Discourse, War and Terrorism

Adam Hodges and Chad Nilep, session organizers

Abstract for a panel of the
2004 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting*

Language is a primary tool used in the construction of cultural understandings; and discourses in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 have provided the frameworks through which the world now views global terrorism. This panel explores the discursive production of identities, ideologies, and collective understandings of terrorism in light of the Bush administration's ongoing "war on terror." At issue are how enemies are defined and identified, how political leaders and citizens react, and how societies collectively understand their position in the world vis-à-vis terrorism. Intimately involved in the production of cultural understandings are the media, and importantly tied to the language used by political leaders are ideologies that drive policy.

This panel joins scholars from around the world and across disciplines to analyze these issues. In particular, the narrative of the "war on terror" is examined in light of the Bush administration's ideological stance vis-à-vis terrorism as a military war. The discourse and actions of the administration are looked at within the larger post-Cold War context to explain the conflation of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the discourse of the New World Order. Reactions to the "war on terror" discourse are viewed in places such as Serbia, where intellectuals see the global war against terrorism as an opportunity to upgrade their country's position on the international stage and revive Serbia's myth as "defender of the West." Looking through a gendered lens, the masculinization of the Arab population in the United States and the simultaneous emasculation within the Arab world is viewed in light of the Bush administration's justification for a war of liberation.

The panel takes a close look at the media's role in shaping reactions to and creating cultural understandings of terrorism. Media reports of AP and Reuters are examined with regard to the portrayal of emotions such as fear, worry, and concern. The formation of Arab identities is examined in stories that appear in the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor, where "Arab" is used to describe alternately a religion, a phenotype, a region, a language, and a nationality, sometimes in the same article. The explicit, implicit, and presupposed discursive strategies used in titles and subtitles of the French language Swiss press to construct negative identities of the Other in the Iraq war are analyzed. Finally, the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia and the dialogic construction of meaning are used to explore the processes by which Western discourses on terrorism are entextualized by program moderators, guests, and callers in Aljazeera talk shows.

PAPER
"The Battle of Iraq": The Adequation of Saddam Hussein and
Osama bin Laden in the Bush War on Terror Narrative
Adam Hodges, University of Colorado

PAPER
Enunciating the Enemy: A Critical Analysis of Discourse and
Politics in the Post Cold War Era
Annita Lazar and Michelle Lazar, National University of Singapore

PAPER
Gendered Freedom: Rhetorics of Terror and Liberation
Katherine Lemons, University of California, Berkeley

PAPER
Discourse of War and Terrorism in Serbia: 'We were fighting the terrorists already in Bosnia'
Zala Volcic, Franklin College, Lugano, Switzerland

DISCUSSANT
Monica Heller, University of Toronto

GENERAL DISCUSSION

BREAK

PAPER
The Discourse of "War on Terror": The Role of Emotions
in the Reports of International News Agencies
Maija Stenvall, University of Helsinki

PAPER
Mistaken Identity: The Case of Arabs in the New York Times
Greg Stoltz, University of Arizona

PAPER
Media and War: The role of titles and subtitles of media information
in the construction of other negative identities
Marcel Burger, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

PAPER
"Martyrs and Terrorists, Crusades and Jihad": Contextualizing the Exchange of
Terrorism Discourses in Aljazeera Programming
Becky Schulthies, University of Arizona

DISCUSSANT
Paul Chilton, University of East Anglia, UK

GENERAL DISCUSSION

Adam Hodges is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado, and editor of Colorado Research in Linguistics. He can be reached at Adam.Hodges@Colorado.EDU.

Chad Nilep is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado, and associate editor of Colorado Research in Linguistics. He can be reached at Chad.Nilep@Colorado.EDU.

*Due to a change in venue of the 2004 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, this panel met as part of a Society for Linguistic Anthropology mini-conference at the University of California in Berkeley on November 19, 2004.

Colorado Research in Linguistics - Volume 18, Issue 1 - June 2005