Abstract The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) was a pivotal event in the formation of Mexican national identity, known as Mexicanidad . Utilizing Yuri Lotman’s theory of cultural semiotics and Jan Assmann’s theory of cultural memory, this study explores how literary texts function as mediums of remembrance and re-signification, shaping the cultural memory of the Revolution. Initially, early revolutionary novels began to mythologize the Revolution, integrating it into broader cultural narratives. In the mid-twentieth century, the Latin American Boom saw authors like Carlos Fuentes and Juan Rulfo employ modernist techniques to reconfigure revolutionary memory, blending local and global symbolic systems. Finally, in the late twentieth century, female authors such as Ángeles Mastretta and Elena Poniatowska introduced gendered perspectives, re-inscribing revolutionary memory through domestic and affective narratives. This study argues that the cultural memory of the Mexican Revolution is not static but dynamic, continually reshaped through literary expression, reflecting the ongoing negotiation of Mexicanidad within a complex semiotic and sociopolitical landscape. By analyzing these literary works through the lenses of cultural semiotics and cultural memory, this study reveals how Mexicanidad is constructed as a fluid, plural identity shaped by the tensions between memory and forgetting, trauma and idealism, tradition and modernity.
Abstract Seac Pai Van Park is a large, multipurpose park in Macau that is rich in linguistic and semiotic meanings. The article delves into the linguistic landscapes of the park through a theoretical lens of language–spatial relationships, exploring the interplay of language, space, culture, politics, and commerce. Additionally, interdisciplinary perspectives such as multimodality and the commodification of language further enrich the analysis. The article uncovers the fluidity and adaptability of language choreographies and the long-term implications of these orchestration patterns for Macau more broadly, highlighting the fact that the identities represented by language are subject to a continuous negotiation with commodification under globalizing forces. The appearance of English, simplified Chinese characters, and other languages (e.g. Korean and Japanese) for tourists underscores the evolving nature of linguistic diversity and its implications for cultural heritage preservation and identity formation in Macau. In these ways, this study goes beyond the static paradigm of researching top-down linguistic landscapes, deepening the understanding of linguistic dynamics, and providing contemporary information about the complexities and opportunities of urban multilingualism to relevant research and policymakers.
Within disparate cultural discourses, certain forms of absolute being are said to be so far beyond the limits of normal human experience that language simply cannot describe them. Within Western intellectual traditions, this notion of something that is placed beyond the possible reach of signs is called apophatic, as opposed to the cataphatic concepts that can be adequately known through language. The theory of apophasis proposes that certain kinds of objects (such as an infinitely holy deity) cannot be signified because by nature they exceed any possibility of capture by the sign. In some cases, failures of signification become key to the concept or object identified. Given the prevalence of such asserted unsignifiable objects across cultures, a logical question arises: if all such objects lie beyond signification, how can we know that they are not the same object? In fact, when one sets multiple unsignifiers in comparison, intellectual history does make clear that they can still be distinguished. Therefore, the apophatic denial of a sign such as "God" or "Dao" - or of aesthetic experience from a poet such as Wang Wei - does not actually end signification; it creates a new kind of heavily context-dependent sign.
This article argues that in current surveillance studies, too much emphasis is placed on authenticity-based ideas, and this is done at the expense of recognizing that surveillance also results in an enforcement of profile-based identity, which is changing how society operates. In other words, surveillance is not merely about seeing and observing people (invading their privacy) and then, on the basis of these observations, steering them without consent (violating their authenticity). Instead, surveillance today is much more about seeing how people see - that is, observing their observations - and, with the help of AI, forming a profile of their identity. Surveillance systems, and the AI incorporated in or constituting them, have been developed to function without concern for people outside of their profiles. Any regard for sincere, individual, or authentic persons is simply not necessary. And people, because of social validation feedback loops and their own participation within networks of surveillance, have increasingly adopted profiles as a major identity technology for themselves as well. They increasingly identify themselves and others according to profiles. This enforcement of profiles marks deep existential, social, and political shifts.
Peirce's speculative rhetoric, namely, methodeutic, culminates in the reconciliation of theory and practice, which is regarded as his pragmatism. In this context, for him, pragmatism is the logic of abduction, emphasizing experience as semiotic process from perception to conception as a method of right thinking. Based on Peirce's idea of abduction for pragmatic meaning-making, this paper concerns Peirce's esthetics of freedom in terms of dialogic and dialectic abduction in the act of narration. Therefore, the semiotic concept of human freedom is explored by interpreting agency of the self in dialogic condition between the interpreted-sign and the interpretant-sign. As a method of methods, abductive reasoning in narrative by means of narrative imagination, explanation, and interpretation is discussed in the semiotic process from indetermination to determination. I thus argue that Peirce's esthetic vision of freedom, which is characterized by the pragmatic and existential in poetic logic of narration by means of the agential self, will set oneself free, leading to reconciliation between the self and other, thus allowing one to say that "I am what I do." In the end, "fabulous" freedom in narrative agential self becomes a personal reality in the actual mind, resulting in personal identity in the actual world.
