Zimbabwe Dancehall Music as a Site of Resistance

2020 ◽  
pp. 915-933
Author(s):  
Blessing Makwambeni

The popularity and consumption of dancehall music in Zimbabwe has grown exponentially over the past few years. However, despite its popularity, Zimdancehall has attracted controversy for promoting violence and vulgar behavior among other ills. This chapter casts aside society's moral judgements in order to investigate Zimdancehall music's role as an alternative public sphere. Using Fraser's alternative public sphere and Bakhtin's carnivalesque as its conceptual framework, and Norman Fairclough's approach to Critical Discourse Analysis as its methodology, the study analysed the discourses that underpin Zimdancehall music. The chapter argues that Zimdancehall music has become a counter public that provides marginalised youths with a platform to resist the dominant state-sponsored patriotic discourse. The music genre has opened a liberating alternative communicative space, outside of state control and ZANU-PF's patriotic discourse, where marginalised youths can symbolically invert their reality, protest as well as articulate their needs and aspirations freely.

Author(s):  
Blessing Makwambeni

The popularity and consumption of dancehall music in Zimbabwe has grown exponentially over the past few years. However, despite its popularity, Zimdancehall has attracted controversy for promoting violence and vulgar behavior among other ills. This chapter casts aside society's moral judgements in order to investigate Zimdancehall music's role as an alternative public sphere. Using Fraser's alternative public sphere and Bakhtin's carnivalesque as its conceptual framework, and Norman Fairclough's approach to Critical Discourse Analysis as its methodology, the study analysed the discourses that underpin Zimdancehall music. The chapter argues that Zimdancehall music has become a counter public that provides marginalised youths with a platform to resist the dominant state-sponsored patriotic discourse. The music genre has opened a liberating alternative communicative space, outside of state control and ZANU-PF's patriotic discourse, where marginalised youths can symbolically invert their reality, protest as well as articulate their needs and aspirations freely.


1992 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Montgomery ◽  
Stuart Allan

Abstract: This article offers an evaluative assessment of the potential contribution of Michel Pêcheux's research to a current movement within cultural studies to secure a conceptual framework for the critical discourse analysis of the linguistic mechanisms of ideology (examples of which are drawn from news accounts). Résumé: Cet article propose une appréciation et une évaluation de la contribution potentielle qu'apportent les travaux de recherche de Michel Pêcheux à un courant actuel des études sur la culture qui vise à appuyer sur un cadre conceptuel toute analyse critique du discours et des mécanismes linguistiques d'une idéologie (des exemples sont tirés des compte rendus de nouvelles).


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bianka Plüschke-Altof

Despite often being used interchangeably, the dominant equation of the rural with the peripheral is not self-evident. In order to critically scrutinize the discursive node, the aim of this article is twofold. On one hand, it argues for overcoming the prevalent urban‒rural divide and dominant structural approaches in sociological and geographical research by introducing discursive peripheralization as a conceptual framework, which allows the analysis of the discursive (re-)production of socio-spatial inequalities on and between different scales. On the other hand, this article explores how rural areas are constituted as peripheries within a hegemonic discourse naturalizing the ascription of development (non-)potentials. Following a critical discourse analysis approach, this will be illustrated in the case of periphery constructions in Estonian national print media.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yiannis Mylonas

Abstract This study presents a scrutiny of ‘liberal’ discursive constructions of the ‘Enlightenment’ in the Greek public sphere. The study is based on the analysis of articles published in two news/lifestyle websites, ‘AthensVoice’ and ‘Protagon’, during the (ongoing), so-called, ‘Greek crisis’. Discourse theory, informed by critical discourse analysis, is deployed to analyze these discursive constructions. The analysis shows that Greece’s economic/social/political problems are constructed as symptoms that underline Greece’s fundamental deficit, which is the country’s alleged ‘lack of ‘Enlightenment’, as perceived by ‘liberal’ voices in Greece and elsewhere. The article concludes that such discourses are part of a biopolitical, disciplinary framework producing the object to be reformed by austerity: an ‘un-Enlightened’ ‘Greek character’, ‘guilty’ for ‘self-inflicting’ Greece’s crisis. This ‘reform of character’ envisioned by liberals in Greece and elsewhere, is supposed to emerge through the institutional advance of neoliberal restructuring processes that include austerity reforms, privatizations, and loss of labor and civic rights, conditions to foster the neoliberal, entrepreneurial, mobile and austere subject, to potentially meet the socio-political requirements of late capitalist growth.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 278-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Persson ◽  
Luís Moretto Neto

Since 2013, several social actors of the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) community have formed a public sphere in order to deliberate and decide on the University Hospital’s (UH/UFSC) affiliation to the Brazilian Hospital Services Company (EBSERH), a public company set up in accordance with a private law which has been created by the Brazilian federal government in order to set up a management body for public university hospitals. Underpinned by critical discourse analysis, our purpose is to analyze the embedded ideologies in discursive practices within the UFSC/EBSERH public sphere, especially those perpetrated by the federal government’s bureaucratic means as to mystify reality, and also promote and legitimize dominant interests and actions with regard to the UH/UFSC’s affiliation to the EBSERH. We organized this analysis in five main categories: (1) staff shortage and the ideological use of the double standard policy, (2) the ideology of neo-liberalism and managerialism, (3) blame avoidance behavior and the ideological dispute between ideology and pragmatism, (4) the policy of terror and the fallacy of choice and (5) ideology of participationism.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 311
Author(s):  
Zulfa Sakhiyya

Questioning is a potential means to establish identity in social interaction, and thus it helps position oneself in relation to others. However, this relationship between question and social identity remains relatively under-explored in the theoretical territory (Kao & Weng, 2012; Tracy & Naughton, 1994). This paper contributes to this area of inquiry by employing critical discourse analysis in investigating the construction and negotiation of social identity through questions. Data are drawn from four sets of casual conversations I conducted with two native and two non-native speakers of English. Two stages of analysis are carried out. Firstly, I present and distribute the questioning patterns that emerge from the conversation. Secondly, I analyse the questioning process and its relation to the negotiation of social identity. Findings and discussion reveal that social identity is multiple: as a site of struggle and subject to change. The negotiation of identity through questions is evident from the emerging patterns of the length of interrogative form, repetitive questions, and the intensity of social control.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gareth Evans ◽  
Joanne Lusher ◽  
Stephen Day

Purpose The qualitative characteristics of decision-useful financial information (as set out in the revised March 2018 Conceptual Framework for financial reporting of the International Accounting Standards Board [IASB]) are fundamental for standard setting relied on by companies when making accounting policy changes and choices. However, there has not been an overarching universally agreed conceptual context of the qualitative characteristics. This paper aims to study the completeness of the qualitative characteristics towards suggesting a revision of the Conceptual Framework. Design/methodology/approach The present study evaluated the completeness of these qualitative characteristics using Foucauldian critical discourse analysis and content analysis paradigms to elucidate the inclusion conundrum. Foucauldian analysis allowed focus on power relationships, governmentality and subjectification in accounting society, as expressed through language and practices of the IASB who ultimately decide on the qualitative characteristics. Content analysis was used to analyse data collected via interviews with preparers and users of banks’ accounts, changes in banks’ accounting policies after the conceptual framework was published and comment letters from banks who wrote to the IASB. Findings Novel findings from this study revealed the potential significant omissions of the constraints of “materiality”, “transparency” and “regulatory/supervisory framework”. Also, surrounding the qualitative characteristics having been shown to be valid and includable, the adjective “decision-useful” reinstated in the chapter title and the IASB project team technical writers needing to show completeness of attention to all comments. Originality/value From these findings, a freshly formulated chapter in the conceptual framework on the qualitative characteristics can now be submitted for consideration by the IASB, with potential for international post-implementation review.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Duffy ◽  
Annabel Pang

While a discourse of difference has routinely been used as a marker of national identity, such an approach is premised on exclusion. By contrast, this article considers how inclusion or diversity may be employed in nation-building discourse, and its impact on the citizenry, as embodied in the omnivore ‐ one who appreciates a wide range of cultural artefacts and, in doing so, evokes a high status. Using a Verstehen approach to critical discourse analysis, we analyse one kind of state media ‐ the Singapore Tourism Board’s food-related webpages ‐ to assess how they represent citizens and tourists as culinary omnivores, and how this may be interpreted to reveal mechanisms of hegemonic state control.


2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (s1) ◽  
pp. 37-50
Author(s):  
Birgitte P. Haanshuus ◽  
Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk

AbstractThis study explores how an extreme far-right alternative media site uses content from professional media to convey uncivil news with an antisemitic message. Analytically, it rests on a critical discourse analysis of 231 news items, originating from established national and international news sources, published on Frihetskamp from 2011–2018. In the study, we explore how news items are recontextualised to portray both overt and covert antisemitic discourses, and we identify four antisemitic representations that are reinforced through the selection and adjustment of news: Jews as powerful, as intolerant and anti-liberal, as exploiters of victimhood, and as inferior. These conspiratorial and exclusionary ideas, also known from historical Nazi propaganda, are thus reproduced by linking them to contemporary societal and political contexts and the current news agenda. We argue that this kind of recontextualised, uncivil news can be difficult to detect in a digital public sphere.


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