“They are just a danger”

Abstract

In recent years, there has been much discussion about the role of social media platforms in the reproduction of exclusionary rhetoric leveled against social “others” in far-right contexts across the globe. While scholars have examined the ideologies underpinning exclusionary discourses, few have analyzed the discursive mechanisms through which such ideologies and “othered” social types become meaningful to ordinary citizens. In this article, we extend this conversation by analyzing digital discourses on Facebook and YouTube that pertain to Philippine “drug users” and racialized remarks against migrants in Italy through a chronotopic lens. We demonstrate that despite the historical, economic, and social differences, far-right ideologies are ordered through chronotopes of national crisis in both cases. Through these chronotopic worlds, despicable, “othered” social types such as “extracomunitari” in Italy and drug users in the Philippines, acquire coherence.

Radical-right populism in Spain and the strategy of chronopolitics

“…By subverting a dominant notion of time as a linear progression forward, he disrupts the social-semiotic phenomena that it underpins: common understandings of causality, historiographical narratives and chronologies, and evaluative frameworks that link perceptions of time to ideas about moral personhood. My analytical focus on temporality helps make visible these phenomena, while complementing recent scholarship on far-right discourse in which the chronoTOPE has been mobilized to account for time and space concurrently (Bakhtin 1981; see Jereza & Perrino 2020;De Fina & Wegner 2021). 4 In what follows, I address the following questions: Through what textual and semiotic mechanisms are chronopolitics accomplished?…”

“…Indeed, as Norris (2020:699) writes, the essence itself of populism may comprise 'a form of rhetoric, a persuasive language'-one that can legitimate claims to authority merely through its performative, rather than referential, meaning (see Yurchak 2005). A number of sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have contributed to the body of work cited above, shedding insight on 'the reality-760 Language in Society 52:5 (2023) generating property and the bluster of words' of far-right populist actors in Europe and elsewhere by analyzing the various forms, themes, and tactics that they deploy (McIntosh 2020:1): discourse markers (Sclafani 2018), slogans (Dick 2019), topoi (Wodak 2021), chronotopes (Jereza & Perrino 2020), narrative (Taş 2020), incoherence (Slotta 2020), ambiguity (Krzyzanowski 2020), symbolic warfare (Kramsch 2021), and gestures (Hall, Goldstein, & Ingram 2016). Although many of these phenomena animated Abascal's speech at Vistalegre Plus Ultra in 2019, I focus here on one that has yet to receive much attention in the literature: chronopolitics.…”