Startseite “#JeSuisSirCornflakes”: Racialization and resemiotization in French nationalist Twitter
Artikel
Lizenziert
Nicht lizenziert Erfordert eine Authentifizierung

“#JeSuisSirCornflakes”: Racialization and resemiotization in French nationalist Twitter

  • Catherine Tebaldi EMAIL logo
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 11. September 2020

Abstract

After the 2016 spelling reforms deleted the accent circumflex from some French vowels, on right-wing French Twitter, the circonflexe reappeared in the center of the French flag – echoing the flag of Vichy France. Tweets with the hashtag #JeSuisCirconflexe resemiotized the accent circumflex as icon of a lost Frenchness, or voiced the racial other in a colonial faux pidgin to frame them as illiterate and brutish. Drawing on research on resemiotization (Leppänen, Sirpa, Samu Kytölä, Henna Jousmäki, Saija Peuronen & Elina Westinen. 2014. Entextualization and resemiotization as resources for identification in social media. In The language of social media, 112–136. London: Palgrave Macmillan) and raciolinguistics (Flores, Nelson & Jonathan Rosa. 2015. Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2). 149–171), this article explores how constructions of mock youth French use raciolinguistic tropes to imagine a language of social decline, connecting linguistic purism to racist myths of white genocide and the great replacement. Despite this, youth invert the imagination of their illiteracy, using playful language and satirizing white speech (Rosa, Jonathan. 2016b. Standardization, racialization, languagelessness: Raciolinguistic ideologies across communicative contexts. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26(2). 162–183) to contest French nationalism – reframing #JeSuisCirconflexe as #JeSuisSirCornflakes.


Corresponding author: Catherine Tebaldi,University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA, E-mail:

References

Baider, Fabienne & Maria Constantinou. 2019. Discours de haine dissimulée, discours alternatifs et contre-discours: présentation. Semen 47.10.4000/semen.12275Suche in Google Scholar

Balibar, Renee. 1985. L’institution du français. Presses Universitaires de France-PUF.Suche in Google Scholar

Balibar, E, Wallerstein, I.M, Wallerstein, S.R. 1991. Race, nation, class: Ambiguous identities. Verso. Verso.Suche in Google Scholar

Bouzereau, Camille. 2019. Le néologisme lepénien: Un marqueur discursif de haine dissimulée?. Semen 47.10.4000/semen.12448Suche in Google Scholar

Boyer, Henri. 2008. Langue et identité, Sur le nationalisme linguistique. Limoges: Lambert-Lucas.Suche in Google Scholar

Bucholtz, Mary & Kira Hall. 2004. Language and Identity. A companion to linguistic Anthropology, 369–394. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.10.1002/9780470996522.ch16Suche in Google Scholar

Devriendt, Émilie, Marion Sandré & Michèle Monte. 2018. Dire ou ne pas dire la « race » en France aujourd’hui. Mots 116.Suche in Google Scholar

Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau noire, Masques blancs. Ed de Seuil, Paris.Suche in Google Scholar

Fekete, Elizabeth. 2018. Europe’s fault lines: Racism and the rise of the right. London & New York: Verso Books.Suche in Google Scholar

Finkielkraut, Alain. 2016. La France, l’orthographe et l’école. Répliques [podcast produced by France Culture on 26 March, 2016]. https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/repliques/saison-29-08-2016-02-07-2017 (accessed 1 September 2016).Suche in Google Scholar

Fleming, Crystal Marie. 2017. Resurrecting slavery: Racial legacies and white supremacy in France. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Suche in Google Scholar

Flores, Nelson & Jonathan Rosa. 2015. Undoing appropriateness: Raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review, 85(2). 149–171. https://doi.org/10.17763/0017-8055.85.2.149.Suche in Google Scholar

Fogarty, Richard. 2008. Race and war in France: colonial subjects in the French army. 1914–1918. JHU Press.10.56021/9780801888243Suche in Google Scholar

Greene, Viveca S. 2019. “Deplorable” Satire: Alt-Right Memes, White Genocide Tweets, and Redpilling Normies. Studies in American Humor 5(1). 31–69. https://doi.org/10.5325/studamerhumor.5.1.0031.Suche in Google Scholar

Harsin, Jayson. 2018. Post-truth populism: The French anti-gender theory movement and cross-cultural similarities. Communication Culture & Critique. 11(1). 35–52. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcx017.Suche in Google Scholar

Hawley, George. 2017. Making sense of the alt-right. New York: Columbia University Press.10.7312/hawl18512Suche in Google Scholar

Hill, Jane. 2005. Intertextuality as source and evidence for indirect indexical meanings. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1). 113–124. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.113.Suche in Google Scholar

Holmes, Doulgas. 2006. Supernationalism—integralism—nationalism: Schemata for twenty first-century Europe. In Gerard Delanty & Krishan Kumar (Eds.). The SAGE handbook of nations and nationalism, 385–399. London: SAGE Publications.10.4135/9781848608061.n33Suche in Google Scholar

Holmes, Douglas. 2010. Integral Europe: Fast-capitalism, multiculturalism, neofascism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.10.1515/9781400823888Suche in Google Scholar

HoSang, Daniel & Joseph Lowndes. 2019. Producers, parasites, patriots: Race and the new right-wing politics of precarity. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.10.5749/j.ctvdjrrcqSuche in Google Scholar

Iedema, Rick. 2003. Multimodality, resemiotization: Extending the analysis of discourse as multi-semiotic practice. Visual communication 2(1). 29–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470357203002001751.Suche in Google Scholar

Jaspers, Jürgen. 2011. Talking like a ‘zerolingual’: Ambiguous linguistic caricatures at an urban secondary school. Journal of Pragmatics 43(5). 1264–1278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.05.012.Suche in Google Scholar

Judge, Anne. 2000. France:’One state one nation one language’. In Language and nationalism in Europe, 44–60. Oxford: OUP.10.1093/oso/9780198236719.003.0003Suche in Google Scholar

Leppänen, Sirpa, Samu Kytölä, Henna Jousmäki, Saija Peuronen & Elina Westinen. 2014. Entextualization and resemiotization as resources for identification in social media. In The language of social media, 112–136. London: Palgrave Macmillan.10.1057/9781137029317_6Suche in Google Scholar

Ludemann, Dillon. 2018. /pol/emics: Ambiguity, scales, and digital discourse on 4chan. Discourse, Context & Media 24. 92–98. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2018.01.010.Suche in Google Scholar

Maly, Ico. 2018. Populism as a mediatized communicative relation: The birth of algorithmic populism. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies. (213).Suche in Google Scholar

Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2016. Norteño and Sureño Gangs, hip hop and ethnicity in youtube. Localism in California through Spanish accent variation. Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race, 65–80. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190625696.003.0008Suche in Google Scholar

Paveau, Marie-Anne. 27.02.2012. Activités langagières et technologie discursive. L’exemple de Twitter, n La pensée du discours [carnet de recherche]. http://penseedudiscours.hypotheses.org/8338, consulted 03.03.2020.Suche in Google Scholar

Minna, Stern. 2019. Beacon, Boston.Suche in Google Scholar

Paveau, Marie-Anne. 13/06/2016. (((Juif))). L’antisémitisme des parenthèses, in La pensée du discours [carnet de recherche]. https://penseedudiscours.hypotheses.org/14579, consulted 03.03.2020.Suche in Google Scholar

Petrović, Tanja. 2018. Political Parody and the Politics of Ambivalence. Annual Review of Anthropology 47. 201–216. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102215-100148.Suche in Google Scholar

Rampton, Ben. 1999. Deutsch in inner London and the animation of an instructed foreign language. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(4). 480–504. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9481.00092.Suche in Google Scholar

Rosa, Jonathan. 2016a. From mock Spanish to inverted Spanglish. In H. Sami Alim, John Rickford & Arnetha F. Ball (Eds.). Raciolinguistics: How language shapes our ideas about race, 65–80. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190625696.003.0004Suche in Google Scholar

Rosa, Jonathan. 2016b. Standardization, racialization, languagelessness: Raciolinguistic ideologies across communicative contexts. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 26(2). 162–183. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12116.Suche in Google Scholar

Rosa, Jonathan. 2019. Looking like a language, sounding like a race. Oxford studies in the Anthropology of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780190634728.001.0001Suche in Google Scholar

Ryabovolova, Alina & Julie Hemment. 2020. “Je suis Satisfaction:” Russian politics in the age of hybrid media. East European Politics 36(1). 9–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/21599165.2019.1630381.Suche in Google Scholar

Shankar, Shalini. 2008. Speaking like a model minority:“FOB” styles, gender, and racial meanings among Desi teens in Silicon Valley. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 18(2). 268–289. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1395.2008.00022.x.Suche in Google Scholar

Sherzer, Joel & Anthony Webster. 2015. Speech play, verbal at, and linguistic anthropology. Oxford Handbooks Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935345.013.33Suche in Google Scholar

Spitulnik, Debra. 1996. The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 6(2). 161–187. https://doi.org/10.1525/jlin.1996.6.2.161.Suche in Google Scholar

Stoler, Anne Laura. 2016. Duress: Imperial durabilities in our times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.10.2307/j.ctv125jn2sSuche in Google Scholar

Tétart, Frank. 2009. Partie 1. Le nationalisme, un concept idéologique et géopolitique ?. In Tétart, Frank. (Ed.) Nationalismes régionaux. Un défi pour l’Europe, 9–48. Paris: De Boeck Supérieur.10.3917/dbu.tetar.2009.01Suche in Google Scholar

Tetreault, Chantal. 2015. Transcultural teens: performing youth identities in French cités. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Suche in Google Scholar

Vigouroux, Cécile. 2017. The discursive pathway of two centuries of raciolinguistic stereotyping:‘Africans as incapable of speaking French’. Language in Society 46(1). 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404516000804.Suche in Google Scholar

Weber, Eugen. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: the modernization of rural France. 1870–1914. Stanford.10.1515/9780804766036Suche in Google Scholar

Wodak, Ruth. 2015. The politics of fear: What right-wing populist discourses mean. Sage.10.4135/9781446270073Suche in Google Scholar

Woolard, Kathryn. 2016. Singular and plural: Ideologies of linguistic authority in 21st century Catalonia. Oxford.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190258610.001.0001Suche in Google Scholar

Published Online: 2020-09-11
Published in Print: 2020-09-25

© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Heruntergeladen am 30.9.2025 von https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/ijsl-2020-2101/html?lang=de
Button zum nach oben scrollen