This study explores migrant identity construction in the curated stories of UK-based charity organisations. Drawing upon the paradigms of critical discourse analysis and narrative positioning, we demonstrate how the construction of migrant identities as successful, fulfilled, grateful and resilient reproduce a migration as transaction discourse. We problematise these representations as prerequisites to migrants’ acceptance, given that they not only speak to the neoliberal, neoassimilatory paradigm of wider integration debates in UK public discourse, but also conflict with the overtly philanthropic aims of the charity organisations. The curated stories are, thus, transformed into sites of liquid racism in their entanglement of declared antiracist, covertly racist, positionings of migrants in the UK context. Our work contributes to the body of research that aims to scrutinise the largely unexamined work of institutionalised social actors who aim to ‘do the right thing’ by calling for greater reflexivity and the need for critical dialogue in order to unpack the embeddedness of antiracism in racism.

Since 2015, when the current migration ‘crisis’ began, racist discourses and attitudes have gained prominence within European nation-states in an effort to achieve and maintain linguocultural ‘homogeneity’ as well as to stigmatize and exclude migrants. On the other hand, extreme racist behaviors are usually hindered or banned therein (e.g. through antiracist legislation), so verbal racist attacks have often acquired a mitigated form. Therefore, while the overt and fanatic hatred accompanying racism may not be officially tolerated, subtle forms of racism easily find their way into the European public sphere. Both these Greek memes reproduce widespread racist stereotypes according to which migrants are uncivilized individuals threatening to seize power in Greece.

Greek national discourse promotes linguistic and cultural homogenization within Greek borders often through racism against migrants. Racist homogenizing practices are not always explicit but are quite often “liquid,” namely, covert, ambiguous, and hard to trace. The effective promotion of national homogenization not only naturalizes linguistic and cultural assimilation but may also infiltrate antiracist discourse and eventually lead to migrants’ internalization of racism. Within the framework of critical discourse analysis, we investigate how and why migrants may align themselves with national discourse and internalize discrimination against themselves. To this end, this case study analyzes an article written by a young migrant in Greece and published in a newspaper of leftwing and antiracist orientation. By exploiting the problem-solution pattern and the concept of face, our analysis reveals that the migrant author appears to accept the expectations and impositions of national homogenizing discourse. Concurrently, racism emerges as liquid, since the text expressing the author’s internalized racism is published in an antiracist newspaper. The article reproduces racist standpoints typical of the dominant national discourse in a way (and in a context) that disguises such standpoints and deflects any antiracist criticism potentially raised against them. Thus, the hegemony of Greek national discourse is further reinforced.

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.

Following a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach, the present study reports on the analysis of 49 texts from the Hellenic Parliament Proceedings, where the term λαθρομετανάστης ‘illegal migrant’ is used. The texts under scrutiny date back to 2015 (i.e. the year the migration crisis reached its peak) and reveal the recontextualized use of this term, which is identified with the hegemonic national-racist discourse of the 1990s perceiving migrants as criminals. Later on, the term was stigmatized by political correctness as racist and inaccurate. We will examine how the re-emergence of its older racist use as a reaction against the guidelines of political correctness is anew connected with national-xenophobic discourse and, in particular, with framing migrants as invaders and a national threat.

The arrival of refugee and migrant populations in Europe, especially since 2015, has resulted in the (re)production and entrenchment of various attitudes, views, practices towards them, ranging from anti-racist and humanitarian ones to racist and xenophobic ones. These attitudes are also reflected in humorous texts, which project “serious” aspects of social reality through an amusing and seemingly innocuous way. In this article, drawing upon the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo 1994, 2001) and Fairclough’s critical approach (1989, 1992), we analyze jokes concerning migrant/refugee issues. We argue that racist discourse against “foreigners” is not only overtly promoted via hate speech, but also appears indirectly in jokes that (superficially) seem to reinforce anti-racist discourse. Through the analysis, we detect a modern and more subtle kind of racism, i.e. liquid racism (Weaver 2016), which emerges from the (seemingly) anti-racist jokes either through the deprecation of the “Other” or through his/her assimilation.

References

1. Attardo, S. 1994. Linguistic Theories of Humour. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

2. Attardo, S. 2001. Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

3. Fairclough, N. 1989. Language and power. London: Longman.

4. Fairclough, N. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.

5. Weaver, S. 2016. The Rhetoric of Racist Humor: US, UK and Global Race Joking. London: Routledge.

This study adheres to critical humor studies investigating how humor targeting the migrant ‘Other’ may reproduce social inequalities in the form of racist stereotypes. We examine two datasets of online migrant-targeting jokes from two different time periods in Greece. Our first collection of jokes comes from the period 1990–2010, i.e., when Greece, enjoying financial prosperity, received mostly Albanian migrants, while the second one comes from 2014 onwards, i.e., when Greece, facing a severe financial crisis, received mostly Muslim migrants. Our analysis shows that the local sociopolitical context plays a significant role in shaping the ways migrants are humorously represented and targeted: the incongruities identified in the first dataset are different from those of the second. In both cases, however, migrant-targeting jokes seem to reinforce national homogenization by circulating racist stereotypes for migrants in a light-hearted manner and by naturalizing the latter’s marginalization and/or assimilation

The present study follows a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach, which focuses on the (re)production of social inequalities through discourse (Blommaert 2005, Van Dijk 2008, Wodak & Meyer 2016). CDA is interested in the study of public (institutional, political, news, advertising, etc.) texts, because – as Stamou (2014: 151-152) observes – in these texts “issues of social power and inequality are usually raised {…}, [these texts] are widely distributed, and they constitute the most important source for shaping our perception of social and political reality” (see also Van Dijk 2001). In our study, we focus on humorous texts that circulate on the Internet and reproduce racist perceptions and practices against migrants. Humorous texts have not received systematic attention and analysis by CDA, although some of them significantly contribute to spreading and consolidating racist or other stereotypes.

References

1. Blommaert, J. 2005. Discourse. A Critical Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press.

2. Stamou, Α.G. 2014. Critical discourse analysis: Studying the ideological role of language. In M. Georgalidou, M. Sifianou, V. Tsakona (Εds.), Discourse Αnalysis: Theory and Αpplications. Athina: Nissos, 149-187.

3. Van Dijk, T. A. 2001. “Critical Discourse Analysis”. Στο D. Schiffrin, D. Tannen και H. H. Hamilton (Eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Λονδίνο: Blackwell, 352–371.

4. Van Dijk, T.A. 2008. Discourse and Power. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

5. Wodak, R. και Meyer, M. (Eds.). 2016. Methods of Critical Discourse Studies. London: Sage.

The aim of this study is to explore the migrant identities constructed in written narratives posted on the official webpage of the Greek branch of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The narratives examined refer to migrants’ journeys, lives in the country of origin and/or the host country, hopes and goals. The proposed analysis exploits Labov’s (1972) structural model for narratives and Bamberg’s (1997, 2004) one for narrative positioning, so as to shed light on the migrant identities emerging in the narratives examined. It appears that the identities constructed by the migrants themselves or ascribed to them by IOM portray the former under a favorable light, in an effort to undermine and refute current negative representations of migrants in the Greek media and respective stereotypes.

References

1. Bamberg, M. 1997. Positioning between structure and performance. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7, 335-342.

2. Bamberg, M. 2004. Form and functions of ‘slut-bushing’ in male identity construction in 15-yearolds. Human Development 47, 331-353.

3. Labov, W. 1972. Language in the Inner City: Studies in Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

This study examines the opaque reproduction of racism in an online, anti-racist campaign officially aiming to denounce hate speech and challenge widespread stereotypes concerning migrants. In particular, we investigate the video clips of the #StopMindBorders campaign launched by the Greek branch of the International Organization for Migration. We specifically concentrate on the liquid racism attested in these video clips, namely a highly ambivalent form of racism encouraged in the mass media and usually hard to detect, as it involves multiple interpretations, some of which may not be assessed as racist (Weaver 2016). The multimodal critical analysis of the representation of migrants reveals that these video clips tacitly promote migrants' linguocultural assimilation as a prerequisite for their acceptance in the host country. In this sense, although the anti-racist campaign under scrutiny attempts to refute discourses of aggression and mainstream stereotypes against migrants, it ends up naturalizing hate speech and reproducing assimilative and monoculturalist ideologies.

References

1. Weaver, S. 2016. The Rhetoric of Racist Humor: US, UK and Global Race Joking. London: Routledge.

During the refugee crisis, in the public sphere racist discourses against migrants and antiracist discourses defending them coexist and are juxtaposed. By exploiting tools from Critical Discourse Analysis, our aim is to reveal that racist views are not (re)produced only through racist discourse blatantly targeting such populations, but also through superficially anti-racist discourse, which, although it intends to denounce racist practices, it ends up disguising and reproducing inequalities. So, through examining a video clip from the anti-racist #StopMindBorders Campaign (2017) of the Greek office of the International Organization for Migration, we trace the emergence of such an ambivalent, liquid racism. In addition, based on the findings of our analysis, we propose tentative teaching proposals in the framework of critical literacy so as to cultivate students’ critical language awareness.

The goal of this study is to argue that humour as an entertaining and funny way of perceiving and discursively constructing social affairs is most useful and appropriate in literacy courses, because it could sensitise students to how and why people produce humour as well as to its potentially aggressive and deprecating functions. More specifically, a critical literacy approach to teaching about humour is proposed, focusing on material where ‘antiracist’ humour is employed to undermine racist ideologies, but occasionally ends up supporting them. Some tentative teaching activities are put forward, which could help students detect humorous and racist ambiguities. Finally, potential objections and reservations concerning teaching about humour, racism, and anti-racism within a critical literacy framework are briefly addressed.