Historicity and Hybridity: An Approach to Studying Dialogue Under Occupation
Lawrence N. Berlin, Northeastern Illinois University, June 1 @ 4:00 pm Since the inception of Dialogue Under Occupation, there have been numerous attempts to define it. Divided into four strands—enactment, transaction, reaction, and resolution—its study and the efficacy thereof remain unclear. Is DUO intended to be a purely scholarly endeavor and, as a consequence, appear to have little practical relevance to real situations of occupation? Should it lead to some form of social change through action? How can the examination of historical contexts or even current crises lend themselves to resolution, especially when there is a power differential? In fact, considering that differences in power are inherent to situations of occupation, can dialogue even take place?
The presentation begins with a multilayered model of context (MMC) intended for the examination of Dialogue Under Occupation from a critical perspective. Within this model, the stratification of “context” can be said to coincide at each respective level with the participant’s ability to use historicity to evoke and create an opportunity to engage or derail dialogue, and/or to recontextualize dialogue space (i.e., create hybrid discourses) to obscure issues or resolve conflict. Moreover, it allows for a fine-grained analysis by separating out the linguistic (discourse), interactional (dialogue), situational (domain), and extrasituational (sociocultural) levels of context without suggesting that they are mutually exclusive. Rather, the ability to examine the various levels separately leads to a deeper understanding of their interplay in the analysis of the discourse, the practice, and the conjuncture (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999).
The data used here are derived from Hugo Chavez’ particularized use of militarizing language intended to guide the audience in constructing a particular context, in this case support for the militarization of the border with one of the country’s closest neighbors and trading partners, Colombia. By examining the language with its embedded historicity and inherent hybridity, the particular contributions made within the micro level are identified and located within the broader social context (i.e., cultural and societal considerations), both in the synchronic and diachronic (immediate and extant sociocultural context).
Adding the lenses of two concepts—hybridity and historicity—to the ever-complexifying definition of DUO’s four strands, increasing domains, and expanding contexts, I hope to suggest a framework for the approach to its study and to offer ideas about the utility of DUO research as an invaluable component in the progress toward conflict resolution.
The Representation of “Threats” in the Cyberspace Political Macro-Dialogue
Adriana Bolívar,Universidad Central de Venezuela, June 2 @ 4:45 pm One of the main effects of threats in everyday discourse is their potential to produce fear in the recipient. The person who threatens uses these “face threatening acts” in order to destabilize the emotional balance of the other and so gain or keep control of the situation and power. Threats also play a fundamental role in political dialogue because they intensify conflicts and generate fear and anguish, which may extend to entire nations. One of the aims of this talk will be to discuss how threats materialize in cyberspace political discourse with respect to Latin American presidents and their relations with the United States and Cuba. Drawing from data collected through a Google search in the first months of 2009 and 2010, the discussion will focus on how threatening the presidents are perceived, how they perform the roles of agents or victims of threats, which topics are preferred in the cyberspace dialogue, which strategic functions are used by the ones reporting the threat and which actions and values are attributed to the presidents. The discourse of threats will be examined taking into account the grammatical, semantic and pragmatic dimensions as well as a critical perspective in order to deal with the problem of power relations in the region.
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The Coloniality of Knowledge, Complex Communication and Resistant Negotiation
Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Northeastern Illinois University, June 3 @ 4:00 pm I will be raising questions concerning our capacity to hear, speak to and engage other Others in dialoguing under occupation. Within Western intellectual practice, the coloniality of knowledge is a process of translating and rewriting other cultures, other knowledges, other ways of being, presuming commensurability through Western rationality (Mignolo 1995, Dussel 1995). For example, presumptions of transparency and translation strategically function to leave the observer¹s worldview unscathed and our oaths of disciplinary service intact. I have been working the question of what happens when two not framed by the colonial center as being at center, meet to engage. How do we develop the competency to hear an other? Empathy is not enough, for we are good at hearing in ways that keep our worldview intact. The knowing subject who would practice liberatory engagement by forging meaning through engaging others under occupation does not begin with a tabula raza regarding those populations; our situatedness includes being disciplined and embedded in discourse which in one way or another rationalizes, often by means of naturalizing, that very marginalization. I also will take up questions concerning what we must do in order to speak. When someone marginalized gives testimony, they enter a frame of meaning within which the inquiry itself makes sense, and speak to an audience not normally used to hearing or acknowledging the sorts of things they have to say. What are marginalized testifiers required to do to enter the field of meaning within which the testimony is to be given, as well as strategies we/they might use when giving testimony in light of the discourse within which we/they have to make sense? I am specifically interested in how we meet in the construction and performance of communication under occupation/oppression. What are the possibilities of dialogue and discourse not anchored by power? This paper is about struggles to bridge seemingly fixed barriers, negotiating collective agendas, going for what María Lugones develops as complex communication: communication which resists liberal transparency and translation, embraces opacity and ambiguity; communication which animates multiple centers of meaning and which can, through a single speech act, carry on multiple conversations to which power has privy only to some, communication which goes for coalition not through sameness but through difference.
Americanisation and Englishisation as Processes of Global Occupation: Coalition or Coercion of the Willing?
Robert Phillipson, Copenhagen Business School The USA has throughout history been a warfare state (Hixson 2008; www.tomdispatch.com). It played a strong role in Europe in establishing economic and political integration after 1945 that would prevent recurrent inter-state warfare. The ‘European Union’ of currently 27 states is a joint US-European project to shape a ‘United States of Europe’ or a looser alternative. There are moves towards regional integration in other continents. International ‘dialogue’ has been largely on American terms: corporate clout, institutions of global financial management (World Bank, IMF, WTO), a military alliance nurtured by the Soviet threat (NATO, now active in Asia); political institutions (UN) that give ‘great powers’ voice and a veto. In all of these, English has a privileged, hegemonic position. Neoliberalism reinforced an unequal, insecure, ecologically unsustainable world disorder (Naomi Klein’s Shock doctrine, 2008). Europeans are now ‘occupied’ by other means than military coercion. They have internalised the McDonaldization of commerce, banking, the media, advertising, academia, and popular culture (Coca-Colonisation). An American conceptual universe has permeated languages and cultures worldwide, much of it surreptitiously. Examples: universities being run as businesses rather than as a public good, and basic education at risk; privatisation of public utilities and services in hitherto ‘welfare states’; EU complicity with US support for Israeli aggression throughout the Middle East; European support for US aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan by a coalition of ‘willing’ post-communist states and others with undemocratic ‘leaders’, Berlusconi, Blair, Anders Fog Rasmussen, et al. What role does language play in these ongoing processes? The EU supports linguistic diversity in principle (23 official and working languages) but English is primus inter pares in the running of EU affairs. The hegemony of English in EU institutions dovetails with an increasing use of English in corporate affairs, education, the media, and popular culture in continental European countries. ASEAN (Asia, 10 countries) functions entirely in English. The African Union functions mainly in English, and to a lesser extent French and Arabic. Is the expansion of English – occupation of novel space – occurring in synergy with existing languages and cultures or establishing an inequitable hierarchy? It explores some of the forms that resistance is taking to the project of establishing ‘global’ English, to its products, and to these processes of mental occupation (Phillipson 2009). As the Copenhagen climate summit showed, global power relations are unstable.
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