Performing and evaluating (non)modernities of Portuguese migrant figures on YouTube: The case of Antonio de Carglouch

Abstract

We analyze how France-based YouTube comedic performers Ro et Cut enact the stylized figure of a Portuguese migrant in France, Antonio, in their most popular video, Carglouch. We then examine how commenters respond to the enactment. Specifically, we apply Irvine and Gal's notion of semiotic differentiation to study how participants use language to construct and apply polycentric notions of modernity/nonmodernity. This allows us to analyze how YouTube performers and commenters produce their own and Antonio's relative (non)modernity, as they orient to different versions of a modern/nonmodern axis of differentiation, situated in multiple ‘centers’: France, Portugal, or Europe. That is, participants either interpret Antonio as a nonmodern immigrant in France, a nonmodern emigrant from Portugal, or an international representative of Portugal, spreading nonmodern images of Portugal abroad. We then consider how participants bring these differently centered images of the nonmodern Other into dialogue with each Other, with different outcomes for variously positioned participants. (Migration, heteroglossia, YouTube, transnationalism, Luso-descendants, (non)modernity, France, Portugal)*

Airing Ethnic and Linguistic Identities Through Public Media Comic Performances: Challenging and Reinscribing Normative Ideologies

“…Recently, Da Silva (2015) and Koven and Simões Marques (2015) have shown similar outcomes of amateur performances of "Portugueseness" in Canada and France.…”

The Handbook of Narrative Analysis

“…As discussed above and elsewhere (Koven 2004(Koven , 2013aKoven and Marques 2014), this figure is situated in broader international hierarchies, so that my participants' notions of "modernity" are connected to more widely circulating French notions that have treated immigrants as "uncivilized" until assimilated into "French culture." Similarly, from a widely circulating Portugal-centric perspective, my participants may evoke particular images of rural Portugal, linked to the time and place of their families' emigration from peripheral regions in the 1960s and 1970s, during the Salazarist regime.…”

“…In the discourse presented in this chapter, the voice of the youthful figure may appear relatively unmarked relative to the voice of the old-fashioned figure. Although multiple figures are at issue, people may notice the marked figure who is parodied more than the unmarked figure who parodies (Koven and Marques 2014). (4) We must document not only the figures of personhood, but also current participants' alignments with them Voloshinov 1976;, from complete identification to distancing parody.…”

“…The figures therefore emerge and converge from lived personal experiences and from participants' access to more broadly circulating contrasting cultural images of France and Portugal. These images can be understood as cultural chronotopes, the recurrent social visions interlinking space, time, and person that participants presuppose and establish in written and oral discourse Dick 2010;Gal 2006;Koven 2013b;Koven and Marques 2014;Perrino, this volume, chapter 7). As such, they add a spatiotemporal dimension to any notion of personhood.…”

“…My participants draw from a set of cultural chronotopes that construct and contrast Portugal as less modern than France (see Dick 2010;Koven and Marques 2014). Such a chronotope shaped their emigrant parents' decision to leave the poverty of rural Portugal in the 1960s and 1970s for the more "evolved" and affluent urban France.…”