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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 935

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

The discourse of protest: Frames of identity, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity

Authors: Kasanga, Luanga Adrien (1); Ben Said, Selin (2)
Submitted by: Kasanga, Luanga Adrien (University of Bahrain, Bahrain)

Language is an important resource deployed to voice demands, express feelings, and, less often recognized, to give cultural and political meaning to protest action. Yet, the study of the discourse of protest is an under-researched area of sociolinguistics inquiry (one recent exception being Frekko 2009). This presentation aims to contribute to stimulating research in this area. It highlights the role of language, its intersection with, and its embedding in, protest as a social and political act. It underscores the power of language to mediate action and, thus, espouses the view of a symbiotic relationship between discourse and social action: discourse impacts and is impacted by the social act of protesting. Data come from protest signs from the Arab Spring protests, especially the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia and the Egyptian Revolution in January 2011. Use is made of a combination of Frame Analysis and (a number of tenets of) Mediated Discourse Analysis to examine code choice, the polyvalent character of the social act of protesting which can be interpreted in different frames or perspectives. In addition, intertextuality, a reputedly pervasive feature of discourse (Tannen 1989) or text (Fairclough 1992), and interdiscursivity (e.g., Foxlee 2010), are examined by means of textual analysis. For this purpose, additional data are used. These data come from the worldwide protests following the disputed November 2011 presidential and parliamentary elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  This discussion of the discourse of protest cuts across the following issues and themes: intertextuality, interdiscursivity, linguistic landscape, meditational and multimodal discourse.

References

Fairclough, Norman L. 1992. Discourse and social change. Oxford: Polity Press.

Foxlee, Neil. 2010. Intertextuality, interdiscursivity, and identification in the 2008 Obama campaign.  In Iona Mohor-Ivan and Gabriela I. Colipcă, eds, Proceedings of the International Conference Identity, Alterity, Hybridity (IDAH), Galaţi, 14 - 16 May 2009. Galați, Romania: Galați University Press. 26-42.

Frekko, Susan E. 2009. Signs of respect: Neighborhood, public, and language in Barcelona. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(2): 227-245.

Tannen, Deborah. 1989. Talking voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. New York: Cambridge University Press.