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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 28:1 (2018) ► pp.1–28

The representations of racism in immigrant students’ essays in Greece

The ‘hybrid balance’ between legitimizing and resistance identities

| University of Patras, Greece
Racism as a means for accomplishing homogeneity is at the center of this study which draws on Critical Discourse Analysis and focuses on descriptions of racist behaviors included in immigrant students’ school essays. We investigate how the dominant assimilative and homogenizing discourse operates in Greece and how immigrant students position themselves towards this dominant discourse. Our analysis focuses on the ways the immigrant students of our sample construct legitimizing and hybrid resistance identities. We demonstrate that legitimizing identities are found in the vast majority of the essays of our data due to the racist behaviors experienced by immigrant people. On the other hand, the explicit description of such behaviors appears only in few essays. We argue that in these few essays, via referring to racist behaviors of majority people against them, immigrant students manage to build hybrid resistance identities.
Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, racism, dilemmatic positioning, membership categorization device, face threat, hybridity, legitimizing identities, resistance identities
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework: Critical Discourse Analysis
    • 2.1Macro-level
      • 2.1.1Homogenization in the western states
      • 2.1.2Racist behaviors
      • 2.1.3The hybrid resistance to racist homogenization
      • 2.1.4The Greek national discourse of xenophobia and homogenization and the hybrid resistance to it
    • 2.2Micro-level
      • 2.2.1Analyzing majority racist behaviors using Bamberg’s model on the narrative construction of identities
      • 2.2.2The threat against majority people’s face
  • 3.The data of the study and the research questions
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Legitimizing identities
    • 4.2Classifying the descriptions of racist behaviors
      • 4.2.1Introductory remarks
      • 4.2.2Descriptions of racist behaviors
        • a.Denigrating behaviors
        • b.Verbal insults
        • c.Eye gaze insults
        • d.Excluding behaviors
        • e.Abusive behaviors
      • 4.2.3Summary
    • 4.3Racist behaviors: From legitimizing identities to hybrid resistance identities
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 13 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.16016.arc
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