‘Perhaps this is not fiction’: The discursive construction of national and regional identities in Belgium’s public television broadcast hoax on Flemish independence
Available accessOtherFirst published online February, 2010
‘Perhaps this is not fiction’: The discursive construction of national and regional identities in Belgium’s public television broadcast hoax on Flemish independence
This article sets out to reveal and evaluate the strength and scope of those units of media discourse that are connoted by identity. More specifically, it seeks to demonstrate which discursive strategies the media adopt in the case of a hoax news broadcast that announced ‘the end of Belgium as we know it’ in order to construct and stage the opposition between Walloon region-building (‘Us’) and Flemish nation building (‘Them’). For this purpose, it will focus on lexico-grammatical choices, co-textual deployment of rhetorical devices and socio-referential correlations. Relating these observations to social theory on national identity (specifically, Anderson’s historical materialist approach and Smith’s work on ethnosymbolism), as well as relevant sociopolitical perspectives, will allow for a demonstration of the ways in which discursive strategies exploit the symbiosis between language as a functional means of communication and as the carrier of a shared set of values to construct national and regional identities.
Anderson, B. ( 2006) Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (2nd rev. edn). New York: Verso.
2.
Baugnet, L. ( 1998) L’identité sociale. Paris : Dunod.
3.
Bell, A. ( 1991) The Language of News Media. Oxford : Blackwell.
4.
Berdichevsky, N. ( 2004) Nations, Language and Citizenship. London: McFarland & Company.
5.
Blampain, D., A. Goosse, J.-M. Klinkenberg and M. Wilmet ( 1997) Le français en Belgique. Une langue, une communauté . Brussels: Duculot.
6.
Blommaert, J. and C. Bulcaen ( 2000) ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, Annual Review of Anthropology29: 447-66.
7.
Chilton, P. ( 2005) ‘Missing Links in Mainstream CDA: Modules, Blends and the Critical Instinct’, in R. Wodak and P. Chilton (eds) A New Agenda in Critical Discourse Analysis. Theory, Methodology and Interdisciplinarity , pp. 19-51. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
8.
Chouliaraki, L. and N. Fairclough ( 1999) Discourse in Late Modernity. Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
9.
Domenichelli, D. ( 1999) Constitution et régime linguistique en Belgique et au Canada. Brussels: Bruylant .
Elliott, P. ( 1972) The Making of a Television Series. London: Constable.
12.
Esquenazi, J.-P. ( 1995) ‘La vérité d’une institution’ , in D. Buxton (ed.) Télévisions. La vérité à construire, pp. 103-44. Paris : L’Harmattan.
13.
Fairclough, N. ( 1992) Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge : Polity Press.
14.
Fairclough, N. ( 2003) Analysing Discourse. Textual Analysis for Social Research . London: Routledge.
15.
Fairclough, N. and R. Wodak ( 1997) ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, in T. Van Dijk (ed.) Discourse as Social Interaction, pp. 258-84. London: Sage.
16.
Haillet, P. ( 1995) Le Conditionnel dans le discours journalistique. Neuville: Bref.
17.
Hall, S. ( 1996) ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in S. Hall, D. Held, D. Hubert and K. Thompson (eds) Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, pp. 595-634. Oxford: Blackwell.
18.
Hasan, R. ( 2005) Language, Society and Consciousness. London: Equinox.
19.
Meikle, G. ( 2008) Interpreting News. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
20.
Meyer, M. ( 2001) ‘Between Theory, Method, and Politics: Positioning of the Approaches to CDA’, in R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, pp. 14-31. London: Sage.
21.
Mill, J.S. ( 1991[1861]) ‘Considerations on Representative Government’, in J. Gray (ed.) On Liberty and Other Essays, pp. 427-34. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
22.
Moscovici, S. ( 1984) Social Representations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
23.
Moscovici, S. ( 1989) ‘Des représentations sociales collectives aux représentations sociales’, in D. Jodelet (ed.) Les représentations sociales, pp. 79-103. Paris: PUF.
24.
Omonoyi, T. and G. White ( 2006) The Sociolinguistics of Identity. London: Continuum.
25.
Poirier, C. ( 1995) ‘Les variantes topolectales du lexique français’ , in M. Francard and D. Latin (eds) Le régionalisme lexical, pp. 13-56. Louvain-la-Neuve: Duculot.
26.
Pollak, A. ( 2008) ‘All that Remains of the Second World War’ , in H. Heer, W. Manoschek, A. Pollak and R. Wodak (eds) The Discursive Construction of History. Remembering the Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation, pp. 132-54. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
27.
Quatremer, J. ( 2006) ‘D’un État unitaire à un État fédéral’, Libération (18 Aug.). [Accessed 15 October 2007: http://www.liberation.fr/actualite/monde/199295.FR.php ]
28.
Smith, A. ( 1991) National Identity. Reno: University of Nevada Press.
29.
Tajfel, H. ( 1978) Differentiation between Social Groups. London: Academic Press.
30.
Van Dam, D. ( 1997) Flandre, Wallonie: le rêve brisé. Quelles identités culturelles et politiques en Flandre et en Wallonie?Ottignies: Quorum.
31.
van Dijk, T. ( 1993) ‘Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis’ , Discourse & Society4(2): 249-83.
32.
van Dijk, T. ( 2009) Society and Discourse. How Social Contexts Influence Text and Talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
33.
Van Drom, A. ( 2007) Le contrat: concerto grosso ou composition dysharmonique . Quebec: University of Laval.
34.
Van Drom, A. ( 2008) ‘Bruxelles: capitale belge bilingue vs capitale européen plurilingue’, Revue des étudiants en linguistique du Québec2(2): 121-35.
35.
Van Drom, A. (forthcoming) ‘Les variantes topolectales, marqueurs identitaires dans le discours politique en Flandre et au Québec. Analyse critique des discours de six acteurs politiques’, PhD thesis, University of Laval.
36.
Van Leeuwen, T. ( 2008) Discourse and Practice. New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
37.
Von Busekist, A. ( 1997) La Belgique. Politique des langues et construction de l’Etat de 1780 à nos jours. Louvain-la-Neuve : Duculot.
38.
Weiss, G. and R. Wodak ( 2003) Critical Discourse Analysis. Theory and Interdisciplinarity . London: Palgrave Macmillan.
39.
Willemyns, R. ( 2003) Het verhaal van het Vlaams. De geschiedenis van het Nederlands in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden [The Story of Flemish. The History of Dutch in the Southern Netherlands]. Antwerp: Standaard.
40.
Wodak, R. ( 2004) ‘National and Transnational Identities: European and Other Identities Constructed in Interviews with EU Officials’, in R. Herrmann, T. Risse and M. Brewer (eds) Transnational Identities. Becoming European in the EU, pp. 97-128. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
41.
Wodak, R. ( 2009) The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual . Basingstoke: Palgrave.
42.
Wodak, R., R. De Cillia, M. Reisigl and K. Liebhart ( 2009 [1999]) The Discursive Construction of National Identity (2nd edn). Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press.
