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Exploring the Ambivalence of Liquid Racism: In between antiracist and racist discourse
Edited by Argiris Archakis and Villy Tsakona
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 341] 2024
► pp. 71–92

Chapter 3
Normalizing assimilation in antiracist (con)texts and (re)producing liquid racism

Argumentative inferences in Greek right- and left‑wing political discourses

| University of Groningen

This chapter aims to show how liquid racism (Weaver 2016) emerges when assimilationist viewpoints are argumentatively normalized in mainstream (right- and left-wing) political-parliamentary discourses in Greece. I analyze two seminal speeches given by two Greek political leaders, namely PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis (New Democracy; European Peoples’ Party) and Opposition leader, Alexis Tsipras (SYRIZA; European Left), on October 31, 2019, in the Greek parliament; that is, the very day of the vote in favor of the bill proposed by the Ministry of Citizen’s Protection, which outlined the terms according to which international protection would be awarded by the Greek authorities to ‘foreign’ populations. I draw on the framework of Critical Discourse Studies (Wodak and Meyer 2016), employing tools from Social Semiotics (van Leeuwen 2008) and the Argumentum Model of Topics (Rigotti and Greco 2019) to critically examine standpoint-argument couplings inferred in the discursive representations of social actors and realized in the relevant speeches. I conclude that the two Greek politicians under study converge to claims in favor of the assimilation of migrant populations to the Greek context and therefore (re)produce liquid racism, despite their seemingly antiracist attitude and their different ideological and political stance.

Keywords: liquid racism, assimilation, migration, political discourse, Greece, Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), Argumentation Studies
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical premises: In between racism and antiracism
  • 3.Methodological considerations: Critical discourse and argumentation studies
    • 3.1Studying representational meaning(s)
    • 3.2Zooming in on argumentative inference(s)
  • 4.Data analysis: Mitsotakis versus (?) Tsipras on migration
    • 4.1Kyriakos Mitsotakis on migration
    • 4.2Alexis Tsipras on migration
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion: Address the problem – Assimilate the Other
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.341.03ser
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