Asserting racism’s relativity: an interpretive and functional discourse analysis of Flemish nationalist re-articulations of the problematic of racism

This paper focuses on a controversial nationalist discourse that asserts that racism is [a] relative [concept]. It provides a discourse analysis of the functions these assertions and surrounding claims on racism perform in relation to the definitions of racism used, the interpretive repertoires and logics in which they are embedded, and the political project they support. Racism-is-relative discourse reserves the signifier of racism for discrimination on the basis of race and/or descent. It blocks off and delegitimizes critical anti-racist repertoires and notions such as structural racism, racism as ideology, entitlement racism or racism as white privilege. It serves as a shield against accusations of racism. It is integrated with the interpretive repertoire of new realism and with widespread neoliberal and culturalist logics. These patterns do not only characterize discourse on racism’s relativity in Flanders but can be found across Europe in contexts marked by low degrees of political awareness regarding racism’s many faces. The analysis is based on an interpretive and functional heuristic for doing discourse analysis based on a notion of discourse understood as articulatory practice.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Politics and the political in critical discourse studies: state of the art and a call for an intensified focus on the metapolitical dimension of discursive practice

Based on an overview of the ways in which politics and the political have been thought in critical discourse analysis (CDA), the author calls for a focus on the metapolitical dimension of discourse. The author develops his notion of metapolitics on the basis of post-foundational insights into politics, the political and processes of (de-) politicization. Metapolitics refers to projects and struggles where conflicting modes and models of politics clash. Metapolitical debates potentially reshape the structure of the public realm as well as the entities, borders and processes that constitute it. The author differentiates his descriptive and analytic use of the term from the way this signifier has been used programmatically by the anti-democratic New Right and its heirs. He demonstrates that metapolitical projects can be democratic as well as anti-democratic. In order to facilitate discourse analyses of metapolitical projects, debates and struggles, the author suggests that the metapolitical dimension of contemporary debates can be explored further by integrating insights from governmentality studies, studies of political rationality and the discourse theoretical logics approach with CDA. Moreover, a further exploration of the linguistic and textual underpinnings of metapolitics constitutes a promising pathway for future investigation. The study of metapolitics should be part and parcel of the transdisciplinary domain of critical discourse studies so that our understanding of the linguistic and non-linguistic features of metapolitical projects can be developed in equal measure at multiple levels of abstraction.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Critical Discourse Analysis: Definition, Approaches, Relation to Pragmatics, Critique, and Trends

This chapter introduces the transdisciplinary research movement of critical discourse analysis (CDA) beginning with its definition and recent examples of CDA work. In addition, approaches to CDA such as the dialectical relational (Fairclough), sociocognitive (van Dijk), discourse historical (Wodak), social actors (van Leeuwen), and the Foucauldian dispositive analysis (Jager and Maier) are outlined, as well as the complex relation of CDA to pragmatics. Next, the chapter provides a brief mention of the extensive critique of CDA, the creation of critical discourse studies (CDS), and new trends in CDA, including positive discourse analysis (PDA), CDA with multimodality, CDA and cognitive linguistics, critical applied linguistics, and other areas (rhetoric, education, anthropology/ethnography, sociolinguistics, culture, feminism/gender, and corpus studies). It ends with new directions aiming towards social action for social justice

Nostalgia and Hope: Narrative Master Frames Across Contemporary Europe

After the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War, a certain sense of optimism swept across Europe. Some 25 years later, everything seems radically different. With the considerable inroads made into mainstream politics by right-wing populist parties across the continent, there is no shortage of gloom and worry. Nevertheless, despite numerous examples of retrogressive forms of mobilization, there are also many cases of progressive mobilization. To capture this dynamic complexity, we posit politics as a site of struggle that constitutes an arena for the conflicting demands of the two master frames of nostalgia and hope. Following this logic of a polarized political terrain, the volume is divided into three parts that address both right-wing populist politics across Europe (Part I) and politics beyond party politics through either retrogressive mobilization (Part II) or emancipatory initiatives (Part III)