‘Sorry for Our Prime Minister!’: The Semiotic Landscape of Power and Resistance in a Poster-War on Immigration

Session Submission Type: Paper

Summary

This paper investigates LL as an interface with public political discourse in the context of an anti-immigrant billboard poster campaign launched by the Hungarian government against the influx of migrants to Hungary and a citizen-driven campaign of counter posters and internet memes to challenge the ‘xeno-otherist’ state-rhetoric.

Abstract

The study of linguistic landscapes (LL), i.e. linguistic/semiotic inscriptions in the public space (Shohamy, Ben-Rafael & Barni 2010), has focused predominantly on the descriptions of signs as ‘visualizations of modernity’ (Coupland 2010) and their informational/symbolic meanings (e.g. cosmopolitanism, branding, consumerism) in multilingual urban spaces. Taking a different perspective, this paper investigates LL as an interface with public political discourse in the context of a “National Consultation on Immigration and Terrorism” and poster campaign launched by the Hungarian government against the influx of migrants to Hungary in transit to Western Europe. The paper aims to document and discuss how the government uses billboards to construct discursively its anti-immigrant stance and how ordinary citizens deploy a counter- discourse to challenge the official state-rhetoric in a series of internet memes, and counter-campaign posters by the spoof Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party (MKKP). I argue that LL—billboard posters and internet memes—serve both a site and semiotic resource for public political-ideological battle that plays out in/through competing discourses of exclusion/inclusion vs. resistance and contestation.

The data for this study comprise photographs of billboard posters that I collected over a two-week period in Budapest, Hungary, and images of posters and memes circulated on the internet over two-months. The data (50 LL-images) is analyzed within a critical discourse analytic perspective (Reisigl & Wodak 2001), while drawing on theories of LL, Bakhtin (1984), and Goffman (1974). Using a double-voiced discourse, government posters warn migrants in Hungarian (‘If you come to Hungary, you mustn’t take away the jobs of Hungarians’) while simultaneously invoking common topoi of threat, culture, and law to incite Hungarians. In the landscape of resistance, ‘bottom-up’ posters and memes appropriate, subvert, and resignify the government’s ‘xeno-otherist’ discourse through creative strategies of intertextual humor, parody, contempt, while pleading Others in English: ‘Sorry for our prime minister!’.

Strand

• Language and Ideology

Presenter

• Agnes Bolonyai, North Carolina State University