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Article published In:
Language, Culture and Society
Vol. 2:1 (2020) ► pp.7–36

No-go zones in Sweden

The infectious communicability of evil

| University of Gothenburg

The focus of this article is on the mundane nastiness of language. Drawing on Arendt’s (1963) banality of evil and Briggs’s (2005) notion of infectious communicability, the article highlights the moral dimensions of political and media discourses that spread a communicable image of Sweden as a country in disarray. I demonstrate that this image is made of two discursive ingredients: the spatial trope of the no-go zone, and the truthiness of its discursive elements, which, through a web of communicable intertextual links, create the illusion of an accurate and coherent account of society. Each of the discursive devices and links are like mycelia in a growing fungus of evil that encourages us not “think from the standpoint of somebody else” (Arendt, 1963: 49), that concomitantly normalise a problematic subjectivity of the threatening migrant, a barbarian at the gates that needs to be excluded from the Swedish future.

Keywords: banality of evil, infectious communicability, immigration, racial discourse
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Arendt, the banality of evil, and its infectious communicability
  • 3.“You look at what’s happening…”
  • 4.The manufacturing of truthiness
  • 5.No-go zones during the 2018 general election
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 3 July 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lcs.19014.mil
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