Description
Paper(s) presented:Lazaros Karavasilis, Jacopo Custodi & Laura Chazel - How Do Radical Left Parties Frame the Nation? A Comparison BetweenGreece, Spain and France
The trajectory of radical left parties during the 2010s is one of the most critical aspects of contemporary European politics. Indeed, the decline of traditional social-democratic parties allowed the flourishment of political formations that positioned themselves on the left of these parties and addressed issues that the mainstream left could no longer do. Scholars have explored these issues within the radical left discourse, manifestos, and communication to examine how these parties addressed austerity politics, their relationship with the EU, or how they developed their political strategy. What has received minimal attention though, is how these parties frame the nation in their respective countries and how they talk about the national element. This paper aims to expand the range of the existing studies that have examined the issue of the nation in the radical left, by comparing the three most prominent radical left parties in Europe: SYRIZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and La France Insourmise in France. Following a discursive-analytical approach to speeches and interviews by each party’s leadership our goal is to focus on how all of the examined cases employed a form of left-wing patriotism to incorporate the national element in their discourses. Ultimately, our goal is to highlight an often-neglected aspect of the radical left family by analysing it through its comparative potential.
Fatima Zahid Ali - "I Eat Transphobes For Breakfasts": Politics of postcolonial language appropriation & abrogation on Instagram.
Marginalized communities in postcolonial states, in particular transgender people, face unique challenges when consciously displaying their gender and/or sexual identity. Drawing upon postcolonial concepts of appropriation and abrogation – typically only limited to the literary tradition – this paper seeks to understand how colonial language and aesthetics are articulated in media by diverse transgender activists in the Pakistani context. We do this through the case study of the indigenous khwajasira community – an overarching term for transgender, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people, often known as the “third gender” or as gender category X in legal communication. We study the tension between linguistic appropriation and abrogation (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 1989) combined with multimodal critical discourse analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006; Machin & Mayr 2012) on Instagram posts by bilingual/multilingual activists with a primary focus on English and Urdu. We delineate four Pakistani khwajasira activists including Mehrub Moiz Awan, Shahzadi Rai, Hina Baloch and Nayyab Ali as they utilize both English and Urdu languages in their advocacy efforts. Through a close reading of online cultural artefacts and texts from these activists, we analyze language as a fraught and contested site through which the postcolonial condition is negotiated for those on the margins. In terms of media corpus from all activists, we collected around 600 social media posts from their public Instagram accounts. By limiting the inquiry to reels, Instagram videos, Lives, and images with all corresponding captions, we evaluate innovative linguistic and textual strategies such as untranslated words, codeswitching, codemixing, metonymy, interlanguage, and neologism. By examining the language practices of Mehrub, Shahzadi, Hina, and Nayyab, this paper captures a range of perspectives and linguistic expressions within the khwajasira community. That combined with the level of scrutiny and attention that these activists garner on mainstream/alternative and local/international media, we provide a unique lens into the tensions and challenges of the postcolonial ‘subaltern’ subject. Our exploration of social media texts and the discourses surrounding them reveal nuanced insights into the ways in which marginalized communities use language to resist, decolonize, and dismantle dominant power relations. Through these activists, this paper contributes to our understanding of the complex interplay of language, identity, and ‘transness’ in postcolonial milieus. Beyond this, the article emphasizes the need to decenter Anglo-European perspectives within the broader LGBTQI+ movement, in shaping our scholarly understanding of queer discursive processes and practices emerging in South Asia.
| Periode | 10 nov. 2023 |
|---|---|
| Evenementstype | Seminar |
| Locatie | Brussels, BelgiumToon op kaart |