ABSTRACTTelevangelism or preaching religion via TV and YouTube represents an interesting media phenomenon in which religious messages are presented in an entertaining manner. Despite the novelty of televangelism and its popularity, little attention has been paid to the investigation of the features of this genre, which could allow insights into the nature of this phenomenon and the reasons behind its popularity. In this study, I focus on the case study of the American Muslim televangelist Baba Ali who gained popularity through (...) a series of videos on YouTube. With insights from the Discourse Historical Approach and the Framework of Visual Grammar, I analyse four key aspects of Ali’s videos i.e. religious invocation, video-edition and self-representation, use of humour and interactivity. I demonstrate that Ali’s videos represent a novel genre that embeds features of the sermon, video-blogs and YouTube culture. Furthermore, I show that Baba Ali represents a new type of a religious figure whose authority appears to emanate from his ordinariness as he presents himself as one of his audience; and from his playfulness. Thus, I elaborate on contemporary Muslim televangelism and extend the application of Critical Discourse Studies to religious discourse, a domain little examined from a critical perspective. (shrink)

The concept of topos has received considerable attention from both argumentation and discourse studies, although its usage and meaning remain obscure. In this article, I argue that the rediscovery of Aristotelian thought might provide a comprehensible explication of topos. Despite the discourse historical approach’s emphasis on topos, its context is found to be limited and this exposes the argumentation strategies of the DHA to criticism. To overcome any shortcomings and provide a better understanding of topos, a classical approach to the (...) concept is suggested, derived from Aristotle’s rhetoric and dialectic. By focusing on Greek media discourses on ‘Islamist terrorism’, I seek to illustrate the synthesis between the DHA’s argumentation strategies and Aristotelian topos as a fruitful analytical and theoretical tool. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn 2013, the British right-wing tabloid Daily Mail triggered a fierce controversy, focused on antisemitism and patriotism/nationalism. It was sparked by the publication of an article on the British economist Ralph Miliband with the provocative headline ‘The man who hated Britain’. The lead refers to Ed Miliband, then leader of the British Labour Party: ‘Ed Miliband’s pledge to bring back socialism is homage to his Marxist father. So what did Miliband Snr really believe in? The answer should disturb everyone who (...) loves this country’. In this paper, we analyse how Ralph Miliband is discursively constructed as a dangerous ‘Other’ and subsequently politically instrumentalised in a campaign against his son, Ed Miliband. We focus on how a particular concept of national unity is constructed with reference to the stereotype of the ‘disloyal, intellectual, international Jew’. This figure emerges as the ‘Iudeus ex machina’ in the scenario of impending doom in order, we assume, to distract attention from structural issues facing British society and economy. In our analysis we tackle the complex interdependencies of – mostly coded – antisemitic and nationalist rhetoric with the help of an interdisciplinary framework that integrates approaches to antisemitism, nationalism, media studies, and critical discourse studies, and related methodologies. (shrink)

This article explores the rhetoric, and mass mediation, of the national Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration ceremony, as broadcast on British television. I argue that the televised national ceremonies should be approached as an example of multi-genre epideictic rhetoric, working up meanings through a hybrid combination of genres, author/animators and modes. Epideictic rhetoric has often been depreciated as simply ceremonial ‘praise or blame’ speeches. However, given that the topics of praise/blame assume the existence of social norms, epideictic also acts to presuppose (...) and evoke common values, in general, and a collective recognition of shared social responsibilities, in particular. My methodology draws on the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, given, first, its central prominence in analysing argumentative strategies in discourse and, second, the ways it facilitates a reflexive ‘shuttling’ between text-discursive features, intertextual relations and wider contexts of society and history. Here, I examine how a catastrophic past is invoked in speech and evoked through image and music, in response to the demands that uncertainty of the future ‘places upon one’s conscience’. (shrink)

This article introduces the key issues and themes that the articles in the Special Issue aim to apply and develop in greater detail. First, we argue that the field of collective remembering can be conceived as a site of active contestation, rather than simply a means of communicating a historic past or our deontic position in relation to these pasts. Approaching collective remembering as a Lieu de Dispute allows us, in turn, to foreground three consequential dimensions of remembrance, which the (...) articles in the issue examine in different ways: that collective remembering is an interpersonal, political and affective practice. This introduction discusses these three dimensions to collective remembering in greater detail, before outlining the remaining contents of the Special Issue. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHow self-evident is a colonial rationality today? This paper begins by tracing a ‘text trajectory’ about nineteenth century imperialism and colonialism through several educational spaces: curricular guidelines, textbook, teachers’ reflections on history education, material discursive classroom interactions and pupils’ communication about the topic. In a first step, we observe how entrenched and common sensical a great-power discourse about imperialism and colonialism is in current educational practices. We suggest that pupils ‘hyperstate’ a discursive position on colonialism which appears shocking when stated (...) explicitly, but which is already subtly entextualised in curricular and media discourse. However, in a second step, the analysis orients to the molecular lines and foldings, the unexpected intra-connections and unplanned ‘lines of flight’. In this way, the apparent stability of the colonial rationality begins to wobble. The memory practices enacted by pupils, curricula, teachers, authors and the material affordances of textbooks repeat entrenched colonial hierarchies and racisms, ‘and also’ exceed any overly simple understanding of how colonial rationality plays out in contemporary discourse. (shrink)