomastics, onomastics, etymology, and historical linguistics.
Christian missions are historically captured in the construction of mission stations that facilitated religious instruction to advance the gospel with unintended consequences, such as an extension of missionary-colonial ideologies and attitudes. This article discusses how these were captured in mission station naming, inclusive of erroneous or misspelt names. This makes it necessary for the Church of Christ in Zimbabwe’s (COCZ) rural membership, commonly around mission stations, to rename these centres. The distortion of history on mission stations like Dadaya calls for the renaming of the station so as to recover lost values and culture, and the significance of the ecology to Africans. Our discovery of Dadaya macrops, an Asiatic marine species of water flea found in freshwater in this study, denies the assumption that Dadaya was a misspelling of Dayataya. This makes us assume that Dadaya was an idolatrous symbol for missionaries that rhymed with local isotopes to mentally drawn local communities. Norming the mission station, missionaries named Dadaya to transmit images, symbols and meanings known to New Zealand supporting churches. Dayataya Hills has been used as a scapegoat to validate their Dadaya macrops symbol. This study probes into the need to correct and guide people in renaming the mission station. Renaming transforms Dadaya into an African mission station. The article used critical discourse analysis (CDA) from purposive snowball interview results and a hermeneutic of suspicion to probe into naming the mission station.
Contribution: The article is interdisciplinary involving missionary history, humanity, socialisation, missiology, literature and education. it contributes to knowledge through decentering on African discourses, contextualisation, christianisation and decolonised church of christ positioned for healing and transformation where church names are not used for perpetuate Westernisation in African context.
The aim of the article is to elucidate the symbolic function of the underexplored geopolitically motivated phenomenon of toponymic solidarity. Based on the critical toponymic approach and the theories of political performativity, the authors examine the toponymic solidarity with Ukraine as a powerful spatial-political technology that emerged globally following the ongoing full-scale Russo-Ukrainian War in 2022. Drawing upon empirical data from media resources, archival materials, and in-situ observations, they unveil the geopolitical role of performative toponymic solidarity as a form of symbolic toponymic gifting both worldwide and in Ukraine. Concomitantly, two collateral spatial processes are revealed, including toponymic gratefulness as a reciprocal co-performance in Ukraine and toponymic retaliation as a counter-performance in Russia. In conclusion, the article advances the political toponymy literature by expanding the performative understanding of space through the lens of geopolitical place naming/renaming practices of toponymic solidarity.
To examine the social evaluations of place-name variation, a matched-guise study was created by digitally manipulating audio clips from a map task with four bilingual and four monolingual Austinites, varying only in place-name pronunciation: English or Spanish phonology for Spanish place-names; established local or newcomer nonlocal for English place-names. Based on 126 Austinite/Austin-resident listeners, mixed effects linear regression models and qualitative comments found that listeners uniformly perceived English place-name variation only in terms of localness, while Spanish variation indexed several social meanings that varied by listener/speaker demographics, particularly listener ethnicity (i.e., non-Hispanic listeners evaluated Spanish phonology as nonlocal while Hispanic listeners considered both English and Spanish phonology local). I contend (i) not all listeners perceive the same indexical fields, but rather partially overlapping fields; (ii) differing perceptions of Spanish place-names reveal underlying monoglossic ideologies in the U.S.; (iii) place-name variation is a rich site of indexical information for the construction of place identity, particularly in bilingual regions.
Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History and Memory.
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Using as data the events and persons commemorated in the United States Capitol this inquiry demonstrates how the significance of historical events changes from one generation to the next according to a changing infrastructure of societal problems and needs. Before the Civil War, two historical periods, colonization and revolution, produced the only events and heroes on whose commemoration a deeply divided Congress could agree. Once the unity of the nation was brought about by force of arms, the pattern of commemoration changed. Belated recognition was given to the events and heroes of the postrevolutionary period and to outstanding regional, as opposed to national, figures. The commemoration of office incumbency was superimposed on that of extraordinary military and political achievement, thus celebrating the stable institutional structures into which the charisma of the nation’s founders finally became routinized. These and other changes in the Capitol’s commemorative symbolism reflect the Civil War’s solution to the antebellum problems of integration and pattern maintenance. The bearing of these findings on different theories of collective memory is discussed.
In this original and important new book, Professor Entrikin argues that there is no essence or universal structure of place waiting to be uncovered or discovered by the theorist. The significance of place is associated with our 'situatedness' as human agents and is always best understood from a point of view and best represented in terms of narrative which can appreciate its specificity without reducing its richness as context to its more limited sense as location.
Umberto Eco, international bestselling novelist and leading literary theorist, here brings together these two roles in a provocative discussion of the vexed question of literary interpretation. The limits of interpretation - what a text can actually be said to mean - are of double interest to a semiotician whose own novels' intriguing complexity has provoked his readers into intense speculation as to their meaning. Eco's illuminating and frequently hilarious discussion ranges from Dante to The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum to Chomsky and Derrida, and bears all the hallmarks of his inimitable personal style. Three of the world's leading figures in philosophy, literary theory and criticism take up the challenge of entering into debate with Eco on the question of interpretation. Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose each offer a distinctive perspective on this contentious topic, contributing to a unique exchange of ideas between some of the foremost and most exciting theorists in the field.
Insights from literary theory are applied to the analysis of landscapes. It is suggested that the concepts of textuality, intertextuality, and reader reception may be of importance to those interested in the notion that landscapes are read in much the same way as literary texts.It is further suggested that landscapes can be seen as texts which are transformations of ideologies into a concrete form. This is an important way in which ideologies become naturalized. What is lacking in the radically relativistic theoretical perspective of much of twentieth-century literary theory, however, is a consideration of the sociohistorical and political processes through which meaning is produced and transformed. Examples of the relation between texts and landscapes from several different types of societies are offered. -Authors