A textual enactment of community

Regimes like the post-colonial Tunisian government have often been qualified as ‘neo-patriarchal’ with little analysis of actual state practices. Focusing on a specific aspect of government policy in the 1990s in Tunisia, the present article examines a housing programme which removed over a thousand families from unsafe housing in old central neighbourhoods of Tunis to new estates on the western edge of the city. The programme acquired a high profile in the local, state-controlled media, where it was referred to as the Projet Oukala, mashrū' al-ūkayil, an oukala being the shorthand term used by Tunis urban planners for unsafe, overcrowded housing in the old city or médina. Although at the level of the local state, the Oukala Project represents a significant departure in housing provision, the present article is concerned with the analysis of a set of representations of the project, assembled by the present researcher, rather than with the evaluation of policy content. Through a piece of policy aiming at the satisfaction of basic needs, the Tunisian nation-state establishes a persuasive narrative of successful government action, thereby seemingly strengthening its moral hegemony. The article explores the discursive functioning of a myth, that of the all-seeing, generous leader and the grateful people. It is a case study of a small corpus of media writing in Arabic and French about a high-profile low-cost housing project. In methodological terms, the article is thus concerned with the usefulness of critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a tool to approach the creation of subject-positions in media writing. The press reports figure a unified discursive community. But beyond the media texts, further research suggests a more nuanced approach to urban policy

Critical discourse analysis · Discourse analysis · Government (linguistics · Hegemony · Linguistics · Local government · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Public housing · Sociology · State (computer science · Law · Political and Social Issues · Public Administration

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