"Time to draw the line": The deployment of semiotic resources in the Timor Sea maritime boundary dispute

This presentation explores the linguistic landscape of a protest campaign. It analyses the deployment of semiotic resources – both material and virtual – by the protesters, analyzing the intertextuality and indexicality... [ view full abstract ]

This presentation explores the linguistic landscape of a protest campaign. It analyses the deployment of semiotic resources – both material and virtual – by the protesters, analyzing the intertextuality and indexicality manifested in photographs of the protests. The activist Movement against the Occupation of the Timor Sea (Movimentu Kontra Okupasaun Tasi Timor – MKOTT) was formed to advocate for East Timor’s interests in its long-running maritime boundary dispute with Australia. In 2013 and 2016 mass protests against the Australian government’s stance brought the dispute to international attention. While the main site of protest was outside the Australian Embassy in Dili, the campaign was conducted on several international fronts, both in the real world and online. MKOTT positioned East Timor as David and Australia as Goliath and made astute political use of ‘occupation’ as a structuring metaphor. The slogans and messages of the protests were suffused with references to East Timor’s colonial past and its relationship with development partners. In addition, the protestors themselves embodied the intergenerational divide that has resulted from the language regimes imposed during three successive periods of foreign administration (respectively by Portugal, Indonesia and the UN). By looking at language choice, imagery, metaphor, embodied capital, and the discursive interactions between protestors and their target audience I explore the notion of entanglement (Kerfoot & Hyltenstam, 2017; Nuttall, 2009) and what it offers as a way of seeing how these discourses intersected in the Timor Sea protests. The presentation hopes to contribute to a sociolinguistics of the South by looking at the linguistic landscape of protest as a site in which the periphery claims a voice and ‘talks back’ to the centre.

Nuttall, S. (2009). Entanglement: Literary and cultural reflections on post-apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

Kerfoot, C. & Hyltenstam, K. (2017). Entangled discourses: North-South orders of visibility. New York: Routledge.