Linguistic anthropological work on postcolonial elite formations illuminates how economic interests are advanced through the creation of ambiguous value around emblems presupposed as colonial and attached to differentiated elite types in fractally recursive forms. After tracing the question of colonialism across scholarly lineages in linguistic anthropology, this article focuses on elite formations as a key realm within postcolonial semiotics and on “fake,” “mix,” and “excess” as central qualities that constitute chronotopically anchored dimensions of ambivalent, aspirational postcolonial eliteness. This article provides an overview of recent scholarship on postcolonial semiotics: processes through which linguistic and other signs are linked to the colonial and its ongoing relevance in the construction of value. This point is then demonstrated through three sample cases: representations of Koreans as incompetent speakers of English in a commercial advertisement, middle-class Filipino youths’ self-positioning through construction of an undesirable elite figure, and valorization of neoliberal future-readiness in a promotional video for a Singaporean university’s student career center. But how can the concept be operationalized so that it can be used to link metapragmatic analysis to critical investigation of the political processes underlying society? In this paper, I suggest that focusing on how figures of personhood in metapragmatic discourse are organized along dimensions of time, space, and affect can serve as valuable heuristics for a critically oriented metapragmatic analysis, as it is those dimensions that highlight the material and political groundedness of figures of personhood.

Figure of personhood, or set of indexicals that are linked with a performable person type, occupies a key role in contemporary metapragmatic analysis.

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