US Discourse Research Articles

Reparations for Reproductive Slavery and Its Afterlives

ABSTRACT Contemporary US discourse on reparations tends to focus on the suppression of Black economic interests, but the harms of slavery are not exhausted by the labor expropriation of slaves and its concomitant wealth accumulation for white people and the United States at large. Reproductive oppression was constitutive of the institution of slavery, and its harms continue to reverberate today. This article thus calls for reproductive reparations, or the transparent and sustained attention to the effects of racialized reproductive oppression as they intersect with calls for reparations for slavery. Reconceiving reparations through histories and presents of reproductive harm is required to more fully account for the wrongs of slavery and provide a broader reach for radical societal transformation in our present.

Metadiscursive nouns in corporate communication: A cross-cultural study of CEO letters in the US and Chinese corporate social responsibility reports

The study of rhetorical devices and how corporate leaders organise the texts and convey attitudes to stakeholders in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports has become an important research area in recent years. A relatively neglected means of rhetorical expressions, however, is metadiscursive nouns. This study investigates the use of metadiscursive nouns in a 0.5-million-word self-built corpus of the US and Chinese CEO letters in CSR reports to reveal cross-cultural variations. The results show that the interactive metadiscursive nouns are twice as frequent in the US discourse as in the Chinese discourse, demonstrating greater efforts invested in cohesion by the US companies. This difference can be attributed to the writer-responsible rhetoric in the West and the reader-responsible conventions in China. The interactional metadiscursive nouns in the US discourse occur twice as frequently as in the Chinese counterpart, suggesting greater exertion of nominal stance by the US companies. This discrepancy mainly arises from the high- and low-context variations between the US and China. This study sheds new insights on metadiscursive nouns as rhetorical resources in cross-cultural CSR communication and provides implications for ESP practitioners to use them as a means of conceptualising writer–reader interaction in corporate communication.

Can It Be a Gamechanger? Interrogating the Prospects of Decolonization Through Public History in Japan

Abstract As a historical settler and colonizer in Asia, yet a state not colonized by European countries, Japan and its colonial history seem to have been left out from the debates on public history as a decolonizing process, due to the field having arguably been Eurocentric. This article interrogates the extent to which public history could serve as a vehicle to decolonize the history-making process in Japan and demonstrates the challenges of decolonizing through public history within Japan’s national framework due to nationalistic or patriotic silencing and censorship. Such nationalistic public history is rooted in Japan’s narratives of victimhood fostered in its course of history, including the ‘inferior’ position against the West or the experience of the atomic bombs. Moreover, Japan’s historical division between the internal and external colonies as well as its nationalistic, defensive attitude towards the history of external colonialism have played significant roles in burying its settler colonial past. To include narratives about the internal and external colonial victims, I argue that both Eurocentric decolonization and academia-centered public history in Japan need to be, in themselves, decolonized so that they provide more nuanced approaches to Japan’s colonial past. Furthermore, given that narratives of the colonial past in national history projects can be silenced under nationalistic victimhood, this article suggests that transnational collaborative public history could disconnect historical narratives from nationalistic discourses of victimhood, gathering more sympathy beyond Japan and supporting efforts towards decolonization. The overall article eventually contributes to decolonizing the Eurocentric debates on ‘decolonization through public history.’

Gendered Orientalism and Syrian Women Refugees

Orientalist discourses have long recirculated the idea that Muslim women are oppressed victims of Islam; an idea that has denigrated Muslims and positioned white, Christians as superior. For Muslim women refugees specifically, the gendered orientalist discourse of victimization has reappeared on both sides of the debate on Syrian refugee resettlement in the US and Europe. Within anti-resettlement circles, the narrative of Muslim women as oppressed victims has been leveraged as a reason to stop their resettlement, because their lifestyles and values are framed as incompatible with liberal, Western societies. Pro-resettlement circles, on the other hand, often position Muslim women’s victimization as a reason to save them by resettling them. In other words, the same cultural essentialism that positions Muslim women as victims has been used to reject and to support Muslim refugee resettlement. Yet the representations of Syrian Muslim women as oppressed victims of Islam exist in stark contrast to the strong, capable, and resilient Syrian women refugees scattered across SWANA, Europe, the US, and elsewhere. Building from postcolonial, feminist literature, in this paper I first focus on the intersections of the gendered orientalism and refugee resettlement discourses, underscoring the commonality of the victim discourse on both sides of the Syrian refugee resettlement debate. I then shift to highlight the disconnect between the victim representation and the life and experiences of Syrian women refugees. This later point draws from my research on Syrian Muslim women refugees in Jordan who have managed seemingly insurmountable obstacles with strength and determination; and they have done so in part through their faith. I situate my discussion of their strength within literature on Islamic feminism and Muslim women’s agency.

Distinction within the ‘global north’? A Bourdieusian approach for analysing development discourse: The case of U.S. and E.U. relations with the Colombian state (2016–2022): A comparative analysis

The paper conducts a comparative analysis of EU (91 texts) and US (93 texts) discourses concerning post-peace accord Colombia (late 2016 to mid-2022). Employing a Bourdieu-influenced methodology, our proposal aims to reconcile Post-Development theories with International Relations research. This innovative and multidimensional approach illuminates both discursive continuities within Global North while concurrently providing a framework that allows to identify and interpret internal political divergences. Our findings highlight a shared commitment to a liberal conception of peacebuilding, alongside internal distinction strategies employed to legitimize respective policies towards Colombia.

A car of one’s own? A critical discourse analysis of the representation of women drivers in the Chinese-language news media

Nowadays it is commonplace for Chinese women to drive cars either as a means of transportation or for a job. Meanwhile, the varied voices as to women’s capacity to drive are heard in media reports. This article examines media representations of Chinese women drivers on the official news website Chinanews.com. News reports from 2012 to 2021 were collected, sorted in Nvivo 11, and analyzed under the guidance of van Leeuwen’s socio-semantic approach. The results of the analysis revealed three dominant discourses about women drivers: problematic discourse, commendable discourse, and victim discourse, in which categorisation strategy, nomination strategy and passivation strategy, along with the description of material actions and semiotic actions were employed. This study sheds light on the contradictory expectations placed on Chinese women and the perplexity felt by media regarding the social context of the increased mobility and freedom women have attained due to recent economic and social changes.

『머나먼 쏭바강』에 나타난 비판적 인식의 재고

This paper is premised on the idea that a different meaning or a different set of hermeneutic codes are detectable in Park Yong-han’s The Songba River Far Away than those attributed from a realistic perspective to the novel. It starts with charting the similarities and differences between Park’s novel and the so-called “victim discourse” commonly found in the American Vietnam War fiction, which is reputedly employed in order to exempt American GIs from the responsibilities for the horrendous war crimes. This paper then proceeds to focus on what it deems to be two crucial episodes in the novel in order to tease out alternative meanings from the text. One such episode is found in the relationship between the South Korean patient soldiers and master sergeant Oh, the virtual ruler of the army clinic camp in Vietnam, which this research approaches as an allegory. The other is the Christmas party held at Lang’s mansion in Nha Trang. This paper recovers a critique of the US-led world order or a critical consciousness within the novel by reading the two episodes in relation to the South Korean politics of the time and the postwar international relations.

The reproduction of American identities in Somalia through terrorism and ethnicity

ABSTRACT In this article, we aim to discuss how manifestations of American identities have been reproduced in Somalia by diverse US diplomacy actors in the 2000s. Following a knowledge/power nexus, we argue that Orientalist discourses establish alterity politics in global South countries by managing and controlling post-colonial bodies. We explore different expressions of the American self’s reflection by comparisons to Somalia in discourses on terrorism and ethnicity. To do this, we understand American identity based on the notions of Americanity and Puritanism. This article contributes to debates on identity/difference among foreign policy, critical security, and terrorism studies by combining academic, journalistic, and political sources as expressions of US discourse.

Beyond Autopoiesis

As the notion of biological sex becomes increasingly invested with binary, anti-trans meanings in US discourse, some scholars suggest that “reimagining biology” as diverse and not dichotomous might help affirm trans identities. Instead of ignoring science and emboldening its reductionist forms, it is said that theorists should celebrate trans identities as biological diversity. This essay explores the fraught terrain of this hopeful project. The first section examines how dominant histories of the sex-gender distinction autopoietically flatten trans lives by conflating them with the passive materiality of biological sex. The second section turns to two histories of trans life that challenge this historiographic tendency—Jules Gill-Peterson's Histories of the Transgender Child and C. Riley Snorton's Black on Both Sides. Following Sylvia Wynter's call to forge liminal sciences, the article shows how Gill-Peterson and Snorton reimagine biology by encountering marginalized modes of trans scientific practice. In the margins, gaps, and opacities of the archive, there are encounters with trans experimentation, rearrangements of biology and science that do not “affirm” transness as much as they rebel against the racist order of cis-normativity.

Carrying the cross for justice: Digital traces of victimhood in Sri Lanka

Victimhood claims in the digital space are often affectively and morally negotiated based on the extent of sharedness of those sentiments and values. However, media-centric and populist political interpretations based on ‘mobilization’ often curtail the exploration of ‘sharedness’ and ‘belonging’ in digital discourses of victimhood. Therefore, this article explores the nature of digital victimhood discourses, their constitution, and how those victimhoods are negotiated in digital collectives. The article combines affective victimhood with chronotope to analyze digital discourses on ‘public acts’ carried out by members of the public seeking justice for the Easter attack victims of 2019. Accordingly, the article focuses on Facebook posts and comment sequences on “Jehan Appuhamy carrying the cross” to mark the third anniversary of the attacks in April 2022. Data is gathered from four Facebook posts containing a collection of videos and images combined with a selected 3142 post-comment sequences. The article finds that affective and moral understandings of victimhood are negotiated in interaction with right-wing populist undertones and resistance discourses of the people’s protest. The narratives of justice, threat, empathy, and solidarity constitute a multifaceted expression of discontent, representing both a struggle against those in power and a quest to connect with like-minded individuals, irrespective of the specific cause for such sentiments. Additionally, it involves rallying support from friends, sharing feelings of discontent, and motivating them to take action. Thus, digital belonging is fractally nested in specific timespace configurations.

Performing return: victims, criminals or heroes? Senegalese male returnees engaging with the stigma of deportation

In Senegal, migration can both be a stigma and a privilege; it can increase social standing but also lead to stigmatization and suffering following aborted migration projects. This article uses performativity as an analytical lens to explore how Senegalese male migrants narrate and perform their return to Senegal in reaction to diverse social expectations. It focuses on men who were deported from Europe or who lived there under threat of deportation before returning voluntarily. Despite appeals by migration scholars to go beyond a limited discourse of victimhood, few studies explore returnees’ agency and even fewer the agency of deportees. Based on almost a year of ethnographic fieldwork in urban Senegal, we examine multiple simultaneous performances and narrations by returnee men. Despite the numerous difficulties they experience, returnees narrate success post-return by engaging with hegemonic masculine discourses of being a provider, protector and devout Muslim. But ambiguity about return is common, including silencing of suffering in public and private spaces. Performing return as an agentic act, regardless of the duration of return or whether it was voluntary, can enable returnees to conceive of belonging to Senegalese society. By recognizing returnees’ agentic performativity, this article moves beyond common categorizations of deportees as victims or criminals.

“we are still here holding fast”: Stillness in the wake of Hurricane Irma in Richard Georges’ Epiphaneia

This article looks at Richard Georges’ poetry collection Epiphaneia, which is set on the British Virgin Islands in the aftermath of hurricane Irma. While Georges’ poems are placed amidst destruction, they go beyond narratives of devastation; instead, they articulate a poetics of livingness on the hurricane-struck island. This paper first draws out critical debates on the coloniality of climate that show the longue durée and complexity of a history of catastrophe in the Caribbean context. It addresses how Epiphaneia challenges one-sided discourses of island dependency and victimization by offering ways to perceive islands in the Anthropocene not as passive victims of catastrophes but as sites of living within what Glissant calls a chaos-world. This article then advances an ecopoetics of the archipelago in the wake of the hurricane. The various tensions held by the island after the storm will be traced through the word ‘still’: the ongoing violence of coloniality, still present; yet continuously resisted due to the island’s and islanders’ resilience and survival, still alive. This paper explores the poetics emerging from the island in the Anthropocene: What poetics are needed to sustain life after, and within, catastrophe? What does it mean to exist and move, still, on the island in the wake of the hurricane?

“A Clean Conscience behind the Dark Bars”

Abstract The iconification of political prisoners enhances their visibility, credibility, and power. Nevertheless, iconification may also reduce, reimagine, or otherwise distort the biographies and experiences of political prisoners. Moreover, iconicity’s blurring of prisoners’ views and activities may result in the recirculation of their stories in the service of political projects that do not fully align with their own. The incarceration of the Islamist icon Şule Yüksel Şenler (1938–2019) in 1971 presents an excellent vantage point from which to analyze these dynamics and how gender informs them in fundamental ways. The diverse media representations of Şule Yüksel Şenler demonstrate how historical tropes became entangled with critical references to the law, religion, and the discourses of freedom and democracy in the iconification of an Islamist political prisoner in Cold War Turkey. Şenler’s legacy and the recent references to her story show how the tendency of iconification to occlude or distort prisoners’ ideological investments and activities may in fact enhance their ability to integrate into new political projects. This case study of a right-wing political prisoner exposes how the histories of political incarceration, combined with the discourses of injustice and victimization, may also be used to legitimize authoritarian political regimes and new incarcerations.

Reading Guillory's Cultural Capital in South Africa

Abstract This article opens with the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall protests at the University of Cape Town, when a student poured feces on a statue of Cecil Rhodes. This moment exemplifies the ambivalent relationship between symbolic politics and demands for institutional transformation in postapartheid South Africa. The essay considers two sites of tension: the appropriation of this antiapartheid, decolonial rhetoric outside of South Africa (as in the Rhodes Must Fall campaigns at the University of Oxford) and the borrowing of US discourses of racial identity in South African universities. In both cases, specific social and political contexts and their attendant challenges tend to disappear. In South African universities, this has the effect of occluding class, class inequality, and class struggle. To address the South African context, the essay suggests that the writing of Antonio Gramsci, whose work spans literature as cultural production and practical political mobilization, might provide a more useful politics of reading and writing.

The Impact of AI on Strategic Stability is What States Make of It: Comparing US and Russian Discourses

ABSTRACT Military applications of artificial intelligence (AI) are said to impact strategic stability, broadly defined as the absence of incentives for armed conflict between nuclear powers. While previous research explores the potential implications of AI for nuclear deterrence based on technical characteristics, little attention has been dedicated to understanding how policymakers of nuclear powers conceive of AI technologies and their impacts. This paper argues that the relationship between AI and strategic stability is not only given through the technical nature of AI, but also constructed by policymakers’ beliefs about these technologies and other states’ intentions to use them. Adopting a constructivist perspective, we investigate how decision-makers from the United States and Russia talk about military AI by analyzing US and Russian official discourses from 2014–2023 and 2017-2023, respectively. We conclude that both sides have constructed a threat out of their perceived competitors’ AI capabilities, reflecting their broader perspectives of strategic stability, as well as the social context characterized by distrust and feelings of competition. Their discourses fuel a cycle of misperceptions which could be addressed via confidence building measures. However, this competitive cycle is unlikely to improve due to ongoing tensions following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Wanneer de taalklok vijf voor twaalf slaat

The present paper seeks to shed light on the language-ideological dynamics of contemporary (1995-2018) Belgian media discourses that present multilingualism as a problem. Conceiving of the media as meaningful actors in (re)producing, recontextualising and naturalising language-ideological discourses, we analyse a corpus of 170 French- and Dutch-medium press articles containing multilingualism-as-problem orientations. Following the Discourse-Historical Approach, thematic and critical-pragmatic analyses were conducted of (1) the news topics in which multilingualism can be identified as a problem and (2) the linguistic mechanisms through which that ‘problem’ is discursively constructed. Results point to three key elements: discourses of victimhood, teleological perspectives on language justice and language history, and (false) dilemmas opposing multilingualism to the community language. These characteristics will emphasise the persistence and instrumentalisation of standard language ideology and ideals of societal monolingualism rooted in Belgian history. The article concludes with a brief reflection on the role of sociolinguistic research in engaging with language ideologies in public language debate.

A corpus-assisted ecolinguistic analysis of the representations of tree/s and forest/s in US discourse from 1820-2019

This study presents a corpus-assisted ecolinguistic analysis of the evolving discursive representations of tree/s and forest/s in US American discourse from 1820-2019 in the approximately 475-million word Corpus of Historical American English (Davies, 2010). To explore these entities and their depictions in prevailing discourse, this study performs a diachronic collocation analysis of adjectives occurring with the terms across the span of the corpus. The analysis identified the 100 most frequent adjective collocates appearing with the singular and plural forms of tree/s and forest/s and calculated Kendall's tau correlation coefficient scores using decade-by-decade per million use rates in order to empirically assess the strength of trends in language use. The findings indicate a divergence in broadly positive and negative representations over the time span as adjectives construing poor health and lack of vitality are rising while adjectives conveying positive attributes of size, beauty, and wellbeing are declining. In addition, adjectives reflecting experiential engagement with tree/s and forest/s have progressively been replaced by a discourse of scientific identification and governmental dominion.

Exodus, Nakba Denialism, and the Mobilization of Anti-Arab Racism

Nakba denialism – that is, denying Zionist culpability for the mass expulsions of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland in 1948 – has long been a feature of US discourse on Palestine. Through a content analysis of Leon Uris’ 1958 novel, Exodus, I argue that Nakba denialism rests on three anti-Arab racist tropes. The first trope presents Palestinian Arabs as lacking religious attachment to Palestine, the second trope claims they lack modern feelings of national identity, and the third trope claims they are easily induced to commit acts of violence by their ruthless leaders. Through the deployment of these tropes, the Exodus narrative popularized key elements of Nakba denialism in US discourse by blaming the victims of settler colonial violence for the expulsions they faced. More broadly, this article shows how the imbrication of race and settler colonialism functions to epistemologically erase the very acts of settler colonial violence that produce racialized Others.

Psychoanalyzing democracies: Antagonisms, paranoia, and the productivity of depression

Psychoanalyzing democracies: Antagonisms, paranoia, and the productivity of depression

“Mobs” or “Pro-democracy Protesters”: A Comparative Analysis of US and Chinese News Discourses of Domestic and Foreign Protests

ABSTRACT This article comparatively analyzes discourses that U.S. newspaper, The New York Times, and Chinese news outlet, The Global Times, constructed about the Hong Kong and Black Lives Matter protests. It finds that as Sino-U.S. relations have deteriorated to the lowest point in this century (Usher 2020), the selected U.S. news coverage of the domestic and international protests appeared to correspond to the tense relations. Nonetheless, the chosen Chinese news media’s negative portrayal of the overseas protesters suggests that in addition to international relations, a country’s racial background and national ideologies might also contribute to how news discourses about domestic and international protests are constructed.