RE-CONTEXTUALIZING POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

This article intends to build bridges between two recent trends within Critical Discourse Studies as exemplified by cognitive linguistics and multimodality. Thus, the postulates of spatial cognition will be followed to do an analysis of the musical re-contextualization of Barack Obama's New Hampshire 2008 speech. In Will.i.am's music video ‘Yes, we can’, uploaded on YouTube under the username WeCan08, we can listen to a song whose lyrics are made of different extracts from Obama's speech. This type of communicative strategy results in a multiple re-contextualization of the political speech. The effectiveness of the musical video can be explained by identifying it as a blended mental space incorporating elements of the text-world, the music-world and visual-world.

KEYWORDS:

• critical discourse analysis
• multimodality
• mental space
• spatial cognition
• Text-World Theory

Notes

1. The speech can be watched at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe751kMBwms. This video has been uploaded by a user called ‘BarackObamadotcom’. This user name is another proof of the importance that social media had in Obama's campaign (cf. Harfoush, 2009).

2. The transcript can be found on http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/us/politics/08text-obama.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

3. Available on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY.

4. A list of the 34 celebrities featured can be found in the Wikipedia entry for this song (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yes_We_Can_(will.i.am_song)).

5. This Spanish equivalent, ‘Sí, se puede’, also appears in the music video. Even if it could be argued that this is a re-contextualization, I believe that this is not the only reason why this language appears in the video. By using Spanish, Will.i.am (and eventually Obama's ideas) are also trying to get the votes from the increasingly bigger Hispanic community in the USA.

6. This is an even-more-complex process, and there is at least a double – if not triple – re-contextualization. In a first stage, Obama takes a phrase which had previously appeared in texts produced at other times. In a second stage, Will.i.am uses the same phrase in a new text, which results in a new layer of meaning being added to these three words. Finally, these words are uttered by different people in the video – and they even appear printed on the screen – thus acquiring further nuances of meaning.

7. Due to copyright restrictions, quotes have been taken from Obama's speech. This is possible because the words used both in the speech and the song are exactly the same. See William (2008) for checking the use in context.

8. These past events include the foundation of the USA, the fight against slavery, the determination of immigrants and pioneers, the feminist fight for the right to vote, Kennedy's decision to go to the moon in 1961 and Martin Luther King's speech ‘I've been to the Mountaintop’ uttered the day before he was murdered.

9. When this happens, we can also hear a background of people clapping and chanting the phrase (from minute 1:00 to 1:58).

10. Check the re-contextualized use of this extract in William (2008). It is significant to note how certain meanings are foregrounded (Langacker, 2008) with the inclusion of the phrases ‘yes we can’ and ‘we can change’ before and after the first sentence.

11. This visual strategy (mixing shots of Obama with ones of Will.i.am, and alternating those with a constant succession of images from several public figures) is constantly repeated in this part of the song. Both Obama and Will.i.am tend to appear when actual extracts from the speech are uttered, while the public figures tend to do so when the chorus – ‘I want change’, ‘we want change’ or ‘yes, we can’ – is sung.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Regional Government of Castilla y León (project VA084B11–1), by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (project FFI2013–40934-R), and by the University of Valladolid [Funded research study leave at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Autumn 2012].

Laura Filardo-Llamas is a lecturer in English at the University of Valladolid, Spain. Her main research area is discourse analysis and conflict resolution. Her research has been recently applied to ethno-nationalist conflicts and to domestic violence. She has attended several international conferences, and she has published in journals such as Ethnopolitics, Peace and Conflict Studies, CADAAD Journal and Critical Discourse Studies.