Bridging language barriers, bonding against immigrants: A visual case study of transnational network publics created by far-right activists in Europe

Abstract

With the growing importance of digital and social media, visual images represent an increasingly attractive medium for far-right political entrepreneurs to mobilize supporters and mainstream voters in the context of increasing polarization and widespread fears of immigrants and refugees. This article investigates how far-right activists use cartoon images poking fun at immigrants to construct a shared ethno-nationalist bond of solidarity across multilingual and transnational networks and publics. Focusing on right-wing activists as political entrepreneurs, I will explore the visual and discursive translation of nationalist symbols and cartoons within different national political contexts and across linguistic and cultural boundaries. Combining the discourse historical approach (DHA) with multimodal analysis, I will trace the cross-cultural translation and sharing of an anti-immigrant poster created by the Swiss People's Party (SVP), a right-wing political party in Switzerland, in its controversial 'black sheep' campaign. Second, I will show how far-right sympathizers in Italy and Germany, inspired by the SVP, created their own 'black sheep' cartoons in which they imagine a racist bond of transnational solidarity through the use of images depicting immigrants as Europe's other. This article contributes to the study of transnational network publics by showing the relevance of non-verbal and visual translation strategies used by radical right-wing political entrepreneurs to forge stronger alliances cross-nationally and cross-linguistically.

Visual discourse coalitions: visualization and discourse formation in controversies over shale gas development

“…The first question is: how do discourse coalitions and visualizations relate to each other? Our framework draws on work about discourse coalitions (Bulkeley, 2000;Feindt & Oels, 2005;Hajer, 1995) and the role of the visual in framing and politics (Bleiker, 2017(Bleiker, , 2018Clancy & Clancy, 2016;Doerr, 2017;Hendriks et al, 2017;van Beek et al, in press). We address policy controversies as struggles of competing discourse coalitions about the framing of a problem.…”

“…Because of this nature of visualizations, they can narrate, when used within a particular context, a visual storyline and can influence how we understand issues (Hendriks et al, 2017). As such, they have an effect on political mobilization (Doerr, 2017) and governance of policy controversies (Jasanoff, 2004).…”

Affective economy of national-populist images: Investigating national and transnational online networks through visual big data

“…Many studies treat image circulation as platform politics from the user's perspective: the researcher seeking images related to a particular public case analyses the material that platforms offer (see Matamoros-Fernandez, 2017;Sumiala and Tikka, 2011). In another method, the research tracks and follows one or several images or videos by either manually searching particular sites (Doerr, 2017;Kraidy, 2012) or using reverse search engines (Horsti, 2016). In a large-scale pilot study, O'Halloran et al (2016O'Halloran et al ( , 2018 used multimodal analysis visualisation to investigate where images of a particular journal were republished and how they were recontextualised.…”

Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right

“…In non-traditional milieus, the far right has excelled, heeding Breitbart's often-quoted maxim that "politics is downstream from culture" (Meyers 2011). As well as the ease with which different farright subcultures can share news using the internet, it has also proven a rich playground for the adaptation of propaganda material (Whine 2012) and visual content (Doerr 2017) across contexts, flattening circumstantial differences in favor of general ideological alignment. For example, memes have become one of the most common ways that far-right content gets shared, often playing with a cynical or ironic stance relative to current affairs to recruit new sympathizers and make its messages attractive .…”