De/legitimising EUrope through the performance of crises

The far-right Alternative for Germany on “climate hysteria” and “corona hysteria

Bibliographic Data

ID7884367
AuthorsBernhard Forchtner (0000-0001-7782-9288), Özgür Özvatan (0000-0001-5148-3004)
Year2022
Volume21
Issue2
Pages208-232
Publication date2022-03-08
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Language and Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1569-2159 • E-ISSN: 1569-9862
PublisherJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/jlp.21064.for
OpenAlexW4210300337
LanguageEN
Citations received21
References cited37

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

Art · Comics · Linguistics · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Sociology · Topos theory · History · Law · Philosophy

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