Semiotics of spatial citizenship: Place, race and identity in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This thesis uses the work of Frantz Fanon as a perspective to anchor an analysis of semiotic material deployed by students during the #Shackville protests at the University of Cape Town in 2016. Through the notion of Linguistic Citizenship (Stroud 2001) as a decolonial lens, and as a means to account for a myriad of communication tools – linguistic, semiotic materials and the body - as language in the broad sense, the thesis weaves together Fanon and Linguistic Citizenship to grapple with the chronotopic links that time, space and bodies have with the past and the present in South Africa.