ΚΥΚΛΟΣ ΣΕΜΙΝΑΡΙΩΝ ΕΕΠΓ - ΑΝΟΙΞΗ 2024

Memorialisation, museums, and Linguistic Landscapes:
neo-colonial French island settings

Robert Blackwood
University of Liverpool

Περίληψη/ Abstract

The cross-fertilisation between memory studies and Linguistic Landscape research is proving to be highly productive, in particular when undertaken as research-in-place and where the museum – as an institution as much as a building – is read as a text. Based on fieldwork in islands which belong to France but which are former colonial territories overseas, I have been analysing museum spaces where the building, its signage and labels, its architecture, and its online hinterland can be considered as an assemblage through which France’s relationship to these disparate islands can be critiqued. In this talk, I focus on the archipelago of Saint-Pierre-and-Miquelon in the North Atlantic, off the coast of Newfoundland, where a collection of four museums tell us something about the neo-colonial relationship between France and the islands through the memorialisation processes. By interrogating the acts of remembrance entextualised in these four museums – each of which has a different status in terms of management and ownership – I draw on multimodal critical discourse analysis tools to consider what the presentation of memory in museum settings says about the uneven relationship that connects the French State to these former colonial islands that have been incorporated into France.