Challenging nationalist definitions of racism: critical discursive interventions in the Flemish debates on racism's relativity

Zienkowski, Jan [USL-B]

This paper proposes a notion of critique as a public metadiscourse that allows subjects to recognize, rearticulate and/or reconfigure the logics and rationalities that lead to social suffering. It analyses the way critique operates in a controversy triggered by Flemish nationalist politicians who claim that racism is [a] relative [concept]. The author proposes to analyse the associated debate by means of an interpretive and functional discourse analysis. This heuristic operationalizes the poststructuralist concept of articulation. The author identifies different types of critical discursive intervention (CDI) that delineate the boundaries of the racism-is-relative debate: hegemonic claims, ideological disqualifications, metalinguistic disqualifications, and concretization strategies. Such interventions haven been articulated by citizens, activists, academics, and politicians across a variety of mostly written media between 2013 and 2015. It is through the play of discursive interventions that social actors challenge and negotiate political boundaries for interpretation. The article demonstrates that most critiques on assertions of racism being [a] relative [concept] do not undermine the logics and rationalities informing racism- is-relative discourse. It also shows that discourse analysts need to differentiate between different modes of critique in order to examine the complex acts of rearticulation that take place in any debate.