Constructing eliteness : the semiotics of 'artisanal' coffee in global cities

Abstract

Researchers of urban life in late modernity have commented on the rise of new types of coffee shops in major cities worldwide. These “artisanal” coffee places market coffee as a specialised and luxury product requiring connoisseurship, elevated from an ‘ordinary’ drink to one that is associated with gentrification and a ‘hipster’ clientele. This thesis considers how ‘artisanal’ coffee shops index “eliteness” in the global cities of Hong Kong and Singapore. I demonstrate how linguistic ideologies affect and transform stratification and unequal power relations in the material world through examining how semiotic features present in these coffee shops index discursively achieved eliteness (Jaworski and Thurlow 2012, 2017) in the global semio-scape. I elaborate on how eliteness relates to and reinforces social exclusion and inequality as these discourses are mediatised and circulated, in online and offline media. I present my data consisting of images taken during visits to 75 coffee shops as well as images of online Instagram posts as organised into three analytical chapters. The first analytical chapter concerns semiotic elements on coffee shop storefronts. I argue that semiotic elements have coalesced and become enregistered as “elite”, which can be grouped in to four categories of features, namely, (1) orthography and typography, (2) visual images and colour, (3) materiality and layout, and (4) emplacement. In the second chapter, through the analytic lens of stance-taking (Jaffe, 2009), I consider nine examples of Instagram posts to show how businesses style themselves as “elite” places via their social network postings. I argue that the tension between “egalitarian” and “elite” stances is played out by the businesses juxtaposing differently scaled (Blommaert, 2007) images referencing their “local communities” and images referencing “aesthetic connoisseurship” (Silverstein, 2016) required for the appreciation of speciality coffee. In semiotic terms, this is realized, broadly speaking, by images which I analyse in three categories, (1) Authentic Local, (2) Local Communities, and (3) Global Cosmopolitans. In the third analytical chapter, I borrow Jaworski’s (2015) conception of “language objects”, and suggest how they index eliteness through their trajectories, emplacement and circulations. In particular I examine three examples of neon signage found in café interiors, forms of “text art” and show how neoliberal eliteness is stylised through both the medium and the message of these signs. In conclusion, the semiotics of ‘artisanal’ coffee and coffee shop spaces reveal ways in which eliteness is naturalised and entrenched as they point to class privileges which are often hidden and unobvious. This is illustrated by the specific indexicalities of “Western” coffee shops in Asian contexts in light of the global mobility of semiotic forms.