Balance is a socially valorized quality in the United States, and yoga a social practice widely claimed to provide it. In this article, I investigate the semiotic logics of this widespread quality and theorize its relationship to the social practice of yoga and to political projects of neoliberalism and second-wave feminism in the United States. Analyzing ethnographic interviews that I conducted with white female yoga instructors in New York City in the summer of 2016, I show that balance is invoked by speakers as a guide to repurpose chronotopically anchored models of yoga to their contemporary lives. Balance provides speakers a sense that the chronotopic contrasts in these models correspond and are compatible with one another. Identifying three linked semiotic relationships upon which balance’s logics rely—contrast, correspondence, and compatibility—I argue that speakers’ interpretation of these logics is mediated by their social positioning as middle-class white women within a neoliberal political economy in the United States.

This article follows four years of ethnographic research in Beijing and investigates tropes of “third world solidarity” (termed disanshijie datuanjie 第三世界大团结) and “cosmopolitanism” as they are pragmatically recruited or intersubjectively evoked in urban Afro-Chinese interactions. In it, I demonstrate how historical tensions between cosmopolitanism and “third worldism” are mediated through the translation of the intersubjective cultural concepts guanxi (关系) and Ubuntu. I ask: How do semiotic horizons of “history” and “culture” become pragmatically indispensable activities through which contemporary Chinese and African subjects establish historical or culturally intelligible grounds for a “novel” interaction under current conditions of South-South educational migrancy? Drawing on a genealogy of pragmatist semiotics and symbolic interactionism (Goffman 1983; Agha 2007; Carr 2011), read through a critical theoretical lens (Fanon 1965; Lukács 2010), I reveal a dialectics of interaction at play in the mediation of historical and cultural dynamics in Afro-Chinese encounters in Beijing. In doing so, this article explores a tension that emerges at the juxtaposition of third world solidarity and cosmopolitan aspiration, one—as I will show—that certainly informs what will come to be among the most pivotal interactions of the twenty-first century: that between China and Africa.

This essay will examine the work of Jack Spicer through the lens of Federico García Lorca’s homages and his concept of the dark earth inspiration called duende to explore the bonds created through imagined lovers, mostly looking at works proposing relationship through affect, apostrophe, and homoerotics. Spicer communicated with García Lorca in his book After Lorca, which Spicer saw as a direct channeling of the poet and his magic-imbued poetics via translation. In Spicer’s work, anamnesis and homage are attempts to unify the writer with the object of channeling—the “same-like” person with whom the author identifies. The act of imagining or channeling a similar writer into conversation provides a direct link to creativity for Spicer and others like him, who write in the vein of queer magic in order to create and perpetuate lineage and connection to the sexual world despite distances of time and space. Uncovering this perspective within the writings of García Lorca and Spicer allows a deeper and more empathetic rereading of both as queer poets and poets interested in writing-as-magic. This likewise encourages a deeper and fuller imitation of these writers by contemporary kin working into queer lineages.

This article focuses on how Facebook users understand and adapt to or resist recently increasing intensity in Facebook content-curating practices in pages organized around geopolitical satire memes generally known as “Countryball comics.” Participants attach a ludic, nonserious discursive and communal ethos to potentially offensive memes, by which they create a type of sociality that faces punitive actions from Facebook (content deletion and publishing suspensions). Following meta-level discussions about correctness, appropriateness, and acceptability, participants feel compelled to adjust their communicative behavior in ways ranging from self-censorship to altering communicative practices native to such meme pages. Moreover, participants construe Facebook as a composite human (Facebook users and content moderators) and algorithm-driven nonhuman (automated content recognition tools and filters) entity actively involved and embedded in everyday communication. Drawing on posthumanist sociolinguistics and applied linguistics (Pennycook 2016, 2018), the article revisits the traditional notion of “communicative competence” to account for the dynamic interplay between dispersed, disembodied, and (non-)human interactants, environment, and artifacts.

In Bulgaria, the Rom/Ciganin persona is defined by non-Ciganin Bulgarians as a set of reiterated features, displayed as fixed and supposedly identifiable by all. This persona is enregistered through various semiotic processes, television being one of the most important ones. Rom/Ciganin is the name that links together a set of indexical stereotypes (naturalized as essences) and purports to denote a particular referent, a community, an ethnicity, and the individuals who, by being so labeled, are said to belong to it. Through the study of a racist act of aggression filmed in Bulgaria, I hypothesize that the hatred of Cigani passes discursively through a typification constantly reelaborated by a process of enregisterment. The making of peoples, groups, and communities is not new, but it becomes problematic when researchers, and the institution in general, relay the idea of fixed ethnic categories without problematizing them. They thus legitimize the Roma (or Cigani, Gypsies, etc.) category, and indeed the Rom persona, through the (re)production of a set of political discourses based on ethnicity and discrimination. This legitimizes a category that allows the marginalization and exclusion of individuals and families in the name of their supposed membership.

This article elucidates the role of metapragmatic devices like footing and stance-taking in trial hearings before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. It focuses on the case of Ahmad al Faqi al Mahdi, a Malian Islamist found guilty of the 2012 destruction of cultural heritage in Timbuktu. We examine how the prosecution and defense reflexively formulate the hearing as part of a wider text trajectory and how they align personae across participation frameworks by locating the current courtroom event into a wider dialogical field. A careful inspection of these metapragmatic devices reveals how trial participants navigate the multiple tensions facing this emergent, amalgamated form of criminal adjudication, which lacks a coercive apparatus of its own and still bears the traces of the political act of its institution.