33.2399, Confs: Anthropological Linguistics/Belgium

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-33-2399. Tue Aug 02 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.2399, Confs: Anthropological Linguistics/Belgium

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Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2022 19:16:24
From: catherine tebaldi [cat.tebaldi at gmail.com]
Subject: On pragmatics and 'Peach Tree Dishes': Discourses of far-right extremism, conspiracy, and solidarity

 
On pragmatics and 'Peach Tree Dishes': Discourses of far-right extremism, conspiracy, and solidarity 

Date: 09-Jul-2023 - 14-Jul-2023 
Location: Brussels, Belgium 
Contact: catherine tebaldi 
Contact Email: cat.tebaldi at gmail.com 

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics 

Meeting Description: 

Although often dismissed by both academics and progressive voters as
nonsensical and irrelevant fringe ideas, far-right conspiracy narratives in
fact present complex, multimodal, and affective discourses that contest,
co-opt, and connect to mainstream and official knowledges, and as such become
increasingly normalized, accepted, and influential. Responding to the 2023
IPrA conference theme of exceptionality and ordinariness, this panel explores
the conflicting (meta)pragmatic regimentation and unruliness of digital
discourses of far-right politics, of our complicity in them (Verschueren 2021)
or contestation of them. Digital, multimodal discourses can co-opt the
language of the ordinary to promote exceptional conspiracy narratives as, for
example, meat eating in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s recent evocation of the
supposedly outrageous notion of growing meat in a “peach tree dish” (sic!)
which aligned the replacement of meat with the replacement of white men.
Alternatively, they banalize the language of progessive values: COVID
anti-vaccine advocates have co-opted the slogan of reproductive rights
activists, “my body, my choice,” in protest signs in Ireland, UK, US, and
elsewhere (Strange 2021), while in Poland, anti-genderist politicians and
media have sought to resignify the LGBTQ+ symbol of the rainbow as an index of
sinful, immoral, and unpatriotic ideologies (Baran 2022). Perhaps most
perplexingly, the reactionary right sometimes takes up the language of
critique (Tebaldi 2021) and creates a popular, pseudo-linguistic analysis
around the ordinariness of words, claiming that it is the progressives who
twist and denaturalize the “true” meaning of words and concepts such as, for
example, “marriage,” “freedom,” or “patriotism.” Given the global influence of
rightwing languages of hate, this panel aims to examine and demystify their
discursive operation in various national, regional, and local contexts, but
also to engage with existing counter-discourses that seek to disrupt rightwing
attempts at co-opting and perverting progressive terms and ideas. This latter
focus is crucial because, as Borba (2018) convincingly argues, “hatred is past
oriented” (177) whereas “acts of hope” (174) look to the future and to the
potential for checking and pushing against acts of hate. Consequently, we
invite contributions to the panel that include but are not limited to:
theoretical exploration of contestations and different uptakes of discourses,
exploration of rightwing protest discourses (e.g. anti-vaccine,
anti-reproductive rights, conspirituality, and others), the new solidarities
produced between but also, crucially, against these, and attempts at
disrupting these rightwing uptakes through oppositional discourses of hope.
 






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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-2399	
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