Tracing racism in antiracist narrative texts online

ABSTRACT

Τhis paper studies online narrative texts, which, despite their declared antiracist stance, reproduce racist positionings against migrants. Based on the broader framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, our main research question concerns the ways racist and antiracist positionings coexist. To this end, we employ an enriched version of Bamberg’s tripartite model which distinguishes the micro-levels of narrative world and narrative interaction, from which the positionings towards the discourses of the macro-level, in the present case the national discourse, emerge. A common feature of the media narratives under study is the ambiguity between an antiracist reading and a motile racist one. In these readings the denοuncement of majority instances of illiberal/frozen racism coexist with the representation of migrants as people largely assimilated to the majority context. Due to this coexistence, such texts become vehicles of liquid racism.

KEYWORDS:

• Micro/macro-level of analysis
• Bamberg’s narrative model
• migration
• assimilation
• motile racism
• liquid racism

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my colleague Villy Tsakona for her valuable suggestions and comments throughout my research. I would also like to thank my colleagues G. Xydopoulos, R. Karachaliou and V. Tsami for their interesting comments and support. Finally, this paper owes a lot to the critical and insightful remarks of the two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s ).

Notes

1 Among them, we could include Fairclough’s (e.g. 1989/2001) socio-cultural approach, Wodak’s (e.g. 1995) discourse-historical approach and van Dijk’s (e.g. 2001) socio-cognitive approach.

2 The texts of the two examples analyzed in this paper has been transcribed and translated from Greek.

x: : prolongation of a sound.

((xxxx)): comments and contextual information added by the author.

3 In 2016, when we found this video clip in YouTube, the official site of the campaign was already rendered inactive.

4 As we do not always know who are the authors of the media narratives under scrutiny and, even when we know them, we are not sure whether they express themselves or the goals of a specific organization or institution, in the analyses that follow we will not refer to the positionings of a specific speaking subject, but to the positionings promoted in the narrative texts.

5 However, it is worth pointing out that the video clips of the campaign are not intended specifically against the Germans. In the other video clips of the campaign, the story takes place in Australia, France, USA and Canada, i.e. in various countries where Greek migrants migrated.

Additional information

Funding

This research work is supported by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI) under the “First Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to support Faculty members and Researchers and the procurement of high-cost research equipment grant”. It is part of the research project “TRACE: Tracing Racism in Anti-raCist discoursE: A critical approach to European public speech on the migrant and refugee crisis” (HFRI-FM17-42, HFRI 2019–2022).