Sword play: The cultural semiotics of violent scapegoating and sexual and racial othering
-
Robbie B. H Goh
Robbie B. H. Goh (b. 1964) is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. His research interests are nineteenth-century literature, social semiotics of race and class, Christianity in Asia, and postcolonial studies. His recent publications include ‘Asian Christian networks: Transnational structures and geopolitical mappings’ (2004);
Christianity in Southeast Asia (2005);Contours of Culture: Space and Social Dierence in Singapore (2005); and ‘The Internet and Christianity in Asia: Cultural trends, structures, and transformations’ (2005).
Abstract
The abiding cultural significance of swords, in an age of technologicallysophisticated weapons of mass destruction, is as much a semiotic puzzle as it is a socio-psychological one. The semiotics of swords displays certain features — commodity fetishism, the business speak of ‘cutting edge’ performance, primitive vitality, and related elements — that reveal the doubleness of desire in market society, the simultaneous desire to negate the capitalist present in favor of a primitivist past, together with an invigoration of the present through tropes of violent conflict. The edginess of swordsemiotics also marks certain points of cultural instability, in terms of race, gender, and sexuality, evincing an incessantly transgressive impulse.
About the author
Robbie B. H. Goh (b. 1964) is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. His research interests are nineteenth-century literature, social semiotics of race and class, Christianity in Asia, and postcolonial studies. His recent publications include ‘Asian Christian networks: Transnational structures and geopolitical mappings’ (2004); Christianity in Southeast Asia (2005); Contours of Culture: Space and Social Dierence in Singapore (2005); and ‘The Internet and Christianity in Asia: Cultural trends, structures, and transformations’ (2005).
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- A semiotic analysis of the genetic information system
- Sword play: The cultural semiotics of violent scapegoating and sexual and racial othering
- Reading Holmes: Capital and the sign of the market in The Hound of the Baskervilles
- Au sujet des couleurs de céphalopodes — rencontre de points de vue sémiotique et éthologique
- A dialectical materialist reading of the sign
- Rudolf Engler, le grand maître du saussurisme
- Three levels of the symbolosphere
- A discourse-based approach to human-computer communication
- Literacy in the ‘visual world’: Impact of the SLS experiment in rural India
- Neo-dualism and the bifurcation of the symbolosphere into the mediasphere and the human mind
- How to mean without saying: Presupposition and implication revisited
- A solution to the Sorites
- Thirdness as self-reference in computing
- Encounters
Articles in the same Issue
- A semiotic analysis of the genetic information system
- Sword play: The cultural semiotics of violent scapegoating and sexual and racial othering
- Reading Holmes: Capital and the sign of the market in The Hound of the Baskervilles
- Au sujet des couleurs de céphalopodes — rencontre de points de vue sémiotique et éthologique
- A dialectical materialist reading of the sign
- Rudolf Engler, le grand maître du saussurisme
- Three levels of the symbolosphere
- A discourse-based approach to human-computer communication
- Literacy in the ‘visual world’: Impact of the SLS experiment in rural India
- Neo-dualism and the bifurcation of the symbolosphere into the mediasphere and the human mind
- How to mean without saying: Presupposition and implication revisited
- A solution to the Sorites
- Thirdness as self-reference in computing
- Encounters
