De/legitimising EUrope through the performance of crises: the far-right Alternative for Germany on 'climate hysteria' and 'corona hysteria'
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Bernhard Forchtner [1] ; Özgür Özvatan [2]
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[1] University of Leicester
University of Leicester
GB.ENG.H4.31UC, Reino Unido
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[2] Humboldt University of Berlin
Humboldt University of Berlin
Berlin, Stadt, Alemania
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- Localización: Journal of language and politics, ISSN 1569-2159, Vol. 21, Nº. 2, 2022, págs. 208-232
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
This article illuminates the far-right populist Alternative for Germany's (AfD) performances of delegitmisation vis-à-vis EUrope and legitmisation of itself/the nation by articulating two paradigmatic, transnational crises: climate change and COVID-19. It asks: ‘how does the far-right AfD perform these two crises to legitimise itself and delegitimize others?’ and ‘what similarities/differences exist between the performance of these two crises in terms of topics, narrative (genres) and their linguistic realisations?’. To explore AfD’s de/legitimisation efforts, written texts and videos by AfD representatives through which they intervene in discourses about climate change in 2019 and COVID-19 in 2020 are analysed. The analysis identifies a two-dimensional process of narrative delegitimization, vilifying national and backgrounding EUropean ‘others’, and illustrates that a comic-romantic emplotment of ethno-national rebirth pre-configures the largely same topics and topoi. In so doing, the article, furthermore, takes another step towards the conceptual integration of narrative (genre) into the Discourse-Historical Approach in Critical Discourse Studies.
