Multilingual, multicultural and multi-religious diversity: chronotopic affect in the semiotic landscape of Zhongshan Road, Quanzhou

As the starting point of historical maritime silk road, Quanzhou retains spaces of the past and embodies modern development in its signage. This study draws on ‘chronotope’ (Bakhtin 1981), ‘scale’ (Blommaert 2007), and ‘affect’ (Wee 2016) to explore inseparable time-space relations (i.e. chronotopes) evident in the semiotic landscape of Zhongshan Road, Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China. The data consist of photographs, observation notes and formal/informal interviews from an ethnographic scholarly tradition. The paper analyzes the multilingual, multicultural and multi-religious representations in the data and explores the affective effects of the diverse chronotopes, i.e. chronotopic affect. The semiotic landscape of this road manifests multiple time-space frames caused by mobile sociolinguistic resources in the context of globalisation. This mobility leads to the functional shift of linguistic and other semiotic resources, realised by scale-jumping processes from local and traditional scales to global and modern scales, from communication to commodification, from political and historical to commercial and materialistic scales, from instrumental to cultural scales, from religious to mundane scales, etc. The accumulated movements of various scales characterise complex chronotopes interwoven by history in the same site or even in a single sign, and create distinct affect such as love and nostalgia.